The Last Laugh

Well, we do welcome you to the tab this evening. We're going to be thinking about the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the way that his reign is coming on this earth and absolutely will be seen when he returns again physically to set up his kingdom. There's another traditional hymn that follows well on that song which speaks of the glorious victory of our Savior and it's 233 in hymns of faith.

Jesus shall reign wherever the sun doth his successive journeys run. His kingdom stretch from shore to shore till moon shall wax and wane no more. I'm going to be sharing in a little while some of the incidents that are precious to me from our recent trip to the Soviet Union, using them to illustrate the Word of God which Martin's going to read to us.

Martin and his wife are off to Morland's Bible College in just a few weeks' time. We want you to be following them in your prayers. He'll be with us another Sunday but he's going for a couple of weeks' holiday, then back here and then on to Morland.

So, he'll be reading the Scriptures and committing us to the Lord. Let's enjoy this great hymn of faith about the universal reign of our Savior, 233. Jesus shall reign wherever the sun doth his successive journeys run.

The Scripture we're going to look at this evening is Psalm number two, second Psalm. Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against his anointed one. Let us break their chains, they say, and throw off their fetters.

The one enthroned in heaven laughs, the Lord scoffs at them. Then he rebukes them in his anger and terrifies them in his wrath, saying, I have installed my king on Zion, my holy hill. I will proclaim the decree of the Lord.

He said to me, you are my son. Today I have become your father. Ask of me and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession.

You will rule them with an iron scepter. You will dash them to pieces like pottery. Therefore, you kings, be wise.

Be warned, you rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the son, lest he be angry and you be destroyed in your way.

For his wrath can flare up in a moment. Blessed are all who take refuge in him. Let's pray.

Lord and heavenly father, we're awed by your word. We praise you for your word, the depth of your word that we just can't fathom. Thank you for the relevance of your word, Lord.

This psalm written so many thousands of years ago that really speaks into the situation of the world today. And thank you that we can see that the victory is in you. The victory is in a fearful, awe-filled relationship with you.

Help us to be children who take refuge in you, Lord. We praise you that you have chosen us, Lord. You've chosen us from out among the world to take refuge under your wings where you will uphold us and strengthen us with your righteous right hand.

Lord, help us to hear this evening. We're privileged to be your children. We're privileged to be able to understand by your Holy Spirit your word preached to us.

Anoint your servant, Tony, that your spirit may move through him and a light on each of us as we come to a deeper and more profound understanding of this scripture. Help us to apply it to our lives, Lord. To understand it, to grow through it, and to be hungry to understand more and more in the days ahead.

Let us be hungry for holiness and righteousness, Lord. Fill us, refresh us, and send us out of challenged, encouraged, and different people. In Jesus' name, amen.

Now I'd like to turn you again to that psalm that Martin read. He's right in his prayer when he says that this psalm contains depths which are difficult to fathom. I want to speak not for terribly long this evening using our recent experiences as a back cloth by way of illustration on the thought about the laughter of God.

Have you ever considered that God laughs? The one enthroned in heaven laughs? That's what the fourth verse of this second psalm says. I can imagine that God laughs when a sinner is converted because the Lord Jesus gives us the right to believe that this is indeed the case. As he tells the story of the last things in Luke's gospel, I can believe that God sometimes has a chuckle when you and I, to use a colloquial expression, get into a bit of a tizz thinking that somehow God has into a situation out of which we can't emerge.

But here is a thought in this second psalm speaking of the laughter of God in terms of men who have thrust their fists against Him, men who have suggested that they have a greater power than He has, and they can bring their will into perpetual motion in this world. There's a bronze statue in Gdansk in Poland which actually was fashioned after the figure of Lenin. It was toppled by the Polish miners and ship workers some while ago.

Apparently, the bronze is going to be melted down and turned into church bells. Lenin might not have approved, but I think it brings a smile to the face of God. It wasn't that long ago when Karl Marx, as I mentioned this morning, was pushing his pen in the library of the British Museum and putting out a doctrine that was going to be swallowed in its entirety by Lenin that ultimately the working classes of the world would unite and bring about with a more equitable distribution of the wealth of the world, a fairer society, and heaven would come down on earth.

