A joke is circulating on social media: “What a decade this last week has been!” Where would I even begin to recount the last week, or two weeks? If 2020 established “unprecedented times,” what kind of gong show matrix have we entered now? Or, more harrowingly, what awaits us around the next corner?
For those of us clinging to the “MARANATHA” confession,[1] it can feel tempting to just check out and wait for the Day of the LORD. If we’ll go so far as to say (as I have), “To hell with your culture war!”[2] or ponder how to navigate the alternative (narrow) path of the cruciform witness,[3] how then do we engage our neighborhoods and nations with the Gospel of the Kingdom? If the process of discipleship (meaning, obeying Jesus’ command to “make disciples, teaching them to obey everything [He has] commanded”)[4] is personal rather than political, should we become apolitical altogether? It is as if we are asking ourselves if we should paint the walls of a house we expected would soon burn down.
These very questions gripped a young man early in his political career in British Parliament, a career that would become as successful as it was historic. Not long after colliding with the Man from Galilee, William Wilberforce considered resigning from his position in order to enter vocational ministry. He sought counsel from his lifelong friend and mentor, the former slave ship captain John Newton who had experienced his own collision with Jesus before he famously penned the hymn “Amazing Grace,” about the quandary he found himself in. Newton wisely encouraged the young man that God could use him in politics just as well as in vocational ministry. This compounded parallel encouragement from Wilberforce’s dear friend (and then Prime Minister) William Pitt:
[F]orgive me if I cannot help expressing my fear that you are nevertheless deluding yourself into principles which have but too much tendency to counteract your own object, and to render your virtues and your talents useless both to yourself and mankind. I am not, however, without hopes that my anxiety paints this too strongly. For you confess that the character of religion is not a gloomy one, and that it is not that of an enthusiast. But why then this preparation of solitude, which can hardly avoid tincturing the mind either with melancholy or superstition? If a Christian may act in the several relations of life, must he seclude himself for all to become so? Surely the principles as well as the practice of Christianity are simple, and lead not to meditation only but to action.[5]
Wilberforce later recounted in his journal that, with Pitt’s letter failing to convince him to stay in Parliament, he left his meeting with Newton with his “mind in a calm, tranquil state, more humbled, and looking more devoutly up to God.”[6] With his newfound peace and permission to serve the Lord faithfully in an “unconventional” ministry context, he prayerfully sought an assignment to focus on. And with the zeal of every wide-eyed man in his twenties, he committed himself to an almost impossible life mission. In fact, two almost impossible life missions. On October 28, 1787, the twenty-eight-year-old William Wilberforce declared this in his journal:
God Almighty has set before me two great objects; the suppression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of Manners.[7]
Incredibly, he actually did achieve both before he died. The British Slave Trade ended in 1807, with slavery totally abolished in the United Kingdom in 1833. Wilberforce, then 77, passed into glory a week after the legislation passed its second reading in the House of Commons; it was ratified a month later. While it took nearly a decade for full emancipation in Britain to take shape, I marvel at Wilberforce’s dedication. He pursued his “two great objects” for fifty years. No doubt the stress of his efforts shaved years off his own life in the process. The man, who often recited Psalm 119 and other Scriptures while walking to work,[8] was truly a life “poured out.”[9] In collaboration with his friends and colleagues of the “Clapham Sect,” Wilberforce targeted his second great object, paving the road for the ethics of the coming Victorian Era in Britain. An illiterate nation, wrought with poverty and gutter-level ethics and entertainment, was altogether improved. Schools were built and established. Jobs were created. In his five decades in Parliament, Wilberforce and his Clapham colleagues established nearly seventy social initiatives, including the SPCA.[10] Indeed, “the righteous regard the life of his animal.”[11] Imagine having such a dedicated company in your own government. What impact could such a team have? For those of us living in the mid-2020s, is there a biblical foundation for such social and political engagement?
As the nation of Israel stared down the barrel of seventy years in Babylonian captivity, the prophet who had been ridiculed and scorned for warning them of the coming exile wrote this:
Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all who were carried away captive, whom I have caused to be carried away from Jerusalem to Babylon:
Build houses and dwell in them; plant gardens and eat their fruit. Take wives and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands, so that they may bear sons and daughters—that you may be increased there, and not diminished. And seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray to the Lord for it; for in its peace you will have peace. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let your prophets and your diviners who are in your midst deceive you, nor listen to your dreams which you cause to be dreamed. For they prophesy falsely to you in My name; I have not sent them, says the Lord.
