the dress rehearsal

chapter one

it was never about the virus

Let me clear the ground first, because if we do not, the whole conversation will get tangled in the wrong thing within a paragraph. This booklet is not about the virus. I do not care, for the purposes of these pages, how dangerous it was or was not, whether the masks worked, whether the medicines helped, whether the men in charge of the science got it right or got it wrong. Honest people have argued all of that to exhaustion, and it is not my concern here. That is not where the lesson is.

The thing that actually happened in those days was something underneath the sickness, something the sickness merely provided the occasion for. What actually happened is that governments told entire populations where they could go, when they could leave their homes, whether they could open their businesses, whether they could gather, and, most striking of all to a believer, whether they could assemble to worship God. And the populations, by and large, simply complied. That is the event. Not the virus. The virus was the doorway; what walked through it was a thing far larger and far more worth our attention.

The virus was the doorway. What walked through it was a thing far larger, and far more worth our attention.

I say this so that you will not waste your reading of this booklet fighting the last war over droplets and distances. Set all of that down. It is genuinely not the point, and a Christian who can only ever argue about the science has missed the thing entirely. The point is what the episode was, underneath: what it demonstrated about how a whole world can be moved, and how quickly, and how willingly; what it showed about the powers that move in this present age; and what it ought to teach the people of God who were watching, if only they had eyes to see it as more than a medical inconvenience.

For the rest of these pages, then, when I speak of those days, understand that I am never really speaking of the illness. I am speaking of the far stranger thing that happened around it and because of it, the day the world was told to stop, and stopped. That is the thing worth a Christian’s sober attention, and that is the thing we are going to look at together.

chapter two

what the world had never seen

Step back far enough and consider how genuinely unprecedented the thing was, because familiarity has dulled us to it. We lived through it, and so it feels ordinary in memory; but it was not ordinary. It was, in a real sense, something the world had never before seen done on such a scale.

Understand, the world has known hardship before, and it has known restriction before. There have been wars, and famines, and plagues that emptied cities. There have been curfews; in the great wars men were told to darken their windows and stay off the streets after a certain hour. Restriction itself, then, is not new. But what happened in those days was different in kind, not merely in degree, because of one fact that we forget at our peril: the world is now connected as it has never been connected before. And so for the first time in human history, very nearly the entire globe underwent the same sweeping interruption, at the same time, together. Not one nation under a curfew while the rest carried on, but the whole connected world, more or less at once, brought to a halt by command.

And the interruption reached into everything. It was not the narrow restriction of a wartime curfew, leaving the days otherwise intact. It closed the shops and the schools and the workplaces; it emptied the streets; it kept families from their dying in the hospitals and the aged from their families; and, a thing I want you to sit with, it closed the houses of worship and told the people of God they could not assemble. The ordinary fabric of human life, all of it at once, was suspended by decree across nearly the whole earth. There is simply no precedent for that in all of history. Wars touched regions; this touched the globe. Curfews touched the night; this touched the whole of life.¹

Wars touched regions; this touched the globe. Curfews touched the night; this touched the whole of life.

I am not, in saying this, rendering a verdict on whether it was necessary. I am asking you to notice the sheer scale and totality of it, because we have been strangely incurious about something genuinely historic that happened to us. And I am asking you to notice it because what a thing of that scale and that smoothness reveals, about the world, about power, about how easily the whole of humanity can be moved as one, is the matter this booklet exists to examine. Something happened that had never happened. The least we can do, as thinking people, is refuse to pretend it was nothing.

chapter three

the agenda behind it

Now I must say the hard thing, and I am not going to tiptoe up to it. What we lived through was, at its root, something dark. Malevolent. An agenda, and not an accident. I know that word will make some readers flinch and reach for the word conspiracy, as though naming evil were the same as spinning a fantasy, so let me be exact about what I am and am not saying. I am not going to point at a particular man or a particular room and tell you the words they spoke behind the door, for I was not in the room and I will not invent what I did not see. But I do not need the transcript to know the nature of the thing, any more than you need to watch a wolf sign a contract to know what it came to the sheepfold to do.

