100 Sermon Illustrations on War

(Twain apparently dictated “The War Prayer” around 1904-05 in protest of the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902; it was found after his death among his unpublished manuscripts. The actual prayer is also sometimes seen in poem form.)

The War Prayer

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

Sunday morning came -- next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams -- visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and fiends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or , failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation

*God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest!

Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!*

Then came the “long” prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory --

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued with his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, “Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!”

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside -- which the startled minister did -- and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

“I come from the Throne -- bearing a message from Almighty God!” The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. “He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import -- that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of -- except he pause and think.

“God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two -- one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this -- keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

“You have heard your servant's prayer -- the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it -- that part which the pastor -- and also you in your hearts- -fervently prayed silently. And ignorantlyy and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!’ That is sufficient. the *whole* of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory -- *must* follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

(*After a pause.*) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!”

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

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Courtesy of Stephen N Orso

*

[Original illustration at this number was moved to HolwickID #16635]

On most days on BreakPoint, you'll hear examples of how we are trying to resist the cultural slide and maintain our witness against formidable odds -- often bad news.

That's why I'm happy for this broadcast -- some good news -- a case of our leaders working hard to honor the principles that came down to us through the Christian tradition.

Wednesday, I attended a meeting called by my old friend Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense. He had invited a dozen or so religious leaders -- one imam, one rabbi, the rest Christians, mainline and evangelical -- to the Pentagon. The purpose was an open, no holds barred, discussion of the moral limits on war -- what is the Just War doctrine. The fact that the Secretary of Defense would demonstrate sensitivity to these concerns was in itself heartening, but even more heartening were the presentations given by the Pentagon officials.

The Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Admiral Thomas Wilson, told us how targets in the war in Afghanistan are determined. His briefing was straight out of the Just War tradition, emphasizing the importance of proportionality and avoiding civilian casualties. He told us that they use just enough ordnance to do the job but not enough to cause collateral damage.

The enemy, he said, often uses innocent civilians as "human shields" around key leaders or targets. Then he added that we choose not to hit those targets because it's not moral to take out civilians even in the pursuit of important targets.

And this policy hasn't been without cost. Pilots have complained about lost opportunities created by our insistence on protecting civilians.

Dr. Joseph Collins then gave a heart-rending account of our extraordinary efforts to provide relief to suffering Afghanis. I was impressed by the Pentagon's humanitarian concerns.

Rumsfeld himself spoke for only ten minutes. "I didn't come to talk," he said, "I came to listen." In the discussion that followed, he was, as always, quick, bright, and engaged.

When I asked Rumsfeld about the sensitive question of preemptive strikes, he quickly responded with the example of the Israeli attack on the Iraqi nuclear power plant in 1981, an example most Christians believe to have been a just use of force. Our lively dialogue made it clear that Rumsfeld had thought deeply about the moral questions and was committed to prosecuting this war against terrorism in a way consistent with the Just War doctrine.

The only less-than-satisfactory answer was when the Secretary repeated the administration's line about the terrorists "hijacking" Islam, a "peaceful religion." I can understand the political necessity to say this, but I suggest that my old friend read Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations for a different take on Islam's problems with the West.

Listening to Pentagon officials describe a battle plan that could have been formulated by St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas was encouraging beyond description. I can't remember ever attending a meeting in Washington quite like this.

It was also a reminder of how much our culture and society owes to Christianity. Just War is an idea that came to the West from Christianity. Despite the rise of secularism, when America wants to know the right thing to do, it turns to Christianity.

We can thank God that we see Christian truths being lived out in, of all places, the Pentagon by men and women who are prosecuting a just war by just standards.

More:

Samuel p. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Touchstone, 1998).

BreakPoint's fact sheet on Just War theory has been updated with additional reading. [see HolwickID #21914]

Transcripts of Secretary Rumsfeld's prayer at the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance and speech at the October 11 Memorial Service for those lost at the Pentagon on September 11.

_________________________

Copyright © 2001 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. 'BreakPoint with Chuck Colson' is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

JUST WAR PRINCIPLES AND COUNTERTERRORISM

The atrocities of September 11 and the subsequent public response should force Christians of all denominations and theological persuasions to return once again to the fundamentals of moral reflection on the use of military force. The first fundamental that they ought to consider is this: There are two, and only two, responsible ways for Christians to think about the use of military force. For shorthand, I’ll call this classic pacifism and classic just war.

The classic just war position needs no extended exposition for this gathering. It was clearly summarized and articulated by Thomas Aquinas, and for all intents and purposes was adopted by the Reformers as well as the early modern Protestant and Catholic natural law theorists. Thomas held that three requirements are necessary to morally justify the resort to force: legitimate authority, just cause, and right intention. By legitimate authority he insisted, in line with the Biblical witness (citing Romans 13:1-6) and medieval thought, that force was to be employed as a public act by a sovereign political authority. Sovereign political authority means that there is no superior political authority to which aggrieved citizens can appeal. This means that the resort to war is normatively part and parcel of the coercive power of the law itself in its capacity to act on behalf of a political community that has been seriously wronged. In short, the political decisions on whether to resort to war (jus ad bellum) and the art of war itself (jus in bello) were a part of the art of statecraft. This, as we shall see, is most relevant to the current situation.

The criterion of just cause classically and explicitly included one or more of three possibilities: defense against wrongful attack, retaking something wrongly taken, or punishment of evil. (Following the Westphalian settlement the classic possibilities were reduced almost entirely in international law to defense against wrongful attack. But that is a long story that need not detain us here.) Right intention negatively meant that war should not be undertaken with a lust for battle, personal glory, bloodlust etc. Positively, right intention insists that the aim is to bring about peace, not a utopian peace but a tranquility of order.

As the tradition developed, other "criteria" (if that is the right word) were added to the jus ad bellum as prudential considerations to guide statesmen when they considered the use of force: Is there a reasonable chance for success? Will the overall good exceed the harm done (proportionality)? Have other means to redress a harm been attempted or are they possible (last resort)?

The classic pacifist position is, I think, best expressed in the Schleitheim Articles of 1527, widely regarded as the theological consolidation of Anabaptism. The sixth article articulates and summarizes this pacifism:

...It is asked about the sword, whether a Christian may hold a

position of governmental authority if he is chosen for it.

This is our reply: Christ should have been made a king, but he

rejected this (John 6:15) and did not view it as ordained by

his father. We should do likewise and follow him. In this

way we will not walk into the snares of darkness.... Also,

Christ himself forbids the violence of the sword and says,

‘Worldly princes rule,’ etc, ‘but not you.' (Matt. 20:25)

Nor, they continued, is it

"fitting for a Christian to be a magistrate" because the

authorities’ governance is according to the flesh, but the

Christian’s is according to the spirit. Their houses and

dwellings remain in this world, but the Christian’s is in

heaven. Their weapons of conflict and war are carnal and only

directed against the fortifications of the devil. Worldly

people are armed with spikes and iron, but Christians are

armed with the armor of God."

It is worth noting, first, that the prohibition against Christians wielding the sword was part and parcel of the prohibition against holding political office. However, secondly, this prohibition was accompanied, indeed it was preceded by, a recognition that public authorities had a mandate from God to do what they as Christians were prohibited from doing:

Concerning the sword we have reached the following agreement: The sword is ordained by God outside the perfection of Christ. It punishes and kills people and protects and defends the good. In the law the sword is established to punish and to kill the wicked, and secular authorities are established to use it.

When is the last time you heard a modern pacifist, say, from the Mennonite Central Committee, talk like that? (They don’t make pacifists like they used to.)

Now, this position was a distinctly minority view among the reformers, for very good and compelling theological reasons, I might add. (I don’t have the time to bore you with the details.) The point I want to make is that the fundamental distinction between classic pacifism and classic just war thought was not over whether or not public authorities were authorized to punish evildoers by death and waging war if necessary. The Biblical witness was simply too perspicuous for them to doubt this. The issue between them and both the magisterial Reformers and Roman Catholicism was more precisely over whether Christians may legitimately hold a political office. That political authority could legitimately employ lethal force and coercion was simply acknowledged and accepted.

The second fundamental point to be considered concerns the assertions made by contemporary academic guild "ethicists" and some ecclesiastical authorities. They assert that the just war tradition is really a form of "crypto-pacifism" (Philip Wogaman), or that it shares with pacifism a "prima-facie" opposition to the use of force (James Childress), or that it shares with pacifism a common presumption against force or violence (The Challenge of Peace). These assertions should be rejected root and branch, along with academic fads such as "just peacemaking." Such attempts at synthesis must of logical necessity fundamentally distort both traditions and render them logically, morally, and theologically incoherent.

Practically speaking, these hybrids cannot do the work that the just war tradition is precisely designed to do: to provide moral guidance to political leaders as they consider the resort to force, and provide guidance to military planners as they plan the conduct of the war and prosecute it. Nor can it provide guidance for responsible Christian citizenship. As a result, church leaders and theologians, those whose very office is to provide moral clarity in times such as these, do more to contribute to the moral obtuseness among Christian citizens than to relieve it.

Here, let me relate to you the following sent to a colleague by a senior justice department lawyer.

I was listening to Don Kroah on [radio station] WAVA yesterday

and heard his interview with Keith Pavlischek about just war

principles. I appreciated the discussion because I have been

participating in a lot of meetings and religious services

recently where some have asserted that the command to turn the

other cheek precludes Christians from supporting a war against

those who attacked us. At a family retreat last weekend one

woman almost walked out when I said I didn't think Jesus had a

terrorist attack in mind when he preached the Sermon on the

Mount. That's why I especially appreciated Keith's succinct

application of just war principles to the evil of terrorism.

This woman’s reaction is increasingly common. Why is this so common? Contemporary moral reflection by "ethicists" and church leaders has failed to clarify and outline the normative duty and responsibility of public officials who are, in the words of the Apostle Paul, "God’s servant[s], agent[s] of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer." (Rom.13:4b NIV)

Again, recall that the classic pacifists did not deny this was the duty of political authorities. It is precisely on this point, that one finds the "point of contact" between the two classic traditions, and it is most relevant to the war against terrorism. The point of contact cannot be located in a purported common agreement about a "presumption against war" or the claim that the just war tradition is really "crypto-pacifist," or that they share a "prima facie" opposition to force (as if Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin and Suarez need to be tutored by the moral philosophy of W.D. Ross.) Rather, the similarity lies in the fact that for both the classic pacifist and classic just warrior, political authorities are not only permitted by God to wield the sword for the sake of justice, order and peace, but are required to do so by God Himself, whether or not they personally acknowledge God as the ultimate source of their authority to do so.

