Is this our time for going mad?

I remember in 1975, as the Cultural Revolution in China was drawing to an end, that Time magazine had these words emblazoned in large letters on its cover, “When China went mad.”

This was the time when students drove their teachers and professors with sticks and beatings out to the countryside to work, and Mao’s wife unleashed a pogrom of ideological purity that resulted in the death of millions of Chinese people.

We wondered how so many in a whole society could have embraced such madness.

We have also wondered how the best-educated society in history could have had its mind warped in the 1930s.  I refer to Germany, whose percentage of BAs, MAs, and PhDs was higher than that of any other society to that time, and perhaps since.

How could this society have elected Hitler by a plurality?  And gone along with the “Jewish paragraph” that drove Jews from positions of honor and leadership in all aspects of society?  How could Christians have agreed that the Old Testament should not be read from the pulpit on Sunday mornings?  How could the most Christianized society in history have accepted the demonic ways of Nazism without significant protest?

Recently InterVarsity Christian Fellowship was thrown off all the campuses of the University of California system because it would not change its policy upholding the classical Christian teaching marriage.  Other IV chapters around the country are now facing similar moves.

In what seems like a moment, our nation has gone from small percentages who thought that gay marriage was perfectly acceptable to over a majority.  More and more agree that businesses and churches and Christian adoption agencies and hospitals should be penalized if they choose not to cooperate with the new acceptance of gay practice.

Perhaps it is our time for going mad.

There clearly are times when a spirit of deception sweeps over a whole people.  Among other things, this shows that intelligence as measured by IQ tests and admission to prestigious universities is not very important in the long run.  What matters far more is wisdom, whose beginning is “the fear of the Lord” (Prov 9.10).

There is a mysterious passage in Paul’s second letter to the church in Thessalonica that suggests that God is at work in these strange times, even perhaps superintending such spirits of deception for his own mysterious purposes.  Paul speaks of the “mystery of lawlessness” that is at work with “wicked deception” among those “who refuse to love the truth.”

That is easy enough to follow.  But then comes the shocking part.  “Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false” (2 Thess 2.11).

What?!  God sends a strong delusion?  Why in the world?

Paul’s answer to that question has to do with judgment, which Scripture tells us elsewhere is God’s “strange work” (Is 28.21).

These are mysterious times.  It is a comfort to know that this is not the first time that societies have gone mad, and that even these times are part of God’s plans for the history of redemption.