In the fifth century there was a little monk named Telemachus from the Roman province of Asia which is modern day Turkey. He lived alone as a spiritual hermit in the desert seeking God. One day he became convinced that he was selfish rather than selfless, and was led by an inner voice to head to Rome without knowing why. He arrived when the Romans were celebrating a military victory over the Goths.

Prisoners of war were being marched through the streets. He heard there was going to be a great victory celebration at the Coliseum, and so he followed the crowds to the Coliseum.

He was astonished to find 50,000 people cheering as the prisoners of war fought each other to the death in gladiator games. Keep in mind that Rome had become officially Christian by this time. Telemachus could not endure what he was witnessing. He was morally outraged, and he decided to take action.

Two gladiators were fighting, and Telemachus tried to get between them to stop them, shouting three times, “In the name of Christ, forbear!” The crowd was enraged and began to chant for the life of the monk. Finally, the commander of the games gave in to the blood-lust of the crowd and signaled for Telemachus to be murdered.

Telemachus was killed by being run through with the sword of one of the gladiators. Suddenly, a hush fell over the crowd as people began to realize they had encouraged the killing of a holy man. When the crowd saw the little monk lying dead in a pool of blood, they fell silent, leaving the stadium, one by one. Because of Telemachus’ death, three days later, the Emperor by decree ended the Games, and they were never resumed. Edward Gibbon wrote,

His death was more useful to mankind than his life.

How does this apply to me and the reader? God is calling us to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, make disciples and stand up for righteousness in the midst of a society that is calling evil good and good evil. Here is article by Wallace Henley warning American Churches to be prepared for persecution:

Dear Churches in America: Prepare to Be Treated Like 1st Century Christians in Rome

The United States Supreme Court may soon liberate the biblically conservative church from old “prejudices” that should have long ago been “jettisoned,” forcing it into “rightly bowing to the enlightenments of modernity,” in the words of a recent writer in The New York Times.

Homosexuality must be removed from the “sin list” and, according to an MSNBC commentator, traditional marriage proponents must be forced “to do things they don’t want to do.” Sadly, this crusade will be like the Marxist “liberation” movements that promised to “free” people, but really were about control and suppression.

The culmination may come as the Supreme Court hears oral arguments on same-sex marriage cases beginning April 28. By July 1 the Court possibly will issue an official ruling regarding the constitutional right to homosexual marriage.

The Court’s decision may impact the form of biblically based churches dramatically. Churches that hold to a strict and conservative interpretation of the Bible’s teaching about gender and marriage may find themselves “Romanized”.

The elites of first century Rome would not allow the church an institutional presence in society. “The Christian churches were associations which were not legally authorized, and the Roman authorities, always suspicious of organizations which might prove seditious, regarded them with jaundiced eye,” writes Kenneth Scott LaTourette.

In our time this means local churches that do not embrace same-sex marriage would find their legal status shaky or non-existent, as well as parachurch groups, conservative Christian colleges, church-based humanitarian agencies, and all other religious institutions – Christian and otherwise – supporting the traditional view of marriage.

Without state-recognized corporate status everything from mortgages and building permits to employment and hiring practices is threatened – all of them essential for institutional function.

Journalist Ben Shapiro notes that there is already a movement on the state level “to revoke non-profit status for religious organizations that do not abide by same-sex marriage.” The Supreme Court’s decision could make churches refusing to comply”private institutions engaging in commerce,” and therefore subject to laws already in place. Refusal to perform a same-sex wedding would put a church out of business.

Current trends seem to flow against conservative religious institutions. All the elites that set and propagate cultural consensus are aligned in support of same-sex marriage – the Entertainment Establishment, Information Establishment, Academic Establishment, and Political Establishment.

Much of the legal community is on board. Despite a tower of briefs supporting same-sex marriage, there are no major law firms willing to argue against it, reported the New York Times April 11.

Big business has also rallied. Apple and Wal-Mart were among the major corporations opposing moves in Indiana and Arkansas to secure freedom for business owners to follow their religious convictions. Reuters reported that 379 corporations including Google, American Airlines, Goldman Sachs, and Johnson & Johnson have signed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting same-sex marriage.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that public support leans toward same-sex marriage. When Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican presidential candidate, told a CNN interviewer that he supported the right of states to determine marriage policies, Jake Tapper, the CNN host, informed Rubio that he is “the candidate of yesterday” since polls show 61 percent of GOP voters under 30 support same-sex marriage.

Previously, I wrote in The Christian Post about the process by which the prophetic voice is silenced in a culture: Marginalization, caricaturization, vilification, criminalization, elimination.

We have reached the stage of vilification – conservative Christians are now regarded by the consensus establishments as the villains in “transformed” America. The Supreme Court may well take us to the criminalization stage.

The biblical church therefore must learn to live as the first century Christians did in Rome.

Their faith would not permit violent resistance to the state. Rather, as Dr. Martin Luther King would demonstrate, the resistance would take the positive form of standing for truth midst the antagonism of individuals and institutions opposing their freedom. The first century Roman Christians knew the greatest they could do in the exclusion of marginalization, ridicule of caricaturization, loathing of vilification, infamy of criminalization, and threat of elimination was to live out their faith in the midst of a society that hated them.

Since they did not have official sanction for an institutional presence in Rome, the Roman Christians operated through organic relational communities. In homes, catacombs, and other secret places, they functioned as the body of Christ. And when they emerged up into the public glare they manifested the face of Christ.
This is what the biblical church must prepare for now. Leaders should begin thinking about what will happen if non-profit status is lost. Christian institutions must embrace a Book of Acts strategy for corporate operation. Schools must train future church leaders in New Testament strategies.

Winston Churchill wrote that all prophets must “come from civilization, but every prophet has to go into the wilderness. He must have a strong impression of a complex society and all that it has to give, and then he must serve periods of isolation and meditation. This is the process by which psychic dynamite is made.”

Within a decade or less the American church may find itself in a desert institutionally. But as the New Testament church proved, and Churchill believed, something transformative and energizing happens in that barren place.

 Source of Image

 

Albert Einstein is quoted to have said, The world is too dangerous to live in—not because of the people who do evil, but because of the people who let it happen.”

The month of April is Genocide awareness month. It’s also the month the Jews remember the Holocaust. The Holocaust has been described as the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and mass murder of European Jews and other groups carried out by Nazi Germany and its allies between 1933 and 1945.

Richard Von Weizsaecker the President of Germany made this thought provoking statement:

The Jewish nation remembers and will always remember. We seek reconciliation. Precisely for this reason we must understand that there can be no reconciliation without remembrance. The experience of million fold death is part the very being of every Jew in the world, not only because people cannot forget such atrocities, but also because remembrance is part of the Jewish faith.

Remembering the past always helps us to understand the present. And to make the most of the present, we’ve got to try to use the knowledge learned from the past to create a better future. That is why the Bible speaks in the language of remembering. God kept on reminding the Jews to remember what happened. What their ancestors taught them so that they could teach it to their children and eventually to the whole world.

