History's Proven Solution to Barbarism
-Dr. Marshall Foster
The “civilized” world is in shock as it is bombarded daily with scenes of kidnapping, burning or beheading of Christians, journalists, aid workers and soldiers.
What hope is there of ever ending such barbarity by Islamic radicals like ISIS? The story of one man who confronted a nation filled with human sacrifice, genocide and sex slavery, can give us lasting encouragement. This man’s name was Patrick. We know him today as St. Patrick, the founder of Ireland. There once was a land so barbaric and backward that even the Roman Empire refused to go there. Early medieval maps designated the unmapped territory of Ireland with the title “Here do be monsters.”
Over 1,000 Irish slave traders attacked a small town on the northwest coast of Britain in 405 A.D. Their goal? - To capture hundreds of Christian youth and sell them into slavery back in Ireland. Sixteen year old Patrick was beaten, bound and thrown into the raider’s ship and quickly transported back to Ireland along with hundreds of other youth. There this Celtic boy, the son of a Christian elder and nobleman, was sold as a slave to a pagan, druid warlord named Miliucc in the frozen north of the Island.
Approaching Miliucc’s fort, Patrick would have seen human skulls hanging from the pointed stakes which formed the palisade, the defensive wall. Druids believed that the human head was the seat of the soul of their enemies. They drank from their skulls and they hung the shrunken heads of rivals on their belts. It was a culture of death, similar to the modern ISIL. They even used the same techniques of sacrifice to their pagan gods as the Islamic radicals of today, such as burning their captives alive in cages.
During Patrick’s ordeal he would have witnessed the Celtic pagan ritual of Beltaine during which a colossal wicker cage in the form of a man was assembled – the Wicker Man. Many rival clansmen, runaway slaves and even innocent children were crammed inside this cage.
Then the Wicker Man was set aflame. In the fiery inferno the screams of the victims could be heard for miles delighting the chief and terrorizing the people. During his captivity, as he barely survived in the open fields tending sheep, Patrick prayed over a hundred times a day. According to his own writings he was radically converted to a sincere faith in Christ.
After six years in captivity Patrick writes that God spoke to him saying, “Your ship is ready” and directed him to escape to the eastern coastline. He boarded the ship and eventually came home to Britain and his family. But not long after, God spoke to Patrick in a dream and he heard Irish voices saying, “Please, holy boy, come and walk among us again.”
Patrick heard the call and after years of preparation he sold his noble title, bought three small sail boats and took twelve friends with him to go back to serve the people that had enslaved him as a boy. Over the next 30 years, beginning in 435, Patrick preached the loving gospel of forgiveness to the Stone Age culture of Ireland, whose people were still enslaved to druid gods of death and human sacrifice.
With no army, facing almost certain death, Patrick proclaimed the true God of loving kindness and forgiveness with such power that the youth, especially, were challenged to abandon their gods of fear and violence and give themselves to the great cause of liberating the hearts of people all over the world.
Author Thomas Cahill explains how he envisioned the Irish pagans of the 5th century responding to Patrick’s message. The Irish must have thought “We can put away our knives and abandon our altars. These are no longer required…He has given us His own Son, and we are washed clean in the blood of this lamb. God does not hate us; He loves us.”
Without an army or support from the Roman church, Patrick went from town to town setting up over 300 churches, schools and monasteries. He trained thousands of ministers who began to translate and preserve the great documents of antiquity in desolate, cold monastic outposts on the edge of civilization. Cahill says, “as the Roman Empire fell, as all through Europe matted, unwashed barbarians descended on the Roman cities looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish … took up the great labor of copying all of Western literature….Without the Mission of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly re-founded European Civilization throughout the continent… the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one – a world without books. And our own world would have never come to be.” Patrick and his disciples also were the first nation to end sex trafficking and slavery.
But how is this “early history” relevant to us today in our current struggle with radical Islam and atheistic Communism? Patrick illustrates history’s only proven strategy that has subdued the blood-lust of lost souls from any pagan ideology to give up their beheading ways. Ireland was no aberration. Its peaceful transformation became an example which has been repeated in nations worldwide. Let us proclaim, with sincere humility, the God-honoring fact that the tyrannical pagan nations of Ireland, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, France, England, America, Australia, New Zealand and dozens of other nations have been peacefully liberated by Jesus, the true Liberator.
Civilization, based
on the rule of law, however, stands on the brink of collapse because we
have forgotten the source of our civility – the God of the Bible.The “civilized” world is in shock as it is bombarded daily with scenes of kidnapping, burning or beheading of Christians, journalists, aid workers and soldiers.
What hope is there of ever ending such barbarity by Islamic radicals like ISIS? The story of one man who confronted a nation filled with human sacrifice, genocide and sex slavery, can give us lasting encouragement. This man’s name was Patrick. We know him today as St. Patrick, the founder of Ireland. There once was a land so barbaric and backward that even the Roman Empire refused to go there. Early medieval maps designated the unmapped territory of Ireland with the title “Here do be monsters.”