But the believer is not limited to what happens in the rooms of men, because the believer knows something about who actually governs this present age. Let me set down plainly what the Scripture says, and then let you draw the obvious conclusion.

“In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not…”

– 2 Corinthians 4:4

“And we know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness.”

– 1 John 5:19

The god of this world. The whole world lying in the wicked one. This is not poetry; it is the plain teaching of the Word about who holds sway over the present order. And we know exactly what that one is after, for the Lord told us in a single unforgettable line: the thief comes to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. That is his entire program. It never changes and it never rests. So I ask you a simple question. An event that stole years from the young and the old alike, that killed in more ways than the one we counted, that destroyed livelihoods and minds and the ordinary joys of a whole generation: whose fingerprints would you expect to find on a thing like that? You need not know the names of any men to know the nature of the author. The enemy works by whatever means the age makes available to him, and he has never once failed to use a means that lay to hand.²

And the damage was real, My Friend, and I will not dress it in soft words, because the softness is itself a kind of lie. The lockdowns harmed people. They harmed the young most of all. Children were cut off from their friends, their schools, their play, their ordinary growing-up, and they were wounded by it, in their minds and their spirits, and the wounds are measurable and they are documented and they are still coming out. The reviews are in: anxiety and depression, irritability and anger, poured through a whole generation of the young who were shut in and shut down. One large review alone gathered dozens of studies covering tens of thousands of children and set the toll down in black and white. This is not the muttering of cranks; it is the backward look of the very professionals who once pushed the measures, now quietly admitting what they cost. Look into it as deeply as you please, for its depth is past the scope of this book. But do not let anyone tell you it was nothing, or that the harm is a fringe idea. It is neither. It is settled.³

And here is the part I will not soften, because it is the heart of why I call this thing malevolent and not merely mistaken. The harm was not a surprise. It was not some hidden thing that could not have been foreseen. Sober voices warned, from early on and out loud, that shutting the world in would savage the minds of children, would kill the isolated old by inches, would destroy livelihoods and drive despair and cost lives in a hundred quieter ways than the one that was being counted on the screen. The warnings were there. They were spoken. And they were waved aside, mocked, and rolled over, and the measures were pressed on anyway, and prolonged, long past the point where the cost to the weak was plain to anyone who cared to look. That is not the innocence of men who simply did not know. It is the guilt of men who were told, and would not hear it, and let the damage fall on the children and the old and the poor because it was easier than admitting they were wrong. Whatever else you call that, you do not get to call it innocent.⁴

The harm was not a surprise. The warnings were there, and they were waved aside, and the weakest paid for it. That is not the innocence of men who did not know.

There is even a reason rooted in how God built our very minds that helps explain how a whole world could be moved so fast. The brain’s alarm, the seat of fear, fires before the reasoning mind has time to weigh the matter; fear is quick, and judgment is slow, and in a flood of fear the reasoning is very often outrun before it can speak. So when fear is poured over a whole population at once, you do not get careful thought; you get a population moving on its alarm, complying before it has reasoned, exactly as we saw.⁵

So I will say it plainly. I am not going to stand in front of you and pretend this was a run of honest mistakes by well-meaning men who simply got unlucky. Men in power did this. They were warned what it would cost, and they did it anyway, and they kept doing it, and the weakest paid for it. Whether every one of them meant the harm or only refused to care about it, I leave to God, who reads the hearts I cannot. But a thing does not have to be signed and confessed in a boardroom to be evil; it is enough that the harm was foreseeable, and foreseen, and chosen. And behind the men, behind the whole of it, stands the one the believer can name without flinching, because the Word names him: the enemy of our souls, the god of this world, in whom the whole world lies, the thief who comes only to steal and to kill and to destroy. The men were the hands. He was the appetite. And since the world lies in his power and moves at his pull, the only real surprise would have been if it had not moved as it did.

chapter four

the snap of a finger

Here is the thing that has never quite left me, and that I think is the most important single observation in this whole booklet. It is not that the world was told to stop. It is how easily it did. The speed of it, the simplicity of it, the near-total absence of resistance. The word went out, and as if at the snap of a finger, an entire planet of free people folded up its ordinary life and went indoors.