It is, in fact, the near emasculation of the criteria of legitimate authority in contemporary ethical reflection on the use of force that renders so many Christian citizens incapable of serious and sustained moral reflection in response to a terrorist threat. As I’ve suggested elsewhere, the profound evil in terrorism is not to be located merely in the fact that so many innocent noncombatants were killed. In fact, to locate that as the sole evil is to make a fatal concession. After all, the notion of noncombatant immunity is a part of the jus in bello and the notion of guilt and innocence is a legal one that holds in a state of war between two political communities. To fully understand the evil of terrorism we must consider it in the context of the very point which classic pacifism and classic just warriors most profoundly agree -- only legitimate public authority has the right to wage war.

It is not insignificant that in addressing whether war could be waged justly, Aquinas began with the issue of legitimate authority, citing as Biblical support Romans 13:1-6. Thomas was articulating nothing new here. Beginning with Augustine, and throughout the Middle Ages, Christians sought to curb violence by emphasizing that only sovereign political authority could wage war. They thereby declared illegitimate any use of force by subordinate nobles, private soldiers, criminals and even the Church. Eventually, when confronted with a militaristic Germanic culture in which princes frequently engaged and glorified in combat for private ends, Christian thinkers repeatedly insisted that warfare was a public issue. War could not merely be an extreme tool of private parties but had to be a legal instrument, a part of the coercive power of law itself. Historically and theoretically, securing the public monopoly on the use of force was a necessary (albeit not sufficient) precondition for a peaceful and civilized society. Even the pacifists of the radical Reformation recognized this.

The freelance terrorism of the late twentieth and now the twenty-first century is nothing less than a direct assault on this Christian achievement. Left unchallenged, the rise of terrorism may foreshadow a return to the barbarism of private war. But a return to private warfare in the twenty-first century is even more ominous since vengeance is no longer fueled by distorted notions of private glory and honor. Now the motive is ideological, ethnic and religious fanaticism, which knows no bounds. In fact as James Turner Johnson has observed in a remarkably prescient article in First Things (1999), terrorism by its nature aims to undermine and erode the political goods of justice, order and peace, which is secured by political authority, and thus attacks all people who benefit from them.

While the tradition has allowed for the possibility of a war between two states both seeming, because of the complexity of the issues involved, to be just, the kind of violence we today call terrorism is evil in its very nature, because it attacks the foundations of political community itself. The authority to use force to curb and punish terrorism is thus the same authority that seeks to protect the goods of the political order as such. There is no justice in terrorism, only injustice.

Classical pacifists and classical just warriors recognized this. It remains to be seen whether contemporary pacifists and "modern" just war advocates will come to recognize it as well. I have my doubts. And it will be most instructive to see how far the Vatican and the U.S. Bishops have traveled down the path away from the classic just war tradition.

-- Keith Pavlischek

Paper delivered 24 September 2001, at a panel discussion in Washington, DC, at the Faith and Reason Institute for the Study of Religion and Culture

*

When the bombs that fell on Pearl Harbor in 1941 were changing the course of world history, they were also changing the course of one man's life and those who would be touched by his ministry.

Sixty December 7ths later, Joe Morgan still recounts the horror of Japan's surprise attack to many of the millions of tourists who visit the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. When he does so, he shares how God helped him reclaim the call to preach and heal the scar of hatred that the attack had left on his life.

"He's like the Arizona Memorial's Billy Graham," said Robert Morgan, one of Joe's sons.

Every Thursday, despite failing health, Joe tells his story once or twice. And almost every time, it leaves people in tears, partly because of Joe's firsthand account and partly because they identify with the emotional struggles he faced.

"Grown men and women dealing with anger and hatred, this story brings them to a catharsis," said Robert, who assists his father during his talks. "Some can't say anything. They can only hug him."

"One of my goals is to help people get over their anger at the Japanese and other people and learn how to forgive as God forgives us," Joe said.

Recently, a young man visited the Arizona Memorial shortly after losing his fiance in the World Trade Center attack Sept. 11.

"You're helping me heal," the man told Joe after hearing how a few years after the war Joe met and forgave the Japanese officer who led the attack on Pearl Harbor.

When some visitors learn how infrequently Joe speaks, they walk away believing that they had a divine appointment, Robert said. "They say, 'Hearing the story was the high point of my vacation,'" he added.

Growing up in Little River, Texas, in the 1920s and 30s, Joe felt from the moment that he committed his life to Christ at the age of 6 that God was calling him to preach. He publicly accepted the call as a teenager and began preaching occasionally.

Joe intended to go to college and then seminary, but when he flunked a history class, he dropped out of high school and joined the Navy.

In the Navy, he began to drift from God, living the stereotypical life of the young sailor. He began to drink alcohol, swear, smoke, chew tobacco and stay far away from church.

But even in his rebellion, Joe said, "The Lord never turned me loose all this time. I knew he had a hold of my tail."

The morning of the attack, Joe was on duty on Ford Island in the middle of Pearl Harbor when he heard planes approaching. At first he and the other sailors thought the planes were from U.S. aircraft carriers staging a mock attack. Then the sailors heard an explosion.

They thought a plane had crashed until they saw a plane dropping two bombs on a nearby runway. As it pulled out of its dive, they saw the symbol of the Rising Sun and knew Japan was attacking.

Joe admits that his first reaction was fear. He hid behind a tractor wheel as another plane made a strafing pass, but when he realized he was close to a high-explosive magazine, his fear turned to terror and he ran for a safer place.

Back in his hangar, Joe found a place to hide in the recesses of a steel I-beam in the roof. But when he saw other men firing at the planes with pistols and rifles, Joe knew he had to help. Trained to maintain and man machine guns, Joe joined the desperate effort to mount machine guns on planes near the hangar.

Joe manned the last gun mounted and as he fired he became gripped by anger at the attackers. Joe recalled helping to shoot down one of the enemy planes, which eventually went into a kamikaze dive hitting the U.S.S. Curtis. He stayed at the gun throughout the night as the island feared further attacks. Although he didn't suffer any physical wounds, he left the battle scarred by a deep hatred for the Japanese people.

"I think the anger was approved by God but not the hatred that followed," Joe said.

While manning the gun through the night, Joe said, "I promised the Lord that if I lived through the war, I'd get out of the Navy and get my training to be a preacher."

Shortly after the attack, Joe was transferred to another unit on Maui while his previous unit was sent to the South Pacific where it suffered heavy casualties. Joe felt God had a reason for protecting him, and the only wound he carried from the war was his hatred turned animosity for the Japanese.

After the war, Joe kept his promise and left the Navy. He attended Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee, where after being inspired by a history professor, made the subject that he flunked in high school his major. After OBU, Joe earned a divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

The war had affected Joe another way. He had fallen in love with the islands and he had fallen in love with Blanche Fernandes, a Hawaii woman who became his wife of nearly 60 years until her death in August. After graduating, he accepted the pastorate at Wailuku Baptist Church on Maui in 1954.

But as he faithfully followed God's call, he also carried his hatred for the Japanese. He never hated Japanese Americans who abound in Hawaii, just those from Japan. Two years into his Wailuku pastorate, Joe heard that Mitsuo Fuchida, the Japanese naval commander who led the attack on Pearl Harbor, was speaking on Maui.

"He was flying high above my head that day, giving orders to his pilots over the radio," Joe recalls in his written account.

Fuchida, however, had become a Christian after meeting a former prisoner of war who had returned to post-war Japan as a missionary. Joe felt the animosity resurface and didn't know "whether to shake Fuchida's hand or shoot him" if they ever met.

After praying, Joe decided to attend Fuchida's talk.

"God gave me the grace to listen," he recalled.

After the talk, Joe, touched but still unsure of how he felt, introduced himself to Fuchida as a Pearl Harbor survivor. Fuchida bowed slightly, said "Gomenasai [I'm sorry]," and reached out to shake Joe's hand.

At that moment, Joe realized God had changed his heart.

"The anger, hatred and animosity toward this man and his country were gone," Joe said. "It was not how great of a Christian I was, but how great of a God I had."

"We shook hands not as former enemies but as brothers in Christ," Joe says at the close of every presentation on the memorial. "We both had received God's mercy and forgiveness.

"I believe what we both experienced is the answer to bringing peace to the world today."

Joe served several other churches in Hawaii and later returned to the military as a chaplain, including two tours in Vietnam. And he went on to earn a doctor of ministry degree.

He returned to Hawaii to pastor before health problems forced him to retire. He's the chaplain of the Pearl Harbor Survivors and the honorary chaplain of the Arizona Memorial. In addition to sharing about God's work in his life with thousands of visitors, Joe also performs weddings and funerals for survivors and park rangers on the memorial. He shares his testimony through a brochure that he prints at his expense and distributes to anyone who wants one.

Robert often reminds his father of the important "church" Joe serves now at the Arizona Memorial.

"The park rangers adore him," said Robert, an ordained minister, "and to the congregation of tourists he can say whatever he wants to say about how Pearl Harbor changed his life."

They both marvel that Joe is allowed to talk openly about God at a government facility. Because of a loss of short-term memory, Joe can no longer tell his story himself. Instead of a monologue, Robert interviews his father and helps him through rough spots.

Visitors, already moved by Joe's story, are touched even further as they see a son help his father.

In a life that has included the attack on Pearl Harbor, World War II, Vietnam, three heart bypass surgeries and a heart attack, Joe agrees with his son that telling his story of what God has done in his life is the only reason he is still alive.

"He's still here," Robert said, "because I believe he has a story to tell that you need to hear."

Violence kills more than 1.6 million people each year, and suicide claims almost as many lives as war and homicide combined, according to a new report by the World Health Organization that experts say is the first comprehensive documentation of the problem of global violence.

The 346-page report, released by Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, the director general of the health organization, reviews thousands of studies to catalog homicide, suicide and armed conflict, as well as violence against women, the elderly and children. It found that violence accounts for 14 percent of all deaths among men, and 7 percent among women.

"Violence leaves no continent, no country and few communities untouched," the report says. "Although it appears everywhere, violence is not an inevitable part of the human condition, nor is it an intractable problem of modern life that cannot be overcome by human determination and ingenuity."

