God's Cure for the Post-Christian Syndrome: Western Europe

By James Tarter

A Christianity with little of Christ for generations causes a nation to become like Judah in Malachi of the Bible. This includes the nations in Western Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. Many people in all of these nations have hearts hardened against the true God and His words to us. Malachi shows that God is preparing His faithful people, so that at the right time He will release them mightily as He did Jesus in Judea. This will heal the hardened hearts of many people who have not yet really tasted God's goodness in Jesus. God has made a way in Christ to rescue any of the above nations from heading toward certain destruction into becoming Jesus’ national disciple. For any nation that is like Judah, Malachi helps us to see God’s work in His people while the nation keeps corrupting itself. Then God’s sudden release of His prepared people with great power and healing changes everything!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781304048554

Book preview

God's Cure for the Post-Christian Syndrome: Western Europe

God’s Cure for the Post-Christian Syndrome

Western Europe

Insights from Malachi into Its Cause and Cure

Dr. James M. Tarter

Copyright Page

14th Edition

ISBN 978-1-304-04855-4

Copyright 2013, 2018 by James M. Tarter.  All rights reserved.  Permission granted to make copies for purposes consistent with furthering the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God.

Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE® (1995 Updated Edition): 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by the Lockman Foundation.  Used by permission.  (www.Lockman.org)

I call the New American Standard Bible the NAS.  I add boldface or underline to specific words and phrases in Scriptures to add my emphasis for discussion.

Introduction: Our National Wilderness and God’s Cure

In the Bible Malachi shows the spiritual wilderness found in nations of Western Europe, Canada, the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand in especially the past few decades.  The healthiest part of each nation’s foundation is broken (as on this book’s marketing image), which leaves the land moving to an awful curse that cannot be avoided by natural means or strength.  This book is written for believers in any of these nations, which I often call lands of Malachi.

Malachi shows how the wilderness was produced and reveals that God is preparing its cure, which comes through believers in Jesus who continue to let God prepare them in their dry land.  We shall see how God inspired Malachi to speak to his situation so that God says exactly what He wants to say to believers in these nations today.

Any of these nations is often called Post-Christian because its popular culture strongly rejects Christianity now after being open to it for generations.  Most of these nations formed a state Church, which naturally causes the wilderness in Mal. 1-3 (Chapters 1-3).  The U.S. avoided a state Church, but TV and Hollywood helped to cause the wilderness there (Apx. 6).  In each Post-Christian nation, the Church needed to get better, but instead lost Jesus and His life.

The spiritually barren wilderness in a land can aptly be called a syndrome: a group of symptoms of an illness with a poorly seen cause.  We basically follow the sequence of Malachi and consider the syndrome’s cause, symptoms, and cure from God through His people.  Believers in these lands can be awed by the enormity of the problem, but also greatly encouraged by seeing more truth: God is preparing believers who continue with Him to provide a great cure for their land – even helping it to join itself to Jesus as His national disciple.

The 5 chapters about Malachi form this book, and a reader can conveniently add any appendix for its relevant insights.

Chapter 1: Mal. 1-2: Causing a Spiritual Wilderness

Many nations that had started to relate to Jesus have stopped.  For generations a spiritual deadness so thick and deep has made the people there today to be among the world’s most unresponsive to the Good News of Jesus Christ.  The current spiritual wilderness in a land can aptly be called the Post-Christian syndrome.

This spiritual death is no accident.  As with other important issues, God’s word in the Bible reveals how each of these nations lost its life in Christ and moved into a deep spiritual darkness.  Far better, this same word reveals that God has a great plan to correct this great problem.  In His plan, His children learn to work with Him and with each other to produce it.  Each of His children who keeps choosing to walk with Jesus can help others to respond well to Him.  As we shall see, during this spiritual wilderness real progress will be slow – until it explodes!

