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The Commentary

The Sovereign God

Please forgive a rather personal editorial column this month, but I hope that it will be of general encouragement.

Recently my dear father died, but in the middle of the sadness of that event I was led to reflect again on the strong Bible truth of God’s plan and sovereign rule over our lives and our world.

Changi Jail

My father was present at the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in February 1942. He spent the next three years suffering the atrocities of being a prisoner of war in Changi Jail. Of his company of around 380 men he was one of only 27 who survived.

‘Why was I spared when so many died?’ he asked. He rarely said anything about his experiences but not long ago he did share one striking episode. If there was any trouble in the POW camp the Japanese killed people at random. That meant that the prisoners policed themselves because no one knew who would be next. There was an incident. As usual all the prisoners were put on parade for someone to be executed. Often the Japanese picked on tall men like my father. Sure enough, this time the officer stopped right in front of Dad to pick him. Dad closed his eyes thinking, ‘This is it. I’ve had it. There’s nothing I can do.’ But when he opened his eyes the officer for some reason had moved on Ð and presumably someone else died. The man standing next to Dad said later, ‘You’re a lucky so and so. I’ve never seen anything like that before.’ Dad came to see that as God’s hand preserving him.

And, of course, without that strange preservation I myself would never have been born. Do our lives hang on such fragile threads as that of a POW camp officer’s whim? The Bible tells us otherwise. ‘All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be’ (Psalm 139.6).

Forced marriage

But we must think more widely. A couple of columns ago I mentioned the threat which hard-line multi-culturalism is beginning to pose to our freedoms. In mid-June, the Home Office performed a large U-turn when it decided there was, after all, no need for a law to ban forced marriage in our country. The reason for this is that the problem belongs almost exclusively to the Asian community in Britain, and the government having swallowed an ill-advised party-line multiculturalism was worried that such a law might look like discrimination.

Writing in The Sunday Telegraph. Ross Kent said a situation has been created in which ‘young Asian women are deemed to have lesser human rights than the rest of us’. One wonders where such things will lead. One law for one community and different laws for others? Shari’ah law for certain towns and boroughs?

But amid such worries let us not forget the sovereignty of God. The house in Tirana used by Enver Hoxha, who proclaimed Albania to be the world’s first atheist state, has over the last few years been regularly used for Bible studies.

A recent conference on the Muslim world heard that before the Islamic revolution in Iran you could almost count the number of Christians there on one hand. But since the Islamic state has been set up and ordinary people have experienced what that means, thousands upon thousands have turned to Christ in that land.

The sovereign God always has the last laugh (Psalm 2.4): ‘Hallelujah! For our Lord God Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and be glad….’ (Revelation 19.6).

John Benton