Wed, Dec 21, 2022 |
By John Schroeder
Looking For The Messiah
We await, anxiously, the celebration of the birth of the Messiah – the savior. That’s what Christmas is all about.
So, I was stunned when I read this piece about restrictions in the UK and Ireland in the name of combatting climate change. Most specifically this quote:
Not to be outdone, the Emerald Isle is planning initiatives of its own to fight climate change. According to a story in The Irish Times, the Irish government plans to remove one out of every five cars from the roads and reduce the cattle population by 10% by 2030. The paper quoted Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar as admitting that the plan is ambitious, but also stating, “I’m determined that we should be the generation of politicians that passes on the planet in a better condition than we inherited it.”
That sounds remarkably messianic to me. After all he is claiming to be saving the planet.
Now, politicians have been making messianic claims as long as there have been politicians. Many a ruler had themselves invested as God’s sole representative, or even as a god proper. But that particular practice died with democracy, leaving us simply with politicos making promises they could not keep because they were not, in fact, gods. And at that point most of us know it was campaign nonsense.
Communism, of course, made messianic claims, but I don’t think most people bought into it. The Soviet Union was a police state from the very beginning. Both Russia and China have been totalitarian states from their earliest beginnings and communism is simply more of same. After generations upon generations of it, I am not sure the populace is capable of understanding the advantages of democracy.
But I fear the West is losing that capability as well. We are too easily buying into our government as messiah. In point of fact there are many among us that expect the government to be the messiah. That is a gross misunderstanding of both government and messiah. Such misunderstandings are not readily or easily corrected. And yet this misunderstanding is a fulfillment of prophecy:
He was despised and abandoned by men,
A man of great pain and familiar with sickness;
And like one from whom people hide their faces,
He was despised, and we had no regard for Him.
However, it was our sicknesses that He Himself bore,
And our pains that He carried;
Yet we ourselves assumed that He had been afflicted,
Struck down by God, and humiliated.
But He was pierced for our offenses,
He was crushed for our wrongdoings;
The punishment for our well-being was laid upon Him,
And by His wounds we are healed.All of us, like sheep, have gone astray,
Each of us has turned to his own way;
But the Lord has caused the wrongdoing of us all
To fall on Him.
Most look at this passage and see Isaiah prophesying about Christ’s death on a cross. But the current age views Him with similar contempt. Our rejection of The Messiah for the many little false messiahs of our age is little different than the rejection that happened then – we’re just rejecting in the name of climate change instead of in the name of Ceasar.
Now, as then, The Messiah is coming whether we want Him to or not. The easiest way to begin to correct our misunderstandings is now what it was then. Welcome The Messiah, cling to The Messiah, proclaim The Messiah.
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