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The UK Bible Students Website Christian Biblical Studies |
ROCK OF THE PLAIN
Part 2:
Advancing On the Plain
By C.C.
Scripture citations are to the King James
(Authorised) Version, unless noted otherwise.
Behold, I am against thee, O inhabitant of the valley, and rock of the plain, saith the Lord; which say, Who shall come down against us? or who shall enter into our habitations? But I will punish you according to the fruit of your doings, saith the Lord: and I will kindle a fire in the forest thereof, and it shall devour all things round about it.
— Jer. 21: 13, 14 —
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IN PART
ONE of this title the argument was presented that human
history, far from being a pointless series of accidents within a framework of
biological evolution, is purposive it has an object in view, guided by a
benevolent Creator in a choreography of chaos. There is a useful tension between
permission and restraint: God allows people a sufficient degree of freedom to
behave as they choose, yet imposes certain limits, beyond which they may not go.
From one standpoint, history is an academy of tough experience at which each
member of the human family will learn the contrasting values of righteousness
and sin, and in due time will come to love and honour God and His Son, the
Saviour of all. From another, it is the Gospel message of salvation
scrawled across the panorama of the ages.
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I would
Love you ten
years before the flood:
And you should,
if you please, refuse
Till the
conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable
love should grow
Vaster than empires, and
more slow.
– Andrew Marvell (1681) –
World history is in large part a story of empire. Looked at from the biblical standpoint it is also the story of the Jews, the chosen people of God. All this is comprehended in the declaration of Dan. 4: 32: ʻthe most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will.ʼ
Popular history in the west has long been biased towards the prevailing assumptions of western philosophy, and viewed through the filter of the Anglo-Saxon heritage. Modernity has long had a western complexion and a built-in sense of superiority over other cultures, many of which are much older. But things are changing. Increasing trade with nations formerly regarded as mysterious, the ease of worldwide travel, and the accessibility of the World Wide Web have done much to temper the parochial attitudes. The interlinking of the world's financial order has made the interests of one nation the interests of all.
It is instructive to consider China, which appears to the casual reader of history to have popped up like a jack-in-the-box from nowhere. And given the ingenuity of the Chinese people and the quality of its civilisation, it confounds many historians that China did not take the lead in the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. Fairbank and King offer some enlightening comparisons between an ʻinvisibleʼ China and other countries:
ʻThe fact that Chinese history is best known in China, just as Western history is best known in America and Europe, creates discordant perspectives between China and the outside world. For example, Chinese know that Manchu tribal leaders christened their new state Qing (“Pure”) in 1636, the year that Americans (at least those around Boston) remember as the founding of Harvard, the New World’s first college. After 2 million or so Manchus took power over 120 million or so Chinese, the Qing dynasty governed the Chinese people for 267 years while their numbers rose to about 400 million. At its midpoint in the 1770s, the Qing dynasty, governing the Chinese empire from Beijing, completed its conquest of Mongolia, Central Asia, and Tibet, while a few million American rebels in their thirteen colonies declared their independence of Britain. . . . The Chinese Han empire had been contemporary with and bigger than the Roman Empire. Indeed, China was once the superior civilization of the world, not only the equal of Rome but far ahead of medieval Europe. Albert Feuerwerker, an economic historian disciplined against hyperbole, tells us that from 1000 to 1500 AD “no comparison of agricultural productivity, industrial skill, commercial complexity, urban wealth, or standard of living (not to mention bureaucratic sophistication and cultural achievement) would place Europe on a par with the Chinese empire” (in Ropp 1990). So why did China fall behind in modern times? How could it be ignominiously contemned by Western and even Japanese imperialists in the late nineteenth century?ʼ – John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History (original preface) (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; 1999), pp. 1-3.
As for twenty-first-century China, her present
status derives from a world culture quite different from her own ancient regime,
and is a successful melding of pragmatic communism with a shrewd
capitalism. The
originating genius may be her own, but the financial, economic, industrial,
cultural, and political environments from which she now benefits are not.
For in one sense modern China is a creation of the
Anglosphere. One need only look at the
skylines of Shanghai or Beijing, or watch their consumers, clad in western
clothes, ambling through China's ultra-large and hyper-modern shopping malls to
see that this is so. The
most pervasive cultural expressions of present-day China are western and, on
their surface, noticeably American.
