There are two interpretations of these verses. They both start on same track.
With God’s restraining hand operating, people tend to become proud. Each war people like to think will be the last. ‘God – who is he? I hate the notion. I believe an essential goodness of human nature.’ In the 1960s we saw a campaign to do away with God, to promote wickedness – we can have peace permanently. So he says at times, enough.
Even though the second view of the passage is taken, it is true that the church faces persecution in every age, and some of the lives taken belong to believers. Sometimes persecution is physical and violence, even to death. Sometimes as in our country right now, it’s intellectual: the hostility of atheism and unbelief, the great attack on spiritual things, upon God, upon the Bible. There are all the militant atheistic books, and hundreds of videos that the youngsters see constantly, attacking the very being of God, and the faith. Then there are the great theological attacks. All universities have been taken over by theological cynics, who don’t even believe the things their make a living from, and they spend all their lectures attacking the inspiration and authority of the Bible. They do their utmost to belittle it and undermine it, and their scholarship, actually, is dreadful in many ways. Then there is the cultural attack: the whole rock movement. What is it from the permissive society in the 60s onwards? A tremendous cultural attack upon God and the faith, to get all the young people influenced so very much by the beat drug and the rhythm drug, to believe in an alternative morality, and to believe that biblical morality is an offence and an outrage, and should even be criminalised, and there should be a new society in which anything goes. There is the takeover of all educational institutions coming in now, and you can see it entering into the schools.
Can the devil set up war in a county? No, only by permission. Raises a problem. Power given – all in the book God permits or initiates. Does this make God the author of War? Killing? No. To take peace. Let me explain. Human beings are sinful and quarrel the time, take offence, indicative. War would be non-stop if not for God imposing peace. Why is there peace? Because we are kind? No, but God imposes it. We may take credit for it. We have advanced. God has restrained our worst tendencies is the real explanation.
Let men not ask – why does a good God allow wars in this world? He does not merely allow them; by removing his restraint he sends them, for he has the right to judge man at any time.