A MESSAGE WAR BRINGS
Wasn’t
it the American president F. D. Roosevelt who said something like, "I
hate war! My wife hates war! My dog hates war!"? How can you not hate
it? Even if you think you should engage in it, how could you not hate
it, with all its awful consequences that go far beyond the obvious?
There are profoundly serious questions to be asked about the morality of
any war but in certain situations people don’t want endless
debates and lectures because they feel morally obliged to "get on with
it."
Whatever
else the horrors of war should make clear they should tell us this: the
"nice" God who is all "sweetness and light" isn’t robust enough to
redeem us from our great evils. The God of the prophets and Golgotha
hasn’t been seen or heard of a lot since Deism made a "Protestant
gentleman" out of him. And Western evangelicalism has made a "chum" or a
"pal" out of him with its pervasive saccharin sweetness and an
atonement doctrine of forgiveness without transformation. A doctrine
that doesn’t take the cross seriously enough in all that it says.
We've been sinking over our heads not in quicksand but in quick-sugar,
lolling in the lap of a sweet God who keeps himself busy getting some of
us hairdressers that please us or parking places when we’re not in the
mood to walk a few yards.
War
reminds us what the human family is capable of, what we provoke one
another to and what we are willing to do in response to provocation. It
brings into focus for a while the terrible mess we’re in. Come down on
whatever side of any crisis you like but when the bombs begin to fly and
people begin to disintegrate and nations are shaped by the horror of it
all we get a glimpse of the sinister reality that’s behind all war and
mutual destruction. Wars are another bad ulcer that breaks out on the
body of a humanity that is sick with a horrifying virus. Wars, with all
their complexities remind us that it isn’t fine-tuning we need but
redemption! Maybe that’s part of what the psalmist meant when he said to
God, "When your judgments are on the earth the nations learn
righteousness." And it’s easy to read Ezekiel 14:12-23 that makes war
one of God’s "four sore judgments" and pay little attention to it until
we’re in the middle of a war.
War
is part of our sin but it’s also part of the armoury of God to reveal
his judgment against sin and to redeem us from that sin (see Habakkuk 1
and 3 and Amos 4 and so many other places in the prophets—"Behold I
send"). To see it as our sin is right! To see it as God’s strange work
of revelation and redemption is also right. It isn’t only right, it’s
imperative that we see his will being done in and through our evil just
as surely as we see it in the brutal murder of Jesus Christ (Acts 2:23).
War
exposes us for what we are and highlights the kind of Saviour we need.
"For such a high priest meets our need" (Hebrews 7:26). War says to us
in the clearest possible fashion, "Don’t look for a Saviour in humanity
at large." That’s dredging the graveyard looking for a live one. Coming
to the close of the 19th century everything was optimism.
Every day and in every way, we told ourselves, we’re getting better and
better. And that Bible talk about judgment and sin and the wrath of
God—we outgrew it. Who needed it? All we needed was more education and
economic progress and the brilliant scientists and medical men and
inventors among us were doing for us all that we needed. Well, true, we
could use the kind, good-natured Jesus Christ as an inspiration as we
moved toward the inevitable moral excellence toward which we were
evolving. And since Christ was the image of God we knew that God was a
good-natured being and we were good-natured beings along with him. But
as P.T. Forsyth said, two world wars rescued us from that religious pap
and showed us that we needed a redemption and a vaster salvation than we
imagined. You just can’t keep saying, "It’s onward and upward" in the
light of Stalin, Hitler, Japanese warlords, Papa Doc, Pol Pot, the
Hutu/Tutsi conflicts and our history of civil wars in all the Western
nations.
Don’t allow unanswered questions to keep you from embracing the whole
truth about what’s going on in the world. The one thing believers can
be sure of is that the God who is sovereign over the world is the God
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ so his purposes are holy, loving and
redemptive. Believe that truth and chew hard on and swallow down other
truth however difficult that is. That war is a servant and instrument of
God doesn’t deny the evil of it and it’s certainly no excuse for us to
engage in war with a completely clear conscience and a bright spirit.
It's as true of nations as of competent individuals: "There is none
righteous, no, not one!"
But
to miss the message it carries about humanity’s relationship to God is
to make less of war instead of taking it with the profound seriousness
it warrants. In God’s hands even horrific wars have a profound message
to give us about ourselves and the kind of Saviour we need. A member of
my family some years ago said somewhat impatiently, "Jim, we all know war isn't the answer!"
Yeah, right!
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