Rapture Fever

208 RAPTURE FEVER
Chambers was wrong: he had not left the winning side. But
it took almost four decades for the world to know this for sure.
God has granted us a mighty victory. He has removed a major
enemy from our midst.
A few people may fight an “invulnerable enemy” out of
principle, but very few will devote their lives to developing a
theoretical alternative to it. Chambers surely didn’t. He was
content to bear witness to the terrible evil of Communism. He
had no positive theology, no view of progress in history.
This is why eschatology is so important. What people believe
about the earthly future greatly influences what they do in the
present. We need Christians who are willing to devote their
lives to overcoming Christ’s enemies with something better, not
just lay down their lives in a lost historicid cause.
l%e Paralysis of Pessimism
A remarkable statement to this effect was made at the graduation
exercises of Wheaton College’s Graduate School. Josef
Ton, a Romanian pastor, recounted his experiences. His statement
appears in Wheaton Alumni (Aug./Sept. 1991).
Let me illustrate the importance of understanding the times
from my own experience. The communist disaster fell on my
country when I was a teenager. For many years after that, my
life was a battle for intellectual and spiritual survival under
Marxist indoctrination and totalitarian anti-Christian terror. I
struggled to understand the nature of that calamity, and the
Lord gave me that understanding. In the forties, I wrote papers
on the nature of the failure of communism. One of them, published
under the title ‘The Christian Manifesto; landed me in
six months of house arrest with harsh interrogations by the
secret police. But for me the crucial moment came in 1977,
when a friend of mine challenged me to set up an organization
that would openly expose communism.
Here is what I told him: “Communism is an experiment that
has failed. It wasn’t able to fulfill any of its many promises and