It is not good to have zeal without knowledge,
nor to be hasty and miss the way.
—Proverbs 19:2
The last century was the century of the political zealot; it was a time of enormous upheaval, savage wars, and fanatical beliefs. The political leaders who brought civilization to a boil were zealous to establish a new political order and were willing to sacrifice millions of citizens to see their bloody vision to its logical end.
Whether it was Stalin, starving whole populations in Ukraine; or Hitler, massacring defenseless men, women, and children in prison camps; or Pol Pot, destroying a large percentage of the population of Cambodia, the fruit of their zeal was terror, torture, and death. They were zealous, but they lacked wisdom. They substituted their own heretical beliefs for God’s eternal truth, so they were bound to fail.
Zeal delinked from God is a deadly weapon. The fruit harvested by the twentieth-century political zealot is there for all to see. Tens of millions of people were essentially murdered to make way for a cruel new world order. The fruit of all their labor was war, murder, starvation, and torture.
When the believer in Jesus loses his or her passion for the Lord, he or she creates a vacuum that will be inevitably be filled by something else. “Then (the evil spirit) goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first.” (Matthew 12:45)
—Eric Kampmann, Signposts