- Devotional from Vance Havner -

Catacombs and Colosseums

A recent magazine article carries a picture of the ancient Colosseum of Rome and speaks of it as the place “where early Christians died for a faith the world now takes for granted.”
The writer, perhaps, spoke more truth than he meant to say. However much we take our faith for granted now, it certainly was not a matter of course in the heyday of the Colosseum. That Flavian amphitheater, still a show-place in modern Rome, was built by Jewish slaves. The outside walls cost more than fifty million dollars. It seated no less than fifty thousand people. In its arenas gladiators and wild beasts fought for public entertainment. One thousand animals were slain there on an emperor’s birthday.
If we had sat in those grandstands amidst “the grandeur that was Rome” we might have been deceived. For it was not the howling mob in the Colosseum that determined the course of history. Underground in the catacombs another force was working. A handful of men and women who worshiped another King called Jesus, who had died and risen and was coming back some day—here was the beginning of an empire within an empire, the Christians beneath the Caesars. They crept along the subterranean passageways and tunnels, among the tombs and caverns, hunted and persecuted, “the scum of the earth.”
If we had prowled around in these gloomy depths we might have come on little companies singing, listening to a Gospel message, observing the Lord’s Supper. We might have said, “They haven’t a chance.” But the Christians underground eventually upset the Caesars above ground. The catacombs overcame the Colosseum and finally put the amphitheater out of business.
The Fellowship of Simple Believers
There is something fascinating about these saints of the catacombs. It has intrigued our writers and showed up in Quo Vadis years ago, and in similar books today. We cannot forget this fellowship of simple believers who loved Jesus Christ more than their lives, in the world but not of it, whose blood was the seed of the church. It was said of them long ago:

“They live, each in his native land but as though they were not really at home there. They share in all duties like citizens and suffer all hardships like strangers. Every foreign land is for them a fatherland and every fatherland a foreign land. They dwell on earth but are citizens of heaven. They obey the laws that men make, but their lives are better than the laws. They love all men, but are persecuted by all.”

These denizens of God’s Underground were on fire with a passion which swords could not kill nor water drown nor fire destroy. Their blood was spilled so freely in the arena that a traveler was asked, “Do you want a relic? Take a handful of sand from the Colosseum. It is all martyrs!”
Here was a minority group in a pagan land, but, like many minority groups before and after, they changed the course of history. Today the professing church has grown rich and increased with goods and needs nothing. As the magazine writer said, the faith is now taken for granted. What once was asserted is now assumed. We sing,
Our fathers, chained in prisons dark,
Were still in heart and conscience free:
How sweet would be their children’s fate,
If they, like them, could die for Thee!

