“I know men and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between Him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creation of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for Him.”
Napoleon Bonaparte said these words at the end of his life, while being transported to the island of St. Helena after the ultimate failure of his political efforts to build and maintain an enlightened empire. Napoleon was a little too harsh on himself. In fact, if there was a conqueror in the modern European history that enjoyed the support of the masses of people in the conquered nations, it was him. The Napoleonic Code – the first comprehensive civil law code that abolished privileges based on birth or class – was admired by people throughout the whole continent. Napoleon’s enemies, while controlling populations much larger than France, very often had troubles assembling armies large enough to defeat him. His name was used as a symbol of the struggle against feudal privileges among the depressed masses in Europe even as late as the 1890s. England’s ruling class, his chief adversary in the wars on the Continent, had to deal with his popularity even among their own common people; when in 1818 The Times published a false report for his escape from St. Helena, it was greeted with spontaneous celebrations in London. The British Parliament housed so many admirers and sympathizers of the Emperor of the French that some of them were bold enough to demand in long speeches that he should be treated without unnecessary harshness as a prisoner. Whatever Napoleon said about his own empire, he could certainly brag that more than any other ruler or government head he embodied the ideal of the “enlightened despot,” one who changed history and was loved for it by his own subjects.
What today passes for “New World Order” – the attempts of the modern political elite to establish a worldwide government based on the will of that elite and the unconditional obedience of the “masses,” – Napoleon achieved it. Or, at least, was very close to achieving it, on the European Continent. No one before him and after him was able to subjugate so much of the European territory under the power of one person only. No one was able to consistently defeat superior armies as Napoleon did. No foreign invader was greeted in so many conquered cities and towns by so many enthusiastic “commoners” who saw him as a “liberator” rather than an invader.
And yet, at the end he failed. And not only he failed but he confessed that he based his empire, the “creation of his genius,” on the wrong premise. And then he made a comment about Jesus Christ that can top the list of testimonies ever made for the Christian faith. When he made the statement that “at this hour millions of men would die for him,” the Christian faith was still largely confined to Europe and North America, with very small Christian communities in Asia. Africa had no Christianity to be worth mentioning (in 1900 only 2% of its population was Christian, centered in Ethiopia), India had even less, and China’s Christian population numbered in the 100,000s of a total population of 400 million Chinese.
Less than 200 years later, the world is even more thoroughly Christianized than it was in 1815. If those willing to die for Jesus could be numbered by millions then, today we can talk about hundreds of millions, and the majority of them is not confined to the old centers of Christianity in Europe and North America. The Church of Jesus Christ is spreading throughout the whole earth, and even when it experiences short-term ups and downs for a generation or two, in the final account it keeps emerging victorious over its rivals, the kingdoms of men. If two thousand years ago the church started as a small band of people, and its opponent was a mighty empire spread over three continents and including a multitude of nations, today the Church is a mighty global empire, and its opponents progressively degenerate into smaller and smaller political units, fighting each other for an illusory power that no man or institution will ever be able to achieve. Given the insight Napoleon had in his last years, he wouldn’t be surprised at this outcome. He was a smart man, and learned from history, and from his own experience.
What’s even more interesting is that Napoleon – the man who promised to build a “New Europe” – at the end of his life admitted that his “new” political order was nothing but an old political order, the same that Alexander or Caesar tried to establish. There was nothing “new” in it; the same use of force, the same promises for a Golden Age of humanity, the same promises to “remove the old” and build a new world. Napoleon, the most successful builder of a New World Order, saw clearly that his New World Order is the same Old World Order that tyrants of all ages have been trying to build, and uniformly failed. And they failed in favor of the true Builder and Architect of the true New World Order, Jesus Christ. Again, Napoleon learned from history, and from his own experience.
Strangely, today we have so many Christians who are unable to learn from history, and are unable to learn from experience, and are unable to learn from what the Bible says about history.
My email and my Facebook account are bombarded every day with articles, prophecies, interpretations of events and Biblical verses, with ads for conferences and seminars, all of them “surely” pointing to “evidence” that a “New World Order” is in the making by different conspiracies of the enemies of Christianity and of the West. It is inevitable, they claim, because “we live in the last days,” those last days that the Bible “prophesies” will bring upon us a one-world government, and Antichrist will come and reign for a certain period of time. The names of the conspirators are mentioned, usually the Federal Reserve, Soros, Obama, the European Union, and others. While some of these web-sites and conferences and seminars all promise to throw light on these nefarious workings of the enemy, they also assure me that nothing can be done to stop it; it was “prophesied” that these events will happen, therefore whether I know about them or not, I can’t stop them. Even if the whole church around the world – the millions that would die for Christ – know about them and make the effort to stop the conspiracy of the “New World Order,” they will fail against the small group of almighty mischievous elitists. Had I read all the websites, and had I attended all the conferences and seminars, and had I achieved a perfect knowledge of the workings of the Antichrist and the New World Order, all this information would have been useless to me, as far as specific action is concerned. Nothing can be done, the things just happen, and it is going to be ugly, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.
Now, I acknowledge that there are conspiracies, and there are attempts by committed anti-Christian elites to destroy Christianity and to establish a one-world government to control the masses of the world. There were such conspiracies in the past too. Alexander and Caesar made such attempts. Genghis Khan made such an attempt. Napoleon and the British Empire, both were committed to establish world dominion by force or by human laws. In the 20th century we had Hitler and Mussolini and Imperial Japan. Communism also emerged as a contestant for world dominion, and Communists were smarter than anyone before them: they based their program for conquest on skillful propaganda rather than brute force. Then we’ve had local dictators that made similar attempts over limited territories. I am sure that such attempts haven’t ceased, whether locally or globally. People will emerge in every century that will try to use whatever resources they have – armies, money, propaganda, political institutions – to gain power, as much as possible.
