How often I find myself standing at Your feet God,
But I don’t look at You, I look in me.
Every deed right or wrong
I see the failure I have become
The chances I took
the ones gone by
Every high and low in the depths of my soul;
I ponder upon.
But You tilt up my chin,
Look into me and find no sin, or filth,
Just the pure-
glowing appreciation from Your newly restored creation
and You say “My son, this is who you are.
that is what I’ve done.
Now rise
rise
rise to a life lived in me!
a life of love
a life of faith
a life of praise
a life of honor
a life of glory
a life unaffraid of death
a life lived only to serve the Life”
That is what You said to me,
That is Your mission, and I will share.
Your wrath, satisfied,
Your love, awake.
Your mercy overflowing
Your power overwhelming
The sheer awe of Your presence is too much too bear,
and yet someday I will stand there
Few things I know but of this
I am sure,
I am sure of Your creation
I am sure of my flaws
I am sure of Your prophets
I am sure of Your Son
the One
The world’s redeemer,
Even as I stumble
It is Your will I seek.
The world may condemn me
but You send me out,
now help me stand tall
and leave no doubt
[originally written in July of 2008]
Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign LORD. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live? - Ezekiel 18:23
A few months ago, and again this week, bin Laden publicly vowed to publicly wage a terrorist war against America, saying, and I quote, “We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians. They’re all targets.” Their mission is murder, and their history is bloody. - President Bill Clinton
All of a sudden there were people screaming. I saw people jumping out of the building. Their arms were flailing. I stopped taking pictures and started crying. - Michael Walters, a free-lance photo journalist in Manhattan
We’re fighting evil. And these murderers have hijacked a great religion in order to justify their evil deeds. And we cannot let it stand. - President George W. Bush
I was relieved when I turned on the news and saw the immediate headline at the bottom of the screen: “Usama bin Laden is dead”.
There was a sense of closure to know he didn’t die on his own terms, surrounded by bodyguards; he died at the hands of those whose memories were seared with the images of New York coated in dust.
Do I take pleasure in his death?
… no
Does God?
… no
Why? … He was, after all, the present-day personification of evil.
In order to take pleasure in his death I first have to confront the pain he inflicted on our great nation. No, I’m not saying I want to deny that 9/11 happened or that I want to ignore it and move on like it didn’t change our country. Here’s a parallel that might clear up the message I’m conveying.
There are three families living as neighbors on a cul-de-sac. The Smiths have a 5 year old son. The Jones have a 2 year old daughter. The Williams have 4 grown children living elsewhere in town. One day, the Smith boy feels ill. He runs a fever and has trouble holding down food. His mother keeps him from school for the week assuming it is a bad case of the flu. At the end of the week, the boy begins to grow pale and weakens at an accelerated rate. The ER doctors inform the Smiths that their little boy has a ruptured appendix and his body can’t handle the complications of the toxins seeping throughout his body.
They perform multiple surgeries, each one yielding just as much dismay as it does hope. It seems the Smith boy will never be strong enough to fight back. His parents feel a pain that no one else can imagine; they are forced to swallow the torment of outliving their son by decades.
But then one morning, a nurse enters the little boy’s room and is shocked to take down vital signs that show improvement. Hope has a chance, but it’s still distant. After another agonizing week of drugs, surgeries, tests, and prayers the Smiths finally are told it’s over and they can take their son home tomorrow afternoon.
The Jones family loves to hear this story, looking at their young daughter with overwhelming joy knowing that no amount of pain will bring down the hope they have in her safety, even through hopeless crisis. The Williams family loves to hear this story and reflect on the lives their children had growing up. They remember their own trials and are filled with thankful hearts that they have raised a healthy and strong family. But even though the story brings great encouragement and has a wonderfully happy ending, the Smiths don’t like to tell it or remember it more than necessary. It hurts. To the Smiths, it’s not a story of bad news then good news. It’s all one story. In order to tell the triumphant ending, they need to tell of the heart-ripping agony.
America, clearly, is the Smith family. In order to truly take pleasure in the death of bin Laden we must recall the horrific newsreels of the Twin Towers collapsing, the over head images of the Pentagon burning, and the frantic phone recordings from United 93.
I do not take pleasure in bin Laden’s death, because I do not want to recall 9/11 more than necessary.
… So then, what was that feeling of closure? Was that wrong?
To me, that feeling is the one of relief the Smiths would have felt when they were told “you can take him home tomorrow.” To hear the final authority say, “it’s over now, you don’t have to worry again.” If the Smiths could go back and avoid the whole situation, would they? While the feeling of burden being lifted is liberating and grand, it is far better to never have to know the burden in the first place. I do not praise the death of a human, neither does God, but I praise that justice was served and the book can now begin closing.
“Justice was served” - such a unique concept.
It seems the human mind can’t fully comprehend the measure of justice (perhaps because we are not the ones meant to judge) necessary in such a case. I recall a documentary on the Adolf Eichmann trial where one of the prosecutors asks an open ended question to the camera, “How do you properly come up with a sentence that does justice to a man who stoically killed 6 million people and encouraged others to do the same?”
{For those who don’t know the context of this trial, here is a short video http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eichmann_trial_news_story.ogg}
The evil bin Laden inflicted on the world was not just to America or the Western World; he has the blood of thousands of Arabs, Kurds, Persians, men, women, children, Jews, Muslims, and Christians on his hands. How do you properly do justice to this? I believe it is out of the realm of human capability and understanding (for good reason too) to create proper justice. The most we can do is take earthly life, and that’s what has always been the highest price to pay. This is why it meant so much to me to know that bin Laden was given justice at the hand of an American.
