America Is Still the Beautiful
“Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, The people He has chosen as His own inheritance.”
Psalm 33:12
Jesus lovingly talked with a group of religious leaders in His day about repentance and righteousness and their response was: “We are of Abraham’s seed.” That was good, but it was not good enough. What they were saying was their heritage provided them with righteousness which immured them from the need of repentance.
Today many Americans act as though our heritage is enough to protect and preserve us. We behave as though we are the modern chosen people living a charmed life that allows us to violate any of God’s laws we desire. Our legacy is a good one, but it does not immune us from a need for present day vigilance and devotion.
No civilization has ever enjoyed the freedom we now have. We are one of the few civilizations in which people do not have to carry a personal I.D. card at all times.
Now with our open border we have no record of who has crossed our borders and with what intent.
With a member of Congress displaying a Palestinian flag in our national capitol, with 31 student groups at Harvard supporting Hamas, and with Hamas support rallies in our streets and on college campuses it is not foolish to be apprehensive about Hamas terrorist cells in America. Incidentally, Palestine is not a country, it is simply a territory.
These groups in supporting Hamas are endorsing terrorists who breached the border wall between the Gaza Strip and Israel and reigned terror on innocent unarmed civilians slaughtering 20 infants along with an estimated 1000 other people. Their animalistic behavior betrays any code of military conduct.
At a Fourth of July speech a young man shouted: “Why don’t you tell them that freedom is the most dangerous fight anyone can have? Why don’t you tell them that it’s a two-edged sword that will destroy us unless we learn how to use it — and soon?”
Our failure to use this two-edged sword has caused the British historian, Lord Macaulay, to write of our current drift: “Your republic will be pillaged and ravaged just as the Roman Empire was by the Barbarians in the fifth century, with the difference, that the devastators of Rome came from abroad, while your Barbarians will be the people of your own country and the products of your own institutions.”
The renowned historian, Arnold Toynbee, in an interview on ABC was asked: “Are you saying that religion is going to save us or that it can save us in our present state?”
He replied to the question: “I’m saying we can’t be saved unless we have a religious conversion, or if you like, a new religious revival.”
He has made a historical deep dive into the demise of approximately 100 societies in making this statement.
Such a renewal is the one thing it appears we don’t want. Churches are at fault in this by rarely calling for a renewed commitment to biblical virtue.
Not only are the words “God Bless America” good musical lyrics, they are worth praying. Following is a promise made by our promise keeping God.
“If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land” II Chronicles 7: 14.
Bloom Where You Are
Out of the history of Napoleonic France, Leonard Griffith has given us a moving story of a political prisoner by the name of Charnet. Charnet was thrown into prison simply because he had accidentally, by a remark, offended the emperor Napoleon. Cast into a dungeon cell, presumably left to die, as the days and weeks and months passed by Charnet became embittered at his fate. Slowly but surely he began to lose his faith in God. And one day, in a moment of rebellious anger, he scratched on the wall of his cell, “All things come by chance,” which reflected the injustice that had come his way by chance. He sat in the darkness of that cell growing more bitter by the day.
There was one spot in the cell where a single ray of sunlight came every day and remained for a little while. And one morning, to his absolute amazement, he noticed that in the hard, earthen floor of that cell a tiny, green blade was breaking through. It was something living, struggling up toward that shaft of sunlight. It was his only living companion, and his heart went out in joy toward it. He nurtured it with his tiny ration of water, cultivated it, and encouraged its growth. That green blade became his friend. It became his teacher in a sense, and finally it burst through until one day there bloomed from the little plant a beautiful, purple and white flower. Once again Charnet found himself thinking thoughts about God. He scratched off the thing he had scribbled on the wall of his dungeon and in its place wrote, “He who made all things is God.”
Somehow through the guards and their wives and the gossip of the community, this little story reached the ears of Josephine, Napoleon’s wife. She was so moved by it and so convinced that a man who loved a flower that way could not possibly be a dangerous criminal that she persuaded Napoleon to release him. So Charnet was set free. You can be sure that he dug out his precious little prison flower and took it with him and cultivated that plant in the years to come. He also pondered in his heart a verse that he put on the little flower pot holding the plant. What would that verse be? “If God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?”
