For the last couple of days, I’ve been carrying a feeling of sorrow and a burden of prayer for the people of Shanghai, China. This week, I posted an eerie video of the sound of hundreds of people wailing at night in a chorus of despair from the balconies of their high-rise apartment buildings. I saw a video of a sci-fi-like robotic dog patrolling the streets of Shanghai with a loudspeaker attached to its back warning people to stay inside their homes. Another video revealed a messenger drone flying at night over Shanghai blaring out the message “Control your soul’s desire for freedom.” It was like the book 1984 by George Orwell had been turned into a movie.

The Chinese Communists got one thing right. Our souls do desire freedom. This is not rebellion dressed up as freedom. It is the basic desire for true freedom that God placed in every human when He created us so we could respond to His offer of love without coercion or fear.  It was that same soul-desire for freedom that motivated a group of men to craft documents expressing that God-given freedom that resulted in the creation of a new form of civil government called the United States. 

Our experiment in democracy is now being demeaned by naïve individuals, too many who are leaders within the Church, who think personal freedom expressed and exercised against the flow of government oppression is somehow not spiritual.  Powerful social influencers within our culture are also at work. They are censoring the freedom of our individual expressions of speech by restricting the flow of information allowing only a prepared narrative to be seen and heard. It amazed me that the video images I watched this week out of Shanghai were able to escape the constricting filters of government control. I sense the Lord let those images escape so we could see what is happening as a wake-up call.

God is giving us a preview of what hell plans for our world, not just some distant faraway country. This is not a dark Hollywood film production we can sit back and comfortably watch while eating popcorn. This is a spirit that is manifesting in our world. All it needs is a compliant, fearful, and uninformed populace willing to yield to its control without examination and discernment. We are called to be righteous interventionists when injustice manifests in our world. Even the most committed pacificists would be willing to at least stand between those wanting to harm someone and their intended victim as a physical buffer against further harm.

What we see taking place in China is a preview of things to come in the United States and other nations that desire freedom over bondage. Loving our neighbor as ourselves means we would never want another human to suffer such pain. That requires a spiritual and physical intervention many in the Church have been groomed to believe is not a proper spiritual response. If we offer that excuse to suffering people, like those currently wailing in despair in Shanghai, our excuse will ring as hollow as the reasoning we used to arrive at that conclusion.