INTRODUCTION
Lance Morrow, after watching the events since September 11, wrote in “Time Magazine,” “For once, let’s have no grief counselors standing by with banal consolations, as if the purpose in the midst of all of this were merely to make everyone feel better as quickly as possible. We shouldn’t feel better.
“For once, let’s have no fatuous rhetoric about ‘healing.’ Healing is inappropriate now, and dangerous.” He calls for a “focused brutality, a wholesome and intelligent hatred that impels us to act.” That was what we have seen, a propulsion to act. A woman takes to the streets of Atlanta, waving an American flag; blood donors line up for the needle; money, food, and workers pour into New York City.
A 19th century French anarchist said, “The fecundity of the unexpected exceeds the prudence of statesmen.” What he meant was, “Unexpected disasters produce fertile thought, more productive than the well-thought out deliberations of statesmen.”
Instead of grief counselors with “banal consolations,” let’s play the Old Testament prophet and listen to God’s Word. Let the Christian toughen up and listen to what should be said.
When those jets flew out of Genesis 16 and into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, they exploded our most precious myths. The jets from Genesis melted our long held moral relativism, just as their thousand-degree heat melted the steel of the Twin Towers. Moral relativism has no vocabulary to classify September 11, 2001. As the World Trade Center collapses, relativism watches with closed mouth. “Evil” isn’t in its glossary. The President uses a word we haven’t heard in a long time: “Today, Americans saw evil.” Yet moral relativism can pass no judgments.
When the jets from Genesis 16 crashed into the World Trade Center, they exploded the myth of multiculturalism which views every culture and society as equal, none the superior any other. But we see that there are beliefs and cultures that are morally inferior. God declared the Canaanite cultures inferior, perverted.
When the jets flew out of Genesis 16 and into the World Trade Center, they blew a cherished American belief to bits. How long have we clung to the belief that all men possess a divine spark that needs to be fanned into flame? How long have we rejected the biblical prophets who tell us that we all are sinners, so tainted with sin that our minds, emotions, and wills are contaminated? (Genesis 6; Isaiah 53)
It’s the responsibility of government to bear the sword to protect their citizens (Rom. 13) from criminals foreign and domestic. Without national governments, we might see the wholesale slaughter of the human race, even though governments can become so corrupt that they slaughter their own citizens. A government is better than no government. There are national and international criminals against whom a government must take its sword out of the scabbard. The unsheathing is its duty when there are those that would try to destroy its citizens or institutions.
As our government plans its unrelenting pursuit of the international criminals, people call into American radio talk shows asking, “What can we do?” We know what the government with its military arm can do, but what can we, the church do? Our national leaders have their God-appointed role.
But what can the church do? We have no sword to unsheathe. Or do we? Is there not something we, the church, can do that no government can do nor should do? Our President and our Congress can bomb the daylights out of the enemy, but what they can’t do is bomb the “devil” out of them. Bombs bring nations to their knees. Although the knee is bent, the hardened heart inside stands defiantly ramrod straight. As a Confederate soldier said to a Yankee officer after the surrender at Appomattox, “We hate you, sir.”
Government is not God’s solution for the hardened human heart. He has deposited that treasure in the earthen vessels that make up the church. The church? The church with all of its prejudices, all of its narrow mindedness holds the power that no bomb contains, the power to change lives.
Another look at an ancient prophet’s book shows us something of God in all of this. We get hooked by the big fish and miss the theology of Jonah. Like Captain Ahab, we spend our days trying to harpoon the big fish and explain it away, while the important question of who God is swims alongside unnoticed.
Jonah’s book confronts us with the will of God. Jonah tells us that this God we worship has a real interest in Iranians, Iraqis, and all Afghans. It tells us that this God intends to bless Iranians, Iraqis, and the people of Afghanistan. (cf. Gen. 12) It tells us that God is serious about His call when He gives it. (Did Jonah ever learn that lesson the hard way!)
God is just as serious about His call to the church to go into the entire world and make people into apprentices of Jesus. (Matt. 28) He didn’t give the disciples permission to exclude nations they didn’t like, even though they had their list.
So, here’s the question: What can the church do besides give blood, wave flags, and sing “God Bless America?” Those commendable acts have yet to change an Arabic heart.
Here’s what we can do: I call on two committees of County Line Church to lead out in taking the God who wrote Matthew 28 seriously. I call on the Missions Committee at a called meeting to begin an investigation of mission organizations that specialize in getting the Scriptures and the gospel into Arabic countries. I call on our Missions Committee to then choose a mission organization and a missionary enterprise in or to a chosen Arabic country, a country that County Line Church will “adopt” for at least one year. I challenge this committee to present to us a budget for next year that includes giving to that mission organization. I call on our Missions Committee to present their recommendations to us as a part of our Missions Conference in October. What I’m calling on our Missions Committee to do is to develop an “Arabic strategy” just like the Antioch deliberately strategized before sending Paul and Barnabas into the gentile world.
I call on a second committee at County Line Church, our Board of Christian Education to develop a program relating to the Arabic country in our Sunday schools, our Wednesday night programs, our VBS, and our children’s church. This program will include maps to make us geographically aware of this country; it will include monthly reports on that country, its culture, its foods and music, its spiritual condition, the most up-to-date missionary activity in that country and some of its history.
I know what you’re thinking. After Tuesday, September 11th, we have a tendency to be Jonahs. We think: “I hate those people.” So be it. Did you realize that God knew that Jonah hated all Ninevites when He called him? Do you realize that God expects that we will not let our selfish interests govern out obedience? He calls us to obedience in spite of our narrow mindedness. He knew of Jonah’s attitude. He called him anyway.
CONCLUSION
What we saw hit the World Trade Center were the jets out of Genesis 16. Abraham decides that God’s plan won’t work. He may have thought that he misunderstood God’s plan, that he didn’t hear Him right. He goes outside God’s will in disobedience and he sets in motion by his proxy plan an animosity between the descendants of Ishmael and Abraham’s seed from Sarah. The jets that crashed into New York’s skyline were fuelled on the pages of Genesis 16. Abraham didn’t take God’s will seriously and huge prices have been paid ever since.
This is our challenge. Our government can choose to unsheathe its sword and go to war (and rightly so). Will our church take its role seriously and begin a flood of Bibles into its adopted country? Will it pour out a torrent of prayer for that adopted country?
The World Trade Center was bought down by pilots trained just south of Georgia, trained in the gospel air of the Bible belt. Did anyone reach out to them with the gospel, ever just one time? Who knows what hard hearts of some future suicidal pilots God’s Word sent to that Arabic country from County Line will change?
We can learn from a World War II general. Douglas McArthur, in looking over a defeated Japan, put out a call to America for Bibles and missionaries for that country.
George W. Bush’s bombs can force bended knees. The sword of the church can bend hearts.
Dr. Mike Halsey, Pastor
County Line Church
3913 Jonesboro Rd.
Hampton, Georgia 30228