The debacle in Afghanistan has been heartbreaking to watch over the last few days. People dropping from planes as they try futility to hang on for dear life, bodies discovered in wheel wells of planes, children being thrown over razor wire to soldiers on the other side in hopes of being sparred a life under Taliban rule. A rule that, thanks to American soldiers, NATO allies, Afghani nationals, and contracted workers, has been non-existent for 20 years. Since America went to war in Afghanistan in response to the attacks on 9/11, they have kept the Islamic terrorists regime, known as the Taliban, from taking back power in Afghanistan and harboring other Islamic terrorists groups like Al Qaeda who, led by Osama Bin Laden, perpetrated the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, the Pentagon in Washington DC, and the failed attempt on the White House that resulted in the brave actions of the passengers of Flight 93.
Those events burn in my memory like no others as I watched them unfold on my television that Tuesday morning, three days before my 21st birthday. People leaping from 100 story buildings to avoid burning to death, the phone calls to relatives from planes to say goodbye, the aforementioned bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 to take back their plane and prevent further devastation, and the heroic first-responders who ran into those Towers in hopes of saving as many people as they could before those same buildings horrifically crumpled to the ground. For my generation 9/11 is the event that shook us from adolescence to adulthood. The soldiers that became the character studies for my favorite movies from that period were my age. Their lives ever changed by their desire to serve their country and defend the honor of this great nation from savages who despise our freedoms and our way of life. One of my greatest regrets is that I was not one of them. I trust in God's providence to know that had He intended for me to take that path, then that is exactly the path I would have taken, but I will always live with the "what-if's".
Watching everything unfold this week has brought a fresh sense of pain to my heart and mind as I have reflected on those events now almost 20 years ago. I began pastoring less than one month after that day, I got married a few months afterwards, and in the last twenty years God has blessed my wife and I with seven children in the midst of many moves and pastoring five different churches. Yet, as I have watched the events in Afghanistan unfold this week, I am greatly disturbed by the continual trend that I have witnessed over the last twenty years of the growing rejection of objective truth and the foundational destruction of a clear standard of morality. What we are all witnessing in this country and abroad is the consequences of secular ideology and a humanistic worldview coming to bear.
Now, I know that many detractors will say that my rational is a leap too far, but once we understand that ideas, both good and bad, have significant consequences, then perhaps you will be able to see what I am talking about. Ultimately, our problems are spiritual in nature. Your greatest problem, just like my greatest problem is sin. And not just sin in the abstract, but our individual sins are our greatest problems. If you are a believer in the Gospel of the Bible, the sins I am referring to are the sins you must come to terms with and acknowledgement of to rightly understand the vicarious death of Christ on the cross for those sins and in your place of judgment in regards to those sins. Those are the sins you must be turning from (repentance) both instantly and continually, because of their soul-killing design to keep you separated from God and His good grace. However, because sin has so infected the world and everything in it, like a devastating disease much worse than Covid-19 or its variants could ever be, the consequences of our collective sins have affected our hearts and minds in ways we can not even imagine. Sin, and its infectious results, has thrown this world into moral chaos. It has left spiritually dead and blind people asking all of life's grand questions, yet never coming up with any real or satisfying answers, because the ability to know and be known have been made even more complicated by, you guessed it, sin.
That is why an event like what has happened in Afghanistan is so unique in its ability to get almost universal agreement in its horrendous outcome. Everyone watching can see that it was done almost intentionally haphazardly. It so boarders on the grossly incompetent that its hard to imagine how anyone did not mean it to go so poorly. Journalist imbedded in the region have been warning for weeks and months about the impending fall of the nation at the hands of the resurging Taliban, yet no one in leadership seemed to care. Bagram AFB which would have been ideal for evacuating all non-essential and essential personnel before a complete troop withdraw would have been the ideal place to orchestrate that project, yet it was closed down and all contractors and military persons sent home. The backbone of the Afghan army, US air support and intelligence, taken away or sent home; leaving the Afghan army unable to fight as they had been trained by the US. And the slanderous words against the Afghan army about not willing to fight, also proven to be false when one considers that since 2014, when President Obama made great cuts in our troop presence in the country, over 50,000 of their troops have died in conflicts with the Taliban. This year alone they had suffered somewhere around 2,000 deaths, while the US had not suffered a casualty in Afghanistan since February 2020, nearly a year and a half ago. Even with a force of only 2,500 American troops, we were still able to keep the Taliban from attempting to take over Afghanistan and help the Afghanis to continue to make their country safe and build a stable and lasting government. Christians were free to worship, women were free to exist, and children able to enjoy life.