What happened to Jews in Nazi Germany still provides compelling historical lessons for the church today and for the future of all who value justice, truth, and the value of human life.

A famous Holocaust survivor Primo Levi is quoted to have said,

In Hitler’s Germany a particular code was widespread: Those who knew did not talk; those who did not know did not ask questions; those who did ask questions received no answers.

Here are some questions that are worth pondering and reflecting on as Christians:

• Where was the Church during the Holocaust?
• What is the responsibility of the Church when the state legalizes sin, either through the courts or Parliament?
• How should the church respond if the state adopts unjust policies?
• Is the Church spiritually alert enough to face the crushing power and influence of the state?
• What should we have done in face of such evil?

We should not be critical of the church in Germany, because these and so many questions don’t have easy answers. Yet these questions are just as relevant today as there were back then. One of the most important lessons from dark period is that many Christians in Germany justified their allegiance to the state through a belief that “their obligation to God was spiritual; their duty to the state was political, yet the Bible teaches that all issues are spiritual—the moral issues are also the political issues. If the state perverts its God-given authority, it can no longer be honored.

The German census of May 1939 indicates that 54 percent of Germans considered themselves Protestant and 40 percent considered themselves Catholic, with only 3.5 percent claiming to neo-pagan “believers in God,” and 1.5 percent unbelievers. This census came more than six years into the Hitler era.

It has been said that centuries of proselytization, attacks on Judaism, and other anti-Semitic violence also contributed to the Holocaust. Replacement theology was also another factor that contributed to the Holocaust. Most of the Church Fathers” taught a “replacement theology” that the Church is the new Israel of God and that God had totally finished with the Jews. Merril Bolender, in his book When the Cross Became a Sword, writes:

The early Church fathers did not literally interpret the Scriptures; they often allegorized and spiritualized large amounts of Scriptural texts, with strange results. They also failed to consult the historical and cultural Hebraic context of passages as they attempted to rightly divide the Word of Truth….. When the allegorical method of interpretation is used, it denies the literal meaning of the text. Then you can make the text mean anything you want to mean.

Yes, it’s true that Replacement Theology and other factors contributed to the brutal extermination of millions of Jews and others they considered undesirables. But the spirit of Nazism was much more than killing Jews. It was because men had forgotten God, His commandments, His laws and absolute authority, and the Church forgot to preach the whole truth of the gospel message.

Dr Erwin Lutzer, in his book, When a Nation Forgets God, points out that when God is separated from government, judgment follows:

Christians thought that if they left Hitler alone, he would leave them alone. But they soon found out that it wasn’t possible. The church witnessed to the saving grace of Christ but believed that the church’s mission was only to preach Christ…..Pietism, with its emphasis on personal devotion to Christ, was used to inject spiritual life into the mainstream Lutheran church. But by insisting that their faith was private and should not be brought into the political sphere, pietism had scant influence in stemming the Nazi tide.

The majority of the church sat in congregations all around the Western world praising the Lord’s name while completely disinterested in the fate of Jewish people or not prepared to identify with them because of the possible consequences. In fact, part of the church joined in the persecutions. Here is an eye witness account of how some members of the church responded to the Nazi regime:

I lived in Germany during the Nazi Holocaust. I considered myself a Christian. We heard stories of what were happening to the Jews, but we tried to distance ourselves from it because, what could anyone do to stop it? A rail road track ran behind our small church and each Sunday morning we could hear the whistle in the distance and then the wheels coming over the tracks. We became disturbed when we heard the cries coming from the train as it passed by. We realized that it was carrying Jews like cattle in the cars!

Week after week the whistle would blow. We dreaded to hear the sound of those wheels because we knew that we would hear the cries of the Jews en route to a death camp. Their screams tormented us. We knew the time the train was coming and when we heard the whistle blow we began singing hymns. By the time the train came past our church we were singing at the top of our voices. If we heard the screams, we sang more loudly and soon we heard them no more. Years have passed and no one talks about it anymore. But I still hear that train whistle in my sleep. God forgive me; forgive all of us who called ourselves Christians yet did nothing to intervene.

The dealing with the guilt and the enormous scope of the crimes of the Nazis to the Jews is still very hard for the church to grasp. But remember there was a big price to pay: Interrogation, punishment, arrest, solitary confinement in concentration camps, and the death of some church leaders in these camps were consequences that had to be taken into consideration.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoller & The Confessing Church

But in spite of all this there were many, and there will always be a remnant that loves and blesses the Jewish people, even when it is neither popular nor safe. Hundreds of pastors of Germany during the Third Reich refused to take the oath of loyalty to Hitler. Dietrich Bonheoffer and others who spoke out against the state’s abuse of power found themselves imprisoned and persecuted for “Abuse of Pulpit.”

It estimated that 800 pastors were arrested and imprisoned for refusing the Nazification of their churches. They believed that the German church had ceased to be the church of Jesus Christ, and therefore they must break away and form a new church which could be called the Confessing Church because it proclaimed the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Their efforts resulted in chaos within the church because some leaders in the church thought if they compromised on their theology, they would avoid conflict with the Nazi regime. They thought that under Hitler they could continue to evangelize, but Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew that “a church that did not stand with the Jews was not the church of Jesus Christ and to evangelize people into a church that was not the church of Jesus Christ was foolishness and heresy.”

The neutral understanding of the church, of preaching, and of conscience had already deeply disturbed Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He is quoted to have said,

Silence in the face of evil is evil itself. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is act.

Bonhoeffer was convinced that the church must venture to proclaim the Christian message in its elementary sense concretely, that is, in the context of specific situations and fundamental decisions. After all, the Reformers, whether Luther or Calvin, taught that resistance is commanded where authorities are so badly perverted that they destroy the rights and basic ordering of human life in society.According to Bonhoeffer,

The church does play a vital role for the state. What is that role? The church must “continually ask the state whether its action can be justified as legitimate action of the state, i.e., as action which leads to law and order, and not to lawlessness and disorder.

In other words, it is the church’s role to help the state be the state. If the state is not creating an atmosphere of law and order, as Scripture says it must, then it is the job of the church to draw the state’s attention to this failing. Theologian Heiz Eduard who was a theologian and whose work examined Bonhoeffer’s theological ethics in context wrote,

On the road to both the Second World War and the Holocaust, the churches did not even intervene with a resolute witness in the face of wielders of power. Bonhoeffer viewed this as heavy guilt incurred by the church. We should not think this easy to judge. Are we, whose history contains such events, today in a position to proclaim God’s commandment concretely? Do we, at the bottom, still believe that political decisions should always be left to the individual conscience, while the church has nothing to say and to confess in common? If there was so, then we would be just as weak as the church of 1932 and 1933 that could not understand Bonhoeffer’s challenges, let alone muster the courage to act accordingly. We must ask ourselves whether and how we might follow Bonhoeffer’s insight and intention today, or whether we can only admire him as an exceptional prophet on whom the gift of faith was bestowed of doing what we cannot do.