Malachi is the specific source in the Bible that provides so much rich insight for these nations.  Malachi spoke to Judah, the nation descended from Jacob.  But God inspired Malachi’s words so that God could also speak to people and situations that Malachi did not know.  Mal. 1:6-2:9 specifically addressed the priests of Judah near 400 BC and shows their failure to respect God.  First, let us see that the priests of the true God in a nation today are its believers in Jesus, and then we shall see the revelation of Malachi.

Rev. 1:6a says about believers in Jesus: "And He has made us to be a kingdom, priests to His God and Father."

Rev. 5:10 repeats: "You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to our God; and they will reign upon the earth."

Speaking to believers in Jesus, 1Peter 2:5, 9 add:

⁵You, also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ….⁹But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. (1Peter 2:5, 9)

A priest is to go to God on behalf of his people (Heb. 5:1).  In this way a priest represents each to the other.  God calls believers in Jesus to be His priests: we are His representatives or ambassadors (2Cor. 5:20) to people who do not yet know our unseen God or not know Him well.  God’s priests in any land today are its real believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, even as His priests in Judah were descendants of Levi.

Mal. 1:1-2:9: the Cause of the Nation’s Post-Christian Syndrome

Malachi describes a nation of unthankful (Mal. 1:1-5) priests and people that once feared the Lord.  Their unthankfulness would help the nation to lose its start in God.

In v. 2 God said, I have loved you.  People in Judah asked How?  Their question shows they knew no way: they were living unthankful for every loving blessing God gave them.  Unthankfulness hindered their continuing to relate well to Him, helped priests in Judah to grow tired and disdainful of serving Him, and helped both priests and the people in Judah to turn from His ways selfishly and ignorantly.  This is also at work in many lands today.

God has given every Post-Christian nation real blessings that can let people be truly thankful.  Everyone has his/her personal blessings.  God has also saved each land of Malachi (nearly all are identified at the start of the Introduction) in crises that would have destroyed it, and has helped it to be among the first to become a materially developed nation.  Do many in your developed nation know that God helped its development?  If the answer is no, then too few can thank God for this in their hearts.

Long after the nation began, its priests performed mere religious traditions without trying to be in real contact with Him: they kept a form of Godliness but lost its reality.  Mal. 1:6-14 explains with examples how the priests in Judah had failed to honor, respect, or fear God, had despised and profaned His name, and had grown tired, disdainful, and sloppy with their work as priests.  The effects had spread throughout the land as generations of God’s representatives badly distorted His righteous nature.  His priests did not uphold righteousness, and their practice had eroded so much that they did not realize how they were offending Him: He repeatedly needed to illustrate it to them explicitly before they could see it.  For example, consider Mal. 1:6:

"A son honors his father, and a servant his master.  Then if I am a father, where is My honor?  And if I am a master, where is My respect?" says the Lord of hosts to you, O priests who despise My name.  But you say, "How have we despised Your name?" (Mal. 1:6)

Malachi went for the heart-attitude in the sacrifices of the priests in the land.  This applies in all lands.  Priests in Judah made sacrifices required by the Old Testament Law, but priests in nations now make a different kind of sacrifice: the sacrifices of thanksgiving and praise, and the body as a living sacrifice (Ps. 50:23, Heb. 13:15, Rom. 12:1-2).  All of our sacrifices to God are ruined by a bad heart-attitude.  Notice in Mal. 1:12-13 how a complaint to His priests is so meaningful today:

¹¹…My name….¹²"But you are profaning it, in that you say, ‘The table of the Lord is defiled, and as for its fruit, its food is to be despised.’  You also say, ‘My, how tiresome it is!’  And you disdainfully sniff at it, says the Lord of hosts, and you bring what was taken by robbery and what is lame or sick; so you bring the offering!  Should I receive that from your hand?" says the Lord. (Mal. 1:11-13)

How do we believers today profane the Lord’s name?  In the Bible and in many cases today, a name of something comes from a key feature of its character: for example, consider the many names of God, of Jesus, or of Satan.  If we badly distort God’s character by living like we do not respect Him or believe His word, then we profane His name to others and lose respect for our own service to God – we develop increasingly bad heart-attitudes about our life of service to Him.

God promised that if they did not take it to heart to honor His