A Biblical Perspective on Death,
Terrorism, and the Middle East
Part 1
Selected Scriptures
On Tuesday we all saw the most deadly attack on America ever and the images are imbedded deeply in our minds at this time and probably will remain for a long time. Death and devastation of such monumental proportions that it makes the attack on Pearl Harbor the only comparison that we can think of. At Pearl Harbor there were just under 4,000 people killed, almost all of them military people. Tuesday we now know there were more than 4,000 people killed and all of them essentially civilians.
Pearl Harbor has long been the icon for assaults on this nation. No more, at least no more will it be that singular icon because in the future the terrorist attack on New York City and Washington D.C. on September 11 in the year 2001 is the new bench mark. And before we're through counting the dead, it may well double the dead or more at Pearl Harbor. And this not by a nation, not by an alliance of nations but a clandestine group of itinerant terrorists from the Middle East.
Now we all know what happened. In our immediate dominated age we don't lack for visual images or verbal explanations. Four hijacked American domestic airliners headed from the east coast to the west coast were hijacked and flown on a collision course to a specific target meant to kill people, cripple the nation, devastate the economy, damage the military. The idea was to send America a message that there was a greater force than America, a greater power than the super power America. An extremist, Islamic, suicidal group of murderers were asserting themselves as more powerful than this great nation.
Two of the planes flying with full fuel hit their targets with catastrophically destructive accuracy, flying full force into the World Trade Center towers in New York City and causing them to plummet to the ground. One airliner hit the Pentagon and several hundred people were killed. Another never reached its target, whatever that might have been. And we all know the details of what happened.
But our minds cry out to know why it happened. In fact, it seems to me in America we are obsessed with why things happen. Whenever there is an airplane crash, whenever there is a crime of newspaper proportions, we want to know why these things happen. We have all of these agencies and all of the analysts and psychologists and criminologists, people who study all of the details trying to find a motive for why these things happen. Why do people do these kinds of things?
I'm going to try to give you answers to that and I have so much swimming around in my mind, I'm going to try to bring some order and command to my thoughts. I will only be able to do that if I stick pretty closely to what I've written.
We know why on a superficial level. We now know that there is a very highly developed, sophisticated group of terrorists in the Middle East who are the superficial, the immediate why. Intelligence sources indicate to us that it's not just one person, Osama bin Laden, who has come to be known to all of us by name is perhaps the pointman in the actual structure of the events that led to this disaster, but he seems to be backed up by people like Saddam Hussein(?) and who knows how many others in the Middle East are a part of this massive network.
This then immediately catapults us into the land of the Bible. These terrorists weren't Norwegian and they weren't Argentine and they weren't Mexican and they weren't German and they weren't Chinese, they were Middle Easterners from the land of the Bible. There was a writer's news release that I want to start with from London. It said, "Saudi dissident, Osama bin Laden, warned three weeks ago that he and his followers would carry out an unprecedented attack on the United States interest for its support of Israel." Abdul Bon Atwan(??) editor of the London based El Kouds Al Alibi(?????) newspaper said, Islamic fundamentalists led by bin Laden was almost certainly behind the attack of the World Trade Center in New York. Quote: "It is most likely the work of Islamic fundamentalists. Osama bin Laden warned three weeks ago that he would attack American interests in an unprecedented attack, a very big one," Atwan told writers. "Personally...the article said...we received information that he planned very, very big attacks against American interests, we received several warnings like this. We did not take it so seriously preferring to see what would happen before reporting it."
Who is this man, Osama bin Laden? What is this force? What is this network of terrorists and what is it that motivates them to perpetrate such unthinkable atrocities. We all remember they tried this one other time. Not from the top of the tower but from the bottom, the previous effort to bomb the World Trade Center. We've been made very much aware in recent years of the rash of terrorist attacks against American bases, American barracks, American forces in the Middle East and other places. We've also become very much aware of suicide bombers blowing up pizza parlors, blowing themselves up frequently in Israel. We've been asking questions about what makes people do this and why does it happen, and now the question is more compelling than ever because it involves us. And not only does it involve us because of what happened Tuesday, it involves us because the possibility is that what happened Tuesday there could happen on any other day anywhere else. As our Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, said, "We cannot stop all of the tactics of all of the terrorists all of the time."