Bonhoeffer emphasized that the commission of the church is to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ and command of God concretely for the situation.

Under an in human regime of injustice, this preaching will inevitably, and on its own authority, become resistance by word and will, under the prevailing conditions, entail repressions and persecutions. What is needed here is not a direct political action of the church, but only unswerving witness to the truth—and this is the primary mandate of the church…… Jesus did not summon political action. But His sermons were by no means politically neutral….

Surely the church’s witness to the truth and resistance by word are accompanied by activity, for example intercession in solidarity and care for the victims of the welders of power, actions which were always perceived as political provocation in the National Socialist Germany, those who helped Jews were persecuted as well–people like Irena Sendler, Corrie Ten Boon and many others.

Conflict Between Church and State

First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.–Martin Niemoller

The Nazis first saw it as important to keep a good relationship with the Church, because they were worried that many Germans were committed Christians and if at all there was a conflict between the Church and the state, many German Christians would put their faith before the Nazi state.

So when the Church started opposing Hitler, he created new laws and then accused the leaders of breaking these laws, furthermore he also divided the churches by encouraging other churches to work with the Nazis in creating socialist family values and to work for the greater good of the German people.

As the methods of oppression by the Nazis grew worse, the resistance devised all ways of disobedience. Martin Niemoller, Bonhoeffer and other “Young Reformers” formed the Pastors Emergency League and later the Confessing church and they all agreed that the church should be independent of the state, but they disagreed about the nature of the Nazi regime. Remember pastors were required to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler and the Reich declaring “One Reich. One People. One Church. Hail my Fuhrer!

The members of the Pastors Emergency League and pastors of the Confessing Church had refused to swear the oath. They saw themselves as independent of the state and they did not want to violate their consciences; yet they also wanted to be patriotic to the German state. The Bible was the essential foundation on which they based, so they repudiated as much as possible any government intrusion into the affairs of the church and opposed the policies of the state.

This resulted in the Gestapo identifying pastors who didn’t comply, arrest them, and sentence them to whatever the People’s court would decide. More than two thousand pastors who had stood with Niemoller and Bonheoffer withdrew their support. Bonhoeffer was crushed. It was a “gash in his own flesh” that was inflicted by his own people. He felt the shame one would have for his own family.

Will the Confessing Church be willing to confess publicly its guilt and disunion?” he asked. At last the choice was unmistakably clear: In bowing to the swastika, the pastors turned their backs on the Cross.

They believed that making concessions with the Fuhrer would be the best strategy; they thought that if they remained silent they could live with Hitler’s intrusion into church affairs and his political policies. In July 27, 1936, just prior to the 1936 Olympics, Niemoller and nine other Protestant ministers in the Confessional Church wrote a letter to Hitler.

Our people are trying to break the bond set by God. That is human conceit rising against God. In this connection we must warn the Fuhrer, that the adoration frequently bestowed on him is only due to God. Some years ago the Fuhrer objected to having his picture placed on protestant altars. Today his thoughts are used as a basis not only for political decisions but also for morality and law. He himself is surrounded with the dignity of a priest and even of an intermediary between God and man….We ask that liberty be given to our people to go their way in the future under the sign of the Cross of Christ, in order that our grandsons may not curse their elders on the ground that their elders left them a state on earth that closed to them the Kingdom of God.

Pastor Martin Niemoller

When Hitler heard that there might be a church division because some pastors objected to his agenda, he summoned German church leaders to his office to rebuke them for inadequately supporting his programs. Hitler began by reproaching his guests and how he was misunderstood. He told them he wanted Peace between Church and State and they were obstructing him and sabotaging his efforts to achieve it.

When the time came for those who were in the meeting to respond, Pastor Niemoller (pictured left), explained that he was concerned only for the welfare of the church and of the German people. Hitler responded angrily by saying “You confine yourself to the Church. I’ll take care of the German people.” Niemoller replied, “

You said that ‘I will take care of the German people.’ But we too, as Christians and churchmen, have a responsibility toward the German people. That responsibility was entrusted to us by God, and neither you nor anyone in this world has the power to take it from us.

Hitler listened in silence but that same evening, his Gestapo men raided Niemoller’s rectory for incriminating evidence. A few days later a bomb exploded in his church. During the months and years following, he was closely watched by secret police. On June 27 1937, Niemoller preached his last sermon in the Third Reich knowing that he was about to be arrested:

We have no more thought of using our own powers to escape the arm of authorities than had the Apostles of old. No more are we ready to keep silent at man’s behest when God commands us to speak. For it is, and must remain, the case that we must obey God rather than man.”

Niemoller said, “Christianity in Germany bears a greater responsibility before God than the National Socialist, the SS, and the Gestapo.” He was soon arrested and placed in solitary confinement. According to Dr. Lutzer,

The interrogation from police was easier for Niemoller to bear than some of the criticism he received from his colleagues for his words to Hitler, clearly the majority of the pastors had adopted an attitude of safety first. Niemoller declared that he would rather burn his church to the ground, than preach the Nazi trinity of race, blood, and soil.

The great majority of Christians supported the Führer, even when he led them into war. With its idealistic view of the state as being always God’s agent, the Confessing Church was slow to recognize how perverted the political order had become. I think this sounds familiar!

But we should not overlook the hundreds of pastors who stood courageously and preached the gospel even in the prisons and concentration camps. In many ways, the Confessing Church reluctantly resisted the Nazi regime. Its goal was to preserve the church, not to topple the Hitler regime.

Nevertheless, if the church in Germany had truly acted like the Church of Jesus Christ, if Christians had prayed fervently, understood and lived out a Biblical worldview and preached the full gospel of Jesus Christ, Germany would never have accepted the Nazi regime. But as Dr. Lutzer again noted,

Hitler’s political machine swallowed the whole church because the church had lost its Biblical mission. Thus the state not only interfered with religious practices but controlled them. A powerful state has always been a threat to the existence and influence of the church. Whether the threat be Nazism, Communism, or humanism, a state that is hostile to religion will always attempt to push the church toward forced irrelevancy. Even without a dictatorship a state can marginalize the influence of the church.

As the state expands its power, it can initiate laws that limit the church’s freedoms. The Church wasn’t free to exercise its influence and practice religion without interference from the state. This kind of separation is what the church in Germany so desperately needed.

