Keith’s Blog

Whose Side is God On?

On Monday, this week, I spent a very enjoyable day over in Manchester with some of my ministry colleagues. After a very hectic month, it was fun to have time away from the ‘to do’ list and lots of space in which to relax and chat about the things we don’t usually have the opportunity to discuss. Ryanair can have its uses!

Part of our day was spent at the Imperial War Museum about two miles outside Manchester City centre and just a stroll from Old Trafford. The facility was designed by Daniel Libeskind, the Jewish American architect who designed the Jewish Museum in Berlin and, in 2003, won the competition to design the masterplan for the rebuilding of the World Trade Centre site in lower Manhattan. The IWM is an impressive, award-winning modern building designed around the idea of a globe broken into fragments and now put back together again. It tracks the events, people and equipment involved in modern warfare from 1916 right up to the present and is well worth a visit should you ever be in United-land.

I’ve read quite a bit about the events of the two world wars, especially the second, but I’d never come across one particular detail until this week. Apparently, up until now, I had never realised that every German soldier in the Second World War carried a slogan on his belt which stated, ‘God is with us.’

I don’t know why this detail too took me so completely by surprise. Through all of history, kings, emperors and armies have been making such a claim. There are conflicts ongoing even today in which this same sentiment is frequently expressed, but for some reason I found myself particularly repulsed at the thought that God had been Emmanuel for the Nazis as they invaded Poland and began their quest to conqueror the world; that he was really with them as they set up the Auschwitz-Birkenau and other death camps; that he was on their side as they forced an armed struggle that would cost the lives of around 72 million people – many of them women and children. How could such a thing be possible? Of course it is not.

But as I stood there listening to some of Hitler’s hate filled rhetoric blasting from the speakers and watching as images of war and death were flashed upon the walls, I realised that many of us make this same mistake, even in our day to day lives. Loud and clear, the events of Christmas resound with the news that ‘God is with us’ and ‘God is for us’. It is such a wonderful and life-giving truth and how every man, woman, boy and girl needs to know it! It is true that God is with us. It is true that God is for us. But it is never, ever, ever the case that we can assume that God is on our side.

God’s agenda is His own. He is committed to the building of his Kingdom, to the extension of His reign; to the glory of His name; to His purposes in our world, not ours! The moment we forget this, we inevitably reinvent God to be in our likeness, to be, as Karl Barth put it, man writ large, and then proceed to use our idol’s name as a lucky charm, as a self-deceiving mechanism to justify our selfish and ego-centric actions – however wrong they may be. God’s agenda is seldom the same as ours. For this reason, as Abraham Lincoln once put it, “It is not so important that God is on our side as it is that we are on His.”