But we are a pretty comfortable crowd of Christians, who seem to forget that for us the Gospel is not something to come to church to hear, but something to go from church to tell. The cause of Christ is not carried forward by complacent Sunday morning bench-warmers who come in to sit but never go out to serve.
From the Arena to the Grandstand
The worst of it is, we have moved from the arena into the grandstand, from the catacombs into the Colosseum.
Certainly we have caught the spirit of the Colosseum. One would think Christians had never heard those Scriptures, “But not conformed to this world”; “Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God”; “If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” The gods of Rome—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—are still our gods, and we “fear the Lord and serve our own gods.”
Campbell Morgan said we Christians are not to catch the spirit of the age but to condemn it, and, so far as we may, correct it. But churches are filled with worldlings. They sit in the choirs, teach classes, hold offices. They are affiliated with all the unfruitful works of darkness and never reprove them. If their hypocrisy is pointed out, they adopt the hush-hush policy by misusing the admonition, “Judge not that ye be not judged,” only another device of the devil to shut our mouths while the church moves into the Colosseum. We have long since ceased being disturbed by these sensitive souls who howl when the sword of the Spirit opens the pus-pockets of iniquity.
Living in Rome, we are tempted as never before to do as Rome does. When the church moves from persecution to popularity, from the arena into the grandstand, the Gospel fire dies down until God starts another minority underground. He has followed this procedure through the centuries. Witness the Pilgrims, the Quakers, the Wesleyan movement. The church languishes when her members wear medals in the grandstand; she prospers when they wear scars in the arena. And be not deceived: what a lot of people think is the world becoming more Christian is the Christians becoming more worldly!
The Illusion of Showmanship
Furthermore, we have become enamored of the showmanship of the Colosseum. The time has come when sound doctrine cannot be endured, and, somehow, we have fallen for the notion that the church must compete with the world by entering the entertainment business. It is ridiculous to begin with, for we cannot begin to match the cleverness of this age by running third-rate amusements. It is an admission of failure and a sad commentary on present-day preaching when we must resort to numerous devices of music, movies, magic, and monkeyshines to fill the pews. It is contrary to the whole genius of the Christian message and ministry, for God ordained that men should be won by the foolishness of preaching, and when preaching fails there is no substitute. There are minor uses for lesser gifts, but the proclamation of the Gospel by Spirit-filled men is God’s chosen means.
After all, “we are running a lifeboat and not a show-boat.” But this is the age of the Colosseum, and not a few Christians think we must stage a glorified circus to keep step with these days of super-duper glamour.
It is the day of the spectator. Decadent Rome sat in the grandstand. America is a nation of onlookers today. Thousands upon thousands sit at football stadiums and baseball diamonds and horse races, watching man and beast strive for mastery. Then they go to the theater to be entertained again. Some of them go to church on Sunday and again they are spectators, not participants, and the preacher is expected to perform for their enjoyment. They go home with no more intention of practising the sermon than they take seriously what they saw in the theater. It is all unreal. Even Christians sit like the listeners of Ezekiel’s day, hearing the Word but doing it not, and go out having deceived themselves. “Spectatoritis,” whether in the amphitheater or at church, means a flabby generation of comfortable onlookers. For the church it spells decay. “I enjoyed the sermon” may be a sad index to the state of both pulpit and pew.
The Obsession with Size
The church has moved from the catacombs to the Colosseum in its emphasis on size. We stage mammoth demonstrations and gigantic convocations. We put celebrities on the platform and borrow from Cæsar to enhance the banner of Christ. We have gone crazy over bigness. Just now church unification is the fashion. That is another admission of failure. Failing in the Spirit we are trying to impress men with size, as though strength lay in statistics.
When the patient is very ill and the doctors hold a consultation, it does not mean only that the patient is up against it; it may mean that the doctors are up against it! We have gone on the defensive, forgetting that the best defensive is an offensive. If instead of all this banding together to make a show of strength, we secured a fresh filling of the Spirit and launched out with an aggressive evangelism we would win more souls in a week than we now win in a year. The fact is, the more we unify, the fewer souls are brought to Christ. The way out is by expansion, not by concentration.
The saints of the catacombs did not sit in huddles and draw up resolutions deploring the status quo. They believed, lived, and preached the Gospel in the power of God, and empires gave way before them.
Actually, we need a thinning instead of a thickening. Growing corn and cotton must be thinned; we reduce the quantity to improve the quality. Gideon had to thin his troops, and a similar procedure might help God’s army today. Jesus thinned His crowd, as recorded in the sixth chapter of John, and doubtless there was many another such occasion. Many believed on Him, we are told, but He did not believe in them. Today the persecuted minority has become the popular majority.
Returning to the Cross
Real Christians, however, are still a minority in a pagan land right here in America. If instead of aping the world in spirit, showmanship and size, we returned to the offense of the cross and were willing to be the scum of the earth and a “theater to the world” in the New Testament sense instead of in the modern sense, we might once again shake the world.
Men are not impressed from the Colosseum but from the catacombs. As it is written:

“Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men: and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”