Early in 1934, Martin Niemoller at his church in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem had prophetically declared God’s purpose in the trials that faced the German church. He said that:

We have all of us –the whole Church and the whole community—we’ve been thrown into the Tempter’s sieve, and he is shaking and the wind is blowing, and it must now become manifest whether we are wheat or chaff! Verily, a time of sifting has come upon us, and even the most indolent and peaceful person among us must see that the calm of a meditative Christianity is at an end…It is now springtime for the hopeful and expectant Christian church—it is testing time, and God is giving Satan a free hand, so he may shake us up and so that it may be seen what manner of men we are!.. Satan swings his sieve and Christianity is thrown hither and thither; and he who is not ready to suffer, he who called himself a Christian only because he thereby hoped to gain something good for his race and his nation is blown away by the wind of time.

Niemoller has a word for us who live in the Western nations. Of course he was thinking of his own church and the people of Germany when he spoke these words, but they are for us as well……Though we can often see the judgment that God inflicts upon His church, the purification is hidden from us. The chaff is more easily seen than the wheat, which is more precious to Him.”

In the Western world most especially in the U.K. and U.S., it is increasingly becoming more difficult to practice your religion in the realm that belongs to the state. Religion, we are told, should be practiced privately; the state must be “cleansed” from every vestige of religious influence. Hate crime and other legislations are increasingly being used to criminalize Christians who hold a Biblical worldview on political, social or other moral issues.

Yet this study of Germany according to Lutzer “will force us to wrestle with the same sobering questions the German Christians faced 70 years ago.”There is no doubt that the silence and inaction by a majority of Christians during Holocaust still haunts and will continue to haunt the Christian Churches for a very, very long time.

Source of Image The German Confessing Church.

The 7th-century Khor Virap monastery in the shadow of Mount Ararat, the peak on which Noah’s Ark is said to have landed during the Biblical flood.

Armenia was the first nation to become Christian during the Roman era. According to ancient tradition, Noah’s Ark rested on Mount Ararat in the Armenian Mountain Range.Armenia’s Coat of Arms has Mount Ararat with Noah’s Ark on top.

Armenian historian Movses Khorenatsi (410-490 AD) recounted the tradition that Noah’s son Japheth had a descendant named Hayk who shot an arrow in a battle near Lake Van c.2,500 BC killing Nimrod, builder of the Tower of Babel who was the first powerful tyrant of the ancient world.

Hayk is the origin of “Hayastan,” the Armenian name for Armenia. Ancient Armenians may have had some relations with the Hittites and Hurrians, who inhabited that area known as Anatolia in the 2nd millennium BC. Armenia’s major city of Yerevan, founded in 782 BC in the shadow of Mount Ararat, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world.

Armenia was first mentioned by name in 520 BC by Darius the Great of Persia. Borders reached their greatest extent under Armenia’s King Tigrane the Great, 95-55 BC, reaching from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, pushing back the Parthians, Seleucids and the Roman Republic.

Armenia was the first nation in the world to officially adopt Christianity as its state religion around 301 AD, with the conversion of King Tiridates III.

Armenia’s thousands of years of history include independence interspersed by occupations of Greeks, Romans, Persians, Byzantines, Mongols, Arabs, Ottoman Turks, and Soviets.

Armenia’s medieval capital of Ani was called “the city of a 1,001 churches,” with a population of 200,000, rivaling Constantinople, Baghdad and Damascus. In 1064, Sultan Alp Arslan and Muslim Turks invaded and destroyed the city of Ani. Arab historian Sibt ibn al-Jawzi recorded:

The army entered the city, massacred its inhabitants, pillaged and burned it, leaving it in ruins… Dead bodies were so many that they blocked the streets; one could not go anywhere without stepping over them. And the number of prisoners was not less than 50,000 souls… I was determined to enter city and see the destruction with my own eyes. I tried to find a street in which I would not have to walk over the corpses, but that was impossible.

Muslim Turks made conquered Christians, Jewish, and non-Muslim populations into second-class citizens called “dhimmi” and required them to ransom their lives once a year by paying an exorbitant “jizyah” tax.

Sultan Murat I (1359-1389) began the practice of “devshirme” — taking boys from the conquered Armenian and Greek families. These innocent Christian boys were systematically traumatized and indoctrinated into becoming ferocious Muslim warriors called “Janissaries,” similar to Egypt’s “Mamluk” slave soldiers.

Janissaries were forced to call the Sultan their father and were forbidden to marry, giving rise to depraved practices and the abhorrent pederasty of the Turks.
For centuries Turks conquered throughout the Mediterranean, Middle East, Eastern Europe, Spain and North Africa, carrying tens of thousands into slavery.

Beginning in the early 1800s, the Turkish Ottoman Empire began to decline. Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania won their independence.

When Armenia’s sentiments leaned toward independence, Sultan Abdul Hamid put an end to it by massacring 100,000 Armenian Christians in the 1890s.

President Grover Cleveland told Congress, December 2, 1895:

Occurrences in Turkey have continued to excite concern… Massacres of Christians in Armenia and the development… of a spirit of fanatic hostility to Christian influences…have lately shocked civilization.

President Grover Cleveland told Congress, December 7, 1896:

Disturbed condition in Asiatic Turkey… rage of mad bigotry and cruel fanaticism… wanton destruction of homes and the bloody butchery of men, women, and children, made martyrs to their profession of Christian faith… Outbreaks of blind fury which lead to murder and pillage in Turkey occur suddenly and without notice…

President Theodore Roosevelt described to Congress, December 6, 1904:

Systematic and long-extended cruelty and oppression…of which the Armenians have been the victims, and which have won for them the indignant pity of the civilized world.

When Sultan Abdul Hamid II was deposed in 1908, there was a brief euphoria, with citizens naively hoping that Turkey would have a constitutional government.The government was taken over by the “Young Turks,” led by three leaders or “pashas”: Mehmed Talaat Pasha, Ismail Enver Pasha, and Ahmed Djemal Pasha.

They appeared as if they were planning to enact democratic reforms while they were clandestinely implementing a genocidal plan to rid the land of all who were not Muslims Turks.

The first step involved recruiting all the Armenian young men into the military. Next they made them “non-combatant” soldiers and took away their weapons.
Finally, they marched them into the woods and deserts where they were ambushed and massacred.

With the Armenian young men gone, Armenian cities and villages were defenseless. Nearly 2 million old men, women and children were marched into the desert, thrown off cliffs or burnt alive.

Entire Armenian communities were deported to the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia where hundreds of thousands were killed or starved to death.

Russia came to Armenia’s aid against Turkey, because the Russian czar was the protector of the Christian Armenians, but then the strength of the czar and his armies was being depleted by Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution, which eventually took over Russia and murdered the czar and his family. This is how a communist revolution brought persecution to Russian Christians and hindered them from helping Armenian Christians.

Theodore Roosevelt wrote in Fear God and Take Your Own Part (1916):

Armenians, who for some centuries have sedulously avoided militarism and war… are so suffering precisely and exactly because they have been pacifists whereas their neighbors, the Turks, have… been… militarists… During the last year and a half… Armenians have been subjected to wrongs far greater than any that have been committed since the close of the Napoleonic Wars… Fearful atrocities… Serbia is at this moment passing under the harrow of torture and mortal anguish…

Theodore Roosevelt continued:

Armenians have been butchered under circumstances of murder and torture and rape that would have appealed to an old-time Apache Indian… Wholesale slaughter of the Armenians… The crowning outrage has been committed by the Turks on the Armenians… I trust that all Americans worthy of the name feel their deepest indignation and keenest sympathy aroused by the dreadful Armenian atrocities.