Today it's interesting that in the Soviet Union the teachings of Marx and Lenin are less and less popular, and there seems to be a great turn towards the Lord Jesus Christ. The one who is enthroned in heaven laughs as men have ridiculed him, as it was said some years ago that give a couple of decades after the Russian Revolution there will be no more churches, no more need for Bibles, no more need for Christianity. The Russian Revolution was a drastic thing that completely changed the face of the Soviet Union.

Most of us here in the West think of Russia as being the Soviet Union. Actually, it's only one of the countries that constitutes this sort of commonwealth of communist countries. I was preaching just last Sunday to a crowded church mainly of elderly women folk, and as my eye roamed over the congregation I appreciated that I was talking to people who had gone through the First World War and the Second World War.

I was talking to part of a nation that lost something like 30 million men in the Second World War. I remembered walking around the streets of Leningrad the day before with my wife looking at what purports to be shops and thinking that if you could take a citizen of Leningrad and bring him or her to Worthing, take them down Montague Precinct, take them just before the precinct into Sainsbury's and then to Marx and Spencer's and Woolworth's, they would not believe their eyes. You would take them into a veritable Aladdin's cave because there's very little to purchase in the Soviet Union.

You turn to your grossest store and you may find some margarine and some unattractive cans of tinned meat, but to get the delicacies that you and I enjoy and take so much for granted that it seems is the exception rather than the rule in the Soviet Union. A man came down from Leningrad, or rather from Moscow, to greet the arrival of the MV Logos. I should explain for visitors here that my wife and I were on the Logos, the replacement for MV Logos of the Movement Operation Mobilization.

It had shifted from Helsinki to Leningrad. Permissions to move into the Soviet Union were only granted some 30 hours before we sailed as a result of half an hour of prayer that preceding Thursday evening. The man who came down from Moscow aboard the ship and addressed the ship's company, amongst other dignitaries, turned out to be the General Secretary of the Baptist Union of the USSR.

When I listened to him, I nearly fell off my chair because he had this to say. Seventy years ago, just at the beginning of the Russian Revolution, somebody had a vision that sailing into the massive USSR port of Leningrad would come a white ship. And what that ship represented, and what it brought, would have greater consequence than the ensuing revolution.

And he said to sorcerer-eyed young people who were listening to him, is this the fulfillment of that prophecy? It seemed as though a pallor of darkness had fallen over the Soviet empire as the days of the Tsars came to their end, and as the proletariat took control. It seemed as though man had been able to raise his clenched fists against this God and say, we no longer require you. We can work out the solution to our problems on our own.

But there are scriptures in the Bible, not just in the book of Psalms, but also in the prophecy of Isaiah, which speaks about the omnipotence of God, and the way that He brings up one empire and allows it to blossom for a while, and then He cuts it down and He brings up another, so you get the Assyrian empire, and the Babylonian empire, and the Grecian empire, and the Roman empire, and more recently the British empire. And whenever a confederacy of nations comes together and seems to have all power and all authority, then God takes delight, or so it would seem, in showing the futility of man and reducing that empire to absolute powerlessness. God looks down upon this world, men and women, and He sees the nations and men and women as grasshoppers, as the fine dust of the balancers when compared with His greatness and His power.

In the Soviet Union, many of the churches have been handed over, or had been handed over to the state. You've all seen pictures of Soviet churches. They're like buildings with three or four onions stuck on top of them.

Not quite carbuncles, as Prince Charles might suggest, of some of our buildings in London, but onions. And some of these buildings have now been designated, or had been designated, to museums of atheism. There's a church just up the road from where the Logos was moored, and that actually is a skating ring.

But now, because of what is happening in the Soviet Union, these old buildings are being turned back to the churches. And you have, although it's not a very good representation, on the back of notes and news, some illustration of this, of one of the grandest Russian Orthodox churches, built presumably a couple of hundred years ago for all that I know, falling into disrepair, now handed over to the Baptist Church in Leningrad for them to reconstruct the building and to have it as their central meeting point. They got it in October last year and had 60 people in attendance.

They're now getting 1,000 people per Sunday. And in the old historic Baptist Church where I was preaching last Sunday morning, which actually again is a revised, is a redecorated Russian Orthodox church, their church membership numbers something like 3,000 people. If you were to ask me what is one of the things that remains in my mind more firmly than anything else about our trip to the Soviet Union, I would say this.

