Though just an anonymous citizen and a small-time pastor I am trying somehow to cope both rationally and emotionally with a windstorm of hideous evils and the torrent of crying injustices bearing down on my consciousness.
This is somewhat new territory for me. Long ago I decided to park my personal political views outside the church door. I did not marry up with either the political right or left, though neutrality is sometimes hard.
My thing has been to stick narrowly to the main thing. As a pastor, my most urgent (and relevant) business on this sin-cursed planet is to make disciples of Jesus Christ, not to help boost one party or another into office. Unlike some, never has my agenda been to save America (the right) or redistribute wealth (the left). It’s not about saving the Titanic, but rescuing the passengers.
In that regard, only with great discipline have I stuck to my guns, lest I appear a captive of the political right or left and thus shorten my reach as a man of God. Yet maintaining that stance these days is a real dance. One reason is that the political left has been consistently unfriendly to the Christian faith. The other is that political issues often migrate into moral territory. At that point the stakes are raised.
By now any thinking adult should realize that your average politician cannot be trusted to decide right and wrong. Most are functional relativists living in a state of moral vertigo. As we are seeing only too well, they lack any reliable compass or sound filters for making principled moral decisions.
No wonder then that justice regularly goes begging and cries out in the streets for friends. No wonder that with many what was evil is now considered good, what was bitter is now thought to be sweet, what was once called perverted is now boldly paraded. As the Scriptures teach and our political experience confirms, “the compassion of the wicked is cruel.” To that premise our nanny state bears lamentable witness.
Besides, the typical politician is not even interested in doing what is right and just, but just doing whatever keeps him or her in office and keeps their parochial (or perverted) interest intact.
For these reasons, I am finding it more difficult to hold my fire. And why should I? Where the issues have a moral cast, speaking out is not only my right as a citizen, but also my duty as a prophet (in the informal sense). Maybe if others do likewise, critical mass will result.
Frankly, there comes a time—and I think that time has come—when moral sensibility cannot be silent in the face of rampaging evil and unthinkable savagery, such as we are seeing now almost daily in radical Islam. Killing, killing, killing. Not just killing, but slaughtering human beings wholesale, beheading poor Christian people en masse or burning people alive in bunches. . . roasted to death in cages. These criminals do not even bother to hide their atrocities. Rather they boldly celebrate. They broadcast their bloodshed as if they were doing the world a great favor by staging indiscriminate mass murders of non-combatants, brutalizing and wantonly raping and killing women and little children!
How can our government fiddle while Rome is burning?
Do we get it? Either we check the evil over there and elsewhere or tomorrow, like the ebola virus, we are going to find it raging over here.
It is high time that all citizens, and most especially we Christians, if we possess a modicum of humanity, entertain in our hearts any moral outrage, the least bit of compassion and feel any passion about stemming the tide of radical injustice and gratuitous human violence, . . .it is time, I say, to rise up indignantly and demand that our seeming apathetic, fumbling leaders get serious and roll back with all their might this onslaught of man’s inhumanity of man to man.
Where is our sense of history? Haven’t we been here before? Have we forgotten the horrors of the gas ovens of Nazi Germany, savagery of imperial Japan, gulags of the Soviet Union and blood soaked culture wars of Mao’s China, not to mention the terrors of other mad regimes with no regard for human life or justice? Back in those times, the world pretty much stood by in denial until through our inaction many, many more had to perish unnecessarily.
Can we just say, wake up, America! Wake up, Western Europe! Wake up, United Nations! Somebody, everybody, wake up! War is hell, but doing nothing presents a prospect worse than hell.
Apparently we have reached another such pass where, if good people continue to say nothing, insist on nothing, it appears nothing that amounts to anything will be done. Right now Hell seems to have the field all to itself. What our government and the West in general is doing to arrest it has all the counterforce of throwing cotton balls at rock walls. In fact, their approach is exactly what I would do if I wanted to pretend to challenge evil but secretly hoped not to discourage it.
In the face of great perils we citizens historically have usually counted on our government to recognize and react to neutralize grave dangers we face and to take appropriate measures to tame or neutralize mad men and perilous situations. Here I am not talking about mere political or economic or health threats or environmental threats. The growing and imminent danger we now face is the degrading of civilization along with the collapse of whatever moral foundations remain in the community of civil nations. That is where we are, it seems to me.
