(June 2002 Edition)
Editorial - Is It Time to Reorganize?
At the Lord's Table - Chance, or Purpose?
Editorial
Is It Time to Reorganize
Revelation 16:14 informs us that three demonic spirits that look like frogs are to gather “the whole world” for “the battle on the great day of God Almighty.” Symbolically these issue forth from the mouths of the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet.
The
dragon
The chief characteristics of the dragon are
the satanic diabolism of its teaching, which “leads the whole world astray,”
and its long war against those who obey God’s commandments and hold to the
testimony of Jesus (Rev. 12:9,17 NIV). The dragon of godless hedonistic
humanism – love of worldly pleasure – reigns supreme throughout the affluent
‘West’ and also in east Asia. Believers loyal to the Bible and its moral
standards are under increasing legal pressure and being forced into social
isolation. In some places this is beginning to take the form of mild
persecution. Education authorities are insisting that all teaching must be
patently atheistic, especially in science, and guidance counselling must be
“value-free and non-judgmental” (whatever that means!). The government of
Sweden, for example, with the full support of the Lutheran state church, is
preparing legislation to make it a punishable crime to quote in print or
read aloud any passage of the Bible which is considered to be sexist or
discriminatory to homosexuals. A special national exhibition was held
recently in the royal cathedral in Uppsala which specifically presented
Jesus as an active homosexual.
The
beast
The chief characteristics of the beast are
worldwide authority, blasphemous teaching and a long and apparently
successful war against the saints (13:7). The beast puts his symbolic mark
or brand of ownership on those loyal to him. During the last ‘holy year’,
at the ceremony of the opening of the golden door at the Vatican, the “Holy
Father” (the Pope) was presented to a million worshippers in St. Peter’s
Square as “the nearest we have to a world ruler,” and the crowds were urged
to acknowledge him as such.
The
false prophet
The chief characteristics of the false prophet
are his miraculous signs and his ability to delude those who have received
the mark of the beast. We can assume that Revelation is based upon Jesus’
words and warnings in Matthew 7:15 and 24:11. Until eleven years ago, the
world was divided by the ‘Cold War’ into two irreconcilable ideologies ‑ the
so-called ‘free’ world and the socialist countries. Today the world is
divided almost equally into three vast ideological ‘camps’ – militant
Islam, militant apostate Christendom, and an aggressive humanistic
paganism. All three are increasingly hostile to “the saints,” that is to
say, sincere Bible believers.
The
saints
Prominent in the Revelation, alongside the
various symbolic animals, are some very real people. They are (the elders
say to God) “your saints and those who reverence your name” (11:18). They
are those who “overcome” by the word of their testimony, and by their
faithfulness even unto death (12:11). They are characterized by patient
endurance and faithfulness (13:10). They are, in fact, described as
“blameless” (14:5). And, most significantly, they are “from every
tribe and language and people and nation” (5:9).
Miracles of providence
Through miracles of Providence during the past
ten years, sincere seekers for truth from Albania to Zululand have been led
to our biblical faith. Brother Ng and sister Aa have joined brother Smith
and sister Brown around the Lord’s table, and in 2001, for the first time in
the history of our denomination, a majority gave their good confession in a
language other than English. The productivity of God’s harvest fields is
increasing all the time. An elderly visiting brother recently told me that
forty years ago his ecclesia had to invest many thousands of dollars to
‘produce’ one convert, and then he or she did not always stay the course.
Today, from a strictly financial standpoint, the outlay of a few dollars
will yield a new convert for Christ. And he also commented that it is
seeing the ‘quality’ of our new members that gives him the greatest
satisfaction.
Suffering saints
Recent reports indicate that many hundreds,
perhaps even several thousand, beloved brethren and sisters are starving in
Africa and elsewhere throughout the world’s poorer countries. Hundreds are
slowly dying because no emergency medical care is available. Never in the
history of our brotherhood has there been such a dire crisis. Our Bible
mission organisations are presently accepting much of the responsibility for
dealing with this ‘welfare’ crisis, which, strictly speaking, is not their
mandate. Their funds should be directed towards preaching the gospel to
every nation under heaven.