Barring a catastrophic reversal of fortune, and assuming that China retains the world's largest middle class and a healthy economy, it must eventually rise to the top of the heap. And it will continue to enlarge and modernise its military forces, push further out into space, expand home-grown industries, and its high-tech and manufacturing companies will be among the largest in the world. (It already boasts the fastest supercomputer in the world, Tianhe-2, designed and built by Chinese scientists.) In matters of trade and marketing, the eyes of the world will look in its direction. However, it is not likely that most citizens of the west will be speaking Mandarin, reading a Chinese Dickens, or thinking like the Chinese. The dominant cultural flavour of the modern world derives from western capitalist philosophy and liberal laws, birthed it needs to be said in the matrix of Christianity.
In a way, China stands as a metaphor for the radical rearrangement of
the world order in the twenty-first century; the process will probably continue
and accelerate for some decades yet and other formerly poor nations will climb
up the prosperity ladder. There will be a gradual redistribution of global wealth and
influence among all nations. Broadly speaking,
whereas the Protestant countries used to be at the forefront of science and
technology, they will continue to be eclipsed by nations whom they exploited.
The changes are already under way. For
example, gigantic engineering projects and sky-scraping buildings unabashed
expressions of national pride are no longer the province of the west.
Influence will continue to leech away from the former
Christendom, in part because it has departed from its Christian roots and the
virtue which they nourished. In the words of
St. Paul, much of the western world now
exhibits ʻa form of godliness, but denying the power thereofʼ (2 Tim. 3: 5).
The Providential Rise of
Britain
Over the period of its on-and-off, but ultimately enthusiastic embrace of the Protestant Reformation, Britain strictly speaking, England began to be transformed from a small island kingdom to a global power. A latent liberty-loving people, Britain was a free nation before it was a democratic one. From the tussles between monarchy and parliamentary authority there emerged a body of Reformation-enlightened laws habeus corpus, the rules of hearsay evidence which were to form the bedrock of legislation in the land and which were adopted by the democratic countries which came later. In this sense, Britain pioneered the jurisprudence which informs many aspects of modern governance.
The translation of the Bible under the auspices of King James I in 1611, helped to cement Protestantism in the island, and formed the core of the message which the British Empire carried overseas. It is not an exaggeration to say that the new Bible became an obsession of the English. This, from American historian Barbara W. Tuchman:
ʻA single God and a chosen people who are the transmitters of His message and who try, however imperfectly, to live by it – in these terms generation after generation of English came to know the Book. Everyone knew it. In many homes it was the only book in the house and, being so, was read over and over until its words and images and characters and stories became as familiar as bread. Children learned long chapters by heart and usually knew the geography of Palestine before they knew their own.ʼ – Bible and Sword (New York: Ballantine Books; 1984), pp. 82, 83.]
The King James Bible also fostered in the British people a great love for the Jews, the People of the Book. In the seventeenth century the Puritans even contemplated a plan (unsuccessful) to woo the Jews to England, convert them to Christianity, and then shepherd them on to the Holy Land, where they should wait for the coming of Messiah to bless them and, through them, the whole world (Tuchman, ibid., 122, 123, 131).
Man versus
Machine
The first phase of the Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century. It resulted in a growing prosperity, rising levels of education, and a range of mechanical skills. The factory system, and later on an expanding railway network, encouraged a massive migration of workers from field to town. The dislocation and shift from an agrarian order to one run by and in the service of the machine was on a scale unlike anything seen before. Mushroom-like, wealthy industrialists and urban paupers sprang from the same economic soil, defining the social landscape which Dickens would later caricature in his novels.
In our snug twenty-first-century homes with a garden at the front, it is easy to criticise the hovels and grimy skies which the Industrial Revolution produced, but these conditions were a temporary and necessary pathway to the prosperity and conveniences we enjoy today. The humane response to the distresses led to religious and secular movements intended to address these problems of overcrowding, pauperism, and ill-health.
As the Industrial Revolution spread to Europe and North America, there was by the close of the 1800s a vague expectation that a utopia was possible – a new order in which the peoples of the world could live in harmony, their daily routines blessed and simplified by the new labour-saving devices and the thousand-and-one innovations in hygiene and advances in science, engineering, chemistry and medicine. The onset of the Great War in 1914 shattered many of these hopes, as millions died and the map of Europe and the Middle East was reconfigured, preparing the world for a new phase of history, moving it closer to the momentous fulfilment of Bible prophecy in the twentieth century.
End of Empire
It is fashionable to refer to China as the next superstate, and there is a lot of exaggeration on the subject. Although China ranks high in its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – the output of goods and services – the level of personal income is low compared with that of most other nations. In other words, China is a poor country. But this aside, it is not likely that China would ever spawn anything like an empire with the culturally penetrating influence of either the old British empire or the present American hegemony. The world may be too far along the path of history for new empires to arise. Besides, the purpose of empires in relationship to the Jewish people has already been accomplished, when in 1948 Israel was re-established as a nation. That singular event will yet be recognised as having already decided the world's future.