What great provisions or promises of God brighten your road and lighten your load? Take time and make your mind a storehouse of God’s Word. Your mind is such and you are stockpiling it daily with thoughts. Discipline the storage process and refine what is being stored there. Your life will respond in kind. There is a worthy adage: GIGO which stands for “Garbage in, garbage out.” Why not “gospel in, gospel out.” Don’t be flippant about that truth. If you do deposit biblical thoughts it will show in your life and give you peace, joy, and love.
Bloom where you are.
Brief History of Israel/Hamas War
The war between Hamas and Israel has deep roots. One aspect of it relates to who rightfully occupies the land. A history tracing it back to Bible times would require more time and space than this column accommodates. Instead let’s reflect on it going back to when the land was occupied by Arabs. It was basically a nomadic unoccupied desert.
After World War II the British controlled the land. The British Mandate authorized a homeland for the Jews. On May 14, 1948, in Tel Aviv, Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel, establishing the first Jewish state in 2,000 years. This sparked the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which resulted in the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight from the land that the State of Israel came to control. This subsequently led to waves of Jewish immigrants. War is ugly, very ugly and what began and continues is not pretty.
Many of those who occupied the land were displaced from their homes. At the same time the Jews began the development of what has become many modern cities and sophisticated agricultural use of the land. Israel truly is a miracle.
Hamas is a Palestinian political and militant group that emerged in 1987 during an uprising against Israeli rule. It is one of several militant groups committed to “driving Israel into the sea” and seeks to establish an independent Islamic state in what is now Israel. Hamas is designated as a terrorist organization by several countries due to its use of suicide bombings and rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and security forces.
In recent years, the group has also become active in politics, notably winning the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections and subsequently taking control of the Gaza Strip, an area roughly the size of Washington, DC, where they have acted as the governing authority ever since. Hamas is known to be funded by groups from around the world, especially Iran.
Though Hamas controls Gaza it is headquartered in the oil rich country of Qatar where their leader, Ismail Haniyeh watched and celebrated the invasion from the safety of his Qatar office. There is footage of him rolling on the floor praising God for the incursion into Israel.
I have visited Israel 44 times and seen scars on both sides of the conflict. There is enough wrong on both sides to boggle the mind. I have visited a home on the wall of Jerusalem near the Damascus Gate occupied by peaceful Arabs who fled into the desert when war broke out. They came back after the Six Day War to find their former home occupied by Jews. They had no recourse.
I have talked with youthful friends who saw the head of a man blown over the wall surrounding their playground by a terrorist bomb. These are microcosmic examples of the conflict.
I am very much pro-Israel. I have visited Israel with a Jewish group primarily from New York when we purchased a home for a Jewish family in which former Prime Minister Sharon lived out his last years. However, I am not unaware or unopposed to some of their conduct.
Israel will always be the object of aggression and is deserving of our full support.
King David, the psalmist appealed: “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: May they prosper who love you.” This is an appeal to pray for Israel. Let’s do it.
A Word Is Worth…
Etymology, the study of the origin of words, often reveals interesting roots. Consider these words and their genesis.
The Greeks introduced to the world their god Pan. When in a good mood the god Pan’s flute music was soothing. When he got disturbed and outraged it was frantic and erratic. Such idiosyncratic outbursts came to be known as having a panic attack.
Meander is a proverbial word derived from the name of a river in southwest Turkey that flows from Dinar to Miletus on the Iconian. Sitting on a hillside overlooking a plain through which the river wound its rambling abstract course, I could see the word’s meaning.
Berserk is derived from the trance-like state of a raging band of fierce out of control savage Norse warriors, the Berserkers. They would psyche themselves to ignore pain and disregard safety. They went wild in a battle frenzy. Their name came from the fact they wore bear skins. When in a rage a person is often said to have gone berserk.
Blackmail had a most intriguing origin. Rob Roy was a freebooting clan chieftain in the Scottish Highlands who initially joined the Jacobites. In between major conflicts he would raid herdsmen’s cattle and hide them in the Highlands. Cows were as good as cash. He would demand a ransom in order to get them back.