Knowing these conspiracies have existed and still exist, I know one thing for sure: They will never succeed. The “New World Order” as a pagan construct will never be realized on the Planet Earth, Antichrist or not. Over the centuries, those that wanted to destroy Christianity and replace it with a pagan world rule have been growing weaker and weaker. Even where there were no traces of Christianity in history – Japan, or China, or pre-Columbus empires in Central America – the kingdoms of man have never been able to establish the constant eternal rule they wanted. When Hitler promised the German people that he would establish the Thousand Year Reich, he had no example in history to point to; there was no human kingdom or empire in history that could boast surviving for a thousand years without civil wars and bloody coups every 200 years or so. The longest living human empire was Egypt, in the earliest ages of history; after Egypt, a kingdom should be considered lucky if it lasted for more than a 100 years without a major bloodshed or a violent change in its structure and institutions. No human political effort can succeed anymore, was what Napoleon learned, unless it was based on love; and there is no love where the Spirit of Jesus Christ is not present.
So many Christians today haven’t learned that lesson yet, and they still live in fear, believing that somehow the elite – or the Antichrist – will succeed in establishing what can’t possibly be established anymore, this side of the Resurrection and the Ascension of Jesus Christ.
That false “new world order” – of which Napoleon admitted was just the old world order of the pagan empires – will never and can never be established. Why do I believe so? Because there has been a true New World Order in the world, and it has been here for 20 centuries. It is the New World Order established by Christ at His Resurrection and Ascension; the world order which is ruled and managed by Christ Himself, the Lord of history. Against this New World Order the Jews reacted, wishing to preserve the things as they were, with no challenge against the old customs and the old authorities and powers. It was the same New World Order that the pagan Roman Empire desperately fought against, persecuting those that proclaimed “another King, one Jesus.” Nero, Aurelius, Decius, Diocletian, did not persecute Christians because the Empire envisioned a new world; the persecutions had the express purpose to preserve and conserve the old world against the new faith. It is that New World Order of which Julian the Apostate exclaimed at the end of his life, “Vicisti, Galilaee! You have conquered, O Galilean!”
The early church knew it was ushering in a new era, to destroy the old world. Athanasius, Ambrose, Augustine, Tertullian, Isidore, and many other Church Fathers looked at the pagan world as a dying old corpse that had no power to resist the New World Order of Christ. Isidore postulated a “new era” in history, one that will gradually unfold until the very last day; he called that new era Regnum Christi, the Kingdom of Christ. Europe wouldn’t have been born if Christians didn’t believe that they were the true New World Order, the stone prophesied by Daniel that destroyed the human kingdoms and became a great mountain that filled the whole earth (Dan. 2:34-35, 44-45). There was to be no other human empire to rule the world anymore, because the mountain that destroyed the human kingdoms in the last days of the Roman empire had filled the whole earth and was here to stay, till the day of judgment. The true New World Order was that of Christ, and there could be nothing “newer” than it anymore in history.
It is not surprising that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment did not base their opposition to the world order established by Christianity on an idea for a “new world.” Quite the contrary, both movements wanted to restore the antiquity. The term “middle ages” given to the centuries of Christian dominance in Europe before the French Revolution was a derogatory term but it also revealed the impotence of the philosophes and their followers to create a vision for a new world; all they could come up with was a return to the supposedly golden past of the pre-Christian antiquity. The French Revolutionaries went even farther back in their attempts as they officially restored the polytheism of the primitive past, and instituted official worship of different “gods” and “goddesses” on the streets and the churches of Paris. Marxism, Nazism, and all other anti-Christian movements could find no better foundation for their ideologies than the primitive past of man, before there was private property, or Christianity, or a civilization. Whatever “world order” pagans are trying to inaugurate, it always boils down to a return to the past, and it has no idea of a new world. Even when they use the phrase “New World Order,” in it they mean a return to a previous world order that have existed before, and have been proven lacking. Non-Christians just can’t produce a consistent vision for a future world. When in 1940 H.G. Wells made an attempt to outline such a future world in his essay, The New World Order, the result was such a garbled confusion of incoherent ideas and proposals that no one took it seriously. And when George Orwell in 1984 and Aldus Huxley in The Brave New World described the “new world” that the humanistic totalitarian ideologies can produce, it was a stagnant world without past and future, a world without any concept of time, and vision, and hope for the future. “Was and will make me ill, I take a gramme and only am.”
Apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 3:22, that “the present and the future,” that is, all history, belong to the Christians. Paganism has no future, and it can produce no vision of the future. No conspiracy, no Antichrist, no world elite can change this Biblical fact. There won’t be any moment in the future of humanity when an anti-Christian elite will rule the planet. The true New World Order has arrived 2,000 years ago, it is Christ’s world order, the Regnum Christi, and it is here to stay, until the whole earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord.
Therefore, we must reject and expose as unbiblical the panic sown by those who see everywhere the signs of a victorious “New World Order” of an anti-Christian conspiracy. Such attempts will be made but they will never succeed. Our focus must not be on the feeble attempts of mortal men to reverse the course of history set and directed by the Lord of History. Our focus must be on the comprehensive redemption of Jesus Christ; redemption which is stronger than any curse in any aspect of the live of man and of his institutions. The present and the future belong to us, Christians. If Napoleon learned that lesson from history and from his own experience, it’s about time for us to learn it from the Word of God.