Our One Hope

This is not what I thought it would be, 
a quiet safe place with time to rest 
and peace my constant cup of tea. 
Instead I toss and turn, my heart 
churning with yearning for that 
final resolution of these conflicts,
a revolution that turns the world
upside-down, filtering out the evil
and cleansing the cup so it can fill up
with harmony and purity, with love
that heals the hurts and starts
a whole new space, one blessed
with holy truth, security.
This is no usual war, no common
battleground where drones can see
insidious manoeuvers of the enemy.
No, it’s in the air! It’s everywhere,
in hearts and minds, targeting souls,
spreading fear and power grabs 
so that worlds rip and shred apart.
We cannot win without the aid
of One who rules the atmosphere,
the ins and outs of every home
and ups and downs, the One who knows
the ways the Enemy uses ruse
 to conquer for his purposes
the human race. So we cry out
to you, the Sovereign King,
our only hope when we see dreams
go up in smoke! Bring out your guards,
defend your own! Devastate
the darts that come with poison
intent to bring us down!
You have soldiers we can’t see
but we know they can overcome
the wiles of the Unruly One
and all his nasty hidden troops!
Our hope is you! Just you!

Do we believe he is God Almighty? We sing it. Do we live it?

These past two weeks I was involved in the official checking of our translation of Isaiah into Nyarafolo. The true meaning of one of the names of God came up when the consultant asked my co-translator, Moise, and I, why we had chosen to render  “YHWH sabaoth”  as “Yahweh the Commander of Heaven’s Armies.” Sure, that’s what the name means in Hebrew,  but doesn’t that scare people, he asked?

Moise chuckled. “No! They never reacted in fear when they heard it!” The Nyarafolo people are constanly aware of the spiritual forces all around them. Their traditional religion requires all sorts of sacrifices to various gods for different needs, and dangers from tripping up keep them in fear. When they realize that in Christ they are now serving the God in charge of the heavenly armies, they know they are in the hands of the One who can defend them and win over those lesser spiritual beings. They know the reality of spiritual warfare.

In English most translations render this as ”LORD Almighty” or “LORD of hosts”—in French, it is often “SEIGNEUR de l’Univers.” These all capture some of the relevant truths communicated by that name. Yahweh is all powerful, and reigns over the universe. He is lord of hosts, but growing up I always wondered who those hosts were: armies everywhere? crowds?

I processed the truth again this week. When we serve the One who is commander of his own huge and mighty army of beings we know are his loyal servants, the angels, the spiritual forces are the ones who need to be scared. We, Yahweh’s loved ones, are protected.

And when we are his servants, under the command of the One who rules his army of heavenly beings, we are also told to wear armor that is based on our faith in him. That brings hope in the crises as he tells us how to be prepared when battling these evil entities we cannot see:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. (Eph. 6:12 NIV)

The New Living Translation does translate this name more literally: “the Lord, the LORD of Heaven’s Armies.” LORD stands for his name, the “I AM,” YHWH. More and more preachers and translations are ceasing to hide God’s real name, the one by which he revealed himself to humans from the time of creation to Noah, Abraham and Moses (Genesis 7-9, 12-15; Exodus 3, especially verses 13-14). God is the one who always has been, who is, who always will be, and his name is YHWH: the I AM. An English pronunciation of the Hebrew tetragrameton YHWH is Yahweh. (A misunderstanding of the later Hebrew written form that added the vowels for adonai, “lord”, led to the pronunciation “Jehovah.”)

When Israel began to suffer extreme threat from enemies, it was Yahweh the Commander of Heaven’s Armies who spoke to them again and again through the prophets. They needed to know that whatever armies came against them, they had be completely loyal to the Commander; then they could be saved. When they chose not to trust him, there was an inevitable consequence: the enemy would win. Under the Commander’s protection they would win. This brought confidence in both rescue and justice:

O [Yahweh, Commander] of Heaven’s Armies, what joy for those who trust in you. (Ps. 84:12 NLT)

For [Yahweh, Commander] of Heaven’s Armies has a day of reckoning. He will punish the proud and mighty and bring down everything that is exalted. (Isa. 2:12 NLT)

So, bringing this home to our contemporary world, we must remember who it is that sends us into battle, or hides us in his protection, or takes down the wicked forces. He is truly ruler of the entire universe, which includes the earth and the spiritual domain. What we see as corruption, power grabs and cruelty by the powerful here on earth is a result of sin and the machinations of the Enemy to do all he can to tear down what is right and mess up this world. He will not win in the end, but right now we are in a constant battle, whether we are aware of it or not. Remember:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. (Eph. 6:12 NIV)

We tend to attribute the waves of evil around us to human brokenness, which is not wrong—it is just a war that goes way beyond that into the heavenly realms.  I am reminded of The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, in which he imagined how a more experienced devil would coach a novice in strategies to make his assigned human wander from the Truth and be corrupted. If you haven’t read it, pick it up! For those of us who live in Western cultures, it opens the curtains between the physical and spiritual worlds and makes the spiritual battle very real.

There are times when we have truly felt the resistance of the Enemy to our work of translating God’s Word into Nyarafolo. We would get to key points, ready to finish a certain book or move ahead to complete the New Testament or Psalms, and the attack came: a translator fell off his motorcycle and ended up with severe back injuries that incapacitated him for months; a mysterious fire was sparked inside the translation office at dawn and destroyed many of our commentaries and dictionaries as well as a translation desk, severely damaging the electrical wiring and ceiling; just as we hoped literacy work was taking off, we discovered that the man hired to do it was morally corrupt . . . the list goes on.

I was constantly reminded that this project was the Lord’s. He had launched it and would finish it. We needed to be sure that we were wearing all of our battle and defensive gear:

¹³ For this reason, take up the full armor of God so that you may be able to stand your ground on the evil day, and having done everything, to stand. ¹⁴ Stand firm therefore, by fastening the belt of truth around your waist, by putting on the breastplate of righteousness, ¹⁵ by fitting your feet with the preparation that comes from the good news of peace, ¹⁶ and in all of this, by taking up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. ¹⁷ And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. ¹⁸ With every prayer and petition, pray at all times in the Spirit, and to this end be alert, with all perseverance and requests for all the saints. (Eph. 6:13-18 NET)

We pressed on, praying continually, supported by the prayers of many of our friends and “companions of the Road.” The Word is still being completed in the Nyarafolo language, and attacks continue. But the New Testament, Pentateuch and Psalms is in print, in the hands of the people, and the harvest is increasingly visible! God, Yahweh the Commander of Heaven’s Armies, will complete what he has started!

Where do you see ongoing spiritual battle in your life, your community, your world? Make sure you constantly wear your armor and are ready to act as the Commander says to. And “with every prayer and petition, pray at all times in the Spirit, and to this end be alert”! The warfare is ongoing, but we know who is in charge every step of the way: Yahweh, the Commander of Heaven’s Armies!

*If you would like to hear more of the exciting story of how  the seed planted in this people group, the Nyarafolo, one of the “least-reached,” is in a season of harvest, you can hear it from my husband and I and the descendants of the first missionary to the Nyarafolo this coming Friday! We will be interviewed live on WorldVenture in Review:

http://www.worldventure.com/events 10 a.m. EDT, 9 a.m. CDT, 8 a.m. MDT, 7 a.m. PDT

At Pisankaha, January 2025: Lori Gould McKee, Greg Gould, Baba Philippe (son of one of the first Nyarafolo believers) and Hannah Gould