For thus says the Lord: After seventy years are completed at Babylon, I will visit you and perform My good word toward you, and cause you to return to this place. For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart. I will be found by you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back from your captivity; I will gather you from all the nations and from all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you to the place from which I cause you to be carried away captive.[12]
Now, to be clear, this was written to Israel in a very particular historical moment. We tend to pluck the “I have good things for you” verse and put it on placards and mantlepieces without really considering the context. And, when taken in the breadth of the surrounding chapters, Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles gives color to the age-ending calamity Daniel (& Jesus) called the “great tribulation,” which Jeremiah refers to in this prophecy as the “time of Jacob’s trouble.”[13] This truly unprecedented, singular time of trouble serves as the means of labor through which the LORD births the Messianic reign. After our own proverbial “seventy years are completed,” He will perform the good He has promised—the coming of the Son of Man.
In the broadest sense, living in “this present evil age”[14] is to live in the most horrible exile, expelled from the Garden of God and barred re-entry—until the appointed time, through the appointed means. Just as the season of Egyptian slavery fulfilled its numbered days, and just as the Babylonian exile did the same, there are “times and seasons in the Father’s own authority”[15] we are not made privy to—but we are given an assignment in the meantime:
But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.[16]
Sometimes we overthink what this needs to look like, in the same way William Wilberforce very nearly abandoned a strategic and influential political position because he’d elevated the dignity of vocational ministry above any other job. But can you not bear witness while you serve in Congress? Can you not bear witness as a cafe barista? Shouldn’t you though, wherever you are? Surely there are gardens to plant in Babylon.
I’m not a dominionist, and I don’t at all mean to encourage any kind of “seven mountains” campaigns or nationalistic fervor. Babylon was not Jerusalem then, and it is not Jerusalem now. And, in obedience to the word of the LORD, Babylon was bettered by the presence of the exiles. In one generation, they beautified Nebuchadnezzar’s wicked kingdom in obedience to the King of Heaven and Earth, whose Kingdom is “not of this world”[17] but will soon bring our groaning creation under His regenerative jurisdiction.[18] That is what we plant gardens for, because we are meant to bear witness to the Beauty coming. The Clapham Sect pursued just initiatives that bettered their British populous because they pursued things the LORD Himself cares about, and in doing so bore witness to the hope and beauty of His coming reign. The Jews planted gardens in Babylon. The Clapham Sect planted gardens in the United Kingdom. Praise God.
Wilberforce’s exponential impact on his nation, with the compounded efforts of his like-minded colleagues, beautified Britain. He did not endeavor to engineer a counterfeit kingdom; he simply lived in light of the better One soon to be established on the holy hill of God, and the lives of all his neighbors in his entire nation were bettered for it. That is the intercession of an incarnate witness.[18] You could say the same about Daniel, who himself was a Jewish exile in Babylon, who served in a governmental position and bettered Babylon for it.
May we seek the good of wherever we have been assigned, and renounce every cultural ambition for dominion and control so that we are freed up simply “to serve,”[19] lest we instead build a culture wherein we ourselves are served. May we be unthreatened by the strength of Babylon—she’ll collapse one day, and it’ll only take an hour[20]—so that we beautify her in bearing witness of the better Beautiful.
May we match Wilberforce’s fervor and diligence to plant gardens in Babylon, and may we even see them bloom before we pass into the sleep of the saints—until He comes.
Maranatha.
Stephanie Quick is a writer/producer serving with FAI. She cohosts The Better Beautiful podcast with Jeff Henderson. Browse her free music, films, and books in the FAI App and at stephaniequick.org.
[1] See 1 Corinthians 16:22; Quick, Stephanie. (2021.) “Maranatha” is the new song, FAI. Retrieved from https://fai.online/articles/walking-mirrors-maranatha
[2] Quick, Stephanie. (2020.) To hell with your culture war, FAI. Retrieved from https://fai.online/articles/hell-culture-war
[3] Quick, Stephanie. (2024.) Culture wars & the way of the cruciform, FAI. Retrieved from https://fai.online/articles/culture-wars-cruciform
[4] See Matthew 28:18-20
[5]Metaxas, Eric. Amazing Grace (pp. 57-58). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
[6] Metaxas, Eric. Amazing Grace (p. 60). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
[7] Roberts MJD. Moral reform in the 1780s: the making of an agenda. In: Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787–1886. Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories. Cambridge University Press; 2004:17-58.
[8] Metaxas, Eric. Amazing Grace (p. 218). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
[9] See Philippians 2:17; 2 Timothy 4:6
[10] “The Social Work of the Clapham Sect: An Assessment.” The Gospel Coalition. Accessed July 23, 2024. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/the-social-work-of-the-claphamsect-an-assessment
[11] Proverbs 12:10
[12] Jeremiah 29:4-20, NKJV
[13] See Jeremiah 30:5-9; Daniel 9:24-27; 12:1-3; Matthew 24:21
[14] Galatians 1:4
[15] Acts 1:7
[16] Acts 1:8, NKJV
[17] John 18:36
[18] Quick, Stephanie. (2017.) ‘Intercede’ (v): To intervene on behalf of another, FAI. Retrieved from https://fai.online/articles/intercede
[19] See Matthew 20:28; Mark 10:45; John 13:1-17
[20] See Revelation 18:10
