Identifying the Divine Hand in the Uprising in the Middle East and North Africa

Identifying the Divine Hand in the Uprising in the Middle East and North Africa

 

The Middle East and North Africa seems to be taking a page from the history of the civil rights movement in America during the 1950s and 1960s when black Americans demonstrated in the streets to gain the freedoms guaranteed by the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Middle Easterners, North Africans, and now Chinese have taken to the streets in largely peaceful demonstrations crying out for human rights—the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. On CBN Tuesday, a woman was asked by a reporter, “What do you want.” She responded, “We want freedom.” When she was pressed by the reporter about what she meant, she cited one part of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but could not remember the rest. So she concluded, “We have been taught that freedom is not a right.” But she continued to insist that she wanted freedom. In order to get that freedom, the whole area seems to be asking for regime change. Citizens of 11 major cities in China on Sunday, according to UK and World News, were heard repeating the words, “We want food. We want work. We want housing. We want fairness.” Like the civil rights movement, the demonstrators are unsettling their nations.

 

The civil rights movement in the United States had to grapple with the question as to whether the demonstrations were godly or ungodly. Thus, theologians such as James Cone, Major Jones and others had to develop black theologies such as A Black Theology of Liberation and Black Awareness: A Theology of Hope to show to both black and white America that the movement was indeed godly and to identify God’s hand in the movement. In his definition of the love of God and the wrath of God as seen in the black experience, Cone merged the two and wrote: “The wrath of God is the love of God in regard to the forces against his liberation of the oppressed.”  His idea was that God’s hand was seen in the struggle for human rights, liberating the oppressed from the oppressor.

 

The question must be asked, then, “Where is God in the demonstrations in the Middle East, in North Africa, and in China?” The task of theology is to answer that question and to locate the divine hand in the events. In doing so, theology must first recognize the challenge of philosophy. Deism concludes that God is not present in terms of intervention in the operation of the world. Deists believe God created the world and left it run by natural law without intervening. Pantheism says, “The universe is God, and God is the universe.” Pantheists hold that “there is no essential distinction between matter and mind, between soul and body, and between God and the world. Everything is merged into God, and the universe is his existent-form. All reason is his reason, and all activity is his activity,” and God, therefore, reveals himself in both good and evil. He is only “the substance of which the universe and all in it contains”—an ever-changing manifestation. God is, therefore, present in the Middle East; but he exists in the manifestation of both good and evil forms. So says pantheists.

 

Systematic Theology stands in opposition to Deism and Pantheism. It holds that God is present in the whole world in every event. “God is continually involved with all created things in such a way that he (1) keeps them existing and maintaining the properties with which he created them, [preservation], (2) cooperates with created things in every action, directing their distinctive properties to cause them to act as they do [concurrence], and (3) directs them to fulfill his purpose” [government], wrote Wayne Grudem who is a research professor of Bible and theology at the Phoenix Seminary in Scottsdale, Arizona. He wrote this statement as his definition of God’s providence.

 

 In God’s providence, therefore, he preserves, concurs with, and governs the animal world, the nations of the world, and individuals in the world, and also relates to the free acts of humankind. There is nothing that happens in the world that does not fit into God’s ultimate plan for humankind. Emil Brunner was right when he wrote, “All that is, and all that happens, takes place within the knowledge and the will of God.”    

 

Through the lens of systematic theology, therefore, one can identify the hand of God in Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Iran, Morocco, Tunisia, and China. God is working in and through human creatures to fulfill his divine purpose. Theologically, “He rules by his might forever; his eyes keep watch on the nations: let not the rebellious exalt themselves,” says Palm 66:7. “And it is He who changes the times and the epochs; he removes kings and establishes kings,” says Daniel 2:21. Daniel 4:35 says, “And all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, but He does according to His will in the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of earth; and no one can ward off his hand or say to Him, ‘What hast Thou done?’” Paul in Romans 8:28 adds: “All things work together for good for those who love the Lord.”  The hand of God is indeed active in the demonstrations in the Middle East, in North Africa, and in China.

 

People all over the world, Christians and non-Christians, have an innate longing to be free, because it was in the divine plan to make humankind free agents. That innate desire is crying out in the Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Iran, Morocco, Tunisia, and China, and God is cooperating with the people in the fulfillment of his divine plan from the foundation of the world.  

 

The extent of the outcome is not dependent so much on divine will and purpose as on the extent to which human agents are willing to participate in their liberation. Strangely enough, God permits human will to trump the divine will in order to allow mankind to maintain free agency, but he always stands ready to cooperate or concur with humans to bring about his ultimate purpose.

 

The road ahead for those in the Middle East, North Africa, and China will not be easy. As in the civil rights movement in the United States, many will suffer loss, and some will pay the ultimate price—the loss of life. But as Martin Luther King rightly said, “Unearned suffering is redemptive.”