The Weekly Perspective
by Burke Shade, Associate Pastor
May Day, or the International Worker’s Day, was celebrated this past week on the 1st. It’s a day in which communists and socialists commemorate the struggle and gains made by workers and the labor movement around the world. That movement holds Karl Marx as its head, and also attributes great gains to Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Those three men did a lot for workers, putting almost 100 million in the ground, because they did not “work” the way the state wanted them to.
Marx’s ideology/atheology produced the greatest idol of all, the omnipotent state, which made morality relative under the leadership of ambitious men who became gods themselves. With morality relative, the state party could regenerate men and build the paradise to come, with its power absolute and unquestioned. Hence the “workers paradise” of 100 million dead and two billion more sent to hell.
The point of this is to remind us that ideas and false beliefs do have consequences. Either deadly, enslaving ones, or life-giving, freeing ones. Marx is to blame for what came after him, for he saw God’s invisible attributes, eternal power, and divine nature, yet rejected that and became foolish, refusing to honor God or give thanks to him. He exchanged the glory of God for men (Romans 1:19-23).
But thanks be to God that Christ came to set us free, to give us life and to have it abundantly (John 10:10). Through the Father’s great love, Christ’s sacrifice, and the filling of the Holy Spirit, men can love, protect, rule, provide, and give themselves for others, exercising the Dominion Mandate of Genesis 1 to the glory of God and their fellow man. They can work, not to murder and destroy and wither, but to build and worship and love and bring out the glory of nature and man who is made in God’s image. For that end let us rise and worship the Trinity!