The latest information is that brothers and sisters are suffering direct and cruel persecution from dragon, beast and false prophet in at least twenty-five countries across the globe, including several ‘western’ countries (there has even been one recent tragic case in Birmingham, England!). The Karolyn Andrews Memorial Fund, newly reorganized in Canada after being targeted by the international financial police in the Cayman Islands, is doing its best to help, but is desperate for funds also.
Waiting on tables
The worldwide ecclesia of Jesus Christ is
facing its biggest financial challenge since the apostolic age. In Acts
6:2, the leading preaching body (“the Twelve”) insisted, “It would not be
right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on
tables.”
Is it time, brethren and sisters, to reorganize the financial structure of the brotherhood on similar lines to those outlined in Acts 6? The apostolic church had both ‘evangelists’ and ‘pastors’, each with specific responsibilities. This was a wise division of responsibility. Perhaps it is time for our Bible Missions to concentrate on preaching, and restrict their funds to that end. Is it time for a specific worldwide pastoral or ‘welfare’ system to be devised, ecclesially based perhaps, using the sponsorship or twinning system which has proven to be so effective in denominations such as the American Baptists, the Seventh Day Adventists, the Church of God (Anderson, IN) and the Mennonites?
Alan Eyre
QUIZ – KNOW YOUR DRAGON
1. What colour was the dragon? 2. How many heads? 3. How many crowns? 4. What did it want to eat? 5. With whom did the dragon fight? 6. Where was he hurled from, and to? 7. Whom did he accuse before God? 8. How was he overcome? 9. Whom did he pursue? 10. What did he spew from his mouth? 11. What did he give to the beast?
At the Lord's Table
Chance, or Purpose?
Scripture Reading: Ephesians chapter 1.
One day a visiting stranger grasped Abraham by the arm and pulled him away from his campfire. Look up into the sky, he said. As Abraham’s eyes adjusted to the night and scanned the universe, the visitor said, Count the stars – if you can! Then he added, So many will your children be. Long afterwards, Jeremiah was holding an open-air meeting in the courtyard of his prison in Jerusalem. He related the word of the Lord, I will make the descendants of Jacob and David my servant as countless as the stars of the sky and as measureless as the sand on the seashore.
Count
the stars, if you can
These two Bible passages – and a few others
like them – are truly remarkable for this reason: from earliest pre-history
until modern times, human observers like the Chinese, the Greeks and the
American Mayas, counted the stars and agreed that there are about 3,000 of
them. For that is the number of stars that can be resolved by the naked eye
on a moonless night in clear desert air. Only with the development of
modern telescopes has it become evident that they cannot be counted. The
author of a science text that my students use thinks he is revealing
something new and startling when he compares the number of the stars to all
the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. Scripture made that
comparison three thousand years ago. What an utterly astonishing and
miraculous thing it is that the stars should be there at all for Abraham to
see! And it is an even more outrageously improbable chance that there could
have been a tiny, intelligent creature called Abraham looking up to
appreciate them.
The
mysterious force of gravity
My very existence depends on gravity. Rationally, or shall we say as a
‘chance’ phenomenon, gravity is absolutely inexplicable. It is absurdly
weak. Newton’s famous gravitational constant is a ludicrously tiny number,
10-38. But it is exactly right. If it was off by only a couple
of those noughts, I could not exist. Yet, here is an amazing fact: despite
the extraordinary weakness of the force of gravity, and the additional fact
that it decreases rapidly with increasing distance from any material object,
it never falls to zero anywhere in the universe. “The incredible weakness
of gravity turns out to be necessary for the existence of stars,” explains
that science text. Moreover, for stars to exist, so many other parameters
must also be so “carefully tuned” that, when that author does his math, he
admits that the probability or likelihood (or whatever term you want) of any
of the stars existing by chance (that is, not for some kind of intelligent
purpose) is just so low as to be mathematically incalculable, and it does
look like “it might have been done by a god who created the world in this
way.” Then with his back against the wall, and his logic forsaking him, he
tells us that since there cannot possibly be a God, the universe must be the
result of some random process “analogous to natural selection”! The great
Newton said that if you see purpose and you call it chance, you really must
be blind.
