Monday, June 4, 2018

Can wars be won? ............. Parables 750

May 7, 2002

We attended the April 28 Memorial Service at Sky Reach Center for the four soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Those involved expressed their grief in various ways. The music and military participation were a solemn testimony to human feelings about this tragedy.

All the same, it was an odd event. While God was prayed to, His Son was never mentioned. Jesus said, “No one can come to the Father but by me.” Political correctness and the unpopularity of Jesus Christ ruled over the need for people to hear a message of hope.

A second oddity was the darkness. We could not see the stairs as we tried to get to our seats. My feet had to feel each riser. My husband said it was a safety violation. We wondered the reasoning for turning out all the lights except those in the outer hallways and on the platform. Was this one way to express the blackness of being without hope?

The most profound oddity was the fact of the event itself. I never experienced the first world war but remember Vietnam and Desert Storm. People died. They even died under so-called friendly fire. Neither the United States or Canada held memorials each time. Why now? What is this saying? What are they trying to do?

A memorial simply means “in memory of someone.” The men who died will be remembered. However, even more realities belong in our memory banks. Men die to keep our country free. We need to realize that freedom comes at a price. War is very costly.

Beyond remembering, we also say at a memorial that we do not want this to happen. Aside from the tragic circumstances, that we are at war and that men die is something we do not want. We want to live in peace. We want our young men to marry, raise their families and live out full lives. We do not want wars.

I felt that this particular memorial service was a human attempt to say “no” to war, “no” to the terrorism that threatens our freedoms, and “no” to the downhill slide of the world into violence and fear. If this is an accurate evaluation, then it explains the odd sadness that I felt; a sadness apart from seeing survivors weep, seeing one of them on a stretcher with a patch over his war-damaged eye. My sadness relates to the fact that saying “no” will not stop war, terrorists, violence, or fear.

The Bible talks about the direction the world is going. Jesus made several statements regarding the future. Many of them are already history, but some have not yet happened. They are sobering prophecies about wars and a final war. Fear, and that final violence, will bring greater disaster than anything mankind has seen thus far.

Yet there is hope. Our hope is not in our own ability to make it stop; we have neither the power or the resources. Instead, our hope is in our God, and in His Son. Jesus will return and conquer all fear and evil. His reign will be righteousness and just, without any violence at all. The enemy of our souls, the one who works in the hearts of unregenerate and unbelieving people to cause chaos and harm, will be banished forever. All his followers will go with him, and under the Prince of Peace, peace will govern a peace-hungry world.

This reads like a fairy tale to those who do not know Jesus, to those who hold on to their sin and refuse to give it to the One who died for it and for them. They have only their own determination to make this world work, but without Jesus, they do not have the ultimate power or righteousness to do it. They only have themselves, their darkness, and a futile voice that yells “no” against a force that they cannot conquer.

Trust Jesus. “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

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