The lack of urgency on the part of our government is distressing. It borders on appalling. For whatever reasons, it seems that our current administration is disinclined to any counteraction beyond tepid half measures. Whether that is because our president has no clue as to what to do, or is in complete denial, or is afraid to do what needs to be done, or simply lacks the leadership to fill the suit, or, as some actually suspect, given his roots, is really a closet Muslim whose sympathies reside more with those who hate us than those who are for us, who is to say?
As one of our elders, Ross Crowley put it, “If Adolph Hitler were alive today he would tell us that we didn’t understand fascism and that we were Nazi-phobic. To which President Obama and others would say that we needed to treat the root causes of Nazism such as the extreme poverty in Germany caused by excessive war reparations and the wounds of Jewish attacks on German culture. If we could just correct the environment that drives young men to join Hitler, we could stop him.”
What we can say is that, whatever the case, what should be done in response to this aggressive and manifest Islamic evil apparently will not get done the way we are going about it. That is, unless an indignant American people rise up as one in such chorus that this president is forced by the overwhelming will of the people to act as any moral leader should. Meaning he should act decisively, immediately and with a sense of moral outrage in behalf of all humanity, in the name of justice and in mercy and compassion for the innocent and helpless. Otherwise, in my opinion, he should face the wrath of an outraged electorate and a real threat of impeachment and enduring disgrace. Otherwise, this nation will be ruined faster than anyone can imagine.
Granted, our national plate is full of issues. We face a plethora of evils. The worst of them are spiritual/moral, not political, though they get reflected in the latter arena. Presently our country and our world are in such a state of moral white out, so morally diseased on so many fronts that one hardly knows which filthy fly to swat first. With us lurching out of control to Sodom and Gomorrah, there is room to wonder which of the whole swarm of threats present the most clear and present dangers to our cultural survival, (whose extinction by the way, seems assured, at least to me; it is only a question of how soon).
But even on the Titanic, if indeed the ship is sinking, we cannot forget the duty to promote and enforce justice and maintain humanity to our fellow man. What can be done needs to be done and that with alacrity and all necessary force to put down unmitigated evil, appalling hate, gratuitous bloodshed and horrific injustice perpetrated on the weak and helpless. For that very purpose God ordained human government.
When it comes to militant Islam, its crazed enmity knows no bounds. Its bad intentions extend not just to Christians and Jews or even to their fellow Muslims but to every human species, for at bottom they hate themselves.
Radical Islam is, I believe, a demonic scourge on a global scale that requires vigorous resistance, not denial, not word games. It is the latest clear threat to human civilization, an aggressive cancer to the core and as wicked and blood thirsty as any movement ever to come down the blood-stained historical pike. The notion that it can be successfully turned back at the gates by finding ways to provide jobs for their unemployed is beyond absurd! Many of them are well-educated. The problem is not economic, for crying out loud. It is i-d-e-o-l-o-g-y!
Again, I say, check it now or in the future it will check us.
As a Christian pastor and a deeply concerned citizen, I call upon our president to finally step up and assert himself as the moral leader of the Western world, to step boldly into the gap where moral leadership is sorely lacking, and, if he really cares, together with Congress, to bring to bear against this enemy of mankind, all available and formidable military assets and other resources in our possession to say forcefully to radical Islam:
“Enough already! In the name of justice and humanity, with the help of God, we will pursue you to the ends of the earth, day time or night time, all the time, with everything and all the energy we possess, to make certain you pay the dearest price for your crimes against humanity or mend your ways. Until then just know there is no place to hide from your crimes and viciousness.”
I hope you will do likewise.
If that doesn’t happen and happen soon, only God knows what will happen.
However, I for one predict we will rue the day when we were picking our noses and smelling our roses while radical Islam was by the US and the rest of the world given a basically free hand to slaughter human beings like cattle in its campaign to occupy and enslave the earth. And if anyone thinks that agenda is not in play, well, their ignorance of Islamic doctrine is showing.
We are being played for fools and so far we are acting the part.