Violence, the study found, is tied to income; the vast majority of violence-related deaths occurred in low-income countries. Like other health problems, violence is not distributed evenly; men accounted for more than three-quarters of all homicides, with the highest rates among men ages 15 to 29.

Police statistics are a poor way of estimating violence in other nations, the study found, because in many countries victims are afraid to report violence. In South Africa, for example, a survey showed that 50 to 80 percent of victims of violence received medical treatment for an injury without going to the police.

The study found that violence against women by their male partners occurs in all countries, regardless of economic class and religion. Data from Australia, the United States, Canada, Israel and South Africa show that 40 to 70 percent of female murder victims were killed by their husbands or boyfriends.

But the situation is not the same for male murder victims. In the United States, for instance, only 4 percent of men murdered from 1976 to 1996 were killed by their wives, ex-wives or girlfriends.

Violence, particularly war, seems to beget more violence, the study found. "It's a cycle," said Dr. Étienne Krug, the lead author of the report. "We have evidence that after wars, the levels of assault and violence remain higher than before," in part because there are more guns available, and young men have been trained to fight.

The report's main premise - that violence can be studied as a health problem and prevented in much the same way as disease - is not new. It originated at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, which in 1983 opened a violence epidemiology branch to track patterns of violence - a move that was regarded as strange at the time.

"We were viewed as weirdos on the very fringes of public health," said Dr. Mark L. Rosenberg, a former C.D.C. official who helped lead that effort. But in the two decades since, he said, programs to prevent suicide, youth violence and child sexual abuse are now commonplace.

Though there is no definitive proof that such programs contribute to an overall decline in violence, he said, "public health measures are being applied, and a number of them have been found to be effective."

Dr. Krug said: "Violence is predictable, and therefore preventable. We can study it, just like disease, understand the causes, and act on these causes."

*

One way into Sherborn, Massachusetts, takes you through horse country, on a tranquil drive through 3-acre zoning. As the road winds gently down into the center of town, you see Sherborn's dignified war memorial, a baleful Madonna and child mourning the fallen heroes of this tiny bedroom community. Just 50 yards beyond is a small, open plaza, with six low walls radiating away from a central patio which also contains a statue. This is a Pacifist Memorial, and the statue from which those walls radiate out is an 8-foot-tall bronze effigy of Mohandas K. Gandhi.

Vandals have defaced this site with blue paint. The chairman of the Zoning Board resigned in order to challenge the statue's building permit. It is, says a longtime resident, “an affront to the sacrifices of the people of this town for freedom.”

Others think it is ironic, that both Gandhi and the heroes of our revolution struggled against British imperialism, just in different eras and different continents. They both succeeded; our soldiers with muskets, and Gandhi with nonviolent resistance, boycotts and hunger strikes. Our revolution freed a few million people. Gandhi helped free 100 million people. But to many people of Sherborn, he was just another yellow-belly who never picked up a gun.

The statue of the Madonna appears to be mourning the town’s dead, but apparently is not perceived as mourning the killing. The statue of the pacific Gandhi down the street is taken by many as an affront to proper patriotism. The offending statue stands on property belonging to Lewis Randa who emulates his model in saying, “My neighbors are good and decent people. They will come to love this statue.” And if they don't, he was asked? “Sherborn will be known either as the town that has a Gandhi statue, or as the town that took one down.”

The events in this true story happened some years ago, but I think the statue is still there.

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Alex Beam, “The Unwelcome Gandhi Gandhi Disturbs Sherborn's Peace of Mind,” The Boston Globe, taken from http://www.peaceabbey.org/memorial/memorial_3.htm.

*

In the midst of the most terrifying 18 hours of his life, Army Ranger Jeff Struecker's future suddenly crystallized.

Compelled to return to the exploding center of Mogadishu, Somalia, to rescue survivors of a downed American helicopter, Struecker was petrified. On his first trip to retrieve an injured soldier, his Humvee careened through a constant hail of gunfire and rockets. A soldier beside him was shot and killed.

Now he was ordered to re-enter that hellish chaos. He felt certain he would die that day in 1993 in a war-torn and terrifying city.

“I thought I was going to die, and every single soldier that I worked with was going to die, if we had to drive back into that city and fight through the same thing that we had just come through,” Struecker said.

It was at that moment that Struecker's life became clear, he said, because he realized that his life was in God's hands and only one of two things could happen -- he would live or he would die.

“Either I would drive back into that city and I would survive and go home to be with my family, or I would drive back into that city and I would die and go home to be with my savior in heaven,” he said.

“From that moment on, when that finally hit me, I had no more fear about what was going to happen to me. The only fear I experienced that night and the rest of the time I was in Somalia was the fear of losing another one of my soldiers.”

You may know Jeff Struecker because his heroic role as a squad leader rescuing stranded soldiers was portrayed in the movie “Blackhawk Down.” Today Struecker is still an Army Ranger. But instead of leading a squadron in firefights, he wages war on a spiritual front as battalion chaplain.

Like so many young men and women, Struecker was enormously affected by the fear and fire of that horrible night in Mogadishu when 19 American soldiers and dozens of Somalis died. What affected Struecker most, however, was not the gunfire and terror but the hollow, bewildered expressions on the faces of his fellow soldiers who had no “faith foundation” from which to sort events.

“What really impacted me were those young Rangers who were absolutely devastated about what they had just seen and what they had been through,” Struecker said. “A lot of those young Rangers were asking me questions. A lot of veteran Rangers who had been to war a number of times were asking me questions because they knew I was a Christian. And they were saying, 'Jeff, what just happened? How could God let something like that happen? What happened to my friend who just lost his life? What's going to happen to me if I get back on a helicopter or if I get back on a Humvee and I drive back into that city and I lose my life?'

“At that moment, grown men who never wanted to hear about Jesus Christ before that moment, began to sit down and listen as I told them about Jesus Christ and how he could give them the assurance of knowing they'd spend an eternity in heaven.”

Struecker went to seminary after that hitch in Somalia. But he later returned to the Army because of his concern that those soldiers have the opportunity to know God.

He considers his congregation to be his battalion's 750 soldiers and their families. He estimates 80 percent “don't know Jesus.” “It's my responsibility to introduce those men and women to Jesus Christ every opportunity I get.”

Struecker encourages Christians to remember soldiers and their families at every opportunity. “I hope every time you see someone in uniform you think about a mother or father, you think about a wife or a husband, you think about a baby girl or a young toddler who is just learning to walk,” he said. “As that Marine or soldier, or sailor gets on a ship or into an airplane to go do his or her job, they're leaving a family behind.

“When my battalion loads aircraft and we fly somewhere, when we're jumping out of airplanes to go do our job late at night, I never forget there are women back home who are absolutely petrified at the thought of losing their husband. There are mothers not having any idea where their son is tonight and what they're doing.”

Struecker knows people care about those in the military, but he urges those who care to let the soldiers know.

“Let them know you love them,” he said. “Write them a note. Send them an e-mail. Just shake their hand when you see them walk down the street or when you see them at a restaurant.”

And pray their lives will become crystal clear, without having to undergo the hell of another Mogadishu.

*

During a series of genocidal massacres in Rwanda and Burundi that at one point left 10,000 human bodies floating ashore on Lake Victoria, a Harvard anthropologist traveled to war-weary Central Africa to investigate the origins of human violence. But instead of studying the fighting Hutu and Tutsi tribes, professor of anthropology Richard Wrangham plunged into the “time machine” of the rainforests to examine Homo sapiens' closest genetic relatives.

Warfare is not uniquely human. Scholars had long thought that it was. As recently as 1987, an international group of 20 distinguished scientists signed what they called the Seville Statement on Violence, declaring that war “does not occur in other animals” and is almost entirely “a product of culture.”

But as early as 1974, researchers in Gombe National Park in Tanzania had been startled to observe chimpanzee males organizing gangs of a half-dozen or so members and launching lethal raids into the territory of neighboring chimps. These were clearly not food-gathering expeditions. The chimps did not stop to eat, and they did not make any of their normal calls and shouts. Instead, they crept silently into the territory of a neighboring group and hid until they saw a lone chimp. Screaming with excitement, they would ambush the victim, hold him immobile and beat him to death, sometimes twisting the victim's leg until the muscles ripped, or tearing off flaps of skin while he was still alive. In one well-documented case in Tanzania, a group of male chimpanzees used such ambushes to eliminate a whole band of neighbors. Chimpanzees live in patriarchal groups in which males regularly rape, beat, kill, and sometimes even drink the blood of their own kind.

Further research found that such violence was not limited to chimpanzees. Male gorillas, for example, were observed ripping infants out of their mothers' arms and smashing them to the ground in often-successful attempts to entice the mothers to mate with them. One theory is that the male gorillas do this to demonstrate their strength and to show how valuable they would be as protectors.

Violence is present in every human culture, from contemporary New York City to the primitive Waorani people of the Andean foothills, whose frequent raids on each other cause a startling violent-death rate of 60 percent, according to anthropologists Clayton and Carole Robarchek. Given these facts, it might appear that the primate family tree has blood in all its roots. But anthropologists were happy to discover more restrained behavior among the bonobos. Living principally in Zaire, bonobos are slightly smaller than chimpanzees and make calls like twittering birds. Genetically, these apes are more closely related to human beings than they are to orangutans. Although bonobo males are occasionally aggressive, they are usually discouraged from killing or raping by tight-knit bands of females that gang up on and attack aggressive males.

Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham avoids drawing close parallels between bonobos and human beings. He takes a broader look at the species' behavior patterns, seeing female bonding and alliance-building in general as a weapon against the dominance of violent males. “I believe that Fyodor Dostoevsky got it right in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, when he wrote that we all have a demon in us,” Wrangham says. “And I can only hope that by understanding this, we can reduce this demon a little bit.”

*

On the eve of D-Day, Pvt. Tom Porcella was torturing himself with thoughts of killing other human beings. (This was common: the chaplains worked overtime assuring soldiers that to kill for their country was not a sin). “Kill or be killed,” Porcella said to himself. “Here I am, brought up as a good Christian, obey this and do that. The Ten Commandments say, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ There is something wrong with the Ten Commandments, or there is something wrong with the rules of the world today. They teach us the Ten Commandments and then they send us out to war. It just doesn’t make sense.”

