Lambert's Battle For the Ages

This lockdown period, I’ve been trying to reduce the unread books pile. Kind people frequently add to it. I found one given to me by another pastor upon my appointment at Salem. That’s over five years ago, but it’s certainly not the oldest book on the pile. It is The Battle of the Ages by Lance Lambert. The author I’ve heard of and seems to belong to the Prophecy Today school of Bible teacher: charismatic, a lover of Israel, a keen student of end-time phenomena. It’s a view with which I have some sympathy but the book I was not able to finish. It made some lazy claims:

Nursing began with the Quakers such as Florence Nightingale, and others.

In fact she was a Catholic-leaning Anglican, though raised Unitarian, and nursing existed before her. Ok, a simple mistake, but it hardly lends credence to what he says elsewhere. More disturbingly, it made some very tall claims which the scriptures do not fully vindicate. For example, he teaches that archangels have been keeping evil at bay in Britain, but that their power is receding because British churches are not praying hard enough. Evil is therefore going to triumph, unless people heed his book’s message which is to intercede for the nation.

Let me confirm:

• Archangels are real
• Intercession is a good thing
• Praying for a nation is commanded by the apostle
• Godlessness is increasing

It is possible that

• Angelic powers are given earthly territories to influence/watch/administer (cf Daniel 11)

From this, Lambert teaches with a degree of certainly that

• Britain has been protected by certain archangels
• Their power is now diminished
• We must pray to lend them vital support
• We may reduce the evil in the land by so doing

He states

‘…Great archangels were originally watching over the British Empire and its growth…’.

He then goes on to claim

‘I think the United States and the archangel who has watched over its development, its constitution and of everything that is a good in American life…’

The American constitution was written after they concluded a war of independence against the British Empire. Hmm, so does that mean their respective archangels were also fighting each other? There seems to be a breakdown in angelic communication here.

Either way, he claims

‘I think that those good unfallen angels have been dislodged. One of the reasons is that the church has never helped them by standing for the whole truth as it is in Jesus’

I understood that angels were sent to minister to God’s people, not the other way round? Elsewhere, he claims some credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union for having prayed it down. All empires fall; on this both history and the scriptures are in agreement. I grow tired of people telling me that territorial demons can be unseated by their prayers and intercession. It’s funny how the apostles never talked of such a terrific tool at their disposal. Living under a far less benevolent government that many of us, there is no record of them ‘praying down’ the Roman empire or battling the powerful demons who controlled it. Rather, they preached the truth and lived for Christ. Cosmic skirmishing they left to cosmic beings.

We battle not for the ages: evil will inevitably appear to triumph until Christ returns. Rather, we battle for scriptural truth. Lambert is now with the Lord and may have achieved much good on earth, especially with regards to Jewish evangelism. In our battle for truth, however, it means some or all of his books will not be appearing on Salem’s book shelves.

Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay