From
across the border we watched Americans cheer as their post 9-11 President,
George W. Bush, employed his "doctrine of preemption" vis a vis Iraq.
Did their President really believe his position to have been similar to that of
Joshua who received his mandate from God? A year and some change later we
are still perplexed: Where are they now to wonder if, perhaps, to have discussed this mandate further would not have been
pointless? Woe to the one who wonders: Is that it?
Seriously folks, listen to your lighter cousin.
The history of the drawing of maps has precipitated a kind of global myopia on
the part of Americans. Along with your exaggerated sense of self-importance in
the eyes of God comes an incipient eschatalogical racism: if we, predominantly
white believers, fall the world falls. Not so quickly, please,
God is "growing His Church" in South America,
Africa, and Asia. He does not NEED us (read: North Americans of a lighter
hue) to carry on.* If "judgment day" were to dawn in 35,000 A.D. this
stormy week in redemptive history will rightly be called the early
church. Who will think you so important then? If there is to be any
"judgment" on America it will likely come, not from the "hand of God," but
from those of Islamic radicals. By the by, in "living next door to the 500lb
gorilla" we chimps may be recipients of the same fate. Might we have some
say in this?
The "heart" is no more fallen now than "then."
The world is no more a "dreadful" place now than in Noah's day. Surely we do
live in a "different" world, but not on a quantifiably
"worse" planet. Good guys and bad guys
-- it was ever so and never so. Now really, don't you know, there is but
One Good Guy: He who is at the right hand of the Father?
All who are and will be "in Christ" participate
in that which He has already accomplished.
*For those who are
interested in such matters you can read The Next Christendom-the coming of
global Christianity-Philip Jenkins, Oxford University Press,
2002.