One soldier on D-Day who did not forget to thank God was Lt. Richard Winters, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne. At 0001 hour on June 6, he had been in a C-47 headed to Normandy. He had prayed the whole way over, prayed to live through the day, prayed that he wouldn’t fail.

He didn’t fail. He won the Distinguished Service Cross that morning.

At 2400 hour on June 6, before bedding down at Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, Winters (as he later wrote in his diary) “did not forget to get on my knees and thank God for helping me to live through this day and ask for His help on D plus one.”

And he made a promise to himself: if he lived through the war, he was going to find an isolated farm somewhere and spend the remainder of his life in peace and quiet. In 1951 he got the farm, in south-central Pennsylvania, where he lives today.

America was about to go to war — again — and liberal theologians were appalled. We are making a terrible mistake, they warned. We are demonizing the enemy and rushing to war. We are not fighting for democracy, but we're about to engage in a “clash of imperialisms.” And, in fact, we are really to blame for our enemies' evil acts. As it turned out, the theologians were wrong — but many refused to admit it until World War II was over.

Six decades later, as Joe Loconte, the "William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and a Free Society" at The Heritage Foundation, points out, as we fight the War on Terror, we're hearing the same dangerously wrong-headed rhetoric.

In his new book, THE END OF ILLUSIONS, Loconte explains that in the thirties, more than two hundred peace groups, deeply influenced by liberal theology, resisted giving military aid to those being destroyed by Hitler. Instead of demonizing Hitler, they said we should address the “root causes” of Nazi aggression. The Treaty of Versailles, they claimed, made Hitler “almost inevitable.” In other words, Hitler's bad behavior was our fault. Sound familiar?

Even when the gathering storm erupted into a hurricane of death and destruction, they kept urging restraint. We shouldn't fight with weapons, but with peace summits and dialogue, they said. Worst still, they refused to make moral distinctions between the United States and Nazi Germany. John Haynes Holmes comments were typical: “If America goes into the war, it will not be for idealistic reasons but to serve her own imperialistic interests.” If we won, he added, we would merely be replacing one tyranny with another.

Today, in the wake of the Holocaust, no rational person considers Americans morally equivalent to the Nazis. But even at the time, given Hitler's lies, Kristallnacht, and German tanks rumbling across Europe, how could anyone believe that the Allies were the same as the Nazis — or that “dialogue” would solve the problem?

The answer, writes Loconte, was that “the latest fads in theology, psychology, and economics had flattened the Bible's hard-nosed teaching about evil and its deep link to human personality. ... Indeed, the fatal flaw of liberal intellectuals was what the realists called 'the dogma of the natural goodness of man.'“ This heresy, Loconte writes, assumed that “sin resides mostly in social and political institutions”; once man is freed from them through reform or revolution, he will “rise to new humanistic heights.” Well, in all the work we have done in prisons and with prisoners over the last thirty years at Prison Fellowship, we know that is not the case.

Indeed, theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr attacked this heresy and revived the scriptural definition of sin: rebellion against God and His laws. Hitler's rage and maniacal fury against the Jews, Niebuhr asserted, must be stopped through confrontation.

As we prepare to celebrate our third Christmas since September 11, modern-day Christians recall both the lessons of history and the truth of Scripture: The line of good and evil runs through every human heart, and when it erupts into violence, it must be fought — not with well-meaning words appealing to humanity's “natural goodness,” but with force to keep human evil in check.

FOR FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

• Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, The Problem of Evil (Tyndale, 1999).

• Read more about Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”).

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 000614, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace.”

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Copyright (c) 2004 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

The book (and TV series) “Band of Brothers” follows an American paratrooper unit through World War II. One of the few men to survive from beginning to end was Sgt. “Skinny” Sisk. After the war, Sisk had a hard time shaking his memories. In July 1991, he wrote to Capt. Winters to explain:

“My career after the war was trying to drink away the truckload of Krauts that I stopped in Holland and the die-hard Nazi that I went up into the Bavarian Alps and killed. Old Moe Alley made a statement that all the killings that I did was going to jump into the bed with me one of these days and they surely did. I have a lot of flashbacks after the war and I started drinking. Ha! Ha!

“Then my sister’s little daughter, four years old, came into my bedroom (I was too unbearable to the rest of the family, either hung over or drunk) and she told me that Jesus loved me and she loved me and if I would repent God would forgive me for all the men I kept trying to kill all over again.

“That little girl got to me. I put her out of my room, told her to go to her Mommy. There and then I bowed my head on my Mother’s old feather bed and repented and God forgave me for the war and all the other bad things I had done down through the years. I was ordained in the latter part of 1949 into the ministry and believe me, Dick, I haven’t whipped but one man since and he needed it. I have four children, nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

“The Lord willing and Jesus tarrys I hope to see you all at the next reunion. If not I’ll see you at the Last Jump.”

“Hostilities will cease on the whole front at 11 hours today, French time. Until that hour, the operations previously ordered will be pressed with vigor. At 11 hours our line will halt in place, and no man will move one step forward or backward.” Those were the orders released just before 9:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918, in an address to the U. S. Army's 79th Division. That order announced the end of “The War to End All Wars,” now known as World War I. Yet in one of the most bitter ironies of this bitter conflict, thousands would die between the time the armistice was signed and hostilities ceased.

November 11, 1918, is now separated from us by the space of 87 years. We can all too easily lose sight of World War I and its significance. This cultural amnesia is both tragic and dangerous, for the lessons of World War I were learned only through the senseless sacrifice of millions of lives.

Looking back at the twentieth century, historians now generally agree that we should not think of two great world wars in the first half of that century, but rather of one long war interrupted by a brief and awkward span of relative peace. A German soldier headed back through the lines on Armistice Day warned an American soldier that the war was not really over. “You didn't lick us,” he said. “We knew when to quit. We'll be back in twenty years.” As we now know, they were.

The principal causes of the war are still subject to historical debate. The fuse that detonated the bomb was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. The archduke, heir to the imperial throne of Austria-Hungary, was assassinated by a young anarchist named Gavrilo Princip. Within days, the world was at war. Of course, the actual CASUS BELLI of the war was more complicated. Rivalry between the Austrians, Germans, Russians, French, and British had been building for decades. The French remained bitter in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, in which they had lost precious territory. The Germans remained dissatisfied, and the German emperor, Wilhelm II, was convinced that Germany's glory would be revealed in a great military resurgence under his Kaiser Reich. The Hapsburg dynasty in Austria-Hungary was losing its grip, even as the Romanov dynasty in Russia was losing credibility.

Still, no one knew exactly why the war had begun. Nevertheless, as diplomatic efforts failed and hostilities began, Britain's foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, accurately assessed the situation: “The lamps are going out all over Europe,” he observed. “We shall not see them lit again in our time.”

America came into the war only in 1917, driven into the conflict by Germany's resumption of unrestricted warfare on the high seas and by the discovery of the infamous “Zimmerman telegram,” in which the German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmerman proposed to Mexico's president, Venustiano Carranza, that Mexico should enter the war as Germany's ally and, in return, would be allowed “to reconquer the lost territory in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona.”

On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appeared before the U. S. Congress to ask for a declaration of war. “We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion,” Wilson asserted. “We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifice we shall freely make.” Famously, Wilson declared that America would go to war only for the purpose of “keeping the world safe for democracy.”

In military terms, World War I was an unmitigated disaster. In essence, the war was pointlessly murderous. Joseph Persico, author of ELEVENTH MONTH, ELEVENTH DAY, ELEVENTH HOUR: ARMISTICE DAY, 1918 summarizes the gruesome death toll, noting that “Graveyards were the chief legacy of World War I.”

On the Western front alone, the total losses amounted to 11,004,530 men, with fully 3,258,610 killed. On all fronts, the casualties exceeded 29,800,000. Beyond this, there were millions of civilian deaths directly attributable to the war. The conflict left 600,000 widows in France and over 1 million French children fatherless. England lost three men in World War I for every man killed in World War II. The 26,000 Americans killed in the battle at the Meuse-Argonne “represented the greatest loss in a single battle to that point in the nation's history,” Persico explains. Further, “One out of every five West Pointers in action in France was killed.”

The battlefields associated with the war are now etched in the human memory as reminders of senseless slaughter. Passchendaele, Verdun, Ypres, and the Marne became the graveyards for millions, many of whom were never found and never formally buried.

The murderous character of the war was amplified by several factors. In the first place, World War I represented the widespread use of mechanical weapons with awesome killing capacity, such as the machine gun. Early versions of the tank were invented, even as some soldiers carried weapons hardly advanced over those of wars that had occurred a hundred years earlier. Both sides in the war resorted to weapons of unthinkable horror, such as the use of poisonous gas.

Furthermore, the war on the Western front was a series of senseless infantry charges in which the Allied general staff threw millions of British, French, and American soldiers against the meat grinder of entrenched German forces. Throughout the war, the generals appeared to learn very little. For months, the forces would face each other from trenches separated by mere yards, murderously killing each other in the mud, the snow, and the carnage.

Many of the soldiers hardly knew why they were there. Others resorted to poetry. The most famous poem of the war was inspired by the fields of Flanders blooming with red poppies. As Canadian physician, Lieutenant Colonel John McRae famously worded his poem: “In Flanders field the poppies blow, Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place, and in the sky, The larks, still bravely singing, fly, Scarce heard amid the guns below.” The wasted young lives were commemorated with these words: “We are the dead. Short days ago, We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow ....” Siegfried Sassoon considered the plight of the common British soldier. “Tonight he's in the pink; but soon he'll die. And still the war goes on; HE don't know why.” Arthur Jensen, an American survivor of the war, considered what the German dead would say to their American victors: “We are the dividends of war; We're what you came to Europe for. Our cause is lost; we died in vain, And now we're rotting in the rain.”

By the time the war came to an end, the European forces were largely reduced to old men and young boys. An entire generation had seemingly been destroyed on the fields of war. In Britain, the “missing generation” continues to haunt the nation's consciousness. Persico describes the tragic logic of the war: “One side would not give up its gains; the other would not accept its losses. Thus both sides came to the same solution: that the way to stop the killing was to win. And both believed God was on their side.”

The war made some reputations and destroyed others. America's leading general, John “Black Jack” Pershing, emerged from the war as a hero, at least among common Americans. Britain's field marshal Douglas Haig saw his reputation largely destroyed. The war saw the end of three great monarchial dynasties -- the Romanovs in Russia, the Hapsburgs in Austria, and the Hohenzollerns in Germany.

