The church & the nations - An empire shaken

By Balisa Finca

Christ’s victory over Satan and his cohorts at Calvary was devastatingly conclusive. The kingdom of darkness was not merely overcome, it was decimated. Having been annihilated, it was “disarmed” and displayed as a “spectacle”. In light of this historically defining event, the Lord Jesus, having reclaimed functional authority over the earth, commissioned His disciples to enforce this victory. They were to “make disciples of all nations”. This mission was to begin in Jerusalem. It was to move on to Judea and Samaria, and “to ends of the earth”.

Hitherto, with perhaps the exception of Israel, the nations lay under the unremitting “sway of the wicked one”. Their values, customs, laws and culture accordingly, reflected that of the incumbent spiritual authority, for which the end could only be ineluctable destruction, because the enemy comes not, but to “steal, kill and destroy”.

The task before the disciples therefore was no meagre one. They were to unravel systematically entrenched patterns of thought and doing, established over millennia of diabolical rule, perforce, to liberate the nations. Hence, the unequivocal nature of the Divine instruction to them, “tarry in the city of Jerusalem until you are endued with power from on high”. It was the only hope that an untrained group of fishermen had in reshaping the nations according to the newly accessible heavenly mould.

The commission was embraced with some hesitation; the comforts of familiar Jerusalem initially proving difficult to resist. It was, however, too important a mission to be left to their whims. The nations had to be liberated, even if with some discomfort. The flourishing and comfortable church was therefore subjected to a fierce counter-attack from the recently deposed kingdom, scattering it to all corners of the hegemonic Roman Empire, and with this, the reach of its message.

With God as its originator and sustainer, the accomplishment of the mission could only be a foregone conclusion. Nevertheless, the adversary remained defiant. He was going down and he knew it, but he was not doing so without a fight!

And so began a campaign of ruthless persecution against the fledgling church. The established political power of the day, Rome, perceived this new “sect” of Judaism, a threat to political and social stability. So much so that it saw itself as having little option but to embark on a brutal campaign of quenching this nascent flame before it wrought irreparable damage. Far from accomplishing this ill-fated mission, the persecution only served to invigorate the church, causing it to grow, until it could be resisted no more...