Essay on need to continue to fight in the Middle East

We live in a nice place, and in a world we call civilized. We don’t feel threatened when we go outside our homes to go to the bank or to the store or to the post office. Our neighbors are genuinely friendly and good people, most of the time. Crime is the exception in this community, and in most of this country, rather than the rule. But we have not achieved such a world for nothing. When we are born into this life we are taught from an early age that one has to work to have a good life. We are also taught on Sundays when we go to church to love our neighbors and not to quarrel, and to turn the other cheek rather than getting angry and holding grudges. Indeed, this is the singular thing that separates Christ, and Christians from the entire rest of the world and its religions, the idea that we should love our enemies and not hate them. Amazing, isn’t that?

Unfortunately, though, we are a very small minority in our greater world. Most of the rest of the world, the third world as we refer to it, has far less wealth than we do, and significantly less quality of life, whether you measure that by money, food, disease, medical care, personal safety, laws and justice, infant mortality, average length of life, etcetera, etcetera. And what is the natural tendency of people with far less towards people who have far more? Jealousy, envy, and yes, hatred. Certainly we, too, have envy and hatred in this country, but it is curbed by laws and enforcement of our legal system, which is generally lacking in corruption, compared to most systems in other countries….we know it as Our civilization. And… it is leavened by our religion, which tells us to fight these tendencies of jealousy, envy, and hatred, and to love one another and our enemies.

I have been out of this country’s borders many times, most of those times in the 3rd world countries, also frequently referred to as “failed states”, and seen for myself that our nation is far safer, more loving, and nicer to live in than theirs. When I travel I see walls with broken glass embedded in the tops around all the houses. Whether it be in Haiti or Afghanistan, or even Mexico.

I have also always been a student of nature, and one thing that has always struck me in nature is that it doesn’t tolerate a gradient. You’ve heard the phrase “Nature abhors a vacuum”.

That's why wars have been waged, since time has been recorded: Because we all want a better way of life than our own. And, unfortunately, as I have already said, there are many more of them than there are of us. And most of them are not restrained, as we are, by a religion that preaches love above all else.

So what are we supposed to do? Lie down and let them conquer us? Take all that we have, enslave our women as their concubines? What would Christ have told us to do in this situation?

Did he say to turn the other cheek? Isaiah says “Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore" (Isa. 2:4). The Prince of Peace will usher in the time when "the wolf will live with the lamb" (Isa. 11:6). But could it be that what is wrong with this, which is the pacifists' position, is that it is the wrong timing? After all we are not in the Garden of Eden, nor yet in the heavenly city. Maybe this is not the time yet for world peace. We are in the fallen world of human sinfulness, where evil people do dastardly things and where God has given governments authority to administer justice with the sword (Rom. 13:1; 1 Pet. 2:13). It has been said that Pacifism is a godly mistake in that it fails to take seriously the sinfulness of humans, for monsters do exist and do need stopping. We are all capable of doing real harm to our neighbor and need the constraint of law and order and of good government.

When Christ confronted the money changers in the temple He didn’t turn the other cheek, and he was very aggressive about it. “And He made a scourge of cords, and drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen; and He poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables” (John 2:14-15).

This was a physically violent response on the part of Jesus. This makes it abundantly clear that Jesus was not a strict pacifist. The Bible is also clear that Jesus was sinless. So even in this situation, he did nothing wrong.

We so far have done a great job of preventing another 9/11 attack inside our own borders by taking the fight instead to the enemy in their homes in the middle east. But the nation has grown weary of wars again just like after World War I, World War II, and Viet Nam. After all, our friends and family die in wars! So should we become isolationists to the rest of the world and try to pretend the third world doesn’t exist? Christ said that we would always have the poor but he also told us to treat them as if they were Him in disguise. Does this mean we have to give up what we have and our prosperous wonderful way of life in order to do this? Well, if we tried to just give, or redistribute, our wealth to the rest of the world we would be as helpless as they are and we would no longer be in a position to help them lift themselves up out of their primitive lives, would we? I have thought about that many times when in Haiti. If it weren’t for us, who would come help them?

Unfortunately, I’m afraid that because the envy and the hatred of what we have is becoming so great, that if we don’t continually exert energy and sacrifice lives to contain it now it will grow to an uncontrollable, uncontainable state and we will be overwhelmed with another war of World proportions, undoubtedly confronted by nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorist extremists, and our children will no longer enjoy the world that we knew and enjoyed and loved so well for the last 2 centuries.

And then there’s Russia. What about them?

Maybe by fighting to prevent such an unimaginable day, the end of our world, we are only putting off the Day of Reckoning. Or maybe instead, we should just roll over and curl up into a ball now, and ignore, for as long as we can, the terrible things happening in the rest of the world, so as to hasten the Day of Judgment.

Are we supposed to just let it come, our annihilation? Was there ever a point in Christ’s ministry where he told us that we should just live our lives submissively and wait for the evil in this world to take over, thereby bringing on that judgment day?

I looked but I couldn’t find an answer for that. The closest thing I could find was this:

John 3:17 :
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.