The carnage of the war demands an explanation -- as does the fact that thousands died even after the armistice was signed. Why did the Allies determine that the armistice should come into effect hours after it was signed? Furthermore, why did British, French, and American generals send their forces into battle, knowing that many men would die in order to gain territory they would have received by surrender in just hours and minutes?

The last day of World War I saw Allied forces take more casualties than would be taken on D-Day in 1944. As Persico explains, “According to the most conservative estimates, during the last day of the war, principally in the six hours after the armistice was signed, all sides on the Western front suffered 10,944 casualties, of which 2,738 were deaths, more than the average daily casualties throughout the war.” Those casualties included at least 320 Americans who gave their lives after the war had been won and the armistice had been signed.

In the end, the delay in ceasing hostilities was due to the fact that the British, American, and French military leaders wanted to seize yet more territory in order to score political points. Units ordered to rush into the face of murderous enemy fire could not believe that their own leaders were causing men to die by the hundreds, just in order to make a point. The other factor that played into the delay was perhaps even worse -- someone's idea that the number eleven (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month) would end the war on a poetic and memorable note. Were men to be slaughtered for the sake of a poetically-packaged ending?

Looking back at the war, Winston Churchill would observe: “It was not until the dawn of the twentieth century of the Christian Era that war began to enter into its kingdom as the potential destroyer of the human race. The organization of mankind in the great states and empires, and the rise of nations to full collective consciousness, enabled enterprises of slaughter to be planned and executed upon a scale and with a perseverance never before imagined . . .” And for what?

Within a single generation, the world would once again be at war -- and over much of the same territory. Persico recalls that when a celebrating French soldier yelled out to an American, “Finie la guerre!,” the American soldier -- a Southerner -- responded: “Well, ... don't start another one unless you can finish it yourself!” The Americans were back all too soon.

Armistice Day, now known as Veterans Day, is seen by far too many Americans as simply another legal holiday. It's much more than that, of course. Even as the last veterans of World War I pass from our midst, we must remember that this great and awful conflict serves to remind humanity of the horror of war and the insanity of senseless violence. Many lessons unlearned in World War I were learned far more expensively in World War II. The “War to End All Wars” reminds us that war, though sometimes necessary, is never to be celebrated. The war may have come to an end at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month on 1918, but its lessons must not be forgotten.

*

God’s peace is different from the world’s peace.

A former president of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and historians from England, Egypt, Germany, and India have come up with some startling information.

They say that in the more than 5,600 years since 3600 B.C., the world has known only 292 years of peace!

During this period there have been 14,351 wars, large and small, in which 3.64 billion people have been killed. The value of the property destroyed would pay for a golden belt around the world 97.2 miles wide and 33 feet thick.

Since 650 B.C., there have also been 1656 arms races, only 16 of which have not ended in war. The remainder ended in the economic collapse of the countries involved.

The Personnel Journal reported only slightly better statistics, saying that since the beginning of recorded history, the entire world has been at peace less than eight percent of the time! In its study, the periodical discovered that in excess of 8,000 peace treaties have been made — and broken. Peace treaties signed by people who really do not want peace are worth about the cost of the paper they are written on.

In addition to national wars, in every nation’s cities and villages, men, women and even children war with each other, often killing and maiming each other, often within the same families.

We live in a world without peace. Yet, paradoxically, God’s Word repeatedly tells us to be at peace and to have peace. What is the answer?

Someone has said, “Safety consists not in the absence of danger but in the presence of God.” You could also say, “Peace consists not in the absence of conflict but in the presence of God.”

For believers, God’s presence is always with us, and in us. Peace is a fruit of the indwelling Spirit (Galatians 5:22).

How does one appropriate God’s peace? “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee” (Isaiah 26:3, KJV).

Where is God amidst the horrors of war? How do soldiers keep their faith in God’s goodness amidst the suffering and slaughter of battle?

American soldiers and sailors, airmen and Marines have asked questions like these ever since the War for Independence. The questions occupy their thoughts and find their way from faraway battlefields into letters to loved ones.

Journalist Andrew Carroll has collected many of these letters in a book entitled GRACE UNDER FIRE: LETTERS OF FAITH IN TIMES OF WAR. Among them is a note from Private Walter Bromwich, who questioned God’s role in the slaughter of World War I.

“How can there be fairness in one man being maimed for life, suffering agonies, and another killed instantaneously, while I get out of it safe?” Bromwich asked his pastor back in Pennsylvania. “What I would like to believe,” Bromwich wrote, “is that God is in this war, not as a spectator, but backing up everything that is good in us. I don’t know whether God goes forth with armies, but I do know that He is in lots of our men or they would not do what they do.”

Other soldiers worried about their public witness more than their personal safety. In 1943, Private First Class William Kiessel, who was about to take part in the invasion into France, wrote to friends that he did not want prayer for his safety, because “safety isn’t the ultimate goal. True exemplary conduct is.” And he added, “What is important is that whatever does happen to me I will do absolutely nothing that will shame my character or my God.”

Where is God in the midst of war? Lieutenant Colonel Scott Barnes, a doctor who treated hundreds of wounded patients in Iraq, offered an answer to that question in an email home to family and friends.

“Some of my colleagues have wondered out loud,” he wrote, “how there can be a God with all of this suffering. I just remind them that He might just be right in some of our hands and working right beside us.

“Where is God? He is in the O.R. guiding the hands of the surgeons, He is in the will of the sergeants helping organize a blood drive as only they can, He is in the hearts of the soldiers who immediately rolled up their sleeves to give what they had to save a dying brother whom they don’t even know” — or even a captured enemy.

Letters like these renewed Carroll’s own faith in God. “They showed me that even in the bleakest of circumstances, with God’s help, we can overcome all adversity,” Carroll writes. “Through Him, we can endure any hardship. Because of Him, we are never alone.”

Where is Christ during the horrors of war today? He’s on the Cross.

On this day, Memorial Day, I want to send a personal message to our servicemen around the world: We at home are deeply grateful to you and we are proud of your service to our nation and our God as you defend the innocent. And I encourage you to remember the words found in Deuteronomy: “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified ... for the Lord your God goes with you, he will never leave you nor forsake you.” (Deuteronomy 31:6)

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Copyright (c) 2007 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

One of the most famous pictures from World War II must surely be the photo of five valiant Marines raising an American flag on the island of Iwo Jima. The young man in the center of the photo was John Bradley.

After the war, Bradley moved back to Antigo, Wisconsin, married his high school sweetheart, and raised a family.

Although John Bradley won the Navy Cross for saving a fellow soldier's life, he preferred not to talk about the war. And he absolutely refused to accept the hero worship that others tried to force on him. One of the few comments Bradley ever made about the war, he made to his young son, James. In response to James’ remark about heroism, John Bradley replied, “The heroes of Iwo Jima are the guys who didn’t come back.”

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“The Man in the Photograph” by James Bradley from FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS. Reader’s Digest, Nov. 2000, pp. 125-129.

Louis Zamperini was born into an Italian American family. He spoke no English and this made him the target of bullies. His dad taught him to box and he became so good at beating people up he got in trouble with the law. To divert him from this his brother got him involved in the high school track team. Louis really excelled at track and set a world record for the mile. In 1936 he attended the Olympics in Berlin and finished 8th in the 5000-meter race. Eighth isn’t that great, but his final lap was so fast it caught the attention of Adolf Hitler, who insisted on a personal meeting.

The world was in turmoil and war had already started in Europe. Zamperini enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1941 and was stationed in Hawaii as a bombardier. He went on several bombing runs against Japanese islands but in May 1943 he had a special assignment. His plane took off to search for another downed plane. Instead of finding them, his own plane had mechanical trouble and crashed into the ocean. Louis remembered being entwined in electrical cables as the broken plane sank into the depths, but somehow he got free and made it to the surface. Only three crew members survived the crash. For 47 days they drifted on two small life rafts. One of the survivors gave up hope and died.

For the first time in his life, Louis prayed to God. He had never learned how to pray, so he recited snippets of prayers he had seen in Hollywood movies. Soon his prayers became more specific. After being without water for several days, he prayed for rain. If God would quench their thirst, he prayed, I will dedicate my life to you. That afternoon it rained, just enough to quench their thirst.

After weeks of drifting with the current they finally saw a plane nearby which doubled back and came over them. They were delirious with joy, until machine gun bullets began ripping into the water around them. It was a Japanese bomber. Their rafts were riddled with holes yet the men were not hit. Enough of the air compartments were left to keep them afloat until they reached an island. A Japanese-held island.

Because he was famous, Zamperini was transferred to a special prisoner of war camp in Japan. The Red Cross was never informed he was a prisoner, and in 1944 the Army officially declared him dead. For the next two years, Louis might as well have been dead. He was tortured endlessly and starved till he became a skeleton. One guard in particular, nicknamed “The Bird,” took a special interest in beating Louis.

Zamperini survived the war and returned home to his astonished family. Overnight he was famous again. But he forgot all those prayers in the life raft. Instead, he tried to make quick money through various schemes, all of which failed. He became a raging alcoholic to forget his memories but the nightmares came back every night, especially the nightmares about The Bird. His marriage began to unravel.

In 1949 his wife attended a rally in Los Angeles and was so impressed she asked Louis to go with her the next night. The speaker was a young evangelist named Billy Graham. Louis really didn’t want to go, but she insisted.

When he finally went, he bolted out when Billy gave the invitation. Then he returned another night and felt his heart being convicted by God. He remembered something he had said to God on the life raft, “God, spare my life through the war, and I’ll seek You and serve You.” He had never tried to keep one of those prayers.

Louis went forward at Billy’s invitation and gave his life to Jesus Christ. He told a reporter, “I got off my knees and somehow I knew I was through getting drunk. I knew it. I also knew that I forgave all my guards including The Bird.” After he accepted Christ, Louis never had another nightmare about his Japanese guards.

In 1950 he returned to Japan, where many of his former guards were now prisoners themselves. He shared his testimony with them, hugged them, and led a number of them to Christ.

Zamperini is now 94 and lives in Hollywood. For his 81st birthday in 1998 he ran a leg in the Olympic Torch relay for the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. But the most important thing for him has been preaching the forgiveness that can only be found in Christ.

