History Repeats Itself

By John Farish

The old expression goes, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Yet, neither was the collapse of Rome accomplished in a day. Corruption from within caused the once great empire to crumble, but it was the final invasions from the Huns, Franks, Vandals, Visigoths, and others—along with the sack of Rome by the Germanic Goths and Alaric—that put the final nail in the coffin of the western Roman empire. Now this came as horrible news to the citizens of the empire—particularly to the Christians who had been persecuted so terribly by Rome until Constantine made Christianity Rome’s official religion just decades before.

They knew that Paul’s letter to the church at Rome almost four centuries earlier had instructed that, “all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose” (Rom. 8:28, NKJV). How could this monumental event—the collapse of everything they knew—possibly portend the providence of God?

And yet, it is absolutely true that God works good from all events, and it seems the one thing Christians should recognize by now is that God has to strike some sense into His church every few hundred years.

Take Rome, for instance. In 410, word began to spread of the collapse of Rome and finally reached North Africa, where a bishop named Augustine of Hippo tried to reassure believers of the permanence of God’s kingdom and the ephemeral nature of man’s. The result was Augustine’s Promethean work, The City of God, which reminds believers they lived in an earthly kingdom, but there was another kingdom—God’s—to which they belonged as well. It became perhaps the most important book outside of Scripture in the history of the west and dominated ecclesiastical thought for the next 1,000 years. Through Augustine, God reminds us again of why we are here on earth—to glorify Him and His kingdom—not man’s.

Now fast forward 1,000 years. Once again, the church has lost its way. Indulgences are peddled to finance the repair of St. Peter’s Cathedral. The Bible is a forgotten book, the church corrupt, and the local parish sermon as likely to consist of mythology as scriptural content. So God stands the western world on its head with Luther, Calvin, Tyndale, Huss, Wycliffe, and the other great Protestant reformers who preached salvation by grace alone and that the purpose of man is to glorify God.

Think about all the crisis points of church history. The Council of Jerusalem in Acts questioned whether the church was genuinely something new on the world stage or simply another Jewish sect. Then the fall of Jerusalem occurred, which compelled believers to question whether the church would fulfill the Great Commission. The Council of Nicea fought the corruptible teaching of heretics in the late third century. All of these events were God’s way of getting the attention of the church, of working His good out of man’s evil.

I am absolutely convinced we are at a similar crisis point at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The evangelical church has become more like the world around it than a distinctly Christian influence, including Sunday sermons that have more to do with pop psychology than God’s infallible Word. It is absolutely astounding church members vary little from the general population on issues such as abortion and divorce. And now, we add the ordination of homosexual bishops, and, unfortunately, one can go on and on. We, the twenty-first century church, are in a crisis.

In this crisis, God is once again prepared to hit the church over the head to get its attention and return it to the truth. Rick Warren’s influential book, The Purpose-Driven Life, is one example. Warren sums it up at the very beginning, returning his readers to the place where our Reformation fathers—Luther, Calvin, Huss, and others—stood. It is the same place where Paul and Peter stood, where the bishops who gathered at Nicea stood, where Augustine of Hippo stood. It is that very basic building block of understanding why we are here—to glorify God in all that we do and are.

Perhaps that is why, when you read the great Christian thinkers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—Lewis, Bonhoeffer, Packer, Boice, Sproul, Piper, MacArthur, Carson, Schaeffer, Muggeridge, Warren, and so many others—God gets your attention.

John Farish is a deacon and Sunday school teacher at Johnson Ferry Baptist Church, in Marietta, Ga. This article written in 2004 is repeated because of its relevance today.