A modern world empire should meet at least four criteria, spheres in which it dominates (listed in no particular order):
Military
Technological
Economic-Financial
Cultural-Linguistic
Geographical extent is also often, but not always, a factor; previous empires were built through conquest and expansion into lands remote from and often many times larger than the home country.
The United States is an anomaly. After the war between the states, the nation stitched itself together from the Atlantic to the Pacific in the second phase of the Industrial Revolution, when its rail networks were built out to the west and new territories were tamed and absorbed into the Union. Its having a continent-sized land-mass, abundant domestic resources, a favourable range of climates, and a vigorous and God-fearing population, all facilitated the growth of its domestic empire without the pressing need for external adventures. Its nineteenth-century notion of ʻManifest Destinyʼ implying that its success was inevitable was not unreasonable, though in the modern setting the claim is inapplicable.
That the United States embarked on colonial adventures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had perhaps less to do with geographic pressures, but more to do with a twitchy ambition prompted by what might be called ʻempire envyʼ and competition for the high seas with Britain, then the dominant world power. That many in the United States even now prefer to call their empire by any other name than that presumably to deflect the opprobrium associated with the term is to deny what is apparent to those who live elsewhere.
There are other factors which determine the
success and longevity of any imperial power, including its own cultural, legal,
educational and religious temperament. In any case, an authentic empire exerts power
on many levels well beyond its own borders, sufficient to alter or augment the
cultural characteristics of the nations which it dominates, for good or
ill.
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Britain will be honoured by historians more for the way she disposed of an empire than for the way in which she acquired it.
– David Ormsby Gore, Lord Harlech (1962) –
Prophecy is history in the making. Students of Bible prophecy have long recognised the central place of the Jewish people in world affairs. The fate of the Jewish people is more important than the nations with which they interact. National destinies and the fate of empires depend on the nature of their relationship with the Jewish people.
As the chosen of God, the nation of Israel lost its sovereignty at its captivity and forced evacuation under the Babylonian empire. And although the people were allowed to return to Jerusalem by the Persian king, Cyrus, and rebuilt the city as their civic and religious capital, they never regained their autonomy. They remained under the thumb of Gentile powers up to the days of the Roman Empire, under which Jerusalem was destroyed and the Jewish people were scattered to other countries, where they set up communities in the lands of strangers, cut off from the Promised Land.
By the middle of the nineteenth century events began to unfold which would at long last culminate in the Jews getting out from under Gentile domination and reincorporating into a nation-state (1948). In his book, Elpis Israel (Hope of Israel), Dr. John Thomas, a Briton transplanted to the United States, and the founder of the Christadelphian movement, set out his expectations in 1850:
ʻThe pre-adventual colonization of Palestine will be on purely political principles; and the Jewish colonists will return in unbelief of the Messiahship of Jesus, and of the truth as it is in him. . . . Now any person acquainted with the present insecure condition of Palestine under the Ottoman dominion must be satisfied from the testimony, that some other power friendly to Israel must then have become paramount over the land, which is able to guarantee protection to them, and to put the surrounding tribes in fear. This is all that is needed, namely, security for life and property, and Palestine would be as eligible for Jewish emigration as the United States have proved for the Gentiles.
ʻBut to what part of the world shall we look for a power whose interests will make it willing, as it is able, to plant the ensign of civilization upon the mountains of Israel? . . . I know not whether the men, who at present contrive the foreign policy of Britain, entertain the idea of assuming the sovereignty of the Holy Land, and of promoting its colonization by the Jews; their present intentions, however, are of no importance one way or the other, because they will be compelled, by events soon to happen, to do what, under existing circumstances, heaven and earth combined could not move them to attempt. The present decisions of “statesmen” are destitute of stability. A shooting star in the political firmament is sufficient to disturb all the forces of their system; and to stultify all the theories of their political astronomy. The finger of God has indicated a course to be pursued by Britain which cannot be evaded, and which her counsellors will not only be willing, but eager, to adopt when the crisis comes upon them.