________

Adapted from material from Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken: A World War II Story of Surival, Resilience, and Redemption (New York: Random House, 2010); "The Amazing Story of Louis Zamperini - Part 2" by Greg Laurie ; and “Louis Zamperini” article in Wikipedia.org.

July 28, 2014, marked the centennial of the beginning of the First World War (1914-1918). As indicated by the name for the conflict, the war touched nearly everyone in the world at the time.

Perhaps as many as 16 million soldiers and civilians died in the conflict, and more than 50 million people died from the 1918 influenza pandemic spawned by abysmal wartime conditions. Postwar famines in Eastern Europe and Asia also stemmed from the conflict. Four empires -- the Ottoman, German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian -- were toppled and replaced by a collection of smaller states. The British government gave legal recognition to the small Jewish community in Palestine with the Balfour Declaration, clearing the way for the eventual establishment of modern Israel.

In addition, postwar instability spawned a series of smaller conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The Armenian and Greek genocides began during the war. Finally, 20th century Fascism, Nazism, state Communism and Japanese militarism had roots in World War I and its immediate aftermath.

While nearly the entire world was touched by the conflict, the First World War greatly impacted the Christian community. The war made its mark on at least four aspects of the Christian experience with lasting effects.

1. The war triggered a paradigm shift in the Christian worldview and “end of time prophecy.”

For hundreds of years Christians had read the book of Revelation with its frightening images of the Apocalypse. World War I provided a firsthand look at a real-life apocalyptic world. While many Christian theologians believed the Apocalypse was more allegorical than literal, the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse seemed to come alive during the conflict and its aftermath. War, famine, disease and death occurred on a worldwide stage and on a scale that truly was unprecedented. The war and its destruction marked the beginning of a fundamental shift in the Christian worldview. After the war and over time, Christians felt less positive about their standing in the world and began to express some pessimism about world affairs. The war launched a new interest in “end of time prophecy” that peaked in the latter half of the 20th century as the new millennium neared.

2. Postmillennialism waned among western Protestants.

In the years before World War I, western Protestants largely promoted a view of eschatology called postmillennialism. Postmillennialists believed that Christian teaching and societal reforms would foster a time of increased Gospel success called the millennium prior to Christ’s return. The triumph of the Gospel would usher in responsible human governments promoting peace and prosperity. Human society, postmillennialists believed, was going to improve. Postmillennialists dominated the 19th century abolition and social reform movements popular among many Christians of that century (and into the 20th century as well). Although they viewed many of the social reform movements as incomplete since they had no Gospel element, even prominent Southern Baptists like B.H. Carroll endorsed postmillennialism.

As the horrors of World War I unfolded and uncertainty set in after the conflict, many Christians began to question the idea that human society would get better. Therefore, the First World War marked the beginning of postmillennialism’s decline. Some still adhered to it after the conflict, but a Second World War, the holocaust and a Cold War with the threat of nuclear destruction led most Western Christians to abandon postmillennialism. Human reform had not stemmed the collective evils of the 20th century.

3. Premillennialism started to become popular.

While the First World War began to discredit postmillennialism, the war gave new impetus to a premillennial view of the end times popularized earlier by John Nelson Darby and C.I. Scofield. Premillennialists rejected the belief that the world would get better before Christ returned. They saw in the war proof that human society without Christ was in fact getting worse. Pessimistic about human affairs, they believed that Christ would return soon to redeem the elect from an evil world. Like postmillennialists and amillennialists, premillennialists did not speak with one voice. Some premillennialists held that Christ would collect His own in a rapture before His second coming while others thought believers would have to endure a period of tribulation before Christ’s return. Yet all premillennialists believed the world’s slide into anarchy and evil would not be fully or finally reversed before Christ’s second coming. World War I seemed to offer a contemporary glimpse into the future trauma awaiting the world.

4. Evangelism to a “lost generation” increased.

According to Ernest Hemingway, the American author Gertrude Stein coined the phrase “the lost generation” to reference those who came of age during World War I. Hemingway used the term in three of his works. It proved to be an appropriate label. The war produced disillusionment and experimentation with alcohol, drugs and immorality for many young men and women. In the United States, even in an era of prohibition, the public seemed powerless to prevent the excesses of the war years and the “Jazz Age” that followed.

As Christians had done for previous generations, they reached out to the “lost generation” during and after the war. Believers rallied to support the troops with gifts and charitable donations during the conflict and fed the world’s starving masses afterward. Military chaplains addressed the spiritual needs of the troops both at home and abroad. In the United States evangelists like Billy Sunday and Mordecai Ham (a noted Southern Baptist) led “urban campaigns” to reach both servicemen and civilians for Christ. These campaigns were not new to Christian culture (D.L. Moody pioneered them in the late 1800s), but the war years stimulated their development. Evangelists continued their efforts to reach the “lost generation” well after the war. Sgt. Alvin York, who later became the most decorated American soldier of WWI, became a Christian shortly after the war’s outbreak and remained a lifelong witness to those around him.

Alongside their concern and compassion for the “lost generation,” many Christians championed social reforms to curb the temptations young men were experiencing during the war years. A popular song included the refrain, “How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm once they’ve seen Paree?” Prohibition (the 18th Amendment), sought by many Christians in the United States and passed during the war (but implemented afterward), sought to end the manufacture, distribution and sale of alcohol. Josephus Daniels, the secretary of the Navy during the war, closed down all houses of prostitution within five miles of a military base, including the famed New Orleans “red light” district of Storyville and other centers of urban vice. While these moves admittedly did little to curb the excesses of the “Jazz Age,” the urban revivals of Sunday, Ham and other evangelists during the 1920s led tens of thousands of the “lost generation” to saving faith in Christ. The urban campaigns proved to be forerunners of the mid-20th century evangelistic “crusades.”

The First World War and its aftermath have influenced Christians right up to the present time. A renewed interest in end of time prophecy, the decline of postmillennialism, the rise of premillennialism, the rise of evangelistic crusades and some of the Christian social reform movements either began, peaked or surged during the war era. What started on July 28, 1914, impacted Christians for the next 100 years.

The cross is shock therapy for a world addicted to solving its problems through violence. The cross shocks us into the devastating realization that our system of violence murdered God! The things hidden from the foundation of the world have now been revealed. The cross shames our ancient foundation of violence. The cross strips naked the principalities and powers. The cross tears down the façade of glory that we use to hide the bodies of slain victims.

In the light of the cross, we are to realize that if what we have built on Cain’s foundation is capable of murdering the Son of God, then whole edifice needs to come down. In the light of the cross, our war anthems lose their luster. But this throws us into a crisis. What other alternatives are there? How else are we to arrange the world? The alternative is what Jesus is offering us when he told us that the kingdom of God is at hand. God’s way of arranging the world around love and forgiveness is within reach. If we only dare to reach out for it, we can have it. But we are so afraid. We’re not sure we can risk it. It’s so hard for us to let go of the sword and take the hand of the Crucified One. It’s so hard for us to really believe in Jesus.

The crowd never believes in Jesus. Only the little flock that accepts its vulnerability can believe in Jesus. If you tell those rushing to war that their hatred of enemies and their plan for the organized killing of enemies is evil, the crowd will hate you. War is sacred. It lies beyond critique. To critique it is blasphemy. The crowd hates blasphemy. The crowd wants to kill blasphemers. The crowd knows that the criticism of their violence is blasphemy because they know their cause is just. They believe it. And from their perspective their cause is just. They can prove it. Both sides can prove it. Always.

Achilles knew his cause was just and that it was perfectly legitimate to drag Hector’s body from his chariot in front of the gates of Troy in a show of grotesque triumphalism. It’s the same grotesque impulse that causes modern soldiers to pose for gruesome photos with the bodies of dead enemies. It’s literally the way of the world. But it’s not the way of the new world founded by Jesus. Jesus is not the warrior king the world is accustomed to. Jesus is not the Jewish Achilles. Jesus refused to be the violent Messiah Israel longed for. Jesus did not kill Pilate and drag the governor’s body behind his chariot. Jesus did not pose triumphantly over the dead bodies of slain Roman soldiers. Instead it was Jesus who hung naked on a tree after being put to death through a state-sponsored execution. Jesus founded his kingdom in solidarity with brutalized victims. This is the gospel, but it’s hard for us to believe in a Jesus who would rather die than kill his enemies. It’s harder yet to believe in a Jesus who calls us to take up our own cross, follow him, and be willing to die rather than kill our enemies.

Many American Christians are fond of describing the United States as a “Christian nation” — which would mean a Christlike nation. With that in mind, here’s a wild thought experiment. Imagine if Jesus went to Washington D.C. Imagine that he is invited to give a speech to a joint session of Congress. (He’s Jesus after all, and I’m sure the senators and congressmen would be delighted to hear a speech from the founder of the world’s largest religion — if nothing else it would confer some dignity upon their institution.) Imagine that the speech Jesus gave was his most famous sermon — the Sermon on the Mount. Can you imagine that?

Jesus is introduced. (Standing ovation.) He stands before Congress and begins to deliver his speech. “Blessed are the poor ... the mourners ... the meek.” “Love your enemies.” “Turn the other cheek.” After a few perfunctory applauses early on, I’m pretty sure there would be a lot of squirming senators and uncomfortable congressmen. The room would sink into a tense silence. And when Jesus concluded his speech with a prophecy of the inevitable fall of the house that would not act upon his words, what would Congress do? Nothing. They would not act. They could not act. To act on Jesus’ words would undo their system. The Sermon on the Mount doesn’t work in Cain’s system — no matter how noble or sophisticated. In the end, the U.S. Congress would no more adopt the policies Jesus set out in the Sermon on the Mount than they were adopted by the Jewish Sanhedrin or the Roman Senate.

The Jesus way and conventional power politics don’t mix. So we tell Jesus to mind his own business — to go back to church and to “saving souls” and not to meddle in the real affairs of running the world. We sequester Jesus in a stained glass quarantine and appropriate a trillion dollars for the war machine. This begs the question of why Christians get so worked up over which side has the most representatives in Congress when the entire system is incapable of implementing what Jesus taught. Do you see what I mean? It’s hard to believe in Jesus! To believe in Jesus fully, to believe in Jesus as more than a personal savior, to believe in Jesus without qualifications, to believe in Jesus as God’s way to run the world, to believe in Jesus and his Sermon on the Mount, to believe in Jesus as the unimagined solution for a world gone wrong and not as merely chaplain or cheerleader for our favorite version of the status quo is very hard to do. It’s also very controversial.

