We have heard the news that our President will be going to Red China. History is heading up to its momentous climax. Rulers and nations are in motion—they are moving and they are being moved unaware—toward the grand finale. The human actors in this drama are presidents, dictators and national rulers. Back of them stand “principalities and powers, the world rulers of this present darkness, the spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places”—satan and his emissaries. Ephesians 6:12.
Time magazine’s cover story on the President’s planned trip carried this headline in red letters: “Nixon’s Coup: to Peking for Peace.” The story presents the prospect of the President walking through the Gate of Heavenly Peace to sup with Mao and Chou. There are some who are distressed by the President’s plan to visit Peking. Word came over the radio that a diplomat said that there is an ulterior motive in China inviting the President. From the Biblical perspective, we can understand that it would not just be Red China that has the ulterior motive. Rather, satan in back of it all has the ulterior motive.
[from tract: President Nixon intends to visit Peking to seek “the normalization of relations” with Communist China. That raises the interesting, and important, question: What are “normal” relations with a despot, and what can be expected to come of such relations?]
The President has set his aim and sight on peace. He wants peace not only for the present; he wants peace for his children and his children’s children. He hasn’t pulled out of Vietnam so quickly, he says, because he just doesn’t want a peace that will last for a few moths or a year. He wants lasting peace.
[In the Bible,] Saint Paul clearly says, “For when they shall say, peace and safety; then sudden destruction comes upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.” 1 Thessalonians 5:3. Lasting peace—how are we going to have lasting peace until we have the Prince of Peace? Jesus Christ is the Prince of Peace. That means He owns the territory of peace. He says, “My peace I give to you: such as I give the world cannot give and the world cannot take it away. His is the only peace: the peace that passes all understanding. And He is the Prince of Peace.
In European history there were princes of certain regions and each prince reigned over his part, since it had been handed down to him by his father. So Jesus was given the territory of peace by His Father, and He’s the Prince of it. He’s the only one who can give lasting peace because he is the only one who owns it. Truly He is the Prince of Peace.
Can President Nixon bring lasting peace? Can diplomacy bring this about? While we[, as Christians,] honor the President, we cannot possibly honor his audacious and anti-Scriptural assertions[, that he, a man, can bring lasting peace.] and acts. Certainly, we’re not against the man personally. Tricia said she’s never seen a kinder man. He seems to be a kindly man. He wants the nations to be blessed. Then he will bring peace to all the world, and he will be the representative of peace. So, he’s the man of the hour.
In reading about the kings of Israel and Judah in the Bible, you will find the phrase, “He did that which was right in the sight of the Lord.” And when the king did that which was right, then the nation was blessed. The people received the blessing because the king did right. It was one man’s decision that blessed or ruined the whole nation.
We see that the nation rose or fell by what the king did. It’s lamentable that a nation fell by one king doing evil.
Consider King Josiah. Two evil kings preceded him and conditions were at such a low ebb in Judah that the Word of God had been lost and forgotten until it was found in the dust of the temple. A scribe brought him the book of the law, and read it to him. “And when the king heard the words of the book of the law, he rent his clothes.” II Kings 22:11. He realized he was responsible. He said, we have not kept the law, what will God do? Will God spare us or will we be cursed? Josiah sent messengers to inquire of a prophetess. Thank the Lord that there was a woman who was on the watchtower. No king had ever sent to her before. We don’t know to what extent she had ever been used of God, or for what purposes. But she had kept on. No doubt she had been hidden away, but she was there, ready. Her people were keepers of the wardrobe in the college there in Jerusalem. One day the king’s dispatch came to her, five messengers I think it was who said, “We’ve found a book. We want to know what will happen to us, good or bad.”
She said, “Tell the man who sent you”—they didn’t tell her who it was; she knew it was the king right away. She was on the watchtower. Isn’t that marvel? Whether school kept or not, whether she was noticed or not, Huldah the prophetess was on the watchtower! The prophetess said, “Go tell the man who sent you, that the Lord will bring evil upon this nation and its inhabitants, and all the curses of the book—but not in your day. Because your heart was tender and you humbled yourself before the Lord, you shall be taken to the grave in peace. You will not suffer because you have listened.” II Kings 23:19. The king came upon the book by chance and he was so blessed by it because something in him was right. He would be satisfied with nothing less and when he had opportunity, he acted.
Josiah died and the next king came along and put all the evil back again. This was typical of the history of the kings of Israel and Judah. One would do right and many would do wrong. God beholds all of these changes. He sees it all built up and sees it all dragged down over a period of thousands of years in history—hundreds of years just to go through with those kings.
Let us try to get God’s picture. Just look at His side for a while—how He sees it. He has suffered this of mankind from the very beginning: the disobedience, the failure, the pulling away from Him, the stiffening of the neck, the hardening of the heart. Consider the setting up and the pulling down; all the painstaking that one king would do only to have the next king come along and tear it all down.
When rulers act, their people are affected. We see in Biblical history how certain kings—trying to bring about [that when a king did what was right before God, then the nation was blessed. Another king—seeking] security for his nation or a stronger military position or sometimes simply to establish friendly terms [relations] with foreign kings—sold out their people. [One man’s decision brought either blessing or ruination to the whole nation.] We have seen in recent years how fateful Presidential initiatives have been in involving our nation and its people in war and death. These initiatives, all meant for good, have worked to the contrary.
We can look at [Take, for instance,] Jehoshaphat, a king of Judah. When he sought the Lord and walked in His ways, [then] Judah was blessed because the high places and the groves to false gods were destroyed. He grew in power and all the nations round about feared and respected him. But look again! Jehoshaphat joined an affinity [made an alliance] with Ahab, the wicked king of Israel [– a man who had become an enemy of God]. We read, “Now Jehoshaphat had riches and honor in abundance, and joined affinity with Ahab.” II Chronicles 18:1.