- Devotional from Vance Havner - 

2nd Corinthians 4:8

I grew up in the Horatio Alger days, when the numerous stories of that prolific writer made standard fare for country schoolboys. Old-timers will recall those sink-or-swim, bound-to-rise thrillers. They were all cut from the same cloth and had just about the same outline: country boy goes to town; prevents a railroad wreck by flagging the train; gets job as messenger boy; rescues banker’s daughter from bandits; gets job in bank; falls in love with the banker’s daughter and marries her; comes through at the happy ending sitting on top of the world.
It made good reading in those days before the realists began to wallow so morbidly in insanity and suicide. But, of course, most lives do not roll along in story-book fashion. A few do, and we rejoice that their lines have been cast in such pleasant places. A few Christians seem to move through this world on an ever-ascending scale: health, success, happy family life, serene old age and a glorious exit. But with most of us life does not follow the Alger pattern, and with many it goes exactly the other way, through disappointment, pain, grief, broken dreams, and often into sinister situations that simply do not make sense. These days we are listening to ever-increasing stories of tragedy and heartache, and no superficial pious moralizing will meet the need nor soothe the heart. There is no use denying it, there is much that doesn’t make sense, and thousands of saints are not only perplexed but in despair.
Now, Paul was in perplexity but not in despair. He was not whistling his way through the graveyard, however, nor was he merely “smiling through” or, Micawber-like, looking for something to turn up. His way out was not by painting the clouds with sunshine, wearing rose-colored glasses and quoting lovely poems about “God’s in His heaven—all’s right with the world!”
I am constantly encountering dilemmas that don’t make sense. I have a picture of myself standing with two other preachers taken only a few years ago. One was rudely snatched from earth in an automobile collision with a drunken driver. The drunken driver escaped, but the splendid young preacher was taken from a fruitful ministry and a fine wife and little children. The other preacher in the photo died later in his thirties, just a few weeks before the birth of his only child, a son he had longed for through the years. I saw that little fellow recently and was struck again with the unexplainable mystery of what just doesn’t seem to make sense. Even now I am tramping the woods with another fine youngster whose father died some years ago. When I think how much he loved that boy but had to leave him, and wonder why I am enjoying that little fellow instead, there looms again the perplexity of those enigmas that just don’t fit into any of our patterns.
Of course men have wrestled with such puzzles from the beginning. It was Job’s perplexity. Habakkuk contended with it and gave us his blessed “Although” and “Yet.” Micah surveyed a dismal day when godly men had perished from the earth, while the wicked prospered. He got through to God, and a man had better do that or he will go crazy. John the Baptist sat in prison and doubtless pondered why Jesus could work all His miracles but leave His forerunner in jail.
The text finds Paul in straits, “put to it but not put out.” Some things are given us to know (Mt. 13:11) but some things are not for us to know (Acts 1:7), and, unfortunately, we fail to learn much we could know by trying to find out what we cannot know. The little boy who couldn’t understand why God put so many vitamins in spinach instead of putting them all in ice cream was learning early that things just don’t work out as we would do them if we had the universe in charge.
Some things just don’t make sense, but we may be perplexed yet not in despair. The way out is not by explanation but by revelation. The Bible does not give us explanation for some of these riddles, but it does supply revelation.
To begin with, because things do not make sense to us does not mean that they don’t make sense at all. Joseph told his brethren that they meant it for evil when they sold him into Egypt but God meant it for good. It didn’t make sense to Joseph or to Jacob, who said, “All these things are against me.” But Jacob was mistaken, for all things cannot be against us if all things work together for good. We have often used the well-worn illustration of the hand-sewed bookmark. On the reverse side one sees only a meaningless tangle of loose thread-ends, but on the front side one reads “God Is Love.” We are often on the wrong side of God’s providences and the threads make no sense to us. But they make sense to Him who understands the end from the beginning. It is always foolish to assume that what we cannot understand cannot be understood at all.
Furthermore, because some things do not make sense to us now does not mean that they never will make sense. Many things that God does we know not now, but we shall know hereafter. One does not eat flour or sour milk or salt or soda. But when these are properly mixed and baked awhile they come out Southern biscuits. There are happenings and events that are very disturbing when we try to digest them by themselves. But God mixes them as part of His recipe, and when they come out of His oven in the light of eternity we find that they were part of the “all things” that “work together for good.” We run into plenty of trouble trying to isolate certain experiences and understand them torn from their context. What mistakes have been made along that line with Scripture! We cannot detach this event or that from the whole pattern of our lives and make sense of it. It must be viewed in the light of eternity. Some day we’ll understand.
But a still deeper consideration remains. There is a higher viewpoint from which things which don’t make sense to our ordinary reasoning can make sense to our spiritual understanding even now. The highest lesson God wants to teach us is to “trust Him regardless.” If everything made sense to our understanding we would need no faith. If everything worked out in story-book style we would become complacent and spoiled. God wants to bring us to a higher plane, where He Himself is our portion and reward, where we can sing,

Now Thee alone I seek;
Give what is best.

