Over the last week I’ve seen a couple of articles coming from within the British church establishment that suggest people are beginning to wake up to something big happening soon. The first thing I saw was an article on Premier Christianity, Pete Greig is warning Christians to ‘Prepare for War’:

Greig doesn’t make specific predictions, but the clear implication is that a significant global conflict could be on the horizon – one with serious consequences for the UK. The scenario he seems most convinced of is that cyberwarfare could cause communications failures and disruption to supply chains, with the potential for a wider conflict to escalate further.

Then, a couple of days ago, I just happened upon a video from All Nations Christian Centre, “Sober Urgent Warning for the Church”. In that video, Steve and Esther Uppal pass on a prophetic message that something big is coming round the corner. They think it’s necessary to say this to the church because most churches are asleep and have no idea what’s coming.

I’ve been saying for a long time that the church has been asleep. I started Understand the Bible back in 2019 because I think the church wasn’t being serious about teaching the faith to new Christians and the next generation. I thought the church was acting like we’re living in Christendom, where everyone is expected to be a Christian and taught the basics during their school years. In particular, churches had focussed on evangelism at the expense of discipleship.

That said, I hadn’t realised just how bad things were. The next few years, especially what happened during covid, left me under no illusion how deep the problems went. During this time I was highly critical of the church and its utterly abysmal response to everything that was happening. Most of the church simply accepted what they were told without question, and didn’t even attempt to think about what we were being asked to do from a Christian and Biblical perspective. Worse than that, they refused to engage and anyone who raised awkward questions was seen as a troublemaker.

So — I totally agree that the church needs to wake up. At the same time, I’m not sure that we need to wake up in the sense that Pete Greig or the All Nations video talks about. I don’t think they have the answers we need.

This is what the Pete Greig article goes on to say:

In his address, Greig urges Christians to pray for peace and to have a robust theology of Christian hope, rather than panic. Nevertheless, he does suggest churches, ministries and families should make sensible preparations, including stockpiling basic essentials and preparing for a time when the internet may be temporarily inaccessible due to a cyberattack.

Greig also emphasises the first duty of any government is to protect its citizens, therefore in his opinion, the UK’s spending on defence needs to be significantly increased in order to deter hostile forces. He pushes back against Christians who might adopt a purely pacifist position, arguing instead that because “bullies” are in charge of some nations, it is necessary to build up our military, even if only as a deterrent.

I’m totally in agreement with the need for Christians to pray for peace and have a robust theology of Christian hope (which is simply part of having a robust theology in general). I’m not sure that Christians should be stockpiling (Psalm 33:18-19), but let’s leave that for now. In my opinion, the real problem here is what he says about the government and defence spending.

It seems to me that a lot of this so-called prophetic messaging is assuming that the terrible event which is coming will be everything that the government and media say it is, and that we should respond in the way that the they want us to. We should do all that, but just pray more and generally do more ‘Christian stuff.’ For example, the All Nations video I watched said they had been upping the amount of time they spent in prayer.

What’s wrong with that, you might ask?

Cast your mind back to 2019. What would you have thought if someone had given a prophetic message that there was going to be a global pandemic, and that we needed to prepare for it through prayer but also taking sensible precautions such as stockpiling PPE? This is basically how I see these new warnings. Looking back at the covid insanity, I believe the whole thing was manufactured by the media and the authorities. There was no ‘pandemic,’ and I think it questionable whether there ever was anything called Sars-CoV-2 in the first place.

I believe that the best way, and the only right way, to have responded to it would have been essentially to ignore it completely. That is, go on meeting together, go on loving others, sharing fellowship with them, helping them, everything — as if nothing was happening (because, to be honest, nothing really was happening).

Love is the key word here. The supreme calling for each one of us is to love God with all our hearts, and to love our neighbour as ourselves. Because we are sinners, love doesn’t come naturally to us — this is why we need the transforming presence and power of the Holy Spirit to give us love. (If you’re interested I even wrote a song about this). Love is literally the whole point of our lives. If we are seeking to love others, everything else will fall into place.

If the church had been loving one another as God intended prior to 2020, then covid wouldn’t have made much of a difference. Instead, the church basically responded with fear and in the same way as the rest of the world. Yes, there may have been more prayer going on, but it was the kind of prayer which assumed that everything we were being told was completely true rather than dealing with the reality ‘on the ground’. Far too often the church simply rolled over and complied with whatever was being asked of us, e.g. to stop meeting, stop singing, meet but with social distancing, etc. As I’ve argued before, I don’t think the church should have done those things under any circumstances, no matter what view one took of the ‘pandemic.’

In a nutshell, what I am saying is this: the only preparation Christians need for what is coming is simply to be living according to what we read in our Bibles.

The Bible speaks of Satan as the “father of lies,” (John 8:44) and that there will be a “powerful delusion” which is “in accordance with the way that Satan works” (2 Thessalonians 2:9-12). Similarly, Christians are told to expect persecution (2 Timothy 3:12) and to expect upheavals in the world (Mark 13:7-8). But we are also told to trust the Lord through all these times to keep us safe and protect us (Psalm 91; John 16:33). In other words, Christians should be well-prepared for anything that might happen, understanding that the Enemy will try to use world events to drag us away from loving God and each other. This isn’t special or unique to any time in history — this happens all the time. It’s just that sometimes it’s more obvious than others.

God calls us to love him and love each — nothing more, nothing less — at all times and in every situation. Anything that distracts from this calling is not from him. These are the things which all Christians should not need special prophetic warnings to focus on: we don’t need to do anything special for times of deception, uncertainty, war, or whatever. If we simply commit to doing what we should be doing, under the Lordship of Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit, then we will have everything we need to get us through whatever it is that might be coming.

I believe there IS something big round the corner, but I suspect it’s going to be very much along the same lines as covid. That is, it’s going to be a great deception which comes to us primarily via our TV screens and social media feeds but we don’t see with our own eyes and ears. This means that our response should be the same as it should have been toward covid: ignore it, and get on with loving others in the way that God wants us to. In my opinion, that’s the only way the church really needs to wake up right now.