Faith on Earth?
By Lou Poumakis.
2013 – Trade paperback – 152 pages – ISBN 978-0-9831957-8-8.
Nordskog Publishing – 7th Millennium.

Just before the resurrected Jesus left the earth He told his disciples, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”

These words have come to be known as the Great Commission, and Lou Poumakis thinks Christian believers as a whole have failed miserably to carry it out.

Poumakis tells us that his book is a recapitulation of and a brief for the activist program of social reform developed and articulated by Rousas J. Rushdoony known as Christian Reconstruction.

Poumakis points to humanism in its multifarious forms (including, mirabile dictu, Islam) as the principle world philosophy standing in opposition to a Christianized earth, but he asserts that the greatest threat to a completion of the Great Commission paradoxically lies within Christianity itself.

He sees the resurgence of pietism (saving souls while forgetting everything else) and the social gospel (saving society without reference to, much less dependence on, God’s laws) and End Times pessimism engendered by best-selling popular books as a self-fulfilling philosophy of defeatism, all of which works against the fulfillment of Christ’s marching orders to His followers.

Compromise with the world system was the besetting sin of the ancient Israelites, and in Poumakis’s view it’s the same today within Christendom.

The Bible assures us that God’s desires will be done on earth regardless of what we think or wish; all we can do in a practical sense is place our trust in Him and do what He told us to do.

Since no one knows the day or the hour of Christ’s return, it could be millennia before the Great Commission is completed; and that, says Poumakis, should give Christians enough time to “teach all nations . . . for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord.”

From the text:

“Christ defeated Satan at the cross, but it is His body, His people, who have been given the task of defeating Satan’s forces on earth.”

“Eventually we will see predominantly Christian societies governed by Christians and operating under God’s law.”

“The world is to be Christianized by man without God doing it for him. God did not do the work He assigned to Adam, and Christ will not do the work He assigned to Christians. It has not been completed these two thousand years—and may require thousands more—but one day it will be done; and it will be done by man.”

“No faith can dominate a culture without a law that represents that faith. All laws are religious in nature. The law of a nation is the religion of that nation applied to the civil life of that nation. One can see the faith of a people in the laws they enact.”

“The notion of Christian Reconstruction is that, because we have drifted so far away from God’s word, every institution of man needs to be reexamined from top to bottom using Biblical standards and then restructured as necessary along godly lines.”

“The Western world has never seen a fully consistent humanistic society and has never experienced its consequences. Soviet Russia was probably the closest . . .”

“Humanists have successfully employed the concept of religious pluralism as a ploy to effect a transition from Christianity to their form of faith.”

“That Christianity can continue to coexist through multiple generations in today’s heathen cultural environment is doubtful. It must either protect itself from the debilitating influences of the surrounding culture and come to dominate it or, failing to do so, in time be subdued by it.”

Other books are also available from Nordskog Publishing.