Historian Arnold Toynbee wrote:

The Turks draft the criminals from their prisons into the Gendarmeri to exterminate the Armenian race… In 1913 the Turkish Army was engaged in exterminating the Albanians… Greeks and Slavs left in the territory… The same campaign of extermination has been waged against the Nestorian Christians on the Persian frontier… In Syria there is a reign of terror…

Toynbee continued:

Turkish rule… is… slaughtering or driving from their homes, the Christian population… Only a third of the two million Armenians in Turkey have survived, and that at the price of apostatizing to Islam or else of leaving all they had and fleeing across the frontier…

President Woodrow Wilson, addressed Congress, May 24, 1920:

The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations has established the truth of the reported massacres and other atrocities from which the Armenian people have suffered… deplorable conditions of insecurity, starvation, and misery now prevalent in Armenia… Sympathy for Armenia among our people has sprung from untainted consciences, pure Christian faith and an earnest desire to see Christian people everywhere succored in their time of suffering.

Perhaps the most astonishing testimony about the Armenian genocide was told by Demos Shakarian (1913–1993), who was an American Christian businessman of Armenian origin, based in Los Angeles, and who founded the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International (FGBMFI), a Christian organization to bring the Gospel to businessmen.

Demos was named after his grandfather, who left Armenia for America due to the 1855 prophecy of the Russian “Boy Prophet,” Efim Gerasemovitch Klubniken, that an unspeakable tragedy was to soon come upon Armenia. His grandfather and Efim were part of a large group of Pentecostal Christian Armenians who moved to Los Angeles years before the Azusa Street Revival.

Efim’s family was Russian and they were the first Pentecostal Russians to move to Armenia. From earliest childhood Efim had shown a gift for prayer, frequently going on long fasts, praying around the clock.

In the 1850s, when the illiterate Efim was eleven years old, he had heard the Lord calling him again to one of his prayer vigils. This time he persisted for seven days and nights, and during this time received a vision. But what Efim was able to do during those seven days was not so easy to explain.

Efim could neither read nor write. Yet, as he sat in the little stone cottage, he saw before him a vision of charts and a message in a beautiful handwriting. Efim asked for pen and paper. And for seven days sitting at the rough plank-table where the family ate, he laboriously copied down the form and shape of letters and diagrams that passed before his eyes.

When he had finished, the manuscript was taken to people in the village who could read. It turned out that this illiterate child had written out in Russian characters a series of instructions and warnings. At some unspecified time in the future, the boy wrote, every Christian in Armenia would be in terrible danger. He foretold a time of unspeakable tragedy for Armenia, when hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children would be brutally murdered. The time would come, he warned, when everyone in the region must flee. They must go to a land across the sea.

Although he had never seen a geography book, the Boy Prophet drew a map showing exactly where the fleeing Christians were to go. To the amazement of the adults, he drew the Atlantic Ocean! There was no doubt about it, nor about the identity of the land on the other side: the map plainly indicated the east coast of the United States of America.

They chose Los Angeles, where many Pentecostal Russians settled before the Azusa Street Revival. There, the boy wrote, God would bless them and prosper them, and cause their seed to be a blessing to the nations.

Many Armenian Christians were not convinced that the prophetic message was not genuine.

And then, a little after the turn of the century, Efim announced that the time was near for the fulfilment of the words he had written down nearly fifty years before. He said, “We must flee to America. All who remain here will perish.”

Armenian Pentecostal families packed up and left the holdings that had been their ancestral possessions time out of mind. Efim and his family were among the first to go. As each group of Pentecostals left Armenia, they were jeered by those who remained behind. Skeptical and disbelieving folk — including many Christians — refused to believe that God could issue pinpoint instructions for modern people in a modern age.

But the instructions proved correct. In 1914 a period of unimaginable horror arrived for Armenia. With remorseless efficiency the Turks began the bloody business of driving two-thirds of the population out into the Mesopotamian desert. Over a million men, women and children died in these death marches. Another half a million were massacred in their villages, in a pogrom that was later to provide Hitler his blueprint for the extermination of the Jews. “The world did not intervene when Turkey wiped out the Armenians,” Hitler reminded his followers. “It will not intervene now.

The few Armenians who managed to escape the besieged areas brought with them tales of great heroism. They reported that the Turks sometimes gave Christians an opportunity to deny their faith in exchange for their lives. The favorite procedure was to lock a group of Christians in a barn and set it afire: “If you are willing to accept Mohammed in place of Christ we’ll open the doors.” Time and again, the Christians chose to die, chanting hymns of praise as the flames engulfed them.

There are those today, especially Muslims and Turks, who deny the Armenian genocide, just as they deny that Nazi Germany committed a Holocaust against the Jews. And there are also those who deny God speaks and warns today through prophecies, visions and revelations. Yet, those who had heeded the prophecy of the Russian boy headed to Los Angeles, U.S. and were saved.

With information from American Minute and The Happiest People on Earth, by Demos Shakarian.

Source: Last Days Watchman 

Julio Severo is a Brazilian writer and blogger. He is author of the book O Movimento Homossexual (The Homosexual Movement), published in 1998 by the Brazilian branch of the Bethany House Publishers.  He also has blogs in Portuguese, Spanish and German.

Palace of Westminster; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

Assertion of Liberty of Conscience by the Independents of the Westminster Assembly of Divines 1644

The question of Church and State has been a debated issue for many ages. We still suffer from Constantine’s decision of combining church and state, and his legacy still remains in European nations and now in America. Throughout history, the union of Church and state has led to corruption and death.

Whether in Europe, Africa or America, tension has always existed between churches and state. That is why most people are confused when it comes to church/state relations. The Church and state are separate jurisdictions, but religion is not. The Bible defines their limits of jurisdictions because the Word of God is the supreme and ultimate authority in both Church and State. Both kings and priests are commanded to follow the same standard of law and government, even though not all laws apply to each in the same way.

From the beginning, Church and state were separate. When the Pharisees tried to entrap Jesus by asking Him whether it was lawful to give tax money to the Caesar, Jesus asked them to show Him a Roman coin. “Whose image and inscription is this? They said to Him, “Caesar’s.” And He said to them, “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” (Matthew 22:20-21).

Does this mean Christians are not to be involved with State affairs? In this passage we are render our due to the government and our due to God. Our citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven requires that we pledge our allegiance to God as our ultimate obedience and commitment. In other words we have responsibilities in both areas. When Jesus says, we are to render our due to God, and render our due to the government, He is clearly saying not to avoid the state. That is why in Romans 13:4-6, Paul says on three separate occasions that “those those who are civil government are God’s servants and he calls the leaders of both church and state “ministers.”