Chance? No way. We may not be able to count the stars, but, as David sang, the Almighty not only counts them, but calls them each by name. Not even a baby sparrow tumbles out of its nest without the great Creator knowing. And we are of more value than many sparrows. So there’s no such thing as chance at all in your life and mine. There is just a host of opportunities put in our way by a merciful Father, opportunities to grasp for us and for His glory. From all this swells the breadth and depth and height, indeed all the mighty cosmic dimensions, of Ephesians, chapter 1.
Tiny
chances, eternal purposes
Remember all those amazing incidents in the
Bible? Ruth “chanced” to glean in Boaz’ field. “By chance” the priest came
upon the wounded Jew on the Jericho road. An insomniac Ahasuerus just
turned to the right page in the right library book at the right time. He
came in from his garden walk just at the crucial moment. The Ishmaelite
traders arrived just in time to buy Joseph from his murderous brothers.
Anna “coming in that instant” found the promised Saviour. Of course, it
really wasn’t chance at all. It was providence, divine purpose, the force
of spiritual gravity -- all the time. Sometimes I like to imagine myself as
Simon of Cyrene. Why on earth did that brutal legionary pick on me? After
all, I am only a tourist. But Mark 15:21 tells you why ‑ two of his sons
were to believe!
In God’s universe tiny ‘chances’ work mighty and eternal purposes. A dollop of swill into a pigpen sent a sinner back to his Father. A bucket of water for a grumpy camel brought beautiful Rebekah a godly husband. Nathaniel’s nap under a fig tree led to a lifelong commitment to the Son of God. Dilly-dallying by a well changed one Samaritan woman’s sordid life for ever. That is how God works! A physicist once suggested that theoretically one butterfly’s fluttering can become a hurricane. Certainly, a serious scientific paper was published proposing that the wind shear from semi-trailers passing on a Texas highway can trigger deadly tornadoes. There’s nothing trivial in God’s universe. Much more important, there is nobody who is trivial, either. I am sure you realize that one reason why they nailed Jesus of Nazareth to a tree was because he dared, yes dared, to tell people that the desperate prayer of the blind guttersnipe Bartimaeus was far more important to God than the hypocritical posturing of the scoundrel priest Caiaphas each year in the Holy of Holies. And furthermore, that he, Jesus, was going to make sure that his friends, a handful of humble folk, would carry that ‘good news’ to every creature under heaven. Jesus, you see, even then understood how God’s universe works. No wonder the self-righteous people hated him! But it follows that your place at this memorial table is just as important as that of anyone else on earth.
The
power of prayer
I used to think that prayer was some kind of
helpful option in a godly life. Now, gazing heavenward as Abraham did, I
know better. Prayer is as basic to God’s universe as the stars, and as
fundamental a force as gravity. Prayer never falls to zero anywhere in the
universe. Absurdly weak according to the math tables, it can move
mountains, and “nothing shall be impossible unto you.” It is the power that
binds the universe of the Spirit in One. Jesus demonstrated that awesome
truth – on the mountain top, in the garden, and above all, yes above all, on
the cross of shame. Nailed there, he prayed for me, and I can only bow in
wonder before his Father for answering that prayer. If one man, on the top
of Carmel with his face between his knees, can fill the heavens black with
clouds and wind, what might the united prayers of fifty thousand
Christadelphians achieve? Or fifty? Yes, or five?
