Burning the Koran, and Other Unforgivable Sins
Ray was right!
Warning! This blog contains sarcasm. If you find sarcasm intolerable, please stop reading here and return to what you were doing.
First off, Pastor Terry Jones of Dove World Outreach Center, “a fundamentalist Christian church in Gainesville, Florida” is being very unwise in his decision to burn 200 copies of the Koran on September 11th. I am confident it will only serve to be a provocation of Muslims everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. But now Pastor Jones is committed to the event. And he’s in way over his head.
But secondly, how does a 58 year-old pastor of a 50 member, obscure little non-denominational Charismatic micro-church in Florida get the attention of the entire world overnight? By threatening to publicly insult and offend Muslim sensitivities. Only a Christian with such brazen, horrifying political incorrectness could garner this much attention this quickly.
Pastor Jones has appeared on ABC News and CNN and is being talked about on EVERY conceivable news outlet (including this almost totally insignificant one). He has gotten the attention of President Obama, Hillary Clinton, the FBI, Interpol, General David Petraeus, the Pope, the Muslim community in Kabul, the president of Indonesia, the Al-Faloja website, and just about every other spot on the planet where you can get a satellite signal or Morse code.
Local churches in Florida (and no doubt elsewhere) have begun to have inter-faith meetings to publicly renounce Pastor Jones’ actions as hate-mongering and Islamophobic. No doubt the incineration of the Koran will be the excuse millions of Muslims have been waiting for in order to burn down American embassies and kill American troops with whom they are currently working. This could indeed become the catalyst for a global disaster, all in the name of Allah, the merciful.
But then what?
We will see endless examples of groveling politicians and liberal Christian-type people with tear-stained cheeks, begging and pleading with the world to forgive all of us really ugly Americans for our national insensitivity and barbarism towards holy things like the Koran. Everyone from talk show hosts to mega-church televangelists will be feverishly trying to convince the Muslim world, the Hindu world, the Buddhist world, the Shinto world, the Hare Krishna world, the Wiccan world, the Atheist world, the Mormon world, and the local Masonic Lodge to please bear with those Bible-thumping, hate-filled, bigoted, nincompoops who don’t worship at the altar of humanistic political correctness as they ought. (And if Pastor Jones lives to see September 13th, I’ll be surprised.)
All of this national self-loathing for the sake of the kind and gentle Muslims of the world will be absolutely necessary because undoubtedly their psyches will have been irreparably damaged by the international telecast of the burning of 200 copies of the Koran by a “militant fundamentalist Christian”. The insensitivity of it all will push multitudes of peace-loving Muslims over the edge, against their peace-loving and tolerant wills, into the extremist Al Qaida terrorist camp. Suicide bombers will be blowing themselves to Paradise everywhere, and we Americans will have brought jihad upon ourselves once again. Surely we will deserve whatever we get in blowback from this barbaric, book-burning “militant”.
The unforgivable sin here is the burning of the Koran. Once this crime against Muslim humanity is committed, they certainly cannot be held responsible for their actions. Because of this completely unwarranted provocation, Muslims everywhere will be entirely justified in their destruction of properties and the murders of non-Muslim Americans and Christians everywhere. I mean, after all, who could blame them?
This one, obscure, foolish little shepherd of a couple dozen sheep in Florida will be single-handedly responsible for millions and millions of dollars in property damage, and who knows how many deaths. And all because he picked on the wrong people: the tolerant followers of peace-loving Islam. He simplistically thought he was being a patriotic American and faithful to his calling as a preacher of the Bible in the land of religious liberty. But instead, he will cause nothing but chaos and destruction worldwide. He should be ashamed of himself. Doesn’t he understand we all worship the same god?
And what about religious liberty in America? In particular, the religious liberty that is being loudly insisted upon when discussing the building of a 13-story, 100 million dollar mosque within sight of the two holes in the ground that used to be the World Trade Center. On September 11th, 2001, several spiritually devout, fine upstanding men of Middle Eastern descent who surely had no connection with Islam whatsoever, suddenly snapped, commandeered two airliners, and for reasons totally unknown to us Americans, flew them directly into the twin towers. Those poor, misguided men. I feel so bad for them. And (I almost forgot), 3500 Americans were murdered that day as well. But, lest we forget, we must keep repeating, “We brought this on ourselves! We brought this on ourselves! What were we thinking? We brought this on ourselves.” That’s what the imam at Ground Zero said, and he should know!
All hyperbole and sarcasm aside now, I want to ask a serious question: Have we indeed brought this upon ourselves?
There is a pattern in the biblical history of Israel that we see repeated over and over again. If one reads the Old Testament, it can’t be easily missed. This pattern is brought into high relief in the book of Judges, but it is also seen in the major and minor prophets as well. It goes like this:
1. God’s people, Israel, ignore God’s Law and pursue idolatry and the ways of the pagan nations around them (all those other people who aren’t God’s people, i.e. the Gentiles).
2. God calls Israel to repentance from idolatry, et al, but they ignore it.
3. God sends prophets to warn them of His indignation towards them because of their sins against Him, the worst being their whoring after other gods which are not gods at all since He is the one and only true God. But the people kill the prophets because they don’t like to be told they’re wrong. They insist upon freedom of religion in order to worship whoever and whatever, as they please.
4. Finally, God decides to send an army of Israel’s enemies against them (Philistines, Ammonites, Assyrians, Babylonians, etc., etc., etc.) to chasten them and bring them to repentance. Sometimes this results in years of bondage in slavery and subservience to other kings and nations.
5. After decades of misery because of their unfaithfulness to God and His Law, He eventually hears their cries for deliverance and sends a man and/or an army to set them free. A savior of sorts.
6. The people rejoice in their redemption from their oppressors and turn back to God. Briefly.
7. Return to #1 and repeat.
I agree with John MacArthur: America is not, nor has it ever been a Christian nation. And we certainly aren’t the reincarnation of Old Testament Israel. Nations are not Christian. People are Christians. However, our nation was undeniably built upon Christian principles and (more or less) biblical foundations which have been systematically and relentlessly removed from our society over the past 100 years or so. Now, what we have is a nation that does indeed worship at the invisible altar of Political Correctness. We have become a nation that fears offending people more than God. We have rejected the idea of absolute truth, replaced it with absolute relativism, and we worship the creature (ourselves) rather than what's-his-name, our supposed creator whom Stephen Hawking has recently declared to be “unnecessary” since we can now explain everything with science.
Is it any wonder we’re surrounded on every side, and even confronted within our own borders by innumerable enemies?
Whatever bad things happen in the coming days and years, I fear we really may have brought it upon ourselves. If God is still just, and if many of us in America today still want to consider ourselves to be a Christian nation while simultaneously showing God the door, then whatever is coming down the pike is surely being sent by God to bring us down from our mindless “God Bless America” pedestals, and onto our knees in repentance. America has burned the Bible. While this may not be literally unforgivable, it is inexcusable. We have brought God’s judgment upon ourselves, and that judgment will begin with the house of God, the Church. Islam may be the tool He uses to exact that judgment.