ʻThe decree has long since gone forth which calls upon the Lion of Tarshish to protect the Jews. Upwards of a thousand years before the British were a nation, the prophet addresses them as the power which at “evening-tide” should interest themselves in behalf of Israel. In view of this, “the time of the end,” he says, “The nations shall rush like the rushing of many waters: but God shall rebuke them, and they shall flee far off, and shall be chased as the chaff of the mountains before the wind, and like a rolling thing before the whirlwind”; . . . This finished colonization Isaiah styles, “a present unto the Lord of hosts of a people scattered and peeled”; for, speaking of “the time of the end,” he says, “In that time shall the present be brought unto the Lord of hosts of a people scattered and peeled . . . to the place of the name of the Lord of Hosts, the Mount Zion.” (Isaiah 18:7) But, then, the question returns upon us, by whom is the present to be made? The prophet answers this question in the first verse, saying, “Ho! to the land shadowing with wings, which is beyond the rivers of Khush: that sendeth ambassadors by sea, and on vessels of papyrus upon the waters, Go ye swift messengers, to a nation scattered and peeled, to a people terrible from this and onward: a nation meted out and trodden down, whose land the rivers (invading armies (Isaiah 8:7)) have spoiled.” Now, the geography of this passage points to the Lion-power of Tarshish as “the land shadowing with wings.” Taking Judea, where the prediction was delivered, as the place of departure, the word “beyond” points to the east; that is, running a line from Judea across the Euphrates and Tigris, “the rivers of Khushistan,” it passes into Hindostan [India], where “the Merchants of Tarshish, and its young lions,” rule the land. [Note: The British rule [1848, ed.] the land “beyond the rivers of Kush,” or Ethiopia, in Africa, that is, Egypt, the Soudan, and the far South beyond the Atbara and the Blue and White Nile.]
ʻBut the British power is still further indicated by the insular position of its seat of government; for the “sending of fleet messengers by the sea,” implies that the shadowing power is an island-state. Ambassadors are sent from the residence of the Court, and if they proceed to their destination by sea, the throne of the power must be located in an island. The text, therefore, points to the north and east, to England and Hindostan, as the land shadowing Israel with its wings. To Britain, then, the prophet calls as the protector of the Jewish nation in the evening-tide trouble, and commands it to send its messengers in swift vessels because the crisis is urgent, and to plant Israel as “an ensign upon the mountains” (Isaiah 18:3); as it is written in another place, saying, “The Lord shall set an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth” (Isaiah 11:12). – Elpis Israel: An Exposition of the Kingdom of God, by John Thomas, M.D., Thirteenth Edition, 1942; orig. publication, 1850; pp. 441-443.
Thomas was broadly correct. In 1875 Prime Minister Disraeli purchased a major share in the Suez Canal for Great Britain, ensuring secure passage for its merchant ships to India, its ‘Jewel in the Crown’. Towards the end of the 1800s, the Zionist movement (in both secular and religious aspects) attracted Jewish immigrants from around the world into Palestine. The First World War and consequential events, including the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, allowed Britain to solidify its position in the region and throughout much of the Middle East, setting the political and geographic boundaries which became areas of extreme friction, such as Iraq, Iran, Kuwait. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the subsequent mandate granted by the League of Nations formalised Britain’s protectorate of the region, the context of the eventual complications from which Israel forged a nation in 1948.
Sunset Serenade
Once her mission relative to Israel had been accomplished, Britain began to recede on the world stage. She began her official retreat from the Middle East in 1956, a date which serves to mark the practical end of the empire. Her role as Israel’s overseer was taken up, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, by the United States, an alliance which itself now shows signs of rupturing and one which will probably come to an acrimonious end, leaving Israel alone and vulnerable. At some critical juncture it could be decades hence a concatenation of events will conspire to put Israel at risk of obliteration, a prelude to divine intervention and the establishment of Christ's kingdom on earth. See Isa. 2: 2-5; Zech. 14: 1-3.
As for contemporary Britain, this former beating heart of a vast and useful empire is likely to shrink further in status into a middle-rank province of Europe. With a tenuous hold on its own sovereignty, it may become even more dependent for its prosperity on a deeper integration into the European Union and its dubious relationship with the United States. Prospects may be worse should a majority of those voting in Scotland's referendum in September opt for independence. Such an outcome would effectively destroy the United Kingdom, reinstating the ʻlittle Englandʼ of old. Even now, Britain suffers from a crisis of identity and is in the process of dismantling its Christian and conservative heritage, on which it built the most admirable features of its national character. In common with other western governments, it is instigating a raft of squalid social policies, unfriendly to godliness and sound biblical teaching.
The levelling of the high places continues, and many will weep over it (Jer. 9: 10).
Continues
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May 2014. The usual and natural author rights are asserted, except that you may reproduce this article in whole or in part without express permission, but please acknowledge its source.