Now that is all gone. For the first time in 20 years Afghanistan will be a host to Islamic terrorism, and a country that sits in the middle of a strategic area, boarding Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and China, has been turned back over to a people who joyfully shout, "Death to America." From a strictly strategic mind, the decision makes little to no sense. Even if you are someone who falls on the "endless war" side of the debate, the fact that Americans were not dying there, and were still able to keep a strong watch over a good number of our other enemies should warrant enough reason to stay. Now, to go back in will mean full-scale war and American loss of life. That potential certainly still exists since Americans and our allies have been trapped behind the Taliban lines at this point. How could we have let such a debacle take place? How could we have abandoned friends, colleagues, countrymen so callously? The answer is our lack of moral order and the rejection of objective truth.
This is not the first time American government leaders have engaged in such cowardice and morally offensive behavior personally or on the global stage. We have always struggled with our morality both as a nation and as individuals, and we will continue to do so until the Lord returns. Yet, the degradation of our moral collapse has not smacked us in the face like it has recently. For Christians our constant fight in the culture wars has been mocked for some time. Our fight against issues like abortion on demand, homosexual marriage, transgenderism, and all the rest, has been characterized as bigoted and hatred towards people more than a fight for the soul of America. And, granted, in some of the ways we have pursued these issues there has been a lack of love and care for the hurting and the broken. It truly is the complexity of being a Christian in a world gone mad, because we truly believe we have the greatest news anyone would ever want to hear (and desperately needs to hear), and yet the way we communicate that message can be incredibly off-putting and offensive to the very ones who need to hear it. We can come across as people more concerned with imposing a standard of morality, than wanting to see hearts and minds changed by the Gospel. Legalism, a call to self-righteousness as the means of God's approval, is often what is heard by people, rather than the Free Grace of Christ that changes people by its power. That is what makes the balance of these things so difficult.
Christians know, or at least they should know, that there is a moral standard that God holds all people to, and that is the moral standard that He has set forth in His Holy Word. The clearest of these standards are seen in The Ten Commandments, but of course there is a much larger communication of God's law throughout the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, that deal with God's overall plans for national Israel as they make plans to take over the Promised Land and become a new nation fulfilling much of the promises that God had made to Abraham. Some of these laws are misunderstood and mocked today as being outdated, controversial, or just plain barbaric. They are not understood in light of their original audience, context, or the sensible guidance they were providing for a people called to live radically different than the people that would be around them. Israel designed to be a beacon of hope to the world not only as the people of God, but also as the people that were to be a blessing to the Nations for the Glory of God. Their national distinctives served as a contrast between them and the rest of the peoples. It did not make them better in any sense of superiority, but it did make them separate. What plagued Israel, as well as what plagues the people of God today, is that we do not always like being different. Like Israel, we too, become embarrassed by the standards of living God has set for us, or we see the standards not as guard rails, but as self-defining markers for boasting in our own self-righteousness. That is why we shrink back form telling others, and ourselves, what God's standard for you, your family, your church, your work, your play, and your government is because we fear not living up to that standard ourselves, or that it's somehow not necessary to live by God's standard today.
That is why if someone wants to understand the lack of morality that we see today in all areas of life, first they need to understand the churches' unwillingness to stress a true moral standard for fear of being labeled "legalist," "fundamentalist," or "extremist." Second, they also need to understand the moral relativism of the secular culture that has come from the Enlightenment period until now, emphasizing personal autonomy at the cost of personal responsibility. These two things coupled together have lead us to where we are today. Unsure of which direction to go. Unsure of how to communicate objective truth or a right moral standard. We look to our leaders and we see people void of truth-telling and lack any sense of moral obligations whatsoever and we dismiss the project out of hand. However, the people of God never have this excuse for not carrying out what we believe to be morally right and truthful. We have an obligation to these things above everything else. If we truly are believers in Christ as LORD, then we have been freed from sin and shame to live honest and pure lives in this fallen world. We have a responsibility to speak out about immorality and to tell people that God will hold everyone accountable for their sins one day, and that includes governments.