If believing in Jesus were as easy as we pretend, it would have been easy for me to pass my 9/11 test. But it wasn’t easy. And I didn’t pass the test. I didn’t wrestle with what Jesus calls his followers to do in the Sermon on the Mount. It didn’t even cross my mind! I didn’t pray about what it means to love my enemies. I prayed a war prayer. I preached war sermons. Sermons like “The Road to Armageddon” and “Jesus, Jerusalem, and Jihad” — sermons in which I actually said, “We are at war with Islam.” I’m ashamed of it now; I can barely stand to look at those sermon notes. But I preached those sermons. And they were popular sermons! People loved them. The crowd told me those sermons were anointed. When I was preaching my war sermons, I never once received any criticism for them. Never once! Telling the crowd that God is on our side is never a bad career move.

But a few years later, when I encountered Jesus in a fresh and new way, when I began to take the “words in red” seriously, when I repented for my war prayers and war sermons, when I started preaching peace sermons, then criticism came. Oh, believe me, it came! People left the church over my “new direction.” My new direction was that I began to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously. My new direction was that I began to see the kingdom of Christ as God’s alternative society. My new direction was to believe that peacemakers are the children of God. And I learned a bitter lesson. I learned that it is much easier to unite people around a Jesus who hates our enemies and blesses our wars than it is to unite people around a Jesus who calls us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. It broke my heart to learn that people are not as easily drawn to a gospel of peace as they are to a rally for war.

But I couldn’t blame them. I had been the same way. I had endorsed war in the name of the Lord. I had prayed war prayers. I had preached war sermons. And if people became angry when I started praying peace prayers and preaching peace sermons, I couldn’t be surprised. I had been the same way. Believing in a Mars-like Messiah is easy. Believing in the Prince of Peace is hard.

________

This is an adapted excerpt from Zahnd’s book, A Farewell To Mars.

Sixty years after the war, German author Günter Grass admitted he had been a soldier in the Waffen SS, the elite of the Nazi army. Grass himself never fired a shot.

One of his most memorable experiences was in basic training. A big deal was made out of weapons drill and they were taught that “A soldier’s gun is a soldier’s bride.”

One member of his group failed in this. Gloriously. He had a classic Nordic profile of “racial purity.” He was well spoken and no one could beat him in long-distance running, deep knee-bends or jumping over ditches. What made him stand out was his refusal to take part in rifle drill. Worse still, he refused to take butt or barrel in hand; and, worst of all, when their dead-earnest drill instructor pressed the carbine on him, he would drop it.

In every other task he did what he was ordered to do. He would also have received top marks in camaraderie. He was the friendly, good-natured type, always ready to help, and he never complained. Upon request, he would give his comrades’ boots such a regulation shine that they would be a feast for sore eyes, even the eyes of the strictest N.C.O. during roll call. He had no trouble with brushes or dustcloths; it was only the firearm he refused to wield.

Every possible sort of punitive labor was imposed upon him, but nothing helped. He would work conscientiously for hours without a peep, emptying the latrine with a worm-infested bucket on a long stick only to appear, freshly showered, at rifle drill shortly thereafter and refuse to wield the weapon once again.

At first his companions merely asked him questions and tried to talk him out of it. They actually liked the fellow, this oddball, this knucklehead: “Take it! Just hold it!” But when the leaders punished the whole group on his account, they all began to hate him. They were expected to give him a hard time, and they did. He was beaten in his barracks by the very boys whose boots he had polished mirror-bright. All against one. Through the boards that divided room from room, Günter could hear his whimper, the snap of the leather belt, the loud counting. But neither the hazing nor the beatings, nor anything else, could force him to carry arms.

Morning after morning, when they gathered for roll call and the drill instructor started passing out the weapons, the incorrigible insubordinate would let the one meant for him fall to the ground like the proverbial hot potato and immediately return to his ramrod position, hands pressed to trouser seams, eyes fixed on a distant point.

Günter cannot count the number of times the boy repeated his mantra, a catchphrase that has never left Günter: “We don’t do that.” He stuck to the plural. In a voice neither loud nor soft, he pronounced what he and his refused to do. Four words fusing into one: Wedontdothat.

When he was asked what he meant, he repeated the indefinite “that” and refused to call the object he would not take in his hands by its name.

His behavior transformed the others. From day to day, what had seemed solid crumbled. Their hatred was mixed first with amazement, then with admiration expressed in questions like “How can that idiot keep it up?” “What makes him so hard-nosed?” “How come he doesn’t report sick? He’s been pale as a ghost lately.”

Then they let him be. No more beatings on the bare behind. The insubordinate stood above them, as if on a pedestal.

In the end, this morning ritual was cut off by his arrest. From then on, discipline and order reigned. Every once in a while, the “convict” came up in our conversations. Someone would say, “He must be a Jehovah’s Witness.” Or, “He’s a Bible nut. No doubt about it.” But the blond, blue-eyed boy with the racially pure profile had never referred to the Bible or Jehovah or any other Almighty; he had said simply, “Wedontdothat.”

One day his locker was cleared out: private things, including religious pamphlets. Then he was gone — ”transferred,” it was called. They did not ask where to. Günter did not ask. But they all knew. He had been sent to a concentration camp.

Günter admits that he was relieved when the boy disappeared. The storm of doubts about everything in which he’d had rock-solid faith died down. But in the decades since the war, even though he can’t remember the young man’s name, he cannot forget what Wedontdothat did.

________

Holwick: Jehovah's Witnesses are not pacifists but object to military service because it conflicts with loyalty to God, so I believe the young man was more likely some version of Mennonite.

I believe it was General Dwight Eisenhower who said, “There is no victory at discount prices.” Certainly, the Coalition's “Operation Iraqi Freedom” was not an exception. Courageous warriors have again made the ultimate sacrifice. Even as the first casualty reports came in from Iraq, I was reminded of the unforgettable public appearance of a Gulf War soldier's mother not long after that war ended in 1991.

Appearing before over 50,000 people at a Billy Graham stadium meeting, she had been asked by Dr. Graham to share this remarkable letter from her son - one of the last soldiers to die in the first Gulf War. She explained that her son had asked his best friend to give the letter to his mother “if something happens to me,” he said. Now that letter was in his mother's hands. Few would ever forget the words she read that afternoon: “Mom, if you're reading this, I didn't make it. But that's OK. Because now, Mom, for the first time in my life, I'm smarter than you are! Because I have seen heaven. I have seen Jesus!”

Well, I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about “Battlefield Promotion.”

This was a soldier who knew where he was going - forever. He knew he was ready for eternity, whenever and however it came. He had a lot to say to thousands of people that day in the stadium. He has a lot to say to you and me about real hope and security. There is no deeper peace than to know for sure that death holds no fear for you, that when you die, you'll “see heaven” and you'll “see Jesus.”

Every day some 6,000 people die in America alone. Today's obituaries remind us that our time on earth is short and unpredictable. So, when you've fought your last battle, will you “see heaven”? Some people would say, “I think I've got a pretty good shot. I'm a good person.” But listen to God's verdict from the Bible, the only verdict that really matters - “There is no one righteous, not even one.” (Romans 3:10) “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23) In plain words, none of us is good enough to make it with a perfect God. He's sinless. We've all got sin. If getting to heaven depends on our goodness, we don't stand a chance.

Thank God it doesn't depend on our goodness. Our lifetime of doing what I want instead of what God wants has left us under the penalty that sin carries - in God's words, “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23) - that's eternal separation from God. Our only hope is a rescue. Someone has to die to pay my death penalty, and someone did. Speaking of Jesus, the Bible says, “He bore our sins in His own body on the tree.” (1 Peter 2:24) God loves you so much that He gave His Son for you. Listen to 1 John 4:9, our word for today from the Word of God: “He sent His one and only Son into the world that we might live through Him.”

Jesus took your hell so you could live in His heaven. But you have to grab Him in total trust, giving yourself to the One who gave it all for you. The door of heaven isn't open to good people, but to forgiven people - people who've taken what Jesus did on the cross as the payment for their sin. If you're not sure you've ever really told Jesus, “I'm Yours, Lord - now and forever,” you can do it right now, right where you are.

When you belong to Jesus, you can know where you'll be when you've taken your last breath. You'll be seeing heaven, and you'll be seeing Jesus.

________________

Copyright © Ron Hutchcraft Ministries, Inc., PO Box 400, Harrison, AR 72602. Used by permission. Written by Ron Hutchcraft. "Practical Answers to Real Life Issues"

[see also HolwickID #16818]

*

[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #5501]

A soldier in the Vietnam War had a Christian roommate [Dave Roever] whom he called “Preacher-man.” The Christian called him “Pervert Number One”. His friend was Pervert Number Two. The soldier was badly wounded and filled with anger. After the war he married, then almost divorced. He spent all his time drinking and fighting. He only found peace when he turned his life over to God.