Rob was Scottish for Red, a title given him because of his red hair and beard. The word “male” had the meaning of an agreement. “Black” was used for evil. Blackmail was an evil agreement used by Rob Roy in order to return cows.
The golfers mulligan, meaning an extra shot after a poor one, comes from 1920 in Canada. Out of gratitude for driving his foursome to St. Lamberts Golf Course near Montreal, they gave him an extra shot. It became more broadly used starting in 1949.
An absorbing captivating person is often said to mesmerize people. Franz Anton Mesmer, born in Switzerland in 1734, a psychic practitioner, is inaccurately credited with developing hypnotism. He was in many ways spellbinding. His name gave rise to the word mesmerize which identifies a fascinating personality.
The name Christian was given to followers of Christ in Antioch in the first century. The suffix “ian” was borrowed from Latin and meant “adhering to or belonging to.” It meant a partisan of Christ and was initially used as a term of derision. This came as a result of Christ being crucified. As a means of execution it was so loathsome law forbade any Roman citizen from being crucified.
The word “Christian” now being used as a noun and an adjective causes some confusion. As an adjective it describes a person who endeavors to live according to the teachings of Christ because of devotion to Him. Some persons calling themselves a Christian are using it as a noun and in reality are not Christlike in their conduct. A gross application of the appellation is Hitler who is said to have been a Christian. Noun! Associating Hitler with Christ is a travesty. He was not a Christian in the sense of being a follower of Christ, a devotee.
Disgracefully some who use it as a noun don’t live it as an adjective.
As an example, show the world what an adjective Christian is and DOES.
War Is Hell
Writing about the following is difficult in that things are changing rapidly.
The conflict between Hamas and Israel in Gaza began over 2000 years ago in a Bedouin’s tent in the desert when Abraham had one son too many. Those sons Ishmael and Isaac, are the progenitors of the two groups now at war.
War has been best described by one who knew how to rage it, General George Patton, who said, “War is hell.” Can I get an amen?
Get ready for a deep peep into hell, d/b/a Gaza.
There is a statement that has been attributed to a number of Israelis, most recently Benjamin Netanyahu: “If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel”. Based on the record that appears to be true.
With only one provocative reason Hamas, a terrorist group in the Gaza Strip, attacked Israel by breaching 15 holes in the defensive fence separating the two and sending more than 1,000 terrorist fighters into Israel to pillage, murder, and take hostage citizens from a number of countries. Oh, the one provocation. It is the mere existence of Israel. That is it, nothing else.
The Gaza Strip is a 140-square-mile stretch of land located along the Mediterranean coast between Egypt and Israel. It has endured decades of protest, military operations and violence. It is one of the most densely populated places on earth with over 2,000,000 people. Many are innocent Palestinians who are pawns of Hamas, a terrorist organization led by Ismail Haniyeh, the leader behind Hamas’s deadliest ever attack on Israel. He watched it unfold on television with delight from the safety of Qatar. Footage shows him and colleagues rolled on the floor praising God. Praising God, for what.
Israel has urged citizens in Gaza City to get out and go into the country. Israel got no such warning before untold scores of their people along with guests in Israel from many countries were attacked. Many people from Gaza have heeded the warning and gone to NATO schools and the open country.
I have been in touch with friends in Jerusalem who tell me the holy sites are safe, but the citizens are not. Understandably the people feel vulnerable and they are. The known history of Gaza spans 4,000 years. Gaza was ruled, destroyed and repopulated by various dynasties, empires, and peoples. In the early 16th century, it was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire. During World War I, it fell to the British forces and became part of the British Mandate of Palestine. Following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Egypt has administered the newly formed Gaza Strip. Originally a Canaanite settlement, it came under the control of the ancient Egyptians for roughly 350 years. No one has ever been able to successfully govern the people. Israel conquered it during the Six Day War and gave it back after the war rather than investing resources trying to govern it. It was hoped it would be the Singapore of the Mediterranean.
All of my contacts in Israel ask for prayers. Please respond positively with their entreaty.