Over 1,000 Irish slave traders attacked a small town on the northwest coast of Britain in 405 A.D. Their goal? - To capture hundreds of Christian youth and sell them into slavery back in Ireland. Sixteen year old Patrick was beaten, bound and thrown into the raider’s ship and quickly transported back to Ireland along with hundreds of other youth. There this Celtic boy, the son of a Christian elder and nobleman, was sold as a slave to a pagan, druid warlord named Miliucc in the frozen north of the Island.
Approaching Miliucc’s fort, Patrick would have seen human skulls hanging from the pointed stakes which formed the palisade, the defensive wall. Druids believed that the human head was the seat of the soul of their enemies. They drank from their skulls and they hung the shrunken heads of rivals on their belts. It was a culture of death, similar to the modern ISIL. They even used the same techniques of sacrifice to their pagan gods as the Islamic radicals of today, such as burning their captives alive in cages.
During Patrick’s ordeal he would have witnessed the Celtic pagan ritual of Beltaine during which a colossal wicker cage in the form of a man was assembled – the Wicker Man. Many rival clansmen, runaway slaves and even innocent children were crammed inside this cage.
Then the Wicker Man was set aflame. In the fiery inferno the screams of the victims could be heard for miles delighting the chief and terrorizing the people. During his captivity, as he barely survived in the open fields tending sheep, Patrick prayed over a hundred times a day. According to his own writings he was radically converted to a sincere faith in Christ.
After six years in captivity Patrick writes that God spoke to him saying, “Your ship is ready” and directed him to escape to the eastern coastline. He boarded the ship and eventually came home to Britain and his family. But not long after, God spoke to Patrick in a dream and he heard Irish voices saying, “Please, holy boy, come and walk among us again.”
Patrick heard the call and after years of preparation he sold his noble title, bought three small sail boats and took twelve friends with him to go back to serve the people that had enslaved him as a boy. Over the next 30 years, beginning in 435, Patrick preached the loving gospel of forgiveness to the Stone Age culture of Ireland, whose people were still enslaved to druid gods of death and human sacrifice.
With no army, facing almost certain death, Patrick proclaimed the true God of loving kindness and forgiveness with such power that the youth, especially, were challenged to abandon their gods of fear and violence and give themselves to the great cause of liberating the hearts of people all over the world.
Author Thomas Cahill explains how he envisioned the Irish pagans of the 5th century responding to Patrick’s message. The Irish must have thought “We can put away our knives and abandon our altars. These are no longer required…He has given us His own Son, and we are washed clean in the blood of this lamb. God does not hate us; He loves us.”
Without an army or support from the Roman church, Patrick went from town to town setting up over 300 churches, schools and monasteries. He trained thousands of ministers who began to translate and preserve the great documents of antiquity in desolate, cold monastic outposts on the edge of civilization. Cahill says, “as the Roman Empire fell, as all through Europe matted, unwashed barbarians descended on the Roman cities looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish … took up the great labor of copying all of Western literature….Without the Mission of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly re-founded European Civilization throughout the continent… the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one – a world without books. And our own world would have never come to be.” Patrick and his disciples also were the first nation to end sex trafficking and slavery.
But how is this “early history” relevant to us today in our current struggle with radical Islam and atheistic Communism? Patrick illustrates history’s only proven strategy that has subdued the blood-lust of lost souls from any pagan ideology to give up their beheading ways. Ireland was no aberration. Its peaceful transformation became an example which has been repeated in nations worldwide. Let us proclaim, with sincere humility, the God-honoring fact that the tyrannical pagan nations of Ireland, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, France, England, America, Australia, New Zealand and dozens of other nations have been peacefully liberated by Jesus, the true Liberator.
The biblical strategy of liberty, although primarily based upon the voluntary conversion and transformation of individuals, does not preclude the necessity in this fallen world of restraining evil by force. It is a self-evident truth, confirmed throughout the Scriptures, that all people have a right and a duty of self-defense against lawless rogues. While rebuilding pagan nations can never be accomplished by force, the military, led by civil magistrates (Romans 13, Gen. 9) has the right and responsibility, as do the people, to defend themselves and their land from attack. See the “Christian Just War Theory” for details.
John Calvin was faced with the extinction of Christianity five centuries ago in Europe at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. The great Biblicist put the major responsibility for the future of Christendom in the right place – right at the steps of the church. Calvin said “Until the Church finds the will and heart to reach the Muslims with the Gospel we shall always be at peril.” So it is today.
The church has the major responsibility, as God’s Ambassadors of reconciliation, to reach the unreachable and disciple the nations, remembering that Christians also were all at one time “dead in our trespasses and sins.”
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