For example the Jewish Church was not the State, nor was the state the Church. Each had its distinct rulers, courts, laws, subjects, penalties and duration. Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, Hezekiah, and Zerubbabel represented the State; Aaron, Eleazar, Abiather, Zadok, Azariah, and Joshua represented the Church. Formerly it was not considered improper that the three basic functions of government those of making the law, enforcing the law, and interpreting the law in the settlement of controversies should be exercised by one supreme authority.

Accordingly, it should noted that Moses not only made known or proclaimed the law, but he was also leader king, and as well as judge. Church and State are each of them supreme in their own sphere, the Church in things spiritual, and the State in things that are temporal. They are to execute judgment as God’s delegated representatives or servants. Therefore as far as the Bible is concerned, Church and State are separate. We might apply Old Testament principles, but we must remember that the two institutions are not directly comparable. The Church gives effect to her spiritual laws, and the State to its civil laws.

It is the main reason why so many of the American Pilgrims were ministers. They believed and obeyed the Holy Scriptures but did not endorse rebellion against the British government. They knew that the Word of God doesn’t give Christians the liberty to disobey earthly governments, unless of course they contradict the Word of God.

The Pilgrims had endeavored to establish the right worship of God and the discipline of Christ in the Church according to the simplicity of the gospel and without mixture of men’s inventions, and to be ruled by the laws of God’s Word dispensed by such officers, as Pastors, Teachers, Elders, etc according to the Scriptures. Whereas the Founders wanted the nation to have freedom of religion, not from religion.

In the American colonies, church and state were closely related, but the founders of the federal and most of the state governments were careful to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion, and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other. Any religion other than God’s law degrades government because only God’s perfect law provides for a perfect government. As explained by William Penn and quoted by David Barton:

Governments rather depend upon men than men upon governments. . . . Let men be good and the government cannot be bad. . . . Though good laws do well, good men do better; for good laws may want [lack] good men . . . but good men will never lack good laws nor suffer [allow bad] ill ones.”God had ordained government in lieu of anarchy – He opposed anarchy, rebellion, lawlessness, and wickedness and wanted civil government in society. Therefore, a crucial determination in the colonists’ Biblical exegesis was whether opposition to authority was simply to resist the general institution of government (an institution ordained by God Himself), or whether it was instead to resist tyrannical leaders who had themselves rebelled against God.

Philip Schaff, a German-American theologian and church historian, gave the distinctive character of American Christianity in its organized social aspect and its relation to the national life, as compared with the Christianity of Europe. He wrote that although the American history has its roots in Europe, the American relationship of church and state differed from all previous relationships in Europe and the colonial period of its history.

The relationship of church and state in the United States secures full liberty of religious thought, speech, and action, within the limits of the public peace and order. This, according to Philip Schaff, made persecution impossible. In the Protestant states of Europe, the civil government protects and supports the church, but at the expense of her dignity and independence, and deprives her of the power of self-government.

In America the state had no right whatsoever to interfere with the affairs of the church, her doctrine, discipline, worship, and the appointment of ministers. It would be a great calamity if religion were to become a subject to our ever-changing politics. But unfortunately all that has changed.

Christians find themselves under governments that are becoming more hostile to Biblical law in matters of marriage and other moral issues. This is now happening on a very escalating pace in the West—Christianity has to be eradicated from every area of public responsibility and authority. The issue of separation of Christianity and state has led inevitably to the secularization of every sphere of life and centralization of power in the national government.

So what should we do as Christians? The government merely reflects what the people believe in their hearts; it does nothing to form those beliefs. True freedom and liberty comes from the gospel of Jesus Christ. There can be no freedom without Christ. Once you take Christ and the Bible out of any institution of government, you thereby lose your freedom. As the church goes, so goes the nation.

We should note that the spiritual condition of the church determines the economic, political, and social condition of that nation which that church exists. So long as the church of God in America and the West is from backslidden to apostate, I don’t think there are any workable answers to the road to serfdom that we are on today. Philip Schaff also wrote:

Republican institutions in the hands of a virtuous and God-fearing nation are the very best in the world, but in the hands of a corrupt and irreligious people they are the very worst and most effective weapons of destruction. An indignant people may rise in rebellion against a cruel tyrant; but who will rise against the tyranny of the people in possession of the ballot-box and the whole machinery of government?

Elections are coming up but we can’t we find leaders that are just, righteous, and God-fearing in our generation. Every election cycle, the church votes for men who are morally unworthy. This invites God to make those men, if elected, to be agents of His judgment against the people who voted them into office.

God only promises to bless a government whose leaders are just, ruling righteously and in the fear of God. Christians who respect God’s principles should not vote for any man or woman who is not just and God-fearing, no matter what party that leader belongs to after all almost all of them are puppets of big corporations. Politicians criticize each other, but they both play for the same team; the losers are always the people who vote for them

Therefore, without faith, repentance, and a return to God in submission to His Laws in people and politicians, neither appealing politicians nor voting by the people have any substance. Here are the ten commitments given by Dr. Micheal Brown in response to a godless counterculture revolution.

1. I will spend quality time with God every day in prayer and the Word.
2. I will walk in purity of heart and integrity of life, in thought, in speech, and in deed.
3. I will not be ashamed of Jesus but will confess him boldly as Lord and Savior.
4. I will commit myself to the Great Commission, looking for opportunities to win the lost, restore the backslidden, and make disciples.
5. I will seek to be a peacemaker and ambassador of reconciliation, forgiving those who have offended me and seeking the forgiveness of those whom I have offended.
6. I will walk in love towards those who despise and reject me, overcoming evil with good and hostility with kindness.
7. I will pursue fellowship with brothers and sisters of like mind and will not separate myself from the Body.
8. I will be involved with a ministry of mercy, through serving or through giving, helping to relieve human suffering in a tangible way.
9. I will stand for righteousness and justice in my city, speaking the truth in love regardless of cost or consequence.
10. I will seek the fullness of the Spirit, availing myself of everything God has made available for His people today.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life left a vital legacy of civil courage rooted in transcendent truth. His death is an example of joyful hope amidst suffering.

Today is the seventieth anniversary of the execution of the German Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Along with Bonhoeffer, six other members of the German resistance, including Hans Oster, Karl Sack, and Wilhelm Canaris, were killed by the Nazis at the Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9th, 1945. Although seventy years have passed, Bonhoeffer’s life and death continue to have deep significance for us today.

From the very beginning, Bonhoeffer was a staunch critic of Hitler and the Nazis. The day after Hitler was elected chancellor, Bonhoeffer gave a radio address in which he sharply criticized the currently fashionable and tyrannical understanding of the autonomous “Leader” (Führer). In Hitler’s rise to power, Bonhoeffer detected a dangerous connection between the will of the masses and an idolatrous concentration of power devoid of accountability and responsibility to any higher authority.

