He's Back!
No matter what you think of his views, even if you aren't especially religious, you have to admire him and he has been admired and loved by tens of thousands from all strata of society since the fifties. He's had his critics on this matter or that (and I've been one of them) but there isn't a name in the religious world that generates more respect in me for his character and sustained purpose than Billy Graham. Like the rest of us he will appear before God in judgment and God will do what is right, but in the meantime devout people of middle-age or older can't say the name without an approving nod for the noble way he has carried himself all these years.
He conducted a number of "missions" in the UK which were of unequal value as far as "results" go but what struck me and still resonates in me these many years later was the way one of his missions was advertised. All over south England, on buses, billboards, television ads and stuck on every available public wall-space and hung in thousands of shop windows were two words: Billy's Back! That was it; nothing more: Billy's Back. Amazing.
Hebrews 11:27 almost certainly speaks of Moses fleeing to Midian after he had killed the Egyptian foreman; those in authority and even his own people must have thought he was gone for good in a cloud of dust. But I find it easy to imagine an older Egyptian man in the barber's shop getting a trim and a shave, explaining to the barber and everyone else there reading their Tanis Tattler or thumbing through the magazines—explaining why the Hebrews as slaves were good for the economy and the reputation of the nation. I can easily hear him telling of protests by activists, minor scuffles and aborted uprisings—the usual pathetic show of discontent that would never lead to anything. "Why, I remember," he would say, "some years back, they had the backing of one of Pharaoh's family—a high-ranking and well decorated leader (Acts 7:20-36)—but the last we saw of him was his running off into the wilderness with his tail between his legs. Pharaoh stood up, frowned and he ran." Smiles all round.
I can just as easily imagine an old colleague of his coming into the shop just in time to hear the final remarks before quietly saying, "I just got back from the Hebrew ghettos. There's a real stir going on down there. I don't know if anything will come of it but that man you just described as disappearing in a cloud of dust—He's back!
You can't trust these people of God to stay away, can you? Moses may have run off mouthing resentment—"Try to help these people and all you get is abuse and ingratitude! Let them deliver themselves!" but he came back with a strange guttural sound on his lips that nobody to this day knows how to pronounce or knows exactly what it means. He said it was God's name. And while he was away, at some point during his days of shepherding alone in the wilderness he had taken to carrying a big stick. When he left Egypt the first time he went alone with Egyptian authorities all smiles but this time he was leaving with a nation and Egypt in ruins.
You can't trust the God who takes the long view to forget anything and you can't trust those he has destined to carry out his purposes to stay gone! Having murdered James, Herod arrested Peter, your remember, in Acts 12:1-16, and everyone feared the worst; but in the night Rhoda heard someone at the gate and recognized the voice as Peter's. Wild-eyed and scattered-brained with joy she left him standing in the street and ran in to tell the disciples. Picture them rubbing the sleep out of their eyes while she yelled: He's back!
The eternal groundwork for all this: Jesus himself. In Acts 2 and 4 and 5 we have Peter facing the multitudes and the Jewish Supreme Court and saying, "The One you said was gone, permanently gone; the One even we were sure was gone—He's back!"
And that's not the end of the Story. It was just the end of the beginning of the Story.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.