Here’s Bill Muehlenberg:
Leaders come and go and nations come and go. God can use both for his purposes. Think of a Moses, or the judges (as in the book of Judges), or Esther, or even a pagan king like Cyrus of Persia who allowed the Jews to return to their homeland. God providentially raises up people and leaders for crucial times in world history.
He certainly did this often in Old Testament times, and I believe he is still doing so today, even when we may not be fully aware of what God is doing behind the scenes. I have often mentioned for example that I believe God providentially raised up three mighty leaders during one of the West’s darkest hours: the Cold War. As I wrote elsewhere:
I believe without a shadow of a doubt that God in his gracious providence raised up three extraordinary leaders back then to help bring about the end of that hideous failed experiment of Soviet Communism. These three were of course, US President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004), English Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), and Karol Józef Wojtyła (Pope John Paul II – 1920-2005). These three monumental leaders did as much as anyone to help bring the Soviet system to its knees, and to help bring back freedom to the godless hellholes of the USSR and Eastern Europe.
I often recommend that if you want to get the full picture on these three giants and their contributions to modern history, you pick up John O’Sullivan’s terrific 2006 volume, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister (Regnery). Rightly did he subtitle this book, Three Who Changed the World. And they most certainly did.
The threat of godless communism was endangering the entire world, and these three giants were raised up to meet the challenge head on. And they succeeded, by God’s grace. In the same way a few decades earlier the challenge of Nazism was threatening the planet, and great leadership was required to meet this danger.
One of the key players to turn the tide was of course the indomitable Winston Churchill. And Churchill had a very clear sense of destiny, of providence, of divine calling. This is made crystal clear in a brand new book which you all should grab: God & Churchill: How the Great Leader’s Sense of Divine Destiny Changed His Troubled World and Offers Hope for Ours by Jonathan Sandys and Wallace Henley (Tyndale House, 2015).
It is often assumed that Churchill was basically a secular, non-religious character. Here a great grandson of Churchill (Sandys) and Christian columnist (Henley) make it clear, as the subtitle states, that he had an unmistakeable sense of divine destiny from a very early age, and this sense of purpose and mission sustained him and helped to keep the West free from tyranny – both from Hitler and from Stalin.
Read more: Culture Watch
