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A Biblical Perspective on Death, Terrorism, and the Middle East
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 wri |