I am currently reading “Killing Fields, Living Fields” by Don Cormack. The following is from the foreword by Peter Lewis. I urge you all to consider its message to Westerners like myself and evaluate where you are in your obedience to Christ.
An entire country turned into one colossal concentration camp. One and a half million men, women, and children executed by the Khmer Rouge and huge numbers dying of starvation and disease. In all, perhaps thirty percent of the Cambodian people and ninety percent of the young Cambodian Church was wiped out. And yet, in the midst of it all, God; the God who daily bears the pain of a fallen world, at work, calling, comforting, rescuing, saving lives that are falling like sparks into water, like seed into the ground.
So we read too of faith, fortitude, and triumph in the midst of disaster. I shall never forget Don’s account of the last days of Phnom Penh as the Khmer Rouge armies surrounded and shelled the city and as the Christians spread over the city preaching to crowds, baptizing hundreds, and in Christ’s name quite literally ‘rescuing the perishing’ from the jaws of hell. Most of them paid for such a harvest with their lives but it was a price they were willing to pay and they are honoured in heaven:
‘These are they who havee come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore they are before the throne of God and serve him day and night in his temple; and he who sits on the throne will spread his tent over them. Never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat upon them nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd; he will lead them to springs of living water. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’ (Rev 7:14-17)
The early Church, too, was born in conflict. Its leader was the Prince of Peace, its message called men and women into a kingdom of peace, yet it was rarely left in peace for long. Then, as now, the price for peace with god seemed to be conflict with others. ‘In fact,‘ says the Apostle Paul, ‘everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.‘ (2 Tim 3:12) That has been the experience of Cambodian Christians from the beginning, and if it is not our experience in the comfortable and affluent West we must ask if this is because we have taken the escape route implied in those words. Whenever we speak out boldly for Christ, whenever we encounter corruption and challenge the system, whenever we refuse to compromise, we shall be targets of anger and resentment as well as beacons of hope and light. Where we have taken shelter in guilty silence and retreated from the spiritual warfare we are called to wage, we shall never experience or understand the paradoxical words of the Apostle Peter: ‘If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you.’ (1 Peter 4:14)
