INFECTION IN THE BLOODSTREAM

People, very brilliant people, got an infection back in 1917. Looking back, it's hard to imagine how they caught it, but catch it they did. And one by one, and in groups, they infected others, many others. This wasn't the horrible influenza epidemic (that occurred in 1918 and killed 70,000 in America and 50-100 million worldwide). The infection of 1917 wasn't physical; a scientist didn't need a microscope or a blood draw to detect it.

What a lot of brilliant people caught was the infection of an satanic idea.

MOTHER RUSSIA

Back then, the world was watching an upheaval in Russia, an ideological earthquake called the Bolshevik Revolution. But the brilliant people weren't just watching it; they were cheering it, falling in love with it, and writing about it. A wave a journalists went to Moscow and saw the revolution as "history on the march in Russia." (Later, Warren Beatty would star in an long, long movie about one of those writers named John Reed. The movie was called, "Reds," released in 1981.) Reed so wanted to convince other brilliant people that something special was going on in Russia that he wrote a book about what he saw and called it, "Ten Days that Shook the World."

TERROR IN THE STREETS

When the Bolsheviks took over, they instituted the Red Terror which was a campaign of mass killings, torture, and systematic oppression. The Bolsheviks set up what all dictatorships must have, a secret police force and estimates range from 50,000 to over one and a half million people were killed in the Red Terror. Yet John Reed, when he stared at the Red Terror, said, "I don't care." (A paraphrase)

Another brilliant person, E. A. Ross, argued that the secret police had killed relatively few people who opposed the new government, so he said that it wasn't a big deal. Yeah, right. Some of the brilliant people were so in love with the Bolshevik Revolution that they denied the Red Terror ever happened. Double yeah, right.

THE BRITS BEDAZZLED

The British were also love-struck. One English author wrote in "The New Republic," "The Bolsheviks stand for rationalism, for a new system of cultivation, for an active ideal of cooperation and social service against superstition, waste, illiteracy, and passive obedience."

Brilliant people like W. E. B. DuBois, John Dewey, and John L. Lewis in America reported that there was new life going on in Russia. To say they were awe-struck is an understatement. They hailed the revolution as the greatest social experiment in history. They praised the heroism of the Bolsheviks and Stalin's experiment. (Stalin's "experiment?"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the literary giant who wrote about the Soviet gulag system, claimed the true number of Stalin’s victims might have been as high as 60 million!)

To a man, the brilliant people thought that the Bolsheviks were going to lead us, America included, out of the old world and into a new and glorious future. Like I said, the brilliant folks were so in love with the Russian Revolution that many of them traveled to Moscow and its environs, writing love letters about Russia's bold experiment. (Shouldn't we get nervous when a government is going to conduct and "experiment?") Stuart Chase, one of those smart people, wrote that the Soviet Union was the all-caring state and that the Communist Party officials had a burning zeal to create a new heaven and a new earth.

Wait. What?

THERE IT IS: THE INFECTION!

That's it! The infection unmasked! The infection, long loose in the human race, is the innate desire in fallen man to snatch the reins of history from God and bring in the new heaven and the new earth,  apart from Christ.

How could such brilliant people overlook, deny, and cheer the Bolsheviks and what they were doing? It's all because of the infection. The one main symptom of the infection is the idea that anything you do is all right, as long as it leads to the establishment of a new heaven and the new earth apart from Christ. Exterminate thousands, even millions? That's OK as long as it leads to a human-engineered and humanistic millennium.  All of fallen man's plans to bring in heaven on earth apart from Christ's Second Advent bring a blood bath--N. Korea (1.6 million killed by Kim Sung), Red China (60 million killed by Mao Zedong), and Nazi Germany 17 million killed by Hitler) come to mind.

COULDN'T THEY SEE IT?

They were smart people. Couldn't they see it? Several components enter the picture: fallen man is blinded by Satan to the point that as long as he believes man can bring heaven to earth, all is permitted (Line 'em up and shoot them if it'll bring the millennium without Christ), he's willfully ignorant; he's easily fooled.

FOR US

Paul has a word for us about politicians, leaders, authors, journalists, and governments who promise that they or some group or some man or some government will take the reins of history and bring heaven down here to earth: Ephesians 6:11.