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DUAL CITIZENSHIP #
“HOO-AHH!”
What does a Christian do when faced with a moral choice – and both forks in the road seem to lead to conflict? No matter what you do, you’re in trouble. I mentioned yesterday a young Christian soldier, burrowed down in the mud of Vietnam, watching as an enemy sniper picked off his Army mates one by one. Clearly, the Bible tells us to protect life, that the existences of his fellow Americans was a sacred thing. But the only way to protect THEIR lives was to take the life of the Viet Cong enemy soldier in that tree . . . a smooth-faced, starving young man who very well might have left behind a teenaged widow and baby daughter in a village back home as well. But you’re in a hard place where somebody is going to die – what does God’s man do then?
Our title this week is a tough one: DUAL CITIZENSHIP. In the past few days we’ve celebrated Canada Day and the Fourth of July, and we want to think together about what it takes to obey both Uncle Sam and the King of kings. And what do we do when the gentle Jesus seems to have given us two different sets of orders . . . and you can’t do both simultaneously?
For example: it’s very plain in Isaiah 58:6 that all of God’s people have a particular task to fulfill here on earth. Here it is:
“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter – when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?”
That’s very black-and-white, isn’t it? If you see a person being mistreated, being held in real or economic or political chains, you aren’t supposed to simply pass by on the other side of the road, as the neo-isolationist bigwigs did in Luke 10. No, you’re supposed to stop and break the yoke: to get rid of the oppressor, to depose the tyrant, to banish the brutal dictator.
But then comes this corollary reality: there are some oppressors who won’t stop oppressing unless you put a gun to their head. Or fly an F-117 right at their presidential palace with a full payload of cluster bombs. And aren’t Christians supposed to stay away from tools of murder and the now well-known WMD – weapons of mass destruction? At the height of the “shock and awe” campaign, Newsweek did a story on Baghdad’s “Dirty Nine,” the top nine offenders in Iraq’s soon-to-be-toppled regime. “They would not last if they were not brutal enough to satisfy Saddam,” reported one Arab intelligence chief. “When you meet with them they brag about this. They don’t hide it. The more people they’ve killed, the more ‘credible’ they are.” In other words, bombs and bullets are the only way to make these people stop.
So if the only good Saddam Hussein is a dead Saddam Hussein, but the sixth commandment says “Thou shalt not kill,” then how can an army of Christians set the captives free? This is a question that, as always happens when good people go to war, gets to buzzing in the corridors of the church basement and now in the Internet chat rooms. Does the Prince of Peace permit His own followers to push the laptop computer buttons that unleash cruise missiles from Navy ships? President George W. Bush is both a born-again evangelical believer and also the Commander-in-Chief of all United States armed forces. How can he successfully do both?
Decades ago, a young Christian had personally experienced the devastation of World War I as a soldier fighting in the British army. Now a brilliant writer and apologist for the faith, this former combat veteran, “Jack,” better known as C. S. Lewis, had this to say:
“Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment – even to death.” And notice this illustration: “If one had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged. It is, therefore, IN MY OPINION, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy. I have always thought so, ever since I became a Christian, and long before the war, and I still think so now that we are at peace.”
Well, hold on to your bazooka, listeners. Are you thinking about the sixth commandment just like I am? And “turn the other cheek”? Lewis reads our minds and goes right to that question. Here’s how he continues the essay from Mere Christianity:
“It is no good quoting ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ There are two Greek words: the ordinary word to kill and the word to murder. And when Christ quotes that commandment He uses the murder one in all three accounts, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And I am told there is the same distinction in Hebrew. All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery. When soldiers came to St. John the Baptist asking what to do, he never remotely suggested that they ought to leave the army: nor did Christ when He met a Roman sergeant-major – what they called a centurion. The idea of the knight – the Christian in arms for the defense of a good cause – is one of the great Christian ideas. War is a dreadful thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he is entirely mistaken. What I cannot understand is this sort of semipacifism you get nowadays which gives people the idea that though you have to fight, you ought to do it with a long face and as if you were ashamed of it. It is that feeling that robs lots of magnificent young Christians in the Services of something they have a right to, something which is the natural accompaniment of courage – a kind of gaiety and wholeheartedness.”
That’s a lot to think about, isn’t it? And again, friend, a hard issue like war and a believer’s participation in it is something we have to address very gently. Yesterday I mentioned how, in that Adventist Review article, Bill Knott paid a Memorial Day tribute to the young Seventh-day Adventist soldiers who went into the killing fields. Some bore arms; others didn’t. But the Church needed to pray for all of them and support them.
“They paid a price,” he writes, “I pray my sons will never have to pay. Thirty years later, with all my heart, I salute them.”
What we can also do is to prayerfully and obediently follow
the commands of Jesus that are plainly set before us. In every case, we can love one another. Even if an enemy here at home is abusing you or taking advantage of you in the workplace, you can love that person as Christ did. The Bible doesn’t tell us to turn the cheeks of innocent children in Iraq, but it does tell us to turn our own cheek, to sometimes accept unfairness without complaining, to submit ourselves to humility for the greater good of God’s kingdom.
I’ve wandered into lunchroom discussions here at the Voice of Prophecy where some of our staff members were debating the death penalty – more in terms of its political effectiveness as a deterrent than from a biblical perspective – since capital punishment is found all through God’s Word. But I think the Word of God does share this one concept: a child of God may stand outside the gates of Death Row. Now, maybe they are there with a “PRO” sign, or maybe a “CON” sign. But one thing they should not have is a “CHEER” sign. We should not exult at the sober carrying out of a sentence. We shouldn’t jeer and shout epithets or caricature our opponent as something less than a person created in God’s image.
It seems there will always be war and turmoil in the world. And the outcome isn’t always clear-cut for everyone. The suffering brought on by conflict will be with us until Jesus returns to put an end to war once-and-for-all. Realizing this, King Solomon – whose name means “Peaceable,” was philosophical: Ecclesiastes chapter three tells us that there is a time for war, and yes, there’s even a time for the right kind of good hate, of protective, godly, defensive, “just-war” anger and retaliation. And yet there’s an extra layer of mature thoughtfulness, of conscientious quiet, that a man or woman of God will undergo after a military victory, whether you’re the Commander-in-Chief, a general in the field, a soldier in the bombed-out neighborhoods of An Nasiriya or Kirkuk, or an anxious parent back home. War is an evil thing. Sometimes a necessary tool, but still an evil necessity. Satan loves wars. God permits them. Let’s never think that bombs and nuclear weapons are ideas that were thought up in heaven.
And friend, in your own neighborhood, your family, the place where you work, the relationships that God has allowed you to be a part of . . . I pray that He’ll allow you to exhibit the best kind of “dual citizenship.” Be a good spouse because you’re part of the Body of Christ. Be a gentle, strong parent because you yourself have a perfect heavenly Father. Be a salt-of-the-earth part of your flawed-but-beloved nation – whether it’s Canada, the U.S., or wherever you’ve been blessed to live – because you faithfully love THIS home . . . and even more, the home to come.
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