Think honestly about what that required, and how little it actually took. It did not take tanks in the streets or soldiers at the door. It took an announcement, and a fear, and within days the most populous and prosperous societies on earth had surrendered their movement, their gatherings, their livelihoods, and their worship, with hardly a murmur. I do not say this to shame anyone for being afraid; fear is human. I say it because the ease of it should genuinely unsettle us. We learned, in those weeks, something about ourselves that we might have preferred not to know: that the whole apparatus of a free society can be set aside almost overnight, not by force, but by a word and a fright.

It did not take tanks in the streets or soldiers at the door. It took an announcement, and a fear.

I will not be the first to notice that there is a famous book about exactly this kind of thing, Mr. Orwell’s 1984, with its picture of a whole people trained to obey, to fear on command, to believe on command and never quite notice the strings. I do not draw the comparison to be sensational; the parallels are simply difficult to un-see once you have seen them. A population that can be moved that uniformly, that quickly, on the strength of an official word and a managed fear, is a population that has revealed something about how it may be moved again.⁶

That is the unsettling lesson of the snap of a finger: not what was asked of us, but how readily we gave it. A thing does not have to be sinister in every particular to be deeply revealing. What it revealed is that the distance between an ordinary free society and a wholly compliant one is far shorter than we had comfortably assumed, a single announcement wide, it turns out, and a single fright deep. That is worth a Christian’s sober notice, and we will see in a moment why it should not have caught the people of God off guard at all.

chapter five

sheep will be led

None of what I have just described should actually surprise a Christian, and I want to show you why, and in showing you, to lay a gentle but real charge at the door of the church. The Scripture has a favorite picture for humanity, and it is not a flattering one: we are sheep. All we like sheep have gone astray, the prophet says; we are the sheep of His pasture, the psalmist says. And whatever else is true of sheep, this is true: they are followers. They move as a flock. They are led. When an entire population is moved as one at a word, the believer of all people should not be astonished. Of course they were led; they are sheep, and sheep are led. That is simply what they are.⁷

But here is the charge, and it falls on the household of God first. If we are sheep, then everything depends on whose voice we follow, for the Lord Jesus said His sheep know His voice and a stranger they will not follow. And in those days, by and large, the flock of God followed the voice of the state as readily as everyone else, and stampeded where it was driven as readily as everyone else. There was a pause that the church, of all institutions, ought to have taken, and largely did not. The pause is this: when the government commands a thing, and the whole world rushes at once to obey it, that very unanimity ought to make a Christian stop and ask a question.

“Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.”

– Exodus 23:2

The question is simply this: hold on, is this right? Is this thing being asked of me actually in keeping with what God requires of me? Because the fact that everyone is doing it is no answer at all; it never was. A multitude is not a conscience. The crowd has been wrong before, catastrophically and nearly unanimously wrong, and the Word expressly warns the believer not to take the size of a crowd as his guide. Yet how many of us paused even for a moment to ask whether what we were being told to do, including, for many, to cease from gathering as the body of Christ, was a thing we ought to do? Or did we simply move with the flock, because the flock was moving?⁸

A multitude is not a conscience. The crowd has been wrong before, catastrophically and nearly unanimously wrong.

