Right in Exodus chapter 1, there was a small verse that stood out for me and seemed to bring a challenge relevant to the world we live in today. It's at the point where the Pharaoh has ordered that all Hebrew baby boys are to be killed at birth, and in vs 17 we find the first example of civil disobedience in the Bible. It says that, because the Hebrew midwives respected God more than they respected the Egyptian king, they refused to obey this order from their government. It meant that they were risking punishment, maybe even risking their lives, but they cared more about what God thought than about what people thought.
I've believed for some years now, that we're coming to a time in history where this sort of courage is going to be needed again. We live in a world where governments are increasingly passing laws that are hostile and opposed to the laws of God. A Scottish schoolboy was recently suspended after an argument with his teacher; the boy insisted that it was unscientific to claim that there are more than two genders, while his school teacher said that that kind of talk was not allowed in school, because there are "many different gender options." Two pre-teens in England have been suspended after requesting permission to be excluded from a class about same sex marriage. A woman in Canada was taken to court for "hate talk" because she objected to transgender teenagers (boys who "identified" as girls) being allowed to use the same bathrooms and changing rooms as her twelve year old daughter.
The LGBTQ agenda is advancing so aggressively at the moment, that the "politically correct" thing to do is to show public support. Ikea, long known for their iconic blue shopping bags, recently released a "rainbow" bag in order to show their support for the gay and transgender community. Sainsbury's recently hung rainbow coloured banners in their supermarkets in order to proclaim a similar message.
We're coming into a time when not publicly embracing this agenda will require us to break laws and risk criminal prosecution. This is just one of the public issues we face in today's world, but it's one of the most aggressive ones at the moment.
The church in the western world has led a relatively sheltered life for centuries, free from major forms of persecution. But the tides are turning and our world is increasingly anti-Christian. We will need to be people of love, but also people of courage like those midwives in that very first chapter of Exodus.