He had heard that Preacher-Man had been killed with a phosphorus grenade. Then he heard Roever was alive and called him on a radio program. Both went to church together one Sunday, where Preacher-man is giving a message.

~~~~~~~~~~ [November 15, 1991] ~~~~~~~~~~ Background ~~~~~~~~~~

Dave Roever (pronounced Reever) in “From Tragedy to Triumph” video tape.

He grew up in a Christian home, married his high school sweetheart, went to Bible college, got drafted, and decided to enlist in the Navy. He took SEAL training and was assigned to riverine warfare. Dave's buddies were all corrupt (see story of one of them above) and took shots for venereal disease, while Dave remained faithful to his wife. They called him “Preacher-Man.”

While on a patrol he prepared to throw a phosphorus grenade to clear a booby-trapped area. It went off in his hand (a sniper may have shot his hand) and burned up half his body. The right side of his face was burned down to the skull, his chest was blown off so he could see his heart beating. He threw himself into the water only to see the phosphorus burning intensely white even under water. They pulled him back in the boat and medevacked him to a hospital. Two weeks later they opened up his chest and he caught on fire again from concealed phosphorus (the doctor’s report testifies to this); he burned all the way through the gurney and fell on the floor. Thirteen other patients were taken with him to an intensive care unit in Houston, and twelve died there. One wife came up to her wounded soldier, was disgusted and never came back. His wife whispered, “I love you, Davey.” He regained sight in his right eye, had his face reconstructed, wears a plastic ear and hairpiece, but can play piano dramatically.

His wife gave this invitation:

“Everyone is going to serve a god. You may not serve the same God I serve. You may serve Buddha, or Allah, or the god of Mars – he was the god of war and violence.

"We act like the god we serve. If you are a violent person, you’re serving the god of Mars. There’s another god called Venus, the goddess of sex.

"I want you to think about this: When you are lying in a battlefield, legs and arms blown off, lying there dying, Is your god big enough to pull you through? If the god you serve cannot care for you, I suggest you change gods now, and serve the One who will take care of you, who will pull you through in difficult circumstances.”

[verse 3 is most familiar and quoted of this poeml; Lovelace fought on the side of the Royalists against the establishing of the Puritan Commonwealth]

Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind,

That from the nunnery

Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind

To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase

The first foe in the field;

And with a stonger faith embrace

A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such

As you, too, shall adore;

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not honour more.

*

Louis Zamperini was born into an Italian American family. He spoke no English and this made him the target of bullies. His dad taught him to box and he became so good at beating people up he got in trouble with the law. To divert him from this his brother got him involved in the high school track team. Louis really excelled at track and set a world record for the mile. In 1936 he attended the Olympics in Berlin and finished 8th in the 5000-meter race. Eighth isn’t that great, but his final lap was so fast it caught the attention of Adolf Hitler, who insisted on a personal meeting.

The world was in turmoil and war had already started in Europe. Zamperini enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1941 and was stationed in Hawaii as a bombardier. He went on several bombing runs against Japanese islands but in May 1943 he had a special assignment. His plane took off to search for another downed plane. Instead of finding them, his own plane had mechanical trouble and crashed into the ocean. Louis remembered being entwined in electrical cables as the broken plane sank into the depths, but somehow he got free and made it to the surface. Only three crew members survived the crash. For 47 days they drifted on two small life rafts. One of the survivors gave up hope and died.

For the first time in his life, Louis prayed to God. He had never learned how to pray, so he recited snippets of prayers he had seen in Hollywood movies. Soon his prayers became more specific. After being without water for several days, he prayed for rain. If God would quench their thirst, he prayed, I will dedicate my life to you. That afternoon it rained, just enough to quench their thirst.

After weeks of drifting with the current they finally saw a plane nearby which doubled back and came over them. They were delirious with joy, until machine gun bullets began ripping into the water around them. It was a Japanese bomber. Their rafts were riddled with holes yet the men were not hit. Enough of the air compartments were left to keep them afloat until they reached an island. A Japanese-held island.

Because he was famous, Zamperini was transferred to a special prisoner of war camp in Japan. The Red Cross was never informed he was a prisoner, and in 1944 the Army officially declared him dead. For the next two years, Louis might as well have been dead. He was tortured endlessly and starved till he became a skeleton. One guard in particular, nicknamed “The Bird,” took a special interest in beating Louis.

Zamperini survived the war and returned home to his astonished family. Overnight he was famous again. But he forgot all those prayers in the life raft. Instead, he tried to make quick money through various schemes, all of which failed. He became a raging alcoholic to forget his memories but the nightmares came back every night, especially the nightmares about The Bird. His marriage began to unravel.

In 1949 his wife attended a rally in Los Angeles and was so impressed she asked Louis to go with her the next night. The speaker was a young evangelist named Billy Graham. Louis really didn’t want to go, but she insisted.

When he finally went, he bolted out when Billy gave the invitation. Then he returned another night and felt his heart being convicted by God. He remembered something he had said to God on the life raft, “God, spare my life through the war, and I’ll seek You and serve You.” He had never tried to keep one of those prayers.

Louis went forward at Billy’s invitation and gave his life to Jesus Christ. He told a reporter, “I got off my knees and somehow I knew I was through getting drunk. I knew it. I also knew that I forgave all my guards including The Bird.” After he accepted Christ, Louis never had another nightmare about his Japanese guards.

In 1950 he returned to Japan, where many of his former guards were now prisoners themselves. He shared his testimony with them, hugged them, and led a number of them to Christ.

Zamperini is now 94 and lives in Hollywood. For his 81st birthday in 1998 he ran a leg in the Olympic Torch relay for the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. But the most important thing for him has been preaching the forgiveness that can only be found in Christ.

________

Adapted from material from Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken: A World War II Story of Surival, Resilience, and Redemption (New York: Random House, 2010); "The Amazing Story of Louis Zamperini - Part 2" by Greg Laurie ; and “Louis Zamperini” article in Wikipedia.org.

The “Napalm Girl” from a famous Vietnam War photo tells her story of coming to faith.

________

You have seen my picture a thousand times. It’s a picture that made the world gasp — a picture that defined my life. I am nine years old, running along a puddled roadway in front of an expressionless soldier, arms outstretched, naked, shrieking in pain and fear, the dark contour of a napalm cloud billowing in the distance.

My own people, the South Vietnamese, had been bombing trade routes used by the Viet Cong rebels. I had not been targeted, of course. I had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Those bombs have brought me immeasurable pain. Even now, some 40 years later, I am still receiving treatment for burns that cover my arms, back, and neck. The emotional and spiritual pain was even harder to endure.

And yet, looking back at the past five decades, I realize that those same bombs that brought so much suffering also brought great healing. Those bombs led me to Christ.

Mountain of Rage

As a child, I was raised in the religion of Cao Dai (pronounced cow-die). My grandparents were important leaders within the religion, and they enjoyed respect from our entire community. Following in their footsteps, my parents, who had grown up knowing no religion except Cao Dai, also devoted themselves to its beliefs, as did all of my siblings.

Cao Dai is universalist in nature. According to a description on CaoDai.org, it recognizes all religions as having “one same divine origin, which is God, or Allah, or the Tao, or the Nothingness,” or pretty much any other deity you could imagine. “You are god, and god is you” — we had this mantra ingrained in us. We were equal-opportunity worshipers, giving every god a shot.

Looking back, I see my family’s religion as something of a charm bracelet slung around my wrist, each dangling bauble representing yet another possibility of divine assistance. When troubles came along — and every day, it seemed, they did — I was encouraged to rub those charms in hopes that help would arrive.

For years, I prayed to the gods of Cao Dai for healing and peace. But as one prayer after another went unanswered, it became clear that either they were nonexistent or they did not care to lend a hand.

And so I continued to bear the crippling weight of anger, bitterness, and resentment toward those who caused my suffering — the searing fire that penetrated my body; the ensuing burn baths; the dry and itchy skin; the inability to sweat, which turned my flesh into an oven in Vietnam’s sweltering heat. I craved relief that never would come. And yet, despite every last external circumstance that threatened to overtake me — mind, body, and soul — the most agonizing pain I suffered during that season of life dwelled in my heart.

I was as alone as a person can be. I could not turn to a friend, for nobody wished to befriend me. I was toxic, and everyone knew it. To be near me was to be near hardship. Wise people stayed far away. I was alone, atop a mountain of rage. Why was I made to wear these awful scars?

I grew up hearing the proverb “A tree wants to be alone, but the wind always whips it here and there.” That was me: a wind-whipped tree. And I feared I would never stand upright again.

In 1982, I found myself crouched inside Saigon’s central library, pulling Vietnamese books of religion off the shelves one by one. The stack in front of me included books on Bahá’í, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Cao Dai. It also contained a copy of the New Testament. I thumbed through several books before pulling the New Testament into my lap. An hour later, I had picked my way through the Gospels, and at least two themes had become abundantly clear.

First, despite all that I had learned through Cao Dai — that there were many gods, that there were many paths to holiness, that the burden of “success” in religion rested atop my own weary, slumped shoulders — Jesus presented himself as the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). His entire ministry, it seemed, pointed to one straightforward claim: “I am the way you get to God; there is no other way but me.” Second, this Jesus had suffered in defense of his claim. He had been mocked, tortured, and killed. Why would he endure these things, I wondered, if he were not, in fact, God?

I had never been exposed to this side of Jesus — the wounded one, the one who bore scars. I turned over this new information in my mind as a gem in my hand, relishing the light that was cast from all sides. The more I read, the more I came to believe that he really was who he said he was, that he really had done what he said he had done, and that — most important to me — he really would do all that he had promised in his Word.

Perhaps he could help me make sense of my pain and at last come to terms with my scars.

Finally at Peace

My salvation experience happened, fittingly enough, on Christmas Eve. It was 1982, and I was attending a special worship service at a small church in Saigon.

The pastor spoke about how Christmas is not about the gifts we give to each other, so much as it is about one gift in particular: the gift of Jesus Christ. As I listened to this message, I knew that something was shifting inside me.

How desperately I needed peace. How ready I was for love and joy. I had so much hatred in my heart — so much bitterness. I wanted to let go of all my pain. I wanted to pursue life instead of holding fast to fantasies of death. I wanted this Jesus.

So when the pastor finished speaking, I stood up, stepped out into the aisle, and made my way to the front of the sanctuary to say yes to Jesus Christ.

And there, in a small church in Vietnam, mere miles from the street where my journey had begun amid the chaos of war — on the night before the world would celebrate the birth of the Messiah — I invited Jesus into my heart.

When I woke up that Christmas morning, I experienced the kind of healing that can only come from God. I was finally at peace.

Nearly half a century has passed since I found myself running — frightened, naked, and in pain — down that road in Vietnam. I will never forget the horrors of that day — the bombs, the fire, the shrieks, the fear. Nor will I forget the years of trial and torment that followed. But when I think about how far I have come — the freedom and peace that comes from faith in Jesus — I realize there is nothing greater or more powerful than the love of our blessed Savior.

My faith in Jesus has enabled me to forgive those who have hurt and scarred me. It has enabled me to pray for my enemies rather than curse them. And it has enabled me not just to tolerate them but truly to love them.

I will forever bear the scars of that day, and that picture will always serve as a reminder of the unspeakable evil of which humanity is capable. That picture defined my life. In the end, it gave me a mission, a ministry, a cause.

Today, I thank God for that picture. Today, I thank God for everything — even for that road. Especially for that road.

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Kim Phuc Phan Thi is the author of Fire Road: The Napalm Girl’s Journey through the Horrors of War to Faith, Forgiveness, and Peace (Tyndale).