King Ahab [first] prepared a feast for Jehoshaphat: “And Ahab killed sheep and oxen for him in abundance, and for the people that he had with him.” And then he made a proposal: Ahab “persuaded him to go up with him to Ramothgilead” [to fight the threatening Syrians]. II Chronicles 18:2. Jehoshaphat answered Ahab, “I am as thou art and my people as thy people.” II Chronicles 18:3.
The distinction between what was good—that is, in line with the will of God—and what was evil—contrary to the will of God—was blurred in this act of spiritual adultery. It was a fateful step in the wrong direction for Jehoshaphat [and it brought defeat to his army].
How similar that is to what is now going on: Our nation, founded upon faith in God by our Pilgrim Fathers, is headed up by a President saying, “I am one with you” to wicked rulers who have over a period of years viciously denied the Christian faith and doctrine and have systematically destroyed its pastors and congregations, through infiltration, torture and murder.
Atheism—active denial of any belief in God—is a cardinal principle of Communist doctrine. Atheism is obligatory for all Communist party officials.
Our nation was founded by men who had regard for the Word of God, who fled the terror and tyranny of kings in Europe. From its early days it has been a refuge for people who had suffered bitter oppression in other lands. Too long they had known the fear of seizure, the corroding effects of an imposed and inescapable poverty, fixity from birth to one level of the social strata, the autocratic denial of the most elementary rights. They looked out longingly from the countries where they lived for a place of freedom, where fear did not rule men’s souls. By the hundreds of thousands they came to new America and found that life was gloriously different here.
Our founders knew that the ways of the nations were evil and they desired a different country, where liberty and righteousness would dwell. The Lord was pleased to honor their faith and to set the United States at the height of the nations at a critical time in the world’s history, when an evil ideology, inspired by satan and avowing enmity to God, would arise to subjugate the peoples. He lifted our nation with the intent that His light shine into many nations. Yet at this time, when the United States should reflect the glory of God, it reflects its own shame.
The United States, made up of many peoples, became a nation composed of remnants. Her diverse peoples could call back to Europe, to Africa, to Asia, to South America, the wonderful news of spiritual, economic and political liberty.
Communism is a tyranny exceeding that of kings. It is ravenous and murderous and energized by tremendous lies. The Red ideology reaches out to swallow up nations and peoples. It magnifies itself above the Lord and brazenly declares that there is no God. It has perfected the technique of brainwashing. It replaces kings with a small coterie of dictators who constitute themselves rulers of the people in perpetual succession.
There is a special blindness in the West, a willful disinclination to deal with certain facts as facts. The mishandling of one individual human life is a crime, yet Communism is a system whose history is written in the blood of millions. Its victims committed no crime but to be inconvenient, or to seems to be so, to Communism in its raging zeal to obliterate even a murmur of dissent.
In his carefully documented history of the purges in Russia, titled, The Great Terror, Robert Conquest accounts that by “minimal estimates” 20 million Russians were killed, without a war. This figure may be 50 per cent too low, he cautions. More than 20 million human beings, entitled to rights that we hold to be self-evident and unalienable, were put to death. Add to that the fearful sum of arrests-without-trials, families wrenched apart, hopelessness and mental anguish suffered by millions more and you catch only a glimpse of the crimes committed by Communism against the rights of men.
In China, much the same thing has happened on a similarly vast and awful scale. Scholars do not argue over the fact, only the figures. There are some who say the bloody heel of Communism has taken 7,000,000 Chinese lives; others put the total at over 54,000,000 lives.
Millions upon millions—perhaps 25 million—have died in forced labor camps in China. Political liquidation campaigns of wild irrationality have snuffed out perhaps 30,000,000 Chinese. Confiscation, brainwashing, slave labor, the sundering of husbands from wives and children from parents, forced confessions by torture, starvation, mass outdoor trials with frenzied public accusation and wholesale execution—all of this has fallen on the heads of the Chinese people.
Chairman Mao Tse Tung sends [has sent] out his word—“power flows out of the barrel of a gun,”—and imposes it in the place of God’s Word on the masses. His words, printed in the Little Red Book carried like a pocket testament, are memorized and recited. It is by his word that men are inspired to perform their deeds, that good supposedly comes, that all progress may be made. [And] Not only that: he has made himself to be a god!
It is to such a man that the President intends to go, to look eye to eye and to take mutual counsel, to see what may be done for mankind and peace.
The Chinese rulers, never elected by their vast people, desire now to take a prominent place in the affairs of the nations.
A news dispatch from Peking (New York Times, August 29, 1971) reports,
Premier Chou En-lai declared last night that the United States is on the verge of losing the pre-eminent position it has enjoyed in world affairs since the end of World War II.
The Premier said at a banquet here that “the whole world is in the midst of a great upheaval, and the situation is excellent.” He added: “The United States imperialist position of hegemony established after World War II has been shaken to its very foundation, and the imperialist colonial position is collapsing.”
It was the second time in recent weeks that a Chinese leader has spoken of “a great upheaval” in world affairs.
Diplomatic observers here believe the phrase may provide the key to an understanding of China’s initiative in inviting President Nixon to visit here sometime before next May. The Chinese are thought to feel that the President’s continuing withdrawal of United States forces from Indochina, together with growing isolationist sentiment among the American voters, has created a fluid situation in which they can score significant diplomatic gains.
All that sets these rulers apart from murderers of the common sort is that they hold power and that their crimes are larger. Having trampled millions of lives into the dust, Mao and his associates now seek to act upon a greater stage.
