“In the eighth year of his reign…he began to seek the God of his father David, and…purge Judah and Jerusalem.” 2 Chr 34:3
Before it became the world’s most popular dating app, tinder was associated with flammable material that could easily combust and ignite a fire. Spiritually speaking, as God prepares to set His people ablaze, His eyes run to and fro throughout the earth looking for tinder among us. 2650 years ago in Judah, God’s eyes fell upon a young king named Josiah who would usher in one of the greatest renewals the nation ever saw. Josiah reinstituted the Passover, something no King of Israel had done before him, and he purged “all the abominations in all the country…and made all who were present in Israel diligently serve the Lord their God” (2 Chr 34:33). Simply put, God raised up Josiah as a catalyst of revival.
God is about to move again. As He does, His eyes are scanning the earth for tinder! What exactly was it about Josiah that caught God’s attention?
First, he began to diligently pursue the Lord. This was deliberate and focused seeking. He came to a point where he set distractions aside. Important matters paled compared to the sense of urgency he felt as he pressed into God. Desperation is necessary kindling for every move of God.
A central feature of Josiah’s seeking was to know how “the God of his father David” had moved in the past. Finney studied Edwards. Seymore and Roberts studied Finney and Edwards. The Latter Rain leaders of 1948 researched the early Pentecostal outpourings, and subsequent revivals have always sought diligently to unstop the wells of revival opened by the awakenings of past generations. They knew that the treasures of wise householders mined from the old even as they are run after the new.
I’ve been extraordinarily blessed to come from a rich revival tradition. Some of my spiritual mothers and fathers were central figures in that Latter Rain Movement. I was saved and filled with the Holy Spirit at the height of the Charismatic Renewal. I personally drank from the sweet waters of the Toronto Blessing and the Brownsville Revival. I laughed for hours at Rodney Howard-Brown meetings. As good as each of these were, none can compare with the miracle- and presence-filled revival I experienced intensely and first-hand in China. Talk about power-encounters! Those days defy description. Heaven came down. Souls were saved in droves. The blind saw, the deaf heard, the lame walked.
Josiah’s hunger was rewarded. He “discovered” the Book of the Law. It had been there in the temple all along, but as is always the case whenever God’s Spirit is poured out, Josiah trembled as he was confronted with the Word of God. “Thus it happened, when the king heard the words of the Law, that he tore his clothes” (34:19). The Word broke him and called into account everything he had been doing. Worship practices were reformed across the land. A national Passover was instituted. God’s Word brought transformative change. Whenever God pours out His Spirit on a people, you’ll know it because they won’t be able to get enough of the Law of God.
Enter the Prophetess Huldah. She had most certainly been interceding for this day! The wife of a wardrobe-keeper who lived in an obscure part of the city in a male dominated age, Huldah had been promoted in the eyes of the people. Everyone knew…this woman has the Word of the Lord! Her voice pierced like a sharpened sword directing all eyes and ears to the key that had opened the heart of this sixteen-year-old king now responsible for a great visitation in Israel. Huldah says:
“Because your heart was tender, and you humbled yourself before God…” (34:27)
God is about to do a new thing. People around the world are talking about it. Many are devouring books and articles about the Evan Roberts and Wigglesworth, about Azusa Street and the legacies left by the awakenings of past generations. Expectations are reaching a boiling point. Watchmen are taking their places upon the walls. A cry is ascending. Bones are rattling.
Our forests bare the scars of scorched woods from ancient burnings. To walk here is to be struck by the cracking sounds of dry branches snapping underfoot. God walks here as in the Garden of old, His to-and-fro gaze searching for Josiahs. These have cast all other cares aside, bent on witnessing the God who has moved so gloriously in past times to do it again. They are no longer content to snack on the Word; the are discovering anew that they live by every Word that comes from this Law.
If Huldah was here, her unsheathed words would be pointing at those who are diligently humbling themselves before the Father–whose hearts, like Josiah, are being tenderized in order to embrace the next mighty move of the God of fire and a God on fire. This forest will burn again to become a mighty torrent of flames across the lands. Tender is tinder. May He find the combustibles He needs to set this forest ablaze in your heart and mine.
Monthly Archives: June 2021
Is Science Terminally Ill?
I have just finished reading a book from which I quote below called Heretic. The timing of my read coincided with one of the most public and harmful indictments upon the scientific community that the world has seen in recent memory: the Coronavirus Wuhan lab hoax. Both the news and the book present a perspective that only a few years ago I had very little awareness of; namely that there is a collusion and corruption that is at work which undermines the credibility of the mainstream science community as a whole. I use the word mainstream very intentionally here, because the same indictment could similarly be levelled against the media establishment. Let me explain.
