7 A final word

For Father's Day a week ago I received a number of books as gifts. I like to read, so those were appropriate gifts from my children.

I just finished reading one of the books. It actually contained two separate books in the little volume: The second part of the book, which I read first, was Thomas Paine's Common Sense, which was initially published in 1776 and helped solidify the American colonists' resolve to become independent of the British. I had never read the little treatise before, but it was timely in light of this coming week's celebration of our independence.

The first part of the book, which I read second, was Glenn Beck's Common Sense, published earlier this year. The book seemed to make sense to me—common sense, which in the public arena seems so very rare these days. The book confirmed a growing feeling I have long felt: that we are on the wrong track politically and morally and that as a nation we are headed in the wrong direction. We have been for quite some time actually, under both Republican and Democratic administrations. It's nothing particularly new, perhaps just accelerated.

The real answers, I am convinced, do not lie in Washington. The needed solutions are not political, and they are not financial. They have more to do with the moral fiber of the nation. And a return to God. And an acceptance of Him and His laws.

The cultural war currently being waged in our country—focusing on what should be considered marriage and seeking the destruction of the traditional family—is evidence that the war that began in heaven before this earth was even founded (see Revelation 12:7) is still raging all about us.

The war is real and it can prove deadly. But it is not fought with guns or bullets or bayonets. Clearly there were not tanks and armaments and bombs in the war in heaven. It was a contest of ideas, of competing value systems, a conflict between good and evil. And the scripture tells us how the forces of good won it then and foreshadow how they will win it ultimately this time: "And they overcame him [the devil] by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death" (Revelation 12:11).

It will be the Atonement of Christ and the testimony of His servants and their willingness to sacrifice all things in His service that will bring the victory. Or, to say it another way, it will be the restored gospel of Jesus Christ that will bring the victory.

Fortunately, we can take comfort that the ultimate victory is assured, regardless of how discouraging, how bleak, how dark things look before that victory. It may appear we're in the seventh inning, with a score that looks something like a gazillion to one in favor of the bad guys, but we know from the revelations that the final score at the bottom of the ninth will be in favor of the Lord and that His eternal purposes will have prevailed. In the end, the good guys win.