No longer can we allow political leaders to embrace immorality and turn a blind eye. This was not the practice of believers in either the Old or New Testament. The Old Testament is filled with examples of prophets holding bad leaders accountable, not just in Israel or Judah, but even in the surrounding nations. And the New Testament is just as clear with John the Baptist serving as the clearest example of someone willing to call out the sins of the Gentile ruler, Herod the tetrarch. Of course that does not mean that this is all Christians should be doing, especially as a means of trying to perfect this fallen world, but we do bear a responsibility to hold those given the sword to not use or abuse that God granted right for immorality or the furthering of evil.
The events that unfolded in Afghanistan this week were indeed evil. They were chaotic scenes brought about by the immoral handling of the situation overall. President Biden had a moral responsibility to withdraw our armed forces in a way that would guarantee the protection of the most vulnerable first and then the rest of those who had been promised safe passage next until all the equipment and soldiers were ready to head home. That should have been the scenario if you believed in a full-withdraw from the country. Another scenario might have been the continued presence of a minimal amount of American soldiers who could have continued to support and aid the Afghan military and their efforts to keep their country out of the hands of terrorists. This also would have allowed America to keep its promises to her allies, and maintain a presence in a country that is in a strategic area concerning other nations and regions in the world that do not like us, and seemed very intent on causing us harm. The anti-war crowd may not like to admit it, but we live in a fallen world where nations and bad organizations seek to cause trouble for others. They hate us because of our morals and freedoms. They hate us because of our views on equality of opportunity. The do not believe a nation like ours deserves to continue on, and even if that idea might be shared by some in our own halls of Congress or the White House, America is still the land of the free and the home of the brave.
We cannot continue to sit by and watch the decay happen around us without a fight. The Church must be the light that we have always been intended to be. If we will preach the Gospel, make disciples, love our enemies, and seek peace with all, then we can demonstrate to those around us what a true Biblical Worldview is all about. We can show them how we expect husbands and wives, moms and dads, family and friends, and even neighbors and strangers to get along. We can get back to a shared moral understanding of how to love and care for one another, while also respecting individual freedom and liberty. From there we can also hold our government accountable to live up to its purpose in existing. Before our Founders ever set pen to paper, God almighty bestowed upon His creation rights that transcend governments. These rights do not come from governments but are the responsibility of governments to protect and keep safe for generations. When these rights are put at risk or infringed upon, it is the duty of the government to take up the sword in protection of its people. It must rightly punish the guilty and seek and defeat those who commit such acts. Government does not get the chance to co-op these duties out to other sources, anymore than the church gets to sell its responsibilities to parachurch ministries. The institutions God has established from the beginning must serve in the capacities He has ordained, because that, too, is their moral obligation in faithfulness to the Holy God.
Father God, forgive me for not living faithfully in conformity to your rule and authority. Forgive me for using me liberty as an excuse to sin, more than as freedom to obey your faithfully. Forgive me for not being bold and courageous in the face of opposition, but instead shrinking back and avoiding confrontation. Forgive me, LORD, for not valuing the institutions of Family, Church, and Government the way you have ordained them to work and function for all people whom you have made. God, use your Church to be a beacon of Hope and Light, making disciples of all peoples from all places on this earth. God, use good governments to protect the rights you have bestowed upon all of your people, and help them to wisely administer the sword upon those who seek to hurt, harm, or kill the lives that you have created in your image. Heavenly Father, may the families of this earth recognize you as God alone, and your Son, Jesus, as the only Savior and LORD of all the earth. May they all come to the recognition of their sins and shortcomings before a Holy God, and may they see your love and light in the person and work of Jesus, and once your Holy Spirit has brought new life to their dead hearts, may they call out in saving faith to Christ Alone for His all-sufficient grace. May your Gospel and Greatness and Wonder and Power be made known to all the Families of the earth through your Church now and forevermore, in Jesus name, Amen!
May God bless His Church. May God bless our troops. May God bless our country. May God bless the world. Amen!
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