The common denominator in both the media and science spheres is that neither is any longer invested in truth seeking. Outcomes, whether conceived in laboratories or newsrooms, are predetermined and pre-approved. They are pursued and then judged, not on the basis of fact, but primarily for two reasons: to support ideology or guarantee ongoing profitability. Facts in these worlds are either massaged to align themselves with narratives that are uncompromisingly adhered to, or suppressed and ignored when they are considered to be a departure from “orthodoxy”. And this is not a passive stand. Truth can be so inconvenient that it can be deemed a threat, leaving these communities with a penchant for maligning and perverting truth when it gets in their way.
So two cases in point which are windows into these corrupt practices are the Steele Dossier which was carefully crafted then coordinated with other “partners” to give the false impression that there was corroboration of the story when there was none (the same could be said of the Nick Sandmann/Covington School narrative and many, many others); and there is the spate of emails being released about Dr Fauci and other science “experts” in their campaign to cover up the evidence pointing to coronavirus being genetically altered.
These perversions can poison elections (which in turn affect everything that occurs afterwards) as was the fallout from the media/big tech cabal’s scandalous meddling; or they can poison the whole range of scientific research and enquiry, as is the case with mafia-like stranglehold that evolutionists have on “heretics” like Leisola, Witt, Behe, Meyers, and so many others who are outstanding intellects in their disciplines. Tragically, though their research truly follows the science, by challenging the blatantly false and irrational tenets of the zealots in the science establishment, they are left out standing in their fields (pun intended)–stigmatized, patronized and unfunded.
Heretic was the perfect name for this book. One gets the feeling the “bishops” on the evolution side would not hesitate to tar-and-feather ID (Intelligent Design) scum if they could find a way to do it without getting caught. Still, their shamings and banishments and lynchings outside lecture halls have kept “detractors” mostly hamstrung until now. This despite the mountain of evident in support of ID proponent’s theories and a landslide of contradictions and blackholes directed at their own. Leisola represents an existential threat to their (money) vaulted resistance. From institutes to institutions, educators and even education itself, there is a multiverse of people who stand to lose from the slightest admission that what is Undeniable (see book by Douglas Axe) as evidence is in fact true.
Worldview Footprint?
Scientists do not function without worldview commitments, and their worldview easily affects the interpretation of their research results. These interpretations can and often will influence the worldviews of the members of the society. Viktor Frankl was a professor in the medical faculty of Vienna. As a Jew he was sent to one of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps, Auschwitz, but survived. Frankl was “absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.” The Nazi regime did not force scientists to work for them but “many scientists voluntarily oriented their work to fit the regime’s policies—as a way of getting money… Most researchers, it turns out, seem to have regarded the regime not as a threat, but as an opportunity for their research ambitions” (“Uncomfortable Truths,” Nature 434, no. 7034). Professor Ernst Haeckel had already, before the First World War, laid the foundation for the Nazis’ racist views, which were generally accepted by the science community. The father of Finnish genetics, Harry Federley, corresponded with Haeckel. He embraced racism and lectured in the world’s first Eugenics Institute in Sweden. In Finland Federley pushed through the sterilization laws for criminals and the mentally handicapped. The laws were in force till 1970.
Haeckel and Federley were monists (matter is the only reality) and had an enormous influence on society (Jahresbuch Europäisches Wissenschaftskultur 2005, 1:1). The shadow of their worldview hangs still above our culture. It was recently expressed in the school shootings (Kauhava and Jokela) where the motive was the principle of natural selection to eliminate the despised. The shooters were victims of the teachings of our culture. Young people tend to be more radical (the word comes from Latin and means going to the root) and function on the basis of their beliefs. Luckily, not all naturalists are that consistent. We rarely think that as university teachers we have to bear the responsibility of the worldview we communicate to students. But the university law obliges us to educate the youth to serve homeland and humanity. Therefore we teachers should recognize the faith commitments of our own worldviews and be careful how we communicate them to students. Fifteen years ago a teacher gave me an essay of a 15-year-old boy: “I studied science journals and formulated a solid worldview for myself. There is no God, no spirit, no meaning. It does not matter if I die now or after fifty years.” It is frightening to think that my own teaching might leave this kind of a footprint and even more frightening to think where it might lead.
Leisola, Matti; Witt, Jonathan. Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design (pp. 214-215). Discovery Institute Press. Kindle Edition.