Brexit shows we want to feel we’re in the right; we want to feel we’re winning.
Perhaps that’s one reason we find it so easy to get so heated. We forget that someone who voted differently to us might have some interesting points. We forget that they may even be right. At its worst, that impulse to feel that we’re right, and must win, leads to unfair caricature and disdainful rhetoric, a sense of superiority and virtue-signalling.
When was the last time you heard someone talk about Brexit and say ‘I could be wrong, but…’ or ‘Obviously there are good arguments on either side, but…’?
There’s something deeper going on here than just political debate.
I think that, for many of us, it’s to do with the fact that we’ve picked a side (we were made to)—and we now need to feel we picked the right side. And if it’s about the right side and the wrong side, then the right side—our side—must win. And so we get defensive and judgmental and angry.
Wouldn’t it be great to be clear on which way history is going, and be glad about it?
Well, if you’re a Christian, you’re a Christian before you’re a Leaver or a Remainer, or a Don’t-Know-Anymore-But-Please-Get-On-With-It-er.
If you’re a Christian, you are already on the right side, because you’re on God’s side.
Psalm 46 v 8-9 invites us to glimpse the future:
Come and see what the Lord has done,
the desolations he has brought on the earth.
9 He makes wars cease
to the ends of the earth.
He breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
he burns the shields with fire.
God will make wars cease throughout the earth, by disarming those who want to make a fight of it. But don’t miss the strange way the psalm describes that day—as ‘desolations’.
How could peace be a desolation?!
Only if you were fighting, and there’s peace because you lost. And that’s the point here.
There will be a winner.
And it’s God.
And so his people will win, but there will be desolation for those who have defined themselves by their resistance to his rule—which is, of course, the natural state for all of us, however we happened to vote in a referendum in June 2016. In a sense, each of us by nature casts our vote to resist God’s rule in our lives and our country. And the warning here is clear—that is to put yourself on the wrong side of history.
Here is the catastrophic decision: and it’s not leaving when we should remain, or remaining when we should leave.
It’s to try to fight God, to shut him out of his world and to build your own life and your own city; and to discover that one day he disarms you, and shuts you out of the world that you fought him over.
The American President in the 1860s, during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, was once asked if he thought God was on the side of the North, the Union. He answered:
‘My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.’
He might have added, for God always wins. Could it be that we’ve got so tangled up in Brexit—so determined to be proven right, and so exercised by whether our side will win—that we’ve forgotten what really matters? How would you know? Well, do your friends know your views on Brexit, but not on Christ? Do they know whether you love Rees-Mogg, May or Corbyn, but not that you love Jesus? Honestly: what do you talk about? What do you get passionate about? Who do you care most about the victory of: Leave, Remain, or God?
God says, don’t be worrying so much about Britain ending up on the wrong side of history that you forget to consider whether you are currently heading for the wrong side of eternity. And don’t be worrying so much about Brexit that you never get around to telling anyone about the final result—and how to be on the right side of it.
This blog is one of a four-part series (read the previous post here), and is an adapted extract from a sermon given at Grace Church Worcester Park, sw London, on 10th March 2019.
Carl is Editorial Director at The Good Book Company and is a member of Grace Church Worcester Park, London. He is the best-selling author of The Garden, the Curtain and the Cross and God's Big Promises Bible Storybook, and also serves as series editor of the God's Word for You series. Before joining TGBC, he worked as a journalist and then as a teacher, and pastored a congregation in Hull. Carl is married to Lizzie, and they have two children. He studied history at Oxford University.
