It is not their job to stop oppressing us, it is our job to stop them.[1] It is not their job to give us humanitarian supplies and charity aids, it is our job to produce what we need from the resources in our land. It is not their job to organize our society, it is our job to sincerely engage and understand one another towards agreement. God will not help us by doing what he has given us both the power and wisdom to do for ourselves. Instead, God will help us by giving us more grace, wisdom and fortification to actualize the purpose of our presence in our specific society.
You finish studying engineering, and see mineral resources in your ancestral land to begin processing. Unfortunately, the government sends soldiers to seize the mineral resources for foreigners to exploit and export to their factories. Your people are ejected from their communities and denied access to the resources in your land. When you complain, they bribe some of your ‘holy’ kinsmen and elders to justify their exploitation of your mineral resources. When you agitate, they send more soldiers to kill your people and burn their houses till you become ‘peaceful’. As you suffer on, the world-peace-organizations observe, make public shows of concern and still obtain shares of your resources from your oppressors.
You know that you have to organize your kinsmen to expose the hypocrisy behind the suffering and exploitation. You know you have to retrieve your ancestral land and resources, and begin producing what you need for survival. Yet you sit down and borrow the passive church language, “God will help us”. No, God will not help us, he will come down to do everything for us while we give excuses.
Soon you apply for job in a distant city, and you are offered a banking job against the scientific productivity of your engineering acumen. Afterwards, you go to dance in church that God has helped you, while your father’s land and people are plundered. You abandon the dream of production from local resources, accept counting job and console yourself with banking salary. Your fellow indigenous engineers who are supposed to produce what your society needs are stranded without resources for production. You excuse yourself that you cannot do much against government’s brutal force and world peace organizations’ hypocrisy.
Until you organize your people to morally resist and expose the hypocrisy and injustice of their activities, God will not help us. Until you work towards taking back the access to your land and resources, God will not help us. Until you begin to organize and educate your people for scientific productivity, God will not help us. Until we begin to do the work we can and must do for the reign of justice in our society, God will not help us.
[1] Maggie Q, acting as Hannah Wells, in Designated Survivor, Produced by Rich Klein et al, season 1, episode 10
