gravedigger

Os Guinness once wrote a superb little book called The Gravedigger File.

It's sub-titled Papers on the Subversion of the Modern Church. And it has to be a classic.

If you've ever read C S Lewis' Screwtape Letters then you'll recognise the genre. The Gravedigger File is a collection of letters and communiques from the 'Enemy Directorate'.

And if you get the chance to read it, then do so. It provides a remarkable analysis of how and why the church in the western world got to where we are just now. How it's been subverted over centuries.

I was thinking again of the book today in the context of our midweek lunch-time service. The story of Joseph again.

There's the big family re-union as Joseph at last makes himself known to his brothers. Lots of hugs and tears and 'ooohs' and 'aaahs' and ... well, it's a lovely happy ending to a 25 year cycle of sorrow and struggle they've all of them had.

God is good! He turns their mourning into rejoicing. He makes things good.

And in amongst it all Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, speaks. Bring your father down here. Bring your wives and your families down.

(There's a famine on, remember, and it's got another five years to run: and Egypt's where the food is to be found. It seems like a decent offer.)

Bring them all down here, says Pharaoh. I'll give you the best of the land to settle on. I'll give you the best that Egypt has to offer.

Which is hardly small beer. Egypt was top of the range, the Harrods of the nations of the ancient world.

Subtle. A very subtle bit of scheming by the 'enemy directorate'.

The people of God are removed from the land of God. And four hundred years down the line this people will then be enslaved and a single generation away from total extinction.

Subverted.

Just at those moments of triumph when God has prevailed, our guard is too easily lowered - our troubles, it seems, are now past - and it's there and it's then that the enemy subtly sneaks in with a slow-burning fuse which centuries later is found to have weakened God's church.

What on earth is Pharaoh doing there at this family re-union?

And what on earth is his "Do this ... Do this.." all about?

This isn't party games the guy is playing. The man is a pawn in the hands of the powers of darkness. And they don't take defeat lying down.

They're lighting a fuse which will run for some hundreds of years. And their single intent is to subtly subvert the work and the people of God.

And render that people quite impotent. And, ideally, see that people finally, fully destroyed.

Subtle. Scary.

And all too real.

Something like that has been going on here in our lands. For centuries.

The church has been digging her own final grave for herself. That's the basic thesis which Os Guinness seeks to argue in his book.

You need to try and read it for yourself.

You'll maybe then be better placed to understand why things are as they are, and why we're in the state we're in just now.

We've been digging a grave for ourselves.

And hadn't a clue that that's what was going on.

It's maybe now about time we really woke up to it all!