by Erwin W. Lutzer
Reviewed by Eileen Quinn Knight, Ph.D.
The author prepares you to live out your convictions against a growing tide of hostility. Gain a better understanding of non-believers’ legitimate hurts and concerns regarding issues like racism, sexism, and poverty and identify the toxic responses secular culture disguises as solutions. In the process, you’ll see how you can show compassion and gentleness to those outside of the faith without affirming their beliefs.
Lutzer explains that behind all this destructive behavior is the determination of the Marxists to destroy American’s history so that it can be replaced by a new Marxist “history” that is being inculcated into our children’s minds from kindergarten through graduate school. They’re not just tearing down monuments, they’re trying to destroy the very foundation upon which our nation was founded. They understand that “he who controls the past controls the future.” This book traces every secular cultural expression back to its roots. These things are not just “happening”: they have been orchestrated. They are not random individual occurrences; they are all part of a carefully scripted and produced overture to the destruction of America. Finally, this book does not just examine what is happening and explain why it is happening. It exhorts us to respond to what is happening. The author asks, “How do we live courageously in a culture where people who shout the loudest win the argument? How do we live during a time when Christianity is openly being remade to blend more comfortably into a secularized culture? The author wants to inspire us to have the courage to walk toward the fire and not run away from the flames. God has brought us to this cultural moment, and our future cannot be taken for granted. As has been said, “In a time of universal deception, telling the truth us a revolutionary act.”
Lutzer realizes that parallels between our situation in the United States and Nazi Germany can be easily overdrawn. But there is this singularity: at some point, God separates the chaff from the wheat in His church. After Hitler announced that criticism of the Reich was a crime, most of the churches in German were either silent or supportive of him. But Martin Niemoller, who would spend time in a concentration camp for his boldness, preached these words to his congregation: We have all of us the whole church and the whole community, we’ve been thrown into the Tempter’s sieve, and he is shaking and the wind is blowing, and it must now become manifest whether we are wheat or chaff! Satan swings his sieve and Christianity is thrown hither and thither; and he who is not ready to suffer, he who called himself a Christian only because he thereby hoped to gain something good for his race and his nation is blown away like chaff by the wind of time. This is a challenging, inspirational and provocative work.