A Ladder to Heaven. But Which One?

Just this morning, I was at Sainsbury's to buy the morning paper, and as I made my way to the annexed Starbucks Coffee, I heard my name called out. I turned to see my father-in-law at the checkout, and I paused for a moment and asked him to join me once he was through paying for his items.

As expected, he did not sit with me, for his wife sat in the car parked outside, waiting for him to return. But he paused long enough to ask how I was able to cope with my wife's constant symptoms of recurring pain, discomfort and distress. I admitted that yes, these are challenging times, living on a constant knife-edge, not knowing when her pain may suddenly erupt as having a neurological disorder, such is always imminent.

But I was able to answer that our trust in God's mercy and goodness is vital to the health of our marriage. Indeed, it was no accident or mere coincidence that on our wedding day, the ceremony included a song that has the first line reading, Father God, I wonder how I managed to exist without the knowledge of your parenthood and your loving care... 

Father God was one of our wedding songs. Signing the Register.

It's been like this for several years. At first, such painful eruptions caused panic to grip my emotions, and I would dial for an ambulance. The routine was always the same. The ambulance took us to the hospital's A&E department. We would then be handed over to Reception, who assigned my wife to a vacant bed in one of the cubicles. Then she had her blood and urine tested, possibly an X-ray, then connected to a catheter for an intravenous feed of paracetamol or even morphine. Then, once the pain had subsided, she was discharged, and we had to call a taxi to take us home. In all, up to six hours of our day were wasted.

Fortunately, such calls are becoming rare. We now have three powerful painkillers for home treatment. However, no matter how much I may indulge in self-pity, feeling anger toward God, my faith in Him still remains strong. And that was what I replied to my father-in-law at Starbucks.

At times, I find it amazing how things take their turn as the days pass. This week was quite eventful. One incident made me feel astonished. Another made me fume! The source of both was Facebook. The first, which astonished me, was learning how the Russian President Vladimir Putin was encouraged by the Russian Orthodox Church's equivalent of the Bishop of Moscow, Patriarch Kirill, to take back Ukraine and reunite it as part of one God's Russian family. The other issue, the one which made me fume, was our Home Secretary Priti Patel's TV admission that visa requirements to enter the UK was needed due to Brexit.

I'll take a look into Patel's admission. According to The Daily Mail of Saturday, April 9th, a column is written by three journalists, Tom Witherow, David Barrett and Inderdeep Bains, comparing Britain issuing just 12,500 visas out of 46,600 applications submitted - to that "horrible EU" country, Germany. While just 1,200 Ukrainians so far had arrived safely in Britain, in Germany, 300,000 war refugees had found safety. In turn, Poland, also in the EU, has 1,975,500 Ukrainians, with 150,000 living in Krakow alone, Poland's second-largest city. To date, Hungary has around 140,000 Ukrainians.

Please don't get me wrong. Here in Britain, more than 200,000 homeowners have applied to take in a Ukrainian individual or family. That's approx 0.3% of the British population of 68,000,000. This shows how hospitable we Brits can be, although 0.3% looks small, this number still compares favourably with that of some EU countries. But as the layers of bureaucracy attached to UK entry stood in the way of easy entry for the war refugees, I wonder whether the European Union is really "the forerunner of Antichrist's kingdom" - as proposed by some Christian graduates I know personally, and thus, one good reason for them to vote for Brexit, the other two main reasons were for independent sovereignty and tighter border controls.

And about the other issue, a quote from Patriarch Kirill's blessing on Vladimir Putin, encouraging the invasion of Ukraine so to bring that independent nation back into the folds of God's Russian family. Here, I quote a portion of his speech most relevant:-

 "The Ladder of Divine Ascent is a framework for spiritual development, from the flesh of the novice on the first rung, through the acquisition of virtues through the ascetic life, and overcoming vices to ascend to the higher virtues and ultimately the final rung of the ladder, where is found peace and love which transcends all and passes understanding."

That was part of a quote from Patriarch Kirill to Vladimir Putin, giving his blessing for his invasion of Ukraine. I was astonished by that! In his speech, the name of Jesus was only mentioned once and that was at the end of his first paragraph of eight altogether. And it looks apparent that this Jesus died as a sacrifice for the sake of the nation in a political sense and not for the sin of mankind.

Patriarch Kirill is on our left.

Sad it is to say, Kirill's speech was not Christian at all but a heresy, and a dangerous one at that. As a former Catholic, I can identify Kirill's ladder of divine ascent to Rome's sacramental ladder to heaven, which consists of seven rungs: From birth - Baptism, Reconciliation, Eucharist, Confirmation, Holy Matrimony, Anointing of the Sick, Holy Orders - Heaven. This is very different from the Biblical justification by faith alone, the Righteousness of Christ imputed to the sinner by God's unmerited grace.

