Category: Behold Vancouver

Learning to number our days, personally and culturally

More than 70 years ago, in the summer of 1945, the Second World War came to an end, the occasion marked by celebrations around the globe. Those heady days took place long before most of us can remember or were even born. When we look at old photos, we get a small taste of what it must have been like: tickertape parades, dancing in the streets, young men and women kissing in the crowd.

For us, however, the experience of these events remains indirect, the stuff of history, more like a movie than real life. Over seven decades removed, we can only look back with gratitude to the men and women who fought and served. We know little of the actual suffering they endured or the palpable joy they felt when it was over.

As Christians, our gratitude doesn’t end with that great generation. It looks up to the God who is greater still, in whose hands was the ultimate outcome of the war. But if victory is from the Lord, then so is defeat. What would we think if the war had gone differently, and not in our favour?

When we consider a span of 70 years, it carries an undeniable biblical resonance. Our minds are drawn back to Old Testament history, to an event that was most certainly no cause for celebration, but only for grief and mourning: the Babylonian captivity.

After many warnings to the Kingdom of Judah concerning their idolatry and other sins, God finally brought destruction upon them via the Babylonian Empire of King Nebuchadnezzar. The land of Judah was devastated, Jerusalem razed and burned, most of the populace exiled to Babylon. Yet in the midst of judgment there was also mercy. God promised to restore his people to their land after 70 years and carried out that promise through the Persian King Cyrus.

Then as now, events of seven decades past lie beyond the living memory of most people. During the exile in Babylon and Persia, new generations of Israelites were born who knew nothing of life in Judah. They could only experience second-hand what their parents and grandparents had gone through.

Similarly for most of us alive today, the end of the Second World War is confined to a few pictures and articles, the event itself shrouded in a kind of historical unreality.

Nevertheless, our God is the God of real history. He calls us to remember it and learn from it – in a word, to treat it as real. To do that, there are a few things we want to keep in mind.

God is sovereign over all historical events, both good and bad

This is one of the basic truths of Scripture that cannot be reiterated too often: God is in control of everything in his creation, and that includes the events of history.

Seventy-five years ago, on September 2, 1945, the Second World War ended with the formal surrender of Japan aboard the USS Missouri, parked in Tokyo Bay. It had begun six years plus a day earlier, on September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland. The United Kingdom and France promptly declared war on Germany, and within months the world was embroiled in a global conflict on a scale never seen before or since.

By the time the war ended, it had claimed some 70-85 million dead. This included 20-25 million military who’d died in action or as prisoners of war. It also included 50-60 million civilians who’d perished due to disease, starvation, massacre, genocide (including the Holocaust) and mass bombing (including the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

Countless tens of millions more had been wounded or maimed. Cities across Europe and Asia had been reduced to rubble. The economies and industries of most major powers outside the United States were in tatters.

Even so, postwar recovery was brisk (especially in developed countries) ushering in an era of peace and prosperity rarely if ever seen before. Succeeding generations (at least in the West) took this shalom for granted, as if a life of comfort and affluence uninterrupted by calamity was the norm.

And then 2020 happened, with its global pandemic, urban chaos and horrific acts of racial injustice caught on camera.

There is nothing new under the sun

“What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

Sadly, worldwide disruptions such as the Second World War or the COVID-19 pandemic are nothing new or unique in history. A mere 25 years before the Second World War, there was the First, known in its time simply as the Great War or the war to end all wars. Those titles were rendered obsolete by the far greater scale and death toll of the second conflict. Following on the heels of the First World War – and directly caused by it – came the 1918 influenza pandemic that took at least 50 million lives worldwide.

History is dotted with wars and disasters, natural and man-made, that have brought down civilizations, redrawn maps, and led to sweeping cultural and social changes, some of them for the worse, and many of them surprisingly for the better. From a scriptural perspective, such events are painful hallmarks of living in a fallen world. But they’re also the birth pains of a world awaiting redemption by its Creator (Romans 8:18-25).

God creates well-being and calamity

“I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the Lord, who does all these things.”