CAMPBELLTON, New Brunswick, January 27, 2024 – Over the past few years, thousands of churches around the world have been vandalized or burned to the ground. In many cases, local governments have effectively fanned the flames by sympathizing with the vandals, labeling the destruction an understandable response to alleged historical crimes allegedly perpetrated by Christians. As horrendous as the burnings and desecrations may seem to us as believers, are the vandals actually doing God’s work?

Many if not all of the affected churches served as unofficial repositories for local historical artifacts, including those connected to ancient worship ceremonies that are not Christian. As we well know, worship of anything or anyone other than God is paganism, which is a polite term for demon worship. Some communities, prior to adopting Christianity, were steeped in demonism under the guise of “spirit worship” or other religions. Although they’ve since been coerced or persuaded into exchanging their talismans for crucifixes, their hearts have never fully been invested in “White Man’s religion”, especially in recent years. Tokens small and large of their former demon worshiping ways have been creeping back into their Christian rituals through a process known as religious syncretism.

We know what God thinks about religious syncretism. The Bible makes it abundantly clear. God didn’t like it back in the day when the children of Israel were doing it, and he doesn’t like it today when people who claim to be Christians do it. Nothing personal; it’s just that worship of demons and worship of God are not the same thing: one of these things just doesn’t belong. And using church buildings to store and/or display artifacts made for demon worship or to host celebrations or gatherings that invoke and glorify spirits other than God’s – well, God has a solution for that.

It’s called a flame.

And it burns things.

Sometimes to the ground.

If God allowed his desecrated temples in Jerusalem to be burned to the ground, why wouldn’t he also allow his desecrated churches to be burned?

I am not inviting, promoting, or celebrating the vandalizing of churches. I’m simply reporting their destruction as God gives me leave to do so. On the other hand, governments and their unofficial mouthpieces in media have all but condoned the attacks for political or cultural reasons, but we know, from evidence in scripture, that religious syncretism was likely the real catalyst for the burnings and also the reason why God permitted them to happen.

Jesus tells us that God is looking for people to worship him in spirit and in truth, not in a building. Buildings aren’t required to worship God. Paul said that the bodies of true believers form the worship temple, as God’s Holy Spirit resides in them. If this is the case (and it most certainly is), perhaps nothing of real value was lost in the church fires. What the destruction does indicate, however, is that Christianity is now approaching the same point of no return as Judaism once did, and if that thought doesn’t light a fire under you, I don’t know what will.