This conception of the Leader as an “office” was qualitatively different from previous ideas of divinely instituted political authority. The Leader was the expression of the individual will par excellence, and in his person vicariously represented the fulfillment of the masses. In this way, the mass individualism manifested itself in a kind of collectivism, with the Leader acting as lord over the masses.

Among other things, argued Bonhoeffer, such an ideology ignored “the eternal law of individuality before God,” which is violated when a leader “takes on superhuman responsibility, which in the end will crush him.” The basic God-given task of government is to protect and promote the freedom and vitality of other institutions of social life, not to colonize and tyrannize them.

Bonhoeffer thus opposed any totalizing ideology that attempted to subjugate all of human life and existence to political authority:

Where the state becomes the fulfillment of all spheres of human life and culture, it forfeits its true dignity, its specific authority as government.

Fighting Nazism within the Church: A Call to Civil Courage

As he continued to oppose the Nazis and their policies of centralization, Bonhoeffer was one of the leading voices in the Confessing Church movement. The Confessing movement opposed the Nazification of the church through reorganization and imposition of various policies, including racial requirements for officeholders that would bar Jews from the pastorate. In this context, Bonhoeffer worked to defend both the freedom of the church and the dignity of all people.

With his friend Franz Hildebrandt, whose Jewish ancestry would have closed the pastorate to him under these new laws, Bonhoeffer opposed the German Christian party in church elections. Ahead of the pivotal church elections of 1933, Hildebrandt drafted a pamphlet that juxtaposed slogans of the German Christians with texts of Scripture. The German Christians, wrote Hildebrandt, say that “a godless fellow-countryman is nearer to us than one of another race, even if he sings the same hymn or prays the same prayer.” The Bible, by contrast, says “Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother (Mark 3.35).”

Bonhoeffer echoed these sentiments in his arguments against the imposition of Aryan requirements on the church. When discussing Nazi anti-Semitism, Bonhoeffer maintained that the church was responsible for rendering “service to the victims” of state action, no matter their creed or ethnicity: “The church has an unconditional obligation toward the victims of any societal order, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.”

In 1942, a few months before his imprisonment, Bonhoeffer penned a reflection on a decade of Nazi rule, “After Ten Years.” In this letter, which was sent to his friends in the resistance, Bonhoeffer articulated a stirring vision of human flourishing and institutional freedom in sharp opposition to Hitler’s ideology. He called for the “civil courage” needed to stand up to the totalitarian tyrants who would sow injustice and reap misery. “Civil courage,” wrote Bonhoeffer, “can grow only from the free responsibility of the free man.”

This conception of freedom, however, was not one of radical individual autonomy in opposition to or supremacy over God’s will for human life. Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, Bonhoeffer observed, “one thing has emerged that seems certain: in the common life of human beings, there are laws that are stronger than everything that believes it can supersede them, and that it is therefore not only wrong but unwise to disregard these laws.” At times, it might be difficult to apply such abstract natural law principles to a concrete ethical situation. But such situations are rare, and these exceptional circumstances tend to reinforce rather than undermine the validity of such orders.

Marriage and Political Authority

One of these laws of the created order that Bonhoeffer recognized and affirmed was the institution of marriage. The changes in the social order and the upheaval of war and industrialization had placed marriage and family in a precarious position. Bonhoeffer cited the prevalence of voluntary childlessness and dissolution of familial bonds, in part due to the influence of radical individualist and socialist ideologies, as evidence that “marriage and family are experiencing a violent crisis,” as he put it in a 1932 lecture.

Even amid such travails, however, Bonhoeffer steadfastly defended marriage as foundational to God’s purposes in the world. Marriage, like the church and the realm of productive labor, places limits on and sets the framework for responsible political action. As Bonhoeffer put it:

Marriage and work exist from the beginning under an appointed divine mandate that must be performed in faithful obedience to God. For this reason marriage and work have their own origin in God that is not established by government but is to be acknowledged by it.

Only an idolatrous view of political authority would imbue such earthly powers with the right of defining and redefining a God-given institution like marriage. Instead, For the sake of Jesus Christ a special right preserves marriage and with it the family and preserves work and with it economic life, culture, science, and art. That means government possesses for this realm only regulative but not constitutive significance. Marriage is contracted not by government but before government.

Government’s role is thus to protect and promote pre-governmental institutions such as family, work, and church that preserve and promote human flourishing. This conception of marriage was not some abstract or otherworldly ideal. In fact, even in the context of his opposition to Hitler and involvement with conspirators against the regime, Bonhoeffer took concrete steps that demonstrated his convictions about marriage and the world. In 1943, shortly before his arrest and imprisonment, he became engaged to Maria von Wedemeyer. Even when the world seemed as if it were to end tomorrow, Bonhoeffer still affirmed marriage today.

Writing to Maria on August 12, 1943, from Tegel prison, Bonhoeffer confesses that their marriage “can only be a token of God’s grace and goodness, which summon us to believe in him.” Hope for the future, wrote Bonhoeffer, demands faith that endures in the world and loves and remains true to that world in spite of all the hardships it brings us. Our marriage must be a “yes” to God’s earth. It must strengthen our resolve to do and accomplish something on earth. I fear that Christians who venture to stand on earth on only one leg will stand in heaven on only one leg too.

In this way Bonhoeffer meant to illustrate the connection between this world and the next. This world belongs to God and it matters to him, and what we do here in some real way has significance for eternity. Through his life, including his proposed marriage, as well as his writing, Bonhoeffer has left a vital legacy of civil courage rooted in transcendent truth.

Grounded in the Hope of Eternity

Because of his vibrant Christian faith, Bonhoeffer recognized death as “the gateway to our homeland, the tabernacle of joy, the everlasting kingdom of peace.” But far from instilling a quietist or otherworldly orientation, the rooting of Bonhoeffer’s faith in the peace of eternal life engendered in him a radically engaged and sacrificial disposition toward the world.

Bonhoeffer’s life and death, grounded in the hope of eternity, were deeply affirming of the significance of life in God’s world. “The Christian’s field of activity is the world,” said Bonhoeffer. It is in the world that “Christians are to become engaged, are to work and be active, here that they are to do the will of God.” For this reason, “Christians are not resigned pessimists, but are those who while admittedly not expecting much from the world are for that very reason already joyous and cheerful in the world, for that world is the seedbed of eternity.”

Bonhoeffer was executed at the age of 39, filled not with bitterness but with a deep sense of hope about God’s purposes in the world. “It may be that the day of judgment will dawn tomorrow,” he wrote, but “only then and no earlier will we readily lay down our work for a better future.” It is this world- and life-affirming hope amid suffering and loss that is, perhaps, his greatest legacy.