It was just going out onto the streets with a bunch of tracks and conducting open-air services. I caught the metro with Rowena on one occasion. It only cost you two pence to go the extremes of the metro.

And if you think that's cheap, do bear in mind that as far as we could work out, the Russian salary is about seven pounds per month per average. But on this metro with these tracks, it wasn't the difficulty that you get on the streets of Worthing of actually persuading people to receive the tract. They were coming up and asking for them.

I got into conversation with one man, turned out to be the professor of French at the University of Leningrad. He said, you know, I have a lecture to give on religion. Could you let me have 1,000 of your gospel booklets? We thought perhaps we ought to go into the centre of Leningrad in order to hold open-air services, but we discovered that wherever there were people, there was a need represented, and they would flock to here.

So we went to the local metro, stood on the conveniently stacked steps so that we had a bit of a pulpit, and within just a couple of minutes, having sung a few Scripture choruses, at least 200 people gathered, and probably at times the crowd swelled to 300. And not only did they listen, they joined in the choruses. They were clapping, choruses that they'd never heard before.

And some of the people would go to the storeholders near the metro, buy flowers, and send them up to us who were speaking out the gospel. I said on one occasion as I was preaching, wondering what on earth had put the idea into my mind. I've never done this before.

I said, how many of you would like me to pray for you? If you would, would you raise your hand? From that crowd, about 60 people raised their hand. And I shall never forget the sense of awe as all bowed their heads in prayer, in Leningrad, in the Soviet Union, in the place where Marx had first come to instigate his reforms, people praying on the streets. And when I'd finished my prayer, there was a stampede towards me and the folk who were alongside me for more gospel booklets.

And then I started to hear a repetitive request which would come time and time again. Sir, have you a Bible? Have you a Bible? Have you a Bible? If I got Bibles growing out of my ears, they would have plucked them. We took 10,000 Bibles into Leningrad, but that's just a small drop in the ocean of need.

There are 280 million people in the Soviet Union. I didn't count them all, I'm just taking the number by faith. That's a joke.

60 million of these are Muslim. The state has granted permission for 5 million Bibles to be printed. Now that seems a lot, but when you put 5 million into 280 million, well I'm not doing the maths, work it out, there is a tremendous need.

I don't know the geography of the Soviet Union very well, but just on the borders of Pakistan, there's one of the southern provinces of the Soviet states. Now whether they came deliberately, I don't know, but we had people in Leningrad from that area. They were Muslims.

They said, we have read of you people in our Koran. You are the people of the Injil, the people of the Scriptures. Will you let a team of your folk come to our villages to tell us about the Messiah which is referred to, or this great prophet Jesus, who is referred to in the Koran? Can you believe it? We had a party of young people who came one night on the Logos and they said, would you stack our larder, and if you don't know what it is to live by faith, try driving a larder.

Would you stack our larder with Scriptures? L-A-D-A. Will you stack our larder with Scriptures? Because we're just off to Siberia and we want Scriptures to be able to push out in the villages and in the towns there. Such a hunger.

Some of you know I have strange tastes in music. Probably one of the few Protestant pastors who listens sometimes when preparing an address early Sunday morning to Bach's B Minor Mass and so forth. I enjoy Gregorian chant.

That's the Psalms to Latin sung by the monks. Really beautiful. I just want to get you young people into Gregorian chant and we'll have it one day at the TAB.

However, I'd already preached a couple of times, three times actually, twice in the open air, once in the Baptist Church, formerly a Russian Orthodox Church on the outskirts of Leningrad, and I wanted to get to the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in the evening. So hopped on the metro in my typical generous fashion, paying for the chap who went with me, that cost me four pence, and we eventually got to the Cathedral. Well, lots of people in the Cathedral and I'd been standing a long time at the open air and after the liturgy, rather a rich liturgy had been ensuing for a while, I went just to sit down on a bit of a bench because they don't have comfortable pews like you folk have downstairs or luxurious armchairs or luxurious chairs that you've got upstairs.