There is no ‘chance,’ my brethren. There is only divine power, sustaining sparrows, sinners and saints. When Solomon spoke of “chance” he was just speaking of surface appearances, as he recognized thirty-six verses later: the ways of our hearts, all our eyes behold, sorrows, joys, childhood, youth, everything every day ‑ for all these things God will bring us into judgment. Yes, said our Lord, even every idle word any man may speak. That is to say, God will assess how we have turned fleeting chances into eternal purposes. Our lives are not the sport of chance. Our angels are beholding the face of God. They are purposive spirits ministering to those who are the heirs of salvation, strong on behalf of those who love the Lord. All things work together for good to those who are the called according to His eternal purpose.
The
purpose of His will
In Jerusalem, on the ‘pavement’ where our
sinless King was condemned to die, you can still see a Roman game of chance
etched into the stones. It was a kind of Russian roulette called Basilike,
‘the King.’ But God did not leave the fate of His beloved Son to the roll
of a ball or the throw of dice. This table reminds us that He planned your
salvation and mine before the foundation of the world. We have read
Ephesians 1. At the audacity and magnificence of Paul’s cosmic concepts we
can only gasp in awe. Its theme is purpose. Its culmination is God’s
glory. In him (Jesus the Lord) we were also chosen, having been elected
according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the
purpose of his will, in order that we might be for the praise of his glory.
With Paul, we pray also today that the eyes of our hearts may be enlightened
in order that we may know the hope to which he has called us, the riches of
his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for
us who believe.
Glen Isaacs (asleep in Christ)
Brother Neville Beckford of Kingston was baptized into Christ in 1968. The Beckfords are the most famous Jamaicans in history. Neville’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Peter, was Speaker of the Jamaican House of Assembly and possibly the wealthiest man in the entire world at the time. Peter’s son, William, was even richer, and became Lord Mayor of London, then the world metropolis. William’s son designed his own palace, the largest in the world ever built by a commoner. In the last century, Professor George Beckford was an economist of world renown. Brother Neville is genetically related to the royal families of Monaco and Hungary, and more distantly to those of Germany, France and Scotland. Neville himself was born in absolute poverty, as well as disabled from birth. But he found hidden treasure greater by far than his illustrious ancestors could ever dream of. This is his story.
The
story of my ancestors
My
ancestors in the 16th and 17th centuries were among
the world’s richest and most powerful men. The first Peter Beckford,
according to his contemporaries, considered himself “the greatest man in the
world.” Originally, he was a nobody, or possibly a pirate or buccaneer.
But when Charles II became King of Jamaica, the Beckfords received enormous
favors from the new monarch, no doubt a debt repayment for shrewd political
support. The sources of the immense wealth of the Beckford family were real
estate, sugar, slave trading, and Atlantic commerce. Some of the land they
owned is so fertile it has been producing sugar cane continuously for 350
years. It is written of the Beckfords that their “surplus energy found
notable expression in the number of illegitimate children” which they
produced with the eager help of their most beautiful slave girls. The
result has been a lot of Beckfords like me in the “illegitimate line.” Very
many people in Jamaica carry Beckford genes today, even if they do not bear
the name as I do.
One historian has this comment on the first Peter Beckford. “In this Jamaican we see manifest certain of the less attractive characteristics which were to be passed on to his descendants. He was a man of violent temper, ruthless and not over-scrupulous in the conduct of his affairs, and given to exaggerations of a very misleading sort.” The second Peter, son of the first, who might have been my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, inherited a vast fortune. His father’s cash chest, when opened, is said to have revealed £250 million in modern currency equivalent. He became Speaker of the Jamaican House of Assembly. He was also above the law, as when he brutally murdered a senior judge and escaped prosecution. By 1700 he was reputed to be the richest man in Europe and the Americas, and possibly in the world. Certainly in 1735 his son, William, inherited the largest legacy in history, anywhere, and his fabulous wealth was said to be the envy of the crowned monarchs of Europe. The Beckford mercantile fleet was the largest in the American-Caribbean trade.