To do this, God allows things that don’t make sense, that baffle and perplex our ordinary understanding. We may never be able to understand them here. But we can do one of several things about them. We grow bitter and resentful, sulk and grumble, and murmur, “Is the Lord among us or not?” We can grit our teeth and “tough it out” with a stiff-upper-lip stoicism. We can resign ourselves to the inevitable and go around with a martyr spirit. But there is a better way. We can accept it as one of the methods God uses to bring us to walk by faith and not by sight. While we still may not understand it with our heads, it makes sense to the higher understanding of our hearts. This is part of that wisdom which cometh down from above, and if we lack it we may ask of God, who gives liberally and upbraids not. It is not learned in schools, and often theologians miss it, while the simplest souls learn it. We have seen these unexplainable providences completely bowl over the wise and mighty, while lowly souls who had learned to sanctify themselves against tomorrow took them in faith’s stride. They did not know why but they knew whom and trusted the matter with Him. It brought peace and blessing and so it “made sense” after all, the highest kind of sense, the sixth sense of the spirit.
When our Lord commanded the servants at the feast of Cana to fill the waterpots with water, I am sure that it didn’t make sense. What they needed was wine, not water. But they filled the pots with water, and when it was served the governor of the feast did not understand, but we read that “the servants which drew the water knew.” Humble souls who co-operate with the Lord even when things don’t make sense have an understanding of which “governors” often know nothing.

Whatsoe’r He bids you, do it:
Though you may not understand,
Yield to Him complete obedience,
Then you’ll see His mighty hand.
Fill the waterpots with water;
Fill them to the very brim.
He will honor all your trusting,
Leave the miracles to Him.

1 Samuel 30:1-8

The smell of smoke is unmistakable. It is a lingering evidence that something that once stood tall has been reduced to rubbish.

For David and his six hundred men, the smoke rising from Ziklag was a scent of total devastation. They had returned from the front lines expecting to embrace their wives and hear the laughter of their children; instead, they found their city burned with fire and their wives and children taken captive. The Scripture says they: “lifted up their voice and wept, until they had no more power to weep.”

We all eventually return to a Ziklag—that moment where everything is turned upside down. These Ziklag’s will be a time most often of discouragement, despair, and defeat. These moments can produce a sense of emptiness, frailty, and helplessness.

Ziklag has a tendency of producing “stones.” The stones will be used to burden us down or to be hurled in retaliation. I’m thinking of the stone of disappointment, the stone of frustration, the stone of anger, the stone of bitterness, the stone of fault-finding, the stone of blaming self, and so many others. In moments like Ziklag, there are no shortage of stones!

I.) Stones of Retaliation
In verse 6, the soul of the people was grieved and they speak of stoning David. When we are in pain, our first instinct is often to find a target. We pick up stones to hurl at:
•Others - Blaming leadership, family, or friends
•Ourselves - Crushing ourselves with guilt, “if only” “I should have”
•God - Resentment against the Lord
The danger is these stones can never rebuild Ziklag and they sure wouldn’t bring their wives and children back. These stones don’t rebuild, they only produce more rubbish.

II.) Stones of Remembrance
While the crowd was looking for a stone to throw, David looked for a Stone to Stand on. I love the phrase: “but David encouraged himself in the LORD his God.” In the OT, whenever the Lord did something of significance, people often set up an “Ebenezer” which means a “Stone of help.” David likely reached back into his walk with the Lord to pick up these metaphorical stones:
•The Lion and the Bear - “If the Lord was with me in the field, He will be with me in the ashes!”
•Goliath - “If He brought down the giant, He can bring back my family!”
•The Cave - “If He protected me from Saul, He can protect me from these stones!”

In closing, let me challenge you with the ending of the text. David Examined - As David went before the Lord, I’m sure he examined his heart. Ziklag should be a time of examination. David Encouraged - David began to encourage himself in the Lord his God! David Entreated - He requested guidance of the Lord for the next step. David Experienced Victory - David left the prayer place with a promise that they would recover all!