And I mean that literally, not as a figure of speech, for history is a long record of the near-unanimous crowd being dead wrong. There was a day when almost the whole educated world agreed the earth sat still at the center of everything, and the lone voices who said otherwise were mocked and worse. There was a day, and it was not so long ago, when respectable medical opinion in great nations agreed that some human beings were fit to be sterilized against their will for the good of the race, and it was the consensus, taught in the finest universities, until the world saw at last where that consensus led. There was a day when a crowd in a courtyard, given the choice, cried out with one voice to free a murderer and crucify the Lord of glory, and the crowd was unanimous, and the crowd was as wrong as it is possible to be. The point is not that crowds are always wrong. It is that the sheer size and confidence of a crowd is worth exactly nothing as evidence that it is right, and the believer who forgets this will be swept along by the next confident consensus as surely as he was by the last.⁹

I am not laying down here a verdict on what the right answer to that question was in every case; it is not the burden of this booklet. My charge is narrower and, I think, harder to escape: that most of us never asked the question at all. We did not pause. We did not weigh it before God. We were led, as sheep are led, by the voice of the age rather than stopping to test that voice against the voice of our Shepherd. And a flock that will follow any voice that speaks loudly and confidently enough has told you something important about itself, something it would do well to know before the next voice calls.

chapter six

the dress rehearsal

Let me give you now the picture that gives this little book its name, for I have come to believe it is the truest way to understand what we lived through. What if that strange season was not a singular, freak event, but a rehearsal? One more dress rehearsal, in a very long line of them, for a show that has not yet opened.

Consider that the world has held many such rehearsals across its history. In the great wars, whole nations accepted curfews, rationing, surveillance, and the suspension of ordinary liberties, and complied because they were told it was necessary. Again and again, in one form or another, populations have been moved to surrender their freedom and their movement at the word of an authority and the pressure of a fear. What we saw was not the first time the world practiced this. It will not be the last. But here is what a rehearsal does, and why the image fits so well: with each rehearsal, the production draws nearer to opening night, and the stakes climb. Each one is a little larger, a little more total, a little more global, a little more effortlessly obeyed than the one before. And by that measure, what we lived through was the biggest dress rehearsal yet, the most total, the most worldwide, the most complete in its compliance that the human race has ever performed.¹⁰

And these are not vague generalities; the history is specific, and it is worth naming, because the naming makes the pattern impossible to miss. Think of the last century alone. In the year 1942, the government of the United States, a free republic with a written guarantee of liberty, rounded up some one hundred and twenty thousand of its own people, most of them citizens, whose only offense was Japanese ancestry, and put them behind wire in camps, and the public went along with it, because there was a war and a fear and an official word that it was necessary. Think of whole nations under the great dictators, where a population was taught to inform on its own neighbors, to denounce, to report the wrong word overheard at the wrong dinner table, until a man could not trust his own children not to turn him in; and it was not chiefly the guns that held those societies, but the fear, and the willingness of ordinary people to comply and to conform. Think of the show-trials, where men stood up in open court and confessed to crimes they had never committed, because the machinery of fear had done its work so thoroughly that the victims themselves would recite the lie. Each of these was a real thing that real people accepted, and in every case the mechanism was the same three parts: an authority that commanded, a fear that pressed, and a multitude that complied.

Now set our own recent days beside those, not to say they were as cruel, for they were not, but to see the family likeness in the mechanism, and to see how it has grown. Those older rehearsals were terrible, but they were mostly contained: this nation, that regime, this war. What we lived through was the first time the whole thing went planetary at a single stroke, the whole connected earth moving together, on the same fear, in the same weeks. That is what a rehearsal drawing nearer to opening night looks like. Not crueler, necessarily, than what came before. Bigger. More total. More global. More smoothly obeyed. And that growth, that steady climb in scale and in ease, is the thing the believer is meant to notice.

And the believer knows what the show is that all this rehearsing is for, because it has already been written down for us. There is coming, the Scripture says, a day of one ruler and one system over the whole earth, when no man may buy or sell who has not submitted and received its mark.