Was the act just? Necessary? Are we trapped in a horrible moral confusion?
- Yes to all of the above. We brought justice as best we could and protected/saved unknown (in name and number) people by weakening radical offshoots of Islam (bin Laden may have had more impact as a figure head leader than direct action leader), however, as stated above, there is no justice within man’s grasp for the crimes committed. In order to better understand where we stand as Christians in this mess, we need to remember a few key things:
In the end, do not bathe in blood, at least not in the blood of only a man. Remember the somber reason justice was issued. Remember and find peace. It’s almost over. It’s almost over. Christ is coming soon, and our crisis of justice will be out of our hands (for good reason too)!
Jesus answered, ”My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.” - John 18:36
“Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.” 2 Thessalonians 2:11-12 (ESV)
When the Antichrist comes, he’s going to mess with our spiritual alliances and manipulate us in ways that we won’t even know we are being manipulated. Some will stay faithful to the LORD; they won’t need anyone to tell them about Christ’s return because they will know. Some will follow the Antichrist and willingly reject God for the god of this world. This is where the context of the above verses come into play.
This wording of “God sends them a strong delusion” seems to be so contradictory to the Christian God we know and praise. Why on earth would the LORD close the door on these souls’ hope of redemption? As we discussed in my Rel 203 New Testament class, God is effectively taking away the free will of those who have already elected not to follow Him. The allegory we drew up was as follows.
A teenage girl goes up like clockwork every evening in anger and slams shut her door. After doing this for months and months and year after year, the Father, who payed and built the house for His family and that room just for His daughter, finally takes the door off the hinges and walks it out to the garage. The door was a gift to the teenage girl and she abused it purposely to aggravate her Father and siblings.
In this same way, the strong delusion God sends on the people will be God talking away the freewill (door) from those who constantly choose to use it for harm. Is God playing bully by doing so? Of course not because 1) it was never OUR door by right and 2) the door is being taken away only from the daughter who abused it, not from every single child in the home. God is allowing those who are already lost to blindly follow down the path of destruction.
Still hard to swallow? That’s good, because it’s the saddest story there ever will be.
But let’s look at one more angle that has too often been ignored in all this…
We say our God is a God of love, compassion, justice, peace, jealousy, and righteousness. The heart of the LORD is greater than the sum of all humanity’s trials and triumphs throughout all of history. Why then, when we come to what is invariably the saddest moment in history do we ignore the emotions of our Father?
Think about it, why is God really taking away the freewill of His creation? You can give all the large, theological vocabulary words you want, but I think the answer is something so simple all of us can understand it.
God does it for Himself!
… Has it hit you yet?
The apple of His eye, the greatest joy in His creation, His bride has chosen to knowingly walk away from Him.
… Has it hit you yet?
When we dramatically lose a friendship or end a relationship in which we personally invested not just time, but care and emotion and thought, it hurts. It hurts tremendously. It hurts even more to have to watch that person go on and be happy with actions and friends that we know are bad for them in the long run.
Be honest with yourself, how many of you have checked up on old high school friends or ex’s just to see if their life is better or worse without you? Whether you’ve done it personally or not, we all know that is an unfortunate part of social networking.
For God, this breakup is more painful than any we have experienced because He has already invested His life in us. In marriage, we invest “Til death do us part” but God invested that nothing but choice will do us part. Can we even begin to grasp the pain God experiences when just one person chooses to walk out of His love and into the arms of “pleasure”? He has put up with our fits, our cheating, our misplaced rage, our apathy, and our charades.
He will still continue to put up with us as long as we keep coming back to Him in the end …
But when the Antichrist comes, and those who leave him are bound to never return, God can’t allow Himself to get hurt anymore. Does it still break His heart to do it? More than any of us can begin to grasp. Yet God still sends down this delusion that seals them to the deception, because the LORD knows no matter what happens they aren’t coming back, and it’s easier to breakup with someone when you don’t have to see them again.
When people separate as friends or as partners, they don’t try to see each other, at least not for a while. The pain is too fresh. Often people will erase email and phone contacts, delete from Facebook, and remove any memorable tokens. For God, the pain will never subside. He removes them entirely from His heart. Will God ever get past the loss? No. But He is a jealous God who cannot stand to watch His beloved follow this wayward path. So He unfriends them, deletes their email, removes their phone number, empties his inbox, and throws away the pictures.
… Has it hit you yet?
He is a God of justice, punishing the wayward and unrepentant.
He is a God of freedom, letting us chose to obey Him or walk away.
He is a God of love, redeeming His bride that we may always come home.
He is a God of heartbreak, watching as His beloved leave Him knowing no amount of words or actions will bring them back to love Him.
Maybe it’s just me, but I smell a strong aroma of BUST in this year’s draft (and I’m talking more than JUST Nick Fairley). I’ll keep it brief, rating players on a percentage based on their common consensus mock draft status.
Cam Newton - QB (88% Bust-ability)
Marcell Dareus - DT (50%)
Von Miller - OLB (40%)
A.J. Green - WR (20%)
Blaine Gabbert - QB (72%)
Patrick Peterson - CB (10%)
Nick Fairley - DT (90%)
Jake Locker - QB (83%)
My “Dead-weight Sleeper” ?
Ricky Stanzi - QB
My true Sleepers
Andy Dalton - QB
Greg McElroy - QB
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