God Uses Bad People to Do His Work
God uses bad people to do his work and even horrible events to accomplish his purposes. Does this not put him in bad light as he is using apparently bad means to accomplish good things?
Habakkuk asked this very question and a look at this recent century does much more.
See what Habakkuk says:
Your eyes are too pure to look on evil;
you cannot tolerate wrongdoing.
Why then do you tolerate the treacherous?
Why are you silent while the wicked
swallow up those more righteous than themselves?
The Babylonians and Assyrians that conquered Judah and Israel were horrible, but the Jews after the fall of Jerusalem are more serious about faith. Habakkuk did not see this.
On a more recent case, when China drove Western Christian missionaries out of China in 1949-53, the missionaries left behind 1 million Chinese believers. Detractors called them rice Christians who believed to get money from the foreigners.
God Uses Bad People Even Now
The Christians saw the efforts of the party to destroy especially in the period of the Chinese cultural revolution (1966-1976). The pastors in Shanghai were all sent to the countryside to learn from the peasants. Western Christians thought all was lost.
However, when China opened to the West in 1978, we found that far from being lost, the church had grown to tens of millions especially in places where the pastors had been sent to the countryside.
God has used the evil of those who wanted to destroy the church to purify it and make it explode in size in a very indigenous way.
Thousands of Christian missionaries over 110 years could not touch what the violence of Chairmen Mao. God knows how to move sinful man and even sinful believers. He is working his purpose out better than we could imagine. Yes, he uses some very bad men when people will not move via that which is termed good.
God clearly knows better how to reach sinful people be they Israelites in the time of Habakkuk or Chinese in much more resent times.
It is hard to trust God in such times. We need to see that God sees things so much better than we do. He loves to reach us and usually we have to go the bottom to finally pray. Sinful people in the all the world are like this. May we hear God speak before he drives us to the bottom. May we ever value God’s kingdom over the world we see before us.
