Wednesday, December 28, 2005
This Troubled World
Terror, War and Rumors of War
I am sore vexed by all of the terrorism, strife, conflict and evil in this troubled world. I long for the Second Advent of Christ. I long for His Heavenly Kingdom and I am glad I have a Heavenly citizenship and I am just a sojourner passing through this troubled world. Sometimes, I need gentle reminders from Scripture and from others... that God is sovereign in the face of it all.
I do not understand why so many so called American Christians are cold, complacent and indifferent to war, or that war is seen as the answer to everything... Many American evangelicals are reflexively in the amen corner of the war-hawk party. They put little consideration into the nature of war and when it is just to fight. They thump their chest for war, and would much rather scream for war than pray for peace. "Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? (James 4:1, NKJV)."
I am distraught at the horrors of the twentieth-century and at the depravity of man. According to R. J. Rummel's Death by Government, over one-hundred-and-fifty-million have been killed by genocide and democide in the last century alone. That does not include the lives lost in war. I found Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw to be the most torturous read for its gritty accounts of the Polish plight. The Poles put up a gallant fight against two overwhelming enemies to no avail. They were brutalized by the Germans and brutalized by their so called liberators, the Soviets. Melancholy and nausea are the only thing this book elicits.
Holocausts and gulags, mass-murder, genocide, and depravity unheralded throughout history: from the urban wastelands of Poland to the barren steppes of Russia to the killing fields of Cambodia. This is the ideological climax of nihilism, Darwinism, and secular humanism in twentieth-century. Quixotic ideologues promise utopia, and a veritable Heaven on earth. Of course, it will only come after a climatic blood purge of revolutionaries and dissidents alike. They promise Heaven on earth, and come close to creating Hell. People wage war against one another in violent, capricious tit-for-tats that go on without end. The Israelis and the Palestinians having been going at it for a half-century. The Irish Republican Army has left a reign of terror in the United Kingdom since the Troubles. Likewise, for centuries the Irish endured hardship and deprivation at the hands of the English, including deliberate starvation in the nineteenth-century. The tit for tat, eye for eye modus operandi never seems to stop.
The viciousness and the scale of the mass-murder was made possible by a swelling crescendo of state power, and authoritarian totalist ideologies. The messianic state and statism are the idol Baals of modernity. One of my compatriots, Jacob Aitken, brilliantly surmised:
I am sore vexed by all of the terrorism, strife, conflict and evil in this troubled world. I long for the Second Advent of Christ. I long for His Heavenly Kingdom and I am glad I have a Heavenly citizenship and I am just a sojourner passing through this troubled world. Sometimes, I need gentle reminders from Scripture and from others... that God is sovereign in the face of it all.
I do not understand why so many so called American Christians are cold, complacent and indifferent to war, or that war is seen as the answer to everything... Many American evangelicals are reflexively in the amen corner of the war-hawk party. They put little consideration into the nature of war and when it is just to fight. They thump their chest for war, and would much rather scream for war than pray for peace. "Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? (James 4:1, NKJV)."
I am distraught at the horrors of the twentieth-century and at the depravity of man. According to R. J. Rummel's Death by Government, over one-hundred-and-fifty-million have been killed by genocide and democide in the last century alone. That does not include the lives lost in war. I found Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw to be the most torturous read for its gritty accounts of the Polish plight. The Poles put up a gallant fight against two overwhelming enemies to no avail. They were brutalized by the Germans and brutalized by their so called liberators, the Soviets. Melancholy and nausea are the only thing this book elicits.
Holocausts and gulags, mass-murder, genocide, and depravity unheralded throughout history: from the urban wastelands of Poland to the barren steppes of Russia to the killing fields of Cambodia. This is the ideological climax of nihilism, Darwinism, and secular humanism in twentieth-century. Quixotic ideologues promise utopia, and a veritable Heaven on earth. Of course, it will only come after a climatic blood purge of revolutionaries and dissidents alike. They promise Heaven on earth, and come close to creating Hell. People wage war against one another in violent, capricious tit-for-tats that go on without end. The Israelis and the Palestinians having been going at it for a half-century. The Irish Republican Army has left a reign of terror in the United Kingdom since the Troubles. Likewise, for centuries the Irish endured hardship and deprivation at the hands of the English, including deliberate starvation in the nineteenth-century. The tit for tat, eye for eye modus operandi never seems to stop.
The viciousness and the scale of the mass-murder was made possible by a swelling crescendo of state power, and authoritarian totalist ideologies. The messianic state and statism are the idol Baals of modernity. One of my compatriots, Jacob Aitken, brilliantly surmised:
Most Christians, perceptive ones anyway, have seen the vicious bloodlust inherent in totalitarian regimes, but have missed the more important issues. It is one thing to point out the obvious and cry over what liberals and wanna-be Marxists are doing to our country in various political policies. It is another thing to attack the worldview upon which it hinges. That worldview is statism. Statism is the attempt of a political party to play god, to be the messiah to the masses, and to bring in a golden age of peace. In other words, it believes in salvation by legislation, and if that were bad enough, it enforces this salvation by military force. It is a bloodthirsty form of universalism.
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
