Necessary Roughness

I’ve received this particular message twice now. Whether or not Anne Graham Lotz said it, and I can’t find a record of it on the CBS Early Show, it’s theology that requires examination.

Here is the message:

In light of the many perversions and jokes we send to one another for a laugh, this is a little different: This is not intended to be a joke, it’s not funny, it’s intended to get you thinking.

Billy Graham’s daughter was interviewed on the Early Show and Jane Clayson asked her “How could God let something like this happen?” (regarding the attacks on Sept. 11).

Anne Graham gave an extremely profound and insightful response. She said, “I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we’ve been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives.

And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed out. How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave us alone?”

In light of recent events…terrorists attack, school shootings, etc. I think it started when Madeleine Murray O’Hare (she was murdered, her body found recently) complained she didn’t want prayer in our schools, and we said OK.

Then someone said you better not read the Bible in school . the Bible says thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as yourself. And we said OK.

Then Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn’t spank our children when they misbehave because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem (Dr. Spock’s son committed suicide). We said an expert should know what he’s talking about. And we said OK.

Now we’re asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don’t know right from wrong, and why it doesn’t bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves.

Probably, if we think about it long and hard enough, we can figure it out. I think it has a great deal to do with “WE REAP WHAT WE SOW.”

Funny how simple it is for people to trash God and then wonder why the world’s going to hell. Funny how we believe what the newspapers say, but question what the Bible says.

Funny how you can send ‘jokes’ through e-mail and they spread like wildfire but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing.

Funny how lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene articles pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion of God is suppressed in the school and workplace.

Are you laughing?

Funny how when you forward this message, you will not send it to many on your address list because you’re not sure what they believe, or what they WILL think of you for sending it. Funny how we can be more worried about what other people think of us than what God thinks of us.

Pass it on if you think it has merit. If not then just discard it… no one will know you did. But, if you discard this thought process, don’t sit back and complain about what bad shape the world is in!!

So let me get this straight. 15 Muslims abducted our hardware and slammed our planes, killing 3000+ people, because:

1. we don’t pray in school,
2. we don’t read the Bible in school,
3. we don’t spank our kids,
4. we “trash God”, send dirty jokes, and use obscene language?

If we become more Biblical, that is supposed to make non-believers hate us less? We have not reversed any of this behavior, yet thankfully we have yet to see more people of Saudi citizenship commander public or semi-public transportation and crash it into population centers. We just might be doing something temporally more effective to prevent those kinds of things.

Are we to do good so that we ward off the next bombing or divert the next hurricane? Be good, or else?

Tragedy can be blamed on man, but not the ones Anne Graham is thinking of. Sin entered the world through one man (Romans 5:12). From then on we are doomed to suffer here and die, until the end times. This week there have been plenty of reasons for Christians to obey God’s commands. Disaster aversion isn’t one of them.

God’s rules do make sense in society: don’t steal, don’t kill, keep families nuclear with one man and one woman loving each other, don’t lie, don’t covet other people’s stuff. Unfortunately your following the rules doesn’t guarantee that you won’t suffer from someone (or some thing) not following “the rules”.