Indeed, Catholic salvation can be likened to a ladder. But since the days of the Reformation, Catholics and non-Catholics have been warring against each other over the past 400 years. Yet, despite this, I have a love and an affection for people in the Catholic faith, including my own brother and his three daughters. In the past, I have read plenty of literature about how those in non-Catholic or Protestant churches denounced Catholics for their salvation ladder. My wish is that all Catholics and non-Catholics, along with Eastern Orthodox churches know the Lord personally and experience salvation. And this makes me wonder: Non-Catholics who are in Heaven may have a shocking surprise to see plenty of Roman Catholics there as well. You see, the Lord is merciful. It's not his will that any should perish. All it takes for a Catholic is to believe in his heart that Jesus is Lord and that God has raised Him from the dead, and the Catholic will be saved, regardless of whether he should pray to Mary or not.

Yet, despite the Lord's great mercy, it's this war between different churches that may motivate someone to say or write: We are the people. We are the ones called by God. We are the ones in tune with God. We are obeying God. We are doing his will. Churchgoers quibble between each other, the agnostic and the atheist turns away, a religious leader feeds the soul of a national leader, the same national leader nourishes his own ambitions and sends his forces to invade a neighbouring sovereign State. His ambition is to annex the State back into its fatherland and create a utopian dream of a unified Russia whose society would have matched the dream of Adolf Hitler - an Aryan State of pale-skinned, advanced civilisation. Hitler had ambitions. Putin still has his ambitions. But it's God who has the final say.

One other issue had drawn my attention. That is the stunning similarity between the ladders of religious faith and that of Charles Darwin's organic evolution, a long ladder from single-cell amoeba to humans. One spinoff from this theory is social evolution, including eugenics.

And so, for Putin to fulfil his dream of a utopian fatherland of Russia under the spiritual guidance of Kirill, a war must be fought with the bloodshedding of many, including families with children. It's such an ugly scene, yet it differed only in a philosophical sense from the pogrom imposed by the Nazis during the holocaust. To create a utopian society with or without God, anyone who doesn't fit in must be eliminated. Wherever out of disagreement, as with the Ukrainians' disagreement with the Russians over national sovereignty, or the Nazis' pogrom to eliminate all genetic and social inferiors unfit for an ideal society.

Oh, so contrary to the love of God for all mankind and the sacrifice of His beloved Son to fulfil this love. Also, no matter how evil Vladimir Putin is, he is still placed in the position of authority by God, and he's still loved by Him and desires for the President to come to the knowledge of the truth. Yea, I know. It's difficult to swallow! Yet, like Putin, the Roman emperor Nero was also evil, bad enough to murder his own family members to secure his position in Paul's day. Yet, the apostle still wrote that all should be in submission to all government authority, as all authority had always been established by God.* The apostle Peter too, instructed his readers to obey the law of the land, respect others, and honour the king.**

And so the war progresses without making any inroads, especially towards Kyiv. Fighters from both sides are injured, more of them die, and citizen blood is spilt. Russian weaponry is disabled. And Putin's ambition to take over Ukraine in a matter of days is thwarted. As the world turns, Putin sits in his office feeling more determined to win this war rather than admit defeat. Maybe his mind has already pondered whether he will be the victim of a coup -  or even be assassinated by someone in his own party. 

Yet, as we as a society despise the war, the sufferings, forced evacuation, the killings, the mass burial graves, indeed, don't we also shrink away from any concept of the huge fatherland annexing a smaller sovereign nation against its will? And so, the Nazi Holocaust is also seen as a blot, an ugly stain on the history of man and his progress in science, education and civilisation. Yet, the majority of us - a huge majority - embrace the very evolutionary theory as a scientific fact, yet Darwin's theory was the very bedrock on which the Holocaust was rooted.

Therefore, I wonder how anyone can exist and be happy in the long term without the knowledge of Father God's parenthood. How can the world's peace be so fragile? Without a shadow of a doubt, with my beloved's ongoing illness, my own health is not that sound either, a life of uncertainty, even living on a knife-edge, doesn't it seem foolish to believe that there's no God, no higher power we can call upon when everything in life had reached the end of its tether?

And so, we have great men such as David Attenborough constantly narrating Darwin's organic evolution as the origins of all life - life without a maker, and Professor Brian Cox on the same theme about our Universe, the Big Bang - a sudden, once for all time atomic explosion with no divine intervention to set off such an explosion in the remote past. Solid rocks hit each other as they fly through space, and instead of flying apart in different directions after a collision, somehow they stick together until, eventually, a very hot, molten sphere is formed which will eventually cool enough to gather enough water to form oceans - and somehow, by chance and over a vast period, amino acid molecules begin to stick together to eventually form the first living cell with its vast, almost infinite complexity. All without any divine involvement.

Prof Brian Cox at Grand Canyon.

Not so with us. We (Alex and I) much prefer to believe in a God who created us, then redeemed us, and one day will glorify us. We are rather able to call upon him when the chips are down, in distress, pour out our souls to him, for he cares for us. Yet in turn, be thankful as we enjoy the good things he allows us to have, to sing praises for his mercy, grace and his salvation.

All these things the atheist and unbeliever have shut themselves out by their own choice.

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*Romans 13:1-7.

**1 Peter 2:13-17.