William studied at Balliol College, Oxford, and became Lord Mayor of London (twice), the only Jamaican ever to reach such eminence. He soon became the richest land baron and real estate speculator in the western hemisphere, and probably the greatest individual slave owner in the entire history of mankind. Another historian has this to say of William. “His family’s position in Jamaica was at least as important as that of any of the great titled families in England, and he was wealthier than any of them. But as a ‘colonial’ with an ‘ugly’ Jamaican accent, he was cold-shouldered and regarded as an upstart. Proud himself, he felt their insolent hauteur.” Nevertheless, this upstart Jamaican, though rebuffed by British aristocracy, was most determined to take the Beckford genes to the very top of human society. Through various marriages over the next four generations, I am genetically related to the royal families of Monaco and Hungary, and more distantly to those of Germany, France and Scotland, as well as to numerous dukes and counts
Lord Mayor William’s son, also William, built or rebuilt several magnificent great houses in Jamaica, including Fonthill in St. Elizabeth close to where I was born. He also personally designed by far the biggest palace in the world ever built by a commoner, Fonthill Abbey in the west of England. In the 1840’s, when slavery in Jamaica had been officially abolished and when his sugar fortune had crumbled, the gigantic and “impossible Abbey” literally crumbled too, in fulfilment of Psalm 49:14-20 and Ecclesiastes 5:13-15. However, one of William’s biographers insists that “in his eighties he was as mentally alert, astute and untiring as ever.”
My
story
My father was Vernon Beckford. He died when I
was young, so I hardly remember him. I don’t recall my grandfather either,
but in those days wherever Beckfords were born, there were the plantations
which some of our ancestors owned and where others had slaved. I was born
at Lacovia in St. Elizabeth, with cane fields all around.
After my family moved to Kingston, I met Larry and Enid Henry and they invited us to Sunday school at the Christadelphian meeting hall, which was then in a back street in Allman Town. I and my brothers used to attend. My brothers didn’t stay long. Perhaps because I am disabled in body, my mind is extra clear. I followed the Light, and I do know that from the first time I went, I never looked back.
Not very long after the Six Day War, when Jerusalem fell to the Jews, I rose to newness of life, on March 10, 1968. Four years later, in 1972, I met Bro. Eddie Johnson. He worked to establish training centres for the disabled. He was a great believer in being self-reliant. Perhaps God-reliant would be more accurate, because he was a great believer in the power of prayer. He recruited me for one of his craft workshops, and I worked there for many years.
I have never been famous as some of my ancestors. But God led me to treasures they never dreamed of. I am far richer than they ever were. Over the years, I have been a great reader, hungry for divine wisdom. I cannot buy books, but any magazines or books on the truth I can lay my hands on, I will devour them.
Wisdom, that is what you need. The wisdom that is foolishness with men. Life is in her right hand. In her left are riches and honour. She is a tree of life to those who embrace her; those who lay hold of her will be blessed (Prov. 3:13-18).
Neville Beckford
As a regular visitor to one of the Caribbean islands over several years, I always noticed that my favourite airport bus driver, an elderly Hispanic lady, was very courteous and pleasant but always bore a quiet sadness. I often used to wonder why. On a recent visit I found her bubbling over with joy, and accompanied by a very frail old man. She told me her story. In 1965 she and her husband, then in their forties, had tried to escape from Fidel Castro’s Cuba. She had succeeded, but he was caught. For thirty-seven years she had lived alone, praying and waiting for him to be released and join her in exile. Finally, ill and in his eighties, he arrived at the airport one day and they were reunited. Moved almost to tears, I asked her what had sustained them both over those sad and lonely years. She pointed heavenward and said simply, “Fidelidad” (loyalty). I was utterly humbled by this lesson in faithfulness.