Well first of all let me dive into one category that we have to begin with and that is there is a natural reason for this...a natural reason. Sociologists in modern days in psychology have been trying to convince us that man is basically good but he is not. Man is basically evil, he is basically wicked. The heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked...the Bible says...and who can know it? That is who can figure it out, it is so desperately wicked?
Romans chapter 3 verses 10 and following describe man as a poisonous snake, describe man as a murderer whose feet are swift to shed blood. One only needs to look at human history, it is an invariable bloodbath and it is nonetheless a bloodbath today. All over the face of the earth on every continent there is the shedding of blood. Not only in individual acts of criminality but in corporate acts of criminality, national acts of criminality. Man is by nature a killer. We see it in the wars of the world. We see it in the terrorists actions of the world. We see it in the tribal battles. We see it everywhere. We see it on the streets of the cities of the world. Man is a killer.
The first crime recorded in the Bible is recorded in the book of Genesis chapter 4, Cain murdered his brother and he launched human life with that ignoble beginning.
Why does this happen? Let's turn to James chapter 4. James is an epistle in the New Testament. The Bible inspired by God comes to us in a series of books, 66 of them. Human authors writing under the inspiration of God recorded for us a true understanding of those things God wanted us to know. We come into the fourth chapter of the book of James and the question is posed to us, it's the very same question that we are asking, that our culture is asking, that our world is asking. The chapter begins like this, "What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you?" Why do these things happen? Why is there murder? Why is there war? Why are there quarrels and conflicts at every level?
The answer comes, "Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members?" Members simply refers to your person, your body, your nature. It is the pleasures inside of you that generate war. What is the source of quarrels? That's the Greek word polemos, it means a prolonged state of conflict. What is the source of conflict? That's mache, separate individual fights. What causes wars? What causes those separate fights and conflicts?
It comes down to this. It is your pleasures. The word hedone in the Greek from which we get Hedonism, what is Hedonism? It is the yearning of self-love, it is the yearning to fulfill what you want. A heedness to someone who lives for the fulfillment of his own self-love, he lives to satisfy himself, to get what he wants, to take what fulfills him. That's why wars happen because people want things and somebody stands in the way.
Verse 2 further develops it. "You lust and you don't have." That's the problem. You want it, you have this Hedonistic compulsion, this drive and it's thwarted. You want it. It's a war inside of you, that's how much you want it. And something is in the way and that something is a someone because you want it so badly and you can't have it, you commit murder. That's the reason, that's the natural reason...personal gratification out of control, unsatisfied so you commit murder. That's why people kill. They're not basically good, they're basically evil and if we didn't have laws and law enforcement, the whole of humanity would be killing itself wholesale all the time. People are driven by their own selfish desire, they're driven by their own need to fulfill their self-love. They're driven by a consuming Hedonism. They're driven by the desire for pleasure and satisfaction and fulfillment. And anyone in the way may have to be sacrificed to that desire.
You ask yourself, why does a mother drown her five children? Because they're in the way of her fulfillment. They're in the way of her satisfaction. Why did those people in Jedwambe(?) in Poland in one day massacre 1600 Jews in their village that they had lived with for a period of 300 years they had been living together, they worked together, they went to school together. In a two-week period they determined to move from being neighbors to being murderers, they killed all 1600 in one day. Why? Was it race? Was it the hatred of the Jewish race? No, they never were so propagandized, all that happened was the Germans came into the town and said you can kill them if you want and take their land and take their possession and take their farms...and they did it. Just give them permission. That's the human heart.