And I've got about 200 tracks just balanced on my knee. Now before God, I didn't go into the Cathedral to give out those tracks, but somebody came along and said, can we have one of those? Do you know there are about two or three hundred people around the priest and gradually, because they move around in Russian Orthodox circles in worship, gradually they started to make their way in a file towards myself and my young OM colleague. And as the priest is chanting and the music is being played, you could see people on their knees actually reading these Gospels.

I thought to myself, we're going to get into trouble here, the priest's not going to like this. And as I say, we didn't deliberately go in to do this sort of thing. And then I had no need to have worried because one of the lady celebrants or whatever they call the ones who were assisting the priest, she sort of hopped over from the middle of the church where most of the liturgy was taking place and she said, can I have one of those? She could speak English.

So I gave her one. She dropped down on her knees and did the sign of the cross and indicated that she was praying for me and for the group that had brought these Gospels into Leningrad. She went back over the fence to the priest and then she came back to me and she said, can I have one for the father confessor so I can give it to him after the service? And this is the Soviet Union, the place designated by Lenin as to be the vast cathedral of atheism.

The one enthroned in heaven laughs. He doesn't laugh at sincere people who need to know the Gospel. He has a heart of compassion towards them.

But he laughs against proud men and women who group together in their political confederacies and endeavour somehow to bring about the annihilation of faith in the world. You can't do that. It doesn't quite hit the nail on the head but it's the best I can do this evening.

In terms of an illustration of the power of man over against the power of God, there's a little mouse and he's walking down a jungle track. I've used this story before. His closest friend is an elephant and they come to a large crevice and they can't get across.

Apart from a rope bridge. And so the little mouse followed by the lumbering elephant go across the rope bridge and it swings to and fro. When they get to the other side, the cheeky little mouse puts his paws on his waist and he looks up to Jumbo and he says, my, didn't we make that bridge swing? The Lord laughs at men who believe that somehow or other they have harnessed such great power that they can bring about the rule of man on earth.

For God says, I have installed my king on Zion, my holy hill. I will proclaim the decree of the Lord. God has promised the kingdoms of this world to His Son, the Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever.

He has placed eternity within the hearts of men. There is a God consciousness that is deep down in the Soviet soul as is deep down in the Chinese soul as there is amongst Westerners and people from the United States and so forth. You can only satisfy men and women by the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And the reason why I want you to pray a great deal for the Soviet Union in these days is because it seems to me that God is redeeming His promise when He says in the eighth verse of this psalm, ask of me and I will make the nations your inheritance. Crowds of people started to come aboard Lagos. One of the great tragedies was we just did not have enough literature and enough Russian books.

We've got books in English and books in French, but hardly any Bible commentaries at all in Russian. I was speaking to a group of forty Russian pastors, forty or so from Leningrad. They were by and large elderly men, though not all.

And on one occasion as we gave them out with the compliments of O.N. beautiful English Bible commentaries, one brother said in a very disappointed state, thank you for these books, but haven't you got something in Russian? We're too old now to learn English. After I'd addressed these men who ought to have addressed me because they have more knowledge than I have of the things of God that really count, some young O.M.ers came and they said, look, we've got another bunch of Russians on the stern of the ship. Would you go and explain the gospel to them? So in the, I'm not too sure where the stern of the ship is, the front or the back.

I should have worked that out by now, but in the stern I went and started to explain to them the gospel. My interpreter, perhaps a word should be said about her. She'd only just become a Christian.

I was wondering at the beginning of the conferences what she would make of the addresses I needed to bring because she didn't know that Revelation was the last book of the Bible and that Jesus taught the stories of the prodigal son and the good Samaritan. But my, was she learning quick. She was the interpreter of Elizabeth Taylor when she was in the Soviet Union.

I'm not too sure what that did for her, but nonetheless it was the case. But she certainly had a very dramatic intonation when she was reproducing my English into Russian. Very godly lady.

And so we were addressing, the two of us, these folk, they were basically all young people, and explained the gospel to them for about 15 minutes. And at the end I said, now if anyone here would like to give their lives to the Lord Jesus and you realize what you're doing, will you stand up? And they virtually all stood up. Now there is in me a great element of doubting Thomas.

People don't stand up when I make an appeal in that sort of proportion. So I said, sit down. Then I said to my good friend, tell them how difficult it is.

Let's have another run at it. So we started to explain, Jesus died on the cross of Calvary for their sins. He's the hope of the world.