“And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark…”

– Revelation 13:17

Now I must be as plain here as I have tried to be everywhere, because this is exactly where the unwise lose their heads. I am not telling you that what we lived through was that. It was not the mark; it was not the one-world system; it was not the final thing. And I am emphatically not telling you when the final thing comes. I do not know. It could be a decade away; it could be a century; it could be a thousand years, a hundred generations after you and I are long in the ground. No man knows the day nor the hour, and any preacher who hands you a date has told you more than God has told him. I hand you no dates. I have none.¹¹

What I hand you is only this: that the mechanism rehearsed in those days bore an unmistakable family resemblance to the thing that Scripture says is coming. For a brief season, in certain places, men found that they could not freely enter, gather, travel, or take part in ordinary life without producing the right card, the right proof of compliance, a faint and partial foretaste of a far more total you may not buy or sell without the mark. It was the faintest echo, mind you, and I do not overstate it past what it was. But it was an echo. And the believer, who knows the song that echo belongs to, is right to notice it, not with fear, and not with date-setting, but with the sober recognition of someone who has read ahead in the script.

The enemy imagines he is the director. He is an actor in a play whose final scene was written before the foundation of the world.

For here is the deepest comfort and the deepest truth of the whole matter. Behind the rehearsals stands an enemy who drives them, yes, but over the enemy and over the rehearsals and over the whole long production stands God, who is sovereignly directing all of it, through the free choices of men and even through the schemes of the adversary, toward precisely the ending He has already declared. The enemy imagines he is the director. He is an actor in a play whose final scene was written before the foundation of the world, and he is unwittingly serving the very script he means to defy. God is leading the world, in His providence, to exactly what Revelation already says, and not one rehearsal happens that He has not already accounted for.

chapter seven

we know the last page

So how then shall we live, we who have watched a thing like this and understood it for what it was? Not in fear, never in fear, and that is the great gift of the whole matter. For we are the people who have read the last page of the book. We know how the story ends. And a reader who knows the ending does not tremble through the dark middle chapters; he reads them with a steady heart, because he knows Who wins, because it has already been won.

This is what frees us to look at history, and at the present hour, and at whatever rehearsals are yet to come, with sober discernment instead of dread. We can look at it all and say, calmly, of course it is heading this way. Of course it is. It has been heading this way since Adam and Eve walked out of the garden and left the world in the hands of the enemy and the reach of sin. The believer is not thrown into a panic by seeing the world behave exactly as a fallen world under the prince of this world was always going to behave. He sees it, names it for what it is, and is not afraid, because he knows the One who holds the ending.

A reader who knows the ending does not tremble through the dark middle chapters. He knows Who wins, because it has already been won.

Because we are not afraid, we are free to live, really live, right in the middle of it. We may use the world’s new tools and its new advances, for most of them are not sinful in themselves; they are things that can be used for good, to live better and to serve more widely, and the believer need not fear technology nor flee from it, only understand what the larger current is and keep his feet. We are to be in the world, after all, and not of it, not huddled in a bunker, and not swept along in the stream, but living wisely in the midst of it with our eyes open.¹²

And let me say clearly what we are not to do, because there is always a soul who hears a booklet like this and does the foolish thing. We are not to run for the hills. We are not to quit our jobs, sell the house, and sit on a mountain waiting for the end. The apostle Paul had to correct exactly that folly in his own day, among the Thessalonians who quit their work to wait for the Lord, and his correction was blunt: get back to work, and earn your bread, and live quietly.¹³

“For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.”

– 2 Thessalonians 3:10

Here, then, is the whole of it, the sober and unafraid way of the one who knows the last page. Go about your life. Do your work. Love the people God has actually set around you, your family, your neighbors, the souls within your reach. Evangelize and make disciples, for that is the commission you were actually given. Stay in the Word, and keep your wits about you, and watch the times with a clear and sober mind rather than a fearful one.

“Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober.”

– 1 Thessalonians 5:6

Watch, and be sober. That is the posture: awake, clear-eyed, unafraid, faithful in the small and ordinary callings, using the good gifts of the age without being mastered by them, recognizing the rehearsals for what they are without trembling at them. And resting, under all of it, in the one certainty that steadies everything, that whether we go down at last into the ground, or are caught up at His call, one day every one of us who is His is going home. We do not know the date of either road. We do not need to. The Author has already written the ending, and for the child of God the ending is home. So watch, and be sober, and go about your life in peace. The show will open in its appointed hour, and the One who wrote it has already won.