Why does a Russian young man in Sacramento kill his family? Because they stood in the way of his fulfillment. They stood in the way of his satisfaction. That's why people kill. Why does Hitler massacre the Jews? Because he saw them standing in the way of his Aryan supremacy. Why does Joseph Stalin massacre millions more? Because they stood in the way of his world empire. It may be as vast as that, it may be as simple as a mother who kills her children because she can't find satisfaction, they're in the way of it.
You can't have what you want...he goes on to say...and so verse 2 says, "You fight and you quarrel because you do not have something you want." And then he adds that amazing statement, "And you don't have what you want because you don't ask." Or you ask and you don't receive it because you ask with wrong motives that you can spend it on your own Hedonistic self-love.
That's why people kill because they want something and somebody stands in the way. Whether you kill on a small scale or you kill on a large scale, the wicked hearts of passionate people who will not be denied their pleasure kill to get it. That is the natural pathology of the human heart. Driven to extreme acts of murder by passions that are so consuming as to be on the border of madness.
So there's a natural motivation here. There's secondly a historical motivation. This introduces us to another category. In order to get to the heart of this we have to go back to the Middle East again, back to the Bible, back to the very origins of the nations and that puts us right back in the book of Genesis. So let's go there.
Genesis is the book of origins. Genesis means beginnings. It's the book of origins. And in Genesis 10 and 11 we have what we call the table of nations. If you look down through just as a glance at Genesis 10 you see all kinds of names, they're names of people and families and nations, tribes. You look in to chapter 11 starting in verse 10 and you find more genealogies of individuals who fathered families and people groups. This is early society as it developed from Noah. You remember God drowned the entire world, as recorded in chapters 6 through 9 of Genesis, and only saved eight people...Noah, his wife, his three sons and their three wives. Eight people came off the ark, repopulated the world. So you have in chapter 10 the generations that flowed from Noah through his three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth.
Japheth, the oldest son, fathered what are now known as the Indo-European people. From Japheth came those who live in Europe and all the way across to India and even across Russia and across the Bering Sea and in to North America and South America, the native peoples. And then Ham, we learn, fathered families in Africa and the Far East, the Asian world as well as some regions of the Middle East. And then that most well-known of the sons of Noah, Shem from whom came the Semitic people of the Mesopotamian valley, the Middle East as we know it, the Jewish people and the Arabic people. Shem's people lived north, south, east of the land of Israel. I don't want to over-simplify because Israel also came from Shem and so did these other Arabic peoples. I don't want to over simplify it because there are complexities and complications in understanding the history of the Middle East but I'm going to try to give you an understanding that is clear enough for you to get a grasp of what is going on.
Let's back up a little bit. When God created, He put Adam and Eve in a garden called the Garden of Eden. That garden was located in the Tigris/Euphrates valley which is the Mesopotamian valley, the heart of the Middle East. That is the original paradise of God, the very place where God walked and talked with Adam in the cool of the day, the very place where God put the Tree of Life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Today that is the center of the Arabic/Muslim world...the very place of Eden. It was there that the Tower of Babel was built, which invented world religions. It was there that later on the city of Babylon was built which is today in modern Iraq. It was there that Noah lived. It was there that Noah preached. It's very historic land. But when Abraham came along, God gave it all to him and his family. God gave to Abraham all the land from the Mediterranean coast through the depths of the Babylonian valley, gave it all to them, the entire Mesopotamian region.
Abraham was a son of a man named Terah. Terah was a moon god worshiper and the worship of the moon god was THE most popular form of idolatry apparently in the day of Abraham. There were two great centers of the worship of the moon god, one was a place called Ur down in the Persian Gulf in what is now Kuwait. And the other was Heron, way up in the north in the area of Iraq. And Abraham was born into a family of worshipers of the moon god in a place called Ur.