The Holy Spirit will come into their hearts and lives as they confess their sins. But it could mean that living with Jesus will bring its own difficulties and problems and so on and so forth, because I believe in being honest in preaching the gospel. Then I tried again.

How many of you want to make a commitment to Jesus Christ? And more stood up on the second run. So we didn't try a third one. Just committed these folk to the Lord.

And then as they left the ship, they were given these gospels, which also had a statement, a summary statement, of the way of salvation as we had tried to explain it. One day, a white ship will come to Leningrad, which will have a message of greater power than the revolution. The mayor of Leningrad tried to stop the ship when weeks ago or months ago permissions were asked.

Do you know what happened? The mayor of Leningrad was removed from his office and a new mayor was appointed. And he sent his deputy to the ship to welcome the ship and to say that because of the great transformations that were happening in the Soviet Union, he was glad to be able to welcome this ship and recognize its cultural and its humanitarian ministries. And I just could not believe my eyes when I watched my good friend Dale, who is with George Verver, the co-founder of OM, Dale Roton, who baptized George years ago.

He was starting to evangelize amongst the celebrities who'd come to the actual dedication ceremony that we'd had aboard the ship. And what he didn't realize was that he'd got the boss of the KGB listening to him explaining the gospel. The man could understand Russian, and Dale, whose home is in Maasbach, Germany, he's got Russian, and so he was able to explain the gospel to this man.

Can you believe it? So many remarkable things that were happening and are happening. The ship's got three more weeks or so going from one port to another port, moving from Russia to some of the satellite states. Pastors have already come from these towns to sort of jibby this ship along a little bit.

They want it there more quickly than it's due to be there, and they want it there longer than it's due to stay there. And the problem is going to be for OM and all the groups who are working, don't think that OM's the only one involved. Thank God for many, many missions, some bigger than OM, who've had commitments to the Soviet Union for longer than OM.

The biggest problem is going to be, what do you give these people to read? They're going to really be in trouble when they tell them they've left the 10,000 Bibles in Leningrad. So let's be praying for more literature to get through to the Soviet states. There's a lovely story that comes out of the Gulag.

That's the area where the concentration camps were. Many horrible things happened, as you know, in Siberia and places like that. And there was one man who was actually being employed in the prison, and the guard watched him day by day as he came out of the prison pushing a wheelbarrow.

And the guards were sure that this guy was smuggling things out of the prison. They searched him day by day. They sifted the contents of the wheelbarrow, and they found nothing that was offensive as far as the law was concerned at all.

This went on week after week until one of the guards was almost going berserk, believing that this guy was smuggling something out of the jail, yet not knowing what it was. And so he goes to him and he says, Comrade Lebra, will you tell me what it is that you are smuggling out of the prison? And I swear on the tomb of Lenin that I won't tell the authorities, but it's driving me mad knowing what it is that you're about. The man says, Comrade Guard, wheelbarrows.

The guard admits the obvious. Proud man. As he lifts his fist to this God of heaven, he misses the obvious.

He cannot force out of the hungers of ordinary people their desire to know God. So the Lord will topple an empire, and he'll have the nations in derision. But the God who laughs is also the God who weeps.

For Jesus wept over Jerusalem and its citizens, and one day went to the cross for their salvation, and for the salvation of the whole world. And the psalm concludes with the somber verses. Serve the Lord with fear.

Rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, ah, lest he be angry. We will not have this man to reign over us, said the leaders of the Jewish nation.

And the Lord laughed, because there's no one else who is destined to reign over the sons of Adam. He'll reign as Savior, or he'll reign as judge. And the people of the Soviet Union more and more want to kiss the Son, and embrace his way of salvation, and escape the wrath of God upon their sins.

Blessed, says the psalmist, blessed are all who take refuge in him. God laughs in joy when people are converted. He chuckles when saints get themselves into difficulties, and feel that he can no longer cope.

But he laughs in derision at power blocks who seek to prevent this gospel from reaching men and women. Pray for the Soviet Union, and pray for yourselves, that God will use you to reach others with the gospel, as many Soviet citizens gave their lives in the dark days of the revolution and its aftermath, to preserve biblical Christianity. Men and women, the lachet of whose shoes I'm not worthy to untie.