“And I saw a mighty angel proclaiming in a loud voice, “Who is worthy to break the seals and open the scroll?” But I wept and wept because no one was found who was worthy to open the scroll or look inside.”
Revelation 5:2-4 (New International Version)
I read some information this morning that I found quite discouraging. In a recent Substack post titled “The Moral Danger of Yes-Buttery.” author Rod Dreher (“The Benedict Option, “Live Not by Lies”) cited a survey that asked respondents whether they believed the October 7th Hamas terrorist attack against Israel was justified. While I took some comfort in seeing that a significant majority (91%) of respondents in my age group (65 and older) believed the attack was not justified. But as I scrolled through the data it became very unsettling. By the time I got to millennials and those aged 18-24 the numbers had shifted dramatically. Forty-eight percent of millennials and fifty-one percent those aged 18-24 believed the Hamas attack was justified. That’s a stunning turnaround!
In believing that the attack was justified, respondents were, in essence, saying that decapitating babies, ripping unborn children from their mothers’ wombs, burning innocent men women to death in their homes, raping and dragging women through the streets, and other ghastly acts of terror were justified. While they may try to cloak their antisemitic bigotry in the “Palestinian Cause,” the truth of the matter is, I believe, far more revealing. If one peeks behind the cloak it screams at you. “The Jews had it coming to them. They deserved this.”
It’s bad enough to see things like this happening in America today. It’s frightening to consider what America might very well be like in the future if these terrible trends continue. The people of Germany, the most literate people on the planet, marched down that totalitarian path in the 1930’s? Could that be the destiny of America? Could some future America version of Stalin, who starved millions of Ukranian Kulaks to death in the Communist march to Utopia, arise here in America?
The answer to that question sends shivers down my spine. Yes, it can happen here. In fact, I see the country I love moving rapidly down that path.
Can this deadly march be stopped? Can we even slow its progress?
Can our political leaders save us? As one surveys our political landscape the futility of political solutions to our problems is obvious. A Republican majority in our House of Representatives has tremendous difficulty electing a Speaker of the House, much less being capable of drafting and passing good sense legislation. We have a President of our Republic living on the cusp of senility. And, we have corruption running wild in our halls of political power. You have George Santos on one side of the aisle and Robert Menendez on the other. That overpowering stench of corruption is even polluting far too many state and local governments. And it’s been that way for some time. In 1979, Bob Dylan made this astute observation – “You got gangsters in power and lawbreakers making rules.”
No, a thousand times no. Our political leaders aren’t going to save us.
Most of America’s churches and schools aren’t faring much better. As Bob Dylan also observed, we’ve got “adulterers in churches and pornography in the schools.”
Maybe technology will save us. Israel’s leaders believed their technology would keep them safe from Hamas and the result of that misguided confidence is now evident. Israel really believed they had Hamas hemmed in with a newly constructed twenty-foot-high wall complete with sophisticated technology designed to spot any intruders. The technology was so sophisticated it could send the alarm if an intruder were to be spotted.
Yet, with all the sophisticated technology arrayed against them, the terrorists simply flew over that wall in paragliders on Israel’s Sabbath day.
Seeing this all play out makes me want to cry in despair. Sophisticated technology is all too often powerless to prevent terror. Crime is rampant. Political corruption is omnipresent. Jews around the world are hated. It all seems so hopeless.
I introduced this essay with a part of a passage from the fifth chapter of the book of Revelation. I read the passage this morning when I read Rod Dreher’s essay. As I began to read the passage, I felt the same sense of despair that prompted the following question raised in the heavenly vision: “Who is worthy to break the seals and open the scrolls?” When the multitudes in the vision see that “no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth could open the scroll or even look inside it,” they weep in despair.
But there is more to that passage. The answer to the question comes swiftly. One of the elders in heaven declares, “Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals.”
That is also the answer for our time. “Do not weep.” One day, hopefully in my lifetime, Jesus, the Lamb of God himself, will break the seals and open the scrolls. He has the answers. He is the answer! I don’t need to bathe myself in constant tears. Knowing that, I see that the task before me is to watch and pray “Maranatha, even so, come Lord Jesus.”