Time for Judgment (A new book) by Paul Yeulett
The 2020s have been so different to everything that went before. Am I the only person who senses this? Life has seemed harder, darker, somehow more menacing. It might be something to do with passing fifty and generally getting a bit grumpier, but it doesn’t take much reflection to demonstrate the objective plausibility of this claim.
The decade was only a few weeks old when the term ‘coronavirus’ began to enter our vocabularies. Very quickly it became clear that we were facing something new and potentially sinister … but boy, we had no clue what kind of impact it was going to make. It’s miserable passage, with its melancholy terminology: social distancing, self-isolation, herd immunity, lateral flow tests, omicron variant, Messrs Whitty, Valence and Van Tam - all that stuff of nightmares - stuck with us for two long years.
Then, on the very Thursday in February 2022 when legally binding Covid-19 restrictions were lifted in England and the masks began to disappear - mercifully, never to be reimposed - we woke up to the news that Mr Putin’s tanks were rolling their way towards Kyiv. And that was also the day when my Bible reading happened to be Jeremiah 15:2.
That verse speaks of ‘pestilence’ followed by ‘sword’. The juxtaposition of these two categories, on the day when Covid exited stage right and the Ukraine war entered stage left, simply stunned me. What came next? ‘Famine’, just at the very time people began talking about a cost-of-living crisis. And fourthly and finally ‘captivity’, and what might that mean?
That was how my book, ‘Time For Judgement’, came into existence. From the original intention of simply penning a short chapter on each of these four categories, a more substantial work emerged, based on 1 Peter 4:17 as much as Jeremiah 15:2. It became clear to me that the title of the book had to reflect a double meaning: on the one hand this was the time when God seemed to be judging the church and the world in new and rather severe ways, but this necessitated Christian people employing the right kind of biblical judgement, engaging their critical faculties.
Issues of life and death, community and worship, war and peace, nationhood and patriotism, masculinity and gender ideology, appetite and greed, prosperity and poverty, personality and character, technology and AI - all of these receive treatment. My aim in writing is to help Christians become stronger, clearer, bolder and better equipped to face uncertain days which lie ahead.
Call me grumpy if you like, but ask whether this is a realistic concern. You’ll only find out if you read the book.
Paul Yeulett is the minister of Grove Chapel and the author of Time for Judgment, which you can purchase here