Dr. Jordan J. Ballor is a research fellow at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty. He is currently finishing a project on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and natural law and is author most recently of Get Your Hands Dirty: Essays on Christian Social Thought (and Action)

Copyright © 2015, Jordan J. Ballor 

When I was nine years old, my father told me he wanted to become a woman. I know I speak for others who have undergone similarly tragic childhoods when I say that I pray the Supreme Court will seriously consider the six amicus briefs submitted by the children of LGBT parents.

What was your biggest concern when you were nine years old? Was it trying to memorize your multiplication tables? Was it that the school cafeteria might serve your least favorite vegetable at lunch? Perhaps it was something more serious; perhaps your parents were talking of getting divorced. My biggest concern at age nine was how to keep my daddy’s secret, the one he revealed to me as we sat alone on a hill near our home. In a sense, I lost my dad that day, when he told me he wanted to become a woman.

As I tried to process that revelation, he blindsided me with another. He told me he never wanted to have children. To him, my siblings and I were mistakes, because we did not align with his desires.

His confessions left me confused and hurt. After all, I just wanted a dad who would love and cherish me, who would make me feel special as a daughter. I felt rejected and abandoned by my own father. By the time I was eleven, my dad had begun to abuse me emotionally and sexually. Even so, I continued to keep my dad’s secret locked away, deep down in my heart.

My dad created a home environment that made me feel as if I was walking on pins and needles. His resentment over my possession of what he so deeply desired for himself—a woman’s body—turned into anger and abuse. As his desires intensified, he began to borrow my clothing. Many times I discovered my underclothes and tops under bathroom towels, or in the attic—often in places I had not been. I learned to organize my clothes just so, in order to know if he had been in my dresser drawers. When I confirmed that he’d worn an article of my clothing, I simply could not bring myself to ever wear that item again.

As an adolescent, I had to be careful about how I dressed. I always had to ask myself how he would react to my outfit. Would it make him so envious that he’d “borrow” it (without my consent, of course)? I began to hate my body. It was a constant reminder of what my father wanted to become. When I began to wear makeup, I had to block out the images I had of him applying makeup or eye shadow or lipstick. He was destroying my desire to become a woman.

I looked elsewhere for comfort. Attending school dances and overnights at friends’ homes a friend and I sometimes met in a school restroom to share bottles of Jack Daniel’s. I desperately tried to fit in, but the truth is I was hurting.

I was so hungry to have my father’s love and attention that I tried to fill that void in other ways. I had thirteen boyfriends in seventh grade alone. I also tried, futilely, to soothe my hurting heart with alcohol. By age fifteen, I was struggling with my own sexuality and gender. I began to seriously consider taking drugs, but God had another plan. He sent a new friend, named Mark, into my life. Mark always treated me with respect and a genuinely caring heart—the very things I so desperately wanted but missed from my dad.

Eager to escape my home environment in my teens, I spent more and more time with Mark, usually at his home, where I saw how a real father cares for his children. Mark’s father reminded me of my uncle. These were homes—Mark’s and my uncle’s—where children felt comfortable, loved in a wholesome way. The more I experienced in loving homes like Mark’s, the more certain I became that my desires for such a home life were right and possible. My home was not right. That grieved me, but I’d gained hope that a good family life was achievable.

As high school graduation approached, I had to start planning for my future. I considered entering the military; I’d be able to travel and escape my home life. But instead, I fell in love with Mark, and he asked me to marry him. I’d be part of a real family, and Mark and I would start our own real family—one in which our children would be comfortable just being kids.

On my wedding day, dressed in the gown my mother sewed for me, and with the guests seated in the church sanctuary, my dad and I were alone at the end of the hall, waiting to walk down the aisle. He looked me in the eye and said, “I wish it were me in that dress.”

I kept my eyes on Mark as I walked down the aisle, knowing I was about to escape my father’s horrible influences. Through Mark, I witnessed the love of Christ, not only for me, but also for my dad. Mark was never hateful toward my dad in any way. Instead, he understood that my dad needed the healthy love and companionship of grounded, responsible men—men who knew and lived out what a husband and father should be. Sadly, my dad rejected those healthy relationships. But my relationship with my loving, responsible husband brought me healing.

Although Mark and I lived in our own home, we often returned to comfort my mother in her distress over the troubles my father created with his bizarre behaviors and periodic lavish spending sprees. Mom’s migraines and general weariness took a toll on her. She decided to retire from her job, leaving Dad as the sole breadwinner. I suspect that responsibility pushed Dad over the edge. Not too long after Mom’s retirement, he openly declared his intention to abandon her and pursue his new lifestyle. He then did so, leaving her nearly penniless and saddled with debt.

Thirteen years later, I was informed that my dad had cancer and his days were numbered. When I learned that he was trying to reach out to his family, I was upset with him. Who did he think he was, deserting us and then, as his death approached, looking to us for love and comfort? Even so, I grieved, knowing that my dream of my dad coming back into our family as a true husband, father, and grandfather was about to die.

I visited my dad often in the hospital during his last months. Seeing him in a lady’s nightgown and slippers was difficult, as was seeing all the teddy bears in his room. The nurses called Dad by feminine pronouns, or by his chosen name: “Becky.” When they did, I corrected them. I said “him,” “he,” or “my dad.” I looked at my dad with sorrow as I saw what his choices had done to him. As I exited following one visit, I made the mistake of looking back. Dad was removing his bra. I was not surprised to learn after Dad’s passing that he’d been in a homosexual relationship. I remembered, then, the way he had looked at my boyfriends. As a child, I’d done my best to ignore this. It was difficult enough to deal with the idea that he believed he was a woman.

All those years I’d hungered for a real dad, not for a second mom. But I did have a real mother, and she taught me about a mother’s love. She taught me not to give up on life. From her, I learned the importance of persevering under the direst situations life would present. Her strong faith in God got her through. I brought those teachings into my children’s lives. I was fortunate to observe healthy father-daughter relationships through my mom’s side of the family.

Today’s culture proclaims that a person who chooses to change gender is being honest and courageous—true to his or her nature. Truth? Truth is what aligns with reality, and the reality is my dad was abused as a child. He had emotional issues, anger issues, and obsessive behaviors. It’s no surprise that he chose to escape into a different identity. The truth is that aberrant behaviors hurt families. And those hurts have ripple effects. The “reality” TV shows that portray transgenderism as the new frontier in human freedom and self-fulfillment are not telling the whole story. I know from experience.

I know I speak for others who have undergone similarly tragic childhoods when I say that I pray the Supreme Court will seriously consider the six amicus briefs submitted by the children of LGBT parents. We are united in believing that the healthiest foundation for any child is with a father and a mother. Please, take the opportunity to learn from the impact on the real lives of children. We may be among the first, but we will not be the last to stand up and speak out.

Denise Shick is author of My Daddy’s Secret, When Hope Seems Lost, and Understanding Gender Confusion. She also directs Help 4 Families Ministry.

Image credit: Heavens Call