One dramatic come-uppance given a hypocrite in the Bible is that given to Judah by Tamar: he wants to have her executed for sexual immorality, but she reveals beyond any doubt that while she has indeed been sexually immoral, it was with Judah. Judah’s conclusion is that she is more righteous than he.
Well, we’ve been shown up, folks, by a Muslim mass-murderer (wannabe), the Times Square bomber. It wasn’t front-page news, but Islamoterrorism has thrown down the gauntlet, and we're behind in the game and need to decide what we’re going to do about it.
When asked why he wanted to kill US civilians by blowing up a truck on Times Square, Faisal Shahzad didn’t say, “Americans are free. Americans are good. Americans are rich. Americans are sexually immoral. America is a Christian nation. America is atheist,” or any of the other words our political, religious, and media bigwigs put in the mouths of the terrorists they say we are fighting. No,
Mr. Shahzad was unapologetic, characterizing himself as “part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people.”
He went on,
I want to plead guilty, and I’m going to plead guilty 100 times over because until the hour the U.S. pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, and stops the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan, and stops the occupation of Muslim lands, and stops killing the Muslims, and stops reporting the Muslims to its government, we will be attacking U.S., and I plead guilty to that.
The judge was shocked—shocked!—that this horrible man intended to kill women and children, to which our villain replied,
“The drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children; they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children. They kill everybody. It’s a war. And in war, they kill people. They’re killing all Muslims.
Let’s see. Why did we do “shock and awe” in Muslim lands? “We were attacked!” and innocent people were killed. So in return we are killing innocent people. How does that differ from Faisal’s response?
But it gets even better.
Judge Cedarbaum interjected: “But not the people who were walking in Times Square that night. Did you look around to see who they were?”
And here’s where Faisal Shahzad pulls a Tamar on our Judah:
The people [of the US] select the government; we consider them all the same.
How does this do us one better?
In the 1990s, after Desert Storm was over, the US government instituted sanctions against Iraq in hopes that the civilian population would rise up and overthrow Saddam. Half a million women and children, children of Adam the First just like those “walking in Times Square that night,” died. Yet one of the reasons given for regime change during Operation Iraqi Freedom was that Saddam was a dictator; that is, the people of Iraq (and Afghanistan) had no say over their government! And why are US evangelicals so determined to protect Uncle Sam? Because “we choose our government.”
So we (I include myself because I initially supported the wars) kill civilians over there because of actions by their governments that we know they have no control over, but we are going to jail or execute someone who attempts to kill those who he believes (wrongly, I think) do control their government and are therefore directly responsible for the death of innocent people. Am I the only one who thinks the monster is condemning the nuisance?
If indeed we do need to repent, is it any wonder our missionaries are in danger of leaving the field? Why should God keep them there? If you were a Muslim in Indonesia or Morocco, let alone Afghanistan or Iran, would you be more likely to listen to the gospel from a US missionary or a layman from China?
Judah’s ordeal of repentance is perhaps the greatest such story in the Bible. I think it may be the reason why God chose Judah, rather than Joseph (as great a type of Christ as he was), to father the messianic line that culminated in Christ. Will we be like Judah and repent in dramatic fashion, or will we be like King Saul, resorting to ever-increasing levels of violence and depravity to preserve the political power God had told him he had forfeited?
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