So this is a historical area, the land of the Middle East, the land of the Mesopotamian valley, the land of the 21 Arab states is the land of the beginnings of human history. It will also be important in the end. The prophets of the Bible tell us that the world is going to come to an end in a great conflagration and a great battle in that same place. Powers from the north are going to come. Powers from the south are going to come. A vast army of 200 million coming from the east and the power from the west all converging under the rule of Antichrist on the land of Israel, the focal point the Valley of Megiddo, but blood spilled clear across the entire land of Israel until Jesus comes and establishes His own Kingdom and destroys all the wicked and takes the righteous into His Kingdom. That is a very important piece of earth, none is more strategic.
Abraham fathered the Jewish people. In chapter 12 of Genesis God said to Abram, then called Abram, later called Abraham, "Go forth from your country, from your relatives, from your father's house to the land that I'll show you. I'll make you a great nation. I'll bless you, make your name great. So shall you be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and the one who curses you, I'll curse. And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." God said...you're My man, out of you is going to come My nation and that nation is going to bring about blessing on those who bless them and cursing on those who curse them. God gave to Abraham the promise that He would give him the land. Turn to chapter 15 verse 18, "On the day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, He said, 'To your descendants I have given this land from the river of Egypt...that's from the Nile in the south...as far as the great river, the Euphrates...that's east...through that fertile crescent, through that Mesopotamian valley, all the land of the Kenite, the Kenizzite, the Kadmonite, the Hittite, the Perizzite, the Rephaim, the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Girgashite, the Jebusite, everything from the Mediterranean coast deep into the Middle East. It's your land, I give it to you.'"
By divine right from the mouth of God Himself, the region belongs to Abraham and his seed. Unfortunately...unfortunately, Abraham brought massive confusion into that promise by having a legitimate son, Isaac, and an illegitimate son, Ishmael. We'll say more about that in a few moments.
At the time of Abraham, all those people that I just read to you were already existing in that land. They already occupied that land. So even though God gave it to Abraham, it was in the possession of those people. And in chapter 10, as I mentioned to you, of the book of Genesis you have all kinds of other people who were the sons of Shem, starting in chapter 10 verse 21, you have a whole listing of people and family groups and tribes and nations that existed as descendants of Shem that would have been around as well. So there were tribes and families and groups of people all over that part of the world. That was the most densely populated part of the world. In fact, at first it was the only populated part of the world because when the Flood was over there were only eight people and they started populating right there.
It wasn't long before Mizraim, it's an old name for Egypt, came into existence, before Aram, an old name for Syria, came into existence, before Asher, an old name for Assyria, came into existence. So there were all these tribes and families and clans and groups of people. They were all idolatrous. They were all rejecters of the true and living God, the Creator God. And when God gave the promise to Abraham that all of this land was his, there was a collision course established. In order for that land to belong to Abraham, God was going to have to give it to him and Abraham was going to have to be true to God. And if Abraham was true to God and obedient, God would give him the land. But if the descendants of Abraham were disobedient to God, they were going to have an endless battle trying to claim what was really theirs.
Was it just to judge those nations that had the land? Yes, because God is just in judging idol worship. The commandments begin, "You shall have no other...what?...gods before Me." Idolatry is to be judged by God always in every era. It is a just judgment for God to take away that precious land from those who turned their backs on Him and give it to a people who would love Him and serve Him. It just so happens too that the Middle East region is the richest land on the face of the earth. If you take it all together from the coastal riches of the Sharon Valley in Israel through to their immense riches that go right down the very spine of Israel, on in to the riches of the Dead Sea, on in to the massive riches of the oil treasures of the Middle East, the great riches to the north in the mountains of Lebanon, valuable timber, fertile plains of the Jordan Valley, unequalled productivity, incredible chemical wealth, as I said, in the Dead Sea, vast black gold of oil that stretches across the sands in the Babylonian valley, God gave it all to them. If they would be obedient to Him they would have that land.
So, the idolatrous people,
Unleashing God's Truth One Verse at a Time