The Church Has Always Been The Answer to Everything That Ails Us

Written by Dr. Everett Piper

It’s been another week of what seems to be terrible news for people of the Bible. From the shameless antisemitism on our college campuses to the blatant anti-Christian bigotry in Congress, the message from the cultural intelligentsia is clear: If you are one of those rubes who still believe in the Old Testament, the New Testament — or both — you are anathema, you should be silenced, you are unworthy of leadership and, in the case of Israel, you should be killed.

With such hatred running rampant, what are Christians to do? Do we take our ball and go home? Do we separate from culture even more? Or do we stay and fight?

The answer is not difficult to find. It is in the message of the first-century church, a body of believers that faced many of the same cultural challenges that we face today.

In the midst of storms that had an eerie resemblance to some of the dark clouds we now see on our own cultural horizon, Jesus couldn’t have been clearer: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father who is in heaven.”

By responding to intolerance, not in kind, but rather by doing “good deeds,” the church changed the world. Orphans were adopted. Widows were loved. The sick were cured. The poor were fed. The dying were saved. Women were honored. Children were wanted. Hospitals, schools and colleges were founded. Slaves were freed.

Amid drought and disease, war and famine, dust bowls, and stock market crashes, Christians through the ages have kept doing good, and the result is that culture changed and people were saved.

Historians tell us that Christians “turned the world upside down” by stopping the widespread practice of human sacrifice in polytheistic religions, converting barbarians, evangelizing the Vikings, and taming the Wild West. Christians and the church have done good, a lot of good, even when they were surrounded by evil in the extreme, and we are all better off for it.

G.K. Chesterton once said, “Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”

Our country’s way out of what appears to be its present “grave” of cultural suicide is to follow that risen God who promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against the church.

St. Athanasius, whom many have called the author of the Nicene Creed, once wrote: “Seeing the exceeding wickedness of men, and how little by little they had increased it to an intolerable pitch against themselves … [Christ] took pity on our race and had mercy on our infirmity.”

Athanasius went on to conclude: “Lest the creature should perish, and the Father’s handiwork in men be spent for naught,” God “took unto Himself a Body,” a body that not only endures, lives and breathes in his resurrection but also in his church.

The church is the salt and light of human history. It has preserved civilization through disease, debauchery and despair. It has been a beacon of hope in the darkest days of violence and oppression.

The church has stemmed the tide of evil time and time again, even when the situation looked most bleak. Amid plague and contagion, the church has been the apex of care and compassion. In times of terror and war, the church has been God’s “mercy on our infirmity” and his “pity on our race.”

The Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the one through whom all things were created, promises victory for the church.

Nothing can stop the manifest power of a living God at work. He is not a dead or static thing, but alive and well.

Theologian Arthur W. Pink wrote: “Nothing in all the vast universe can come to pass otherwise than God has eternally purposed. Here is a foundation of faith. Here is a resting place for the intellect. Here is an anchor for the soul, both sure and steadfast. It is not blind fate, unbridled evil, man or Devil, but the Lord Almighty who is ruling the world, ruling it according to His own good pleasure and for His own eternal glory.”

Sometimes, the best way to respond to the bad news around us is to copy those who came before us: the men and women of integrity who practiced what they preached, who didn’t just believe it but behaved it, those who took up the cross of Christ and marched under the banner of the church.

If they could do it, we certainly can, too.

Hell itself cannot defeat the King of Glory and the church.

Dr. Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Daycare: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” and Grow Up! Life Isn’t Safe But It’s Good, both published by Regnery. This article was originally published by The Washington Times.

Dr. Piper has been a featured speaker in dozens of venues including the Values Voter Summit, the Council for National Policy, the Young American Foundation, the National Congress for Families, and the inaugural ceremony for the United States Department of Health and Human Service’s and Office of Civil Rights creation of a new division for religious freedom. Go here to listen and watch these and/or for more info.