“Can
the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye
also do good, that are accustomed to do evil.” Jer 13:23
Someone has said terrorism is a nebulous term. That
it means different things to different people, hence the rather rancorous saying,
“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”
Someone too would regard the bloody scenes in the
Old Testament of the Bible as terrorist acts. Indeed others have been bold
enough to regard God as a chief terrorist.
Personally I believe there are many various forms of
unethical and gratuitous excesses in the world we live in and which I should regard
as terrorist acts.
It may be the famous road rage or government
(legislative and economic terrorisms), or Church (ecclesiastical terrorism; and
what the preacher George Morrison called The Tyranny of Type); to domestic and
work places acts which border on moral insanity – or simply terrorism.
Debauchery is another form of moral terrorism. We
adore “action packed” movies, where the protagonist mauls with a machine gun a
whole village somewhere in Vietnam or Iraq. It excites us on the screen but
when it comes to life in our own streets it shocks us.
What of pornography and child prostitution? What of murderous games like boxing and
wrestling? Violence, let’s accept, excites us, and it would seem, without
regular doses of it, life would be abysmally dull. Already our recent tragedy
has been packaged into “action packed” movies. The videos are selling like hot
cakes in the streets.
Elsewhere embryos of unborn babies are flushed out
in tens or hundreds thousands in the world per day. But this is not tyranny but
human choice or freedom.
In the old days people committed worse acts of
depravity and God disapproved it. It is why He rained death massively on whole
populations. God’s desire was only to contain them, so their depravity did not
spread – otherwise we should still be sacrificing our children to Molech. But
hasn’t the world raised up a new god called the god of pro-choice? But aren’t
there many other gods which have newly come up in our midst?
“Their sorrows shall be
multiplied that hasten after another god: their drink
offerings of blood will I not offer, nor take up their names into my lips” (Psa 16:4).
What of latter day slavery? What of materialism? What
of racism and raw tribalism, the accompanying hubris and blatant jingoism? Wouldn’t
these be summed up as tyrannical acts – or gods?
As I write this, a boat carrying about 500 African
migrants has capsized off the Italian island of Lampedusa. At the end of the
day the death toll will probably shoot to over 300 people. The silence from the
world is deafening. How different are these deaths to those deaths which occur
in conventional terrorism acts?
Yet the crime of these people is only to hope, and
to dream of a better life. Why are some people obscenely rich, and others obscenely
poor? The other day a man risked being expelled from New Zealand because he had
grown too fat and had become a liability to the state. Perhaps there is such a
thing as a tyranny of indifference?
But things will get worse. Read Paul’s “in the last
days” discourse (2 Tim 3:1-4). The love of many has already waxen cold. And
“All these are the beginning of sorrows.”
When Christ came, He raised the
bar on the definition of terms, including on who is a murderer. “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer:
and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him” (1Jo 3:15). I
believe indifference and exploitation of any sort falls in this category. And according
to that definition we have all murdered – and we need to repent.
Cain
and Abel
The first “terrorist” act recorded in the Bible is
in the book of Genesis. This is where everything first begun. And the first terror
(murder) was caused not by a stranger but by an unrepentant brother to his own sibling.
Same parents. Same house. Same tribe. Same nation. Same blood. “Am I my
brother’s keeper?” was Cain’s retort to God for asking him where his brother
Abel was.
The story of Cain and Abel is a template of our malignant
nature. God asks the world, “Where is Abel thy brother?” And the world retorts,
“Am I my brother’s keeper?”
The anger Cain felt is anger we are all too familiar
with. The crime he committed is a crime
that resonates with the crimes we hear about every day, or we commit.
The problem of hate is a
Spiritual problem. And our natural systems cannot cure it. Only God has the
answer - and that answer is Christ. We have to start where the rain started to
beat us, and that is starting to believe in God again. “For we wrestle not
against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against
the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places”
(Eph 6:12).
There is a war going on out
there, fierce and malevolent - but it is a battle that is invisible to the
natural man.
God told Cain, in warning him and educating him, that
“sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule
over him.” It is a warning Cain refused to heed. It is a warning we have refused
to heed too. Sin begets sin. Cain refused to acknowledge his sin. He only got
worse, not better. He allowed sin to rule over him. It became his master and he
became its slave. Sin pushed him to go and kill his brother. And on top of the
sin of anger came the sins of jealousy, hate, rudeness, arrogance and cruelty.
In the end sin made Cain a fugitive from his God and his family.
The
Sin and the Hope
Sin will bring up a breakup of
things in the end. It causes a separation of people, from their friends, from
their families, and from their God. Is God still among us? Is our family still
with us? Are we still with them or have we become fugitives? “If a man say, I
love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his
brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” (1Jo 4:20).
Sin pulls us further and further down until it
brings us to the place of open grave. It is Christ who comes and lifts us from
that mire. Christ who comes and resurrects us from that death. It is Christ who
gives us a new heart, not a stony one, but of flesh, and a new hope.
It is a heart that feels. A heart that is not timid
but is valiant for the truth. It is a heart that is capable of loving with a
true love. “For this is the message that
ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. Not as Cain, who
was of that wicked one, and slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him?
Because his own works were evil, and his brother's righteous” (1Jo
3:11-12).
But charity begins at home. So go there and forgive
there first. Go and love there first before you love others. Then all things
will be well between you and your Maker, and between you and other people. That
is the word of God.
Let us desire to be found of Him, that we might sing
with John Newton the amazing song which he sang - Amazing Grace. For that is
the desire of God for every one of us. We had become fugitives once, like Cain.
We had gotten lost once, “having no hope, and without God in the world.” But
Christ came to reconcile us back to God. That we might become friends with Him
again, and not enemies. But sin separates us from God, therefore let us repent,
abandon sin, and turn back to God.
For Christ did not come to kill but to save.
To recap, let us not retort to God when He speaks to
us like Cain retorted to Him. For in doing that sin stands at the door of our
heart. It is in such temperaments that we can then hate and murder like Cain
murdered. Sin makes blind and deaf. We cannot see and we cannot hear. And when
we have reached that state there is no longer any difference between a murderer
and a terrorist. That is the word of God.
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