War in the Gulf: A Biblical Perspective, Part 1

Selected Scriptures

     This morning, as I share with you a Biblical perspective on the War in the Gulf, I want to hasten to say that I'm not going to give you any rhetoric.  We have perhaps enough and more of that than we care to have.  I'm not here to give you any kind of poll or any kind of consensus, or the opinions of any experts.  I'm not here to play upon your patriotic emotions.

     I'm here basically to endeavor to have you understand war and this war from God's perspective.  It is more of a lesson, more of a Bible study, in some ways, than a sermon.  And it really comes as a result of a question that I have been asked throughout this week, how should a church respond to what is going on in the Gulf?  How should a Christian respond?

     A few days ago I received a phone call, and the man on the other end of the line said, "All across America, religious leaders are taking their stand with the antiwar protests.  And we're calling you because we want to do an interview with you to play on our syndicated radio system, and we want you to tell us where you stand on this, because we believe you perhaps may take another view."

     And he asked the question, "What is the church to do in response to this?  What is a Christian's proper response?  And are all religious leaders unilaterally committed to an antiwar position?"  Well, if you're watching the news and listening at all, it does seem that all across America, religious leaders are marching and protesting and sitting in and crying out for peace, and demanding the end of American involvement in Iraq. 

     It's a time when people are looking at the church and saying, "Can you help?  How am I to understand this?  How am I to cope with this?"  And, as I said, I don't want to give you rhetoric and I don't want to play on your emotion.  I want to give you an understanding out of the Scripture so that you can perceive this scenario from the viewpoint of the Lord as much as is possible.

     I believe, first of all, that evangelical, Bible-believing Christians are not antiwar necessarily.  I think everybody is antiwar in the sense of the tragedy and the pain and the suffering and the death that is involved.  But I think Christians who understand the Word of God look at war, and even this war, differently, because they look at it from a Biblical viewpoint.

     While war is tragic and painful in a myriad of ways, and while we have every reason to hate war, we must understand what God says about it, because there are times when war is not avoidable.  Many people are praying for the war to end, and that's fine.  But if we're praying that way, our prayers must be based upon understanding.

     Now, there was in my mind earlier in the week some prompting to consider some of these issues and reflect upon the Word of God.  By Wednesday, I spoke in the chapel at the Master's College, and I spoke to the students on a perspective from God's Word about the war.  And following that message I began to think more deeply about it and realized that perhaps I should widen the things I said and bring more Biblical insight together and share it with you this Sunday and next Sunday, at least, for sure.

     And as I was thinking through what I would want to talk about and how I'd want to divide it down in manageable bites so you could comprehend it, I came up with four questions that I think I need to answer for you and help you to see in the Scripture.

     Question number one, why does war happen?  Question number two, can war be just, or moral?  Question number three, how are we to understand the present war in the Gulf?  Question number four, is this a sign of the coming of Christ?  Today and next Lord 's Day, I want to endeavor to answer those questions.

     Let's begin with the first one, why does war happen?  There is a certain amount of frustration in our culture about the fact that war even exists.  There are certain people who just can't imagine that it's happening when we're so far along the evolutionary chain.  We have come so far.  We are so advanced.  We are so educated.

     Not only is everyone exposed to education via schools, but certainly everyone is exposed to education via media.  We are so advanced, and there's so much talk of peace, and there's so much talk of love.  And we have so much technology, sociology, psychology and theology, why are we still killing each other? 

     Isn't man basically far enough up the evolutionary ladder that it is true of him that he is a noble being, that his deepest desires are for love and peace?  Isn't he good at heart?  If left to himself, won't he find that which is the best?  Isn't he the noblest beast?  Sociologists and philosophers and psychologists and theologians tell us he is.  And thus there is a lot of confusion about how can this be happening in a modern world.

     But all of that is a lie.  Man is not a noble beast.  The heart of man is wicked, rebellious, proud, selfish, deceitful, violent, destructive, murderous.  Not every man acts on the outside like he is on the inside, because there are built into culture some restraints, by God's mercy. 

     But man left to himself is a vile being, not at all the apex of an evolutionary chain, but the bottom, as it were, of a declining morality that started down in the Garden.  And evil men, in fact, are getting worse and worse.  It always interests me that even the peace lovers appear hostile and violent when they don't get what they want. 

     And so we ask the question, why is there war?  How are we to explain war in such an advanced society?  After all, we're not running around in loincloths with spears in our hands.  And somebody might say, "Well, there are as many reasons for war as there are wars."  That's a rather generic statement, and perhaps not at all correct.

     Why are there wars?  Let me suggest to you there are three components, three components.  Number one, evil aggression.  Evil aggression.  Not all men are as wicked as they could be.  Not all men are as wicked on the outside as they are on the inside.  Some are better at constraining their internal wickedness because of trained consciences, because of wanting peer approval, because of some kind of religious expectation, because of police and government control and a myriad of other things.

     Not everybody's as bad as he could be.  But there are some people who are as bad as they can be.  And some of the people who are as wretched as human beings can possibly be are in positions to enact unbelievably horrendous acts.  Evil aggression.  Whether you kill one person or whether you are a mass murderer of 30, or whether you massacre millions, that kind of hostility is generated from a wicked, wretched, evil heart that has gone to the extremes of evil and knows no compunctions.

     War happens because of evil aggression in the heart of man unrestrained.  And every one of us, because we are fallen and sinful, and particularly those who are without the redemption and transformation of Jesus Christ, have the capacity to effect crimes of heinous character, were it not for restraints of one kind or another.

     A good insight into this evil aggression cause of war is found in James chapter 4.  Let's look together at this chapter and the first two verses, because I think the principle that James gives here is directly applicable.  In James chapter 4, in verse 1, James writes profoundly, "What is the source of," and the Greek words, "wars and battles among you?"  What is the source of them?  Where do they come from?

     And then he answers the question most interestingly.  "Is not the source your pleasures, your lusts, your desires?"  That word there is the word hedonae, from which the word hedonism comes, which is a word that means self-gratification.  The word actually means the yearnings of self-gratification, to fulfill your own hedonistic desire for personal gratification.  That's where war comes from.

     "Is not the source your hedonistic, self-gratifying passions that wage war in your members?"  Now, notice this, please.  Before the war ever gets on the outside, it starts where?  On the inside.  You say, "What is this war?"  This is a war between self-gratification and conscience.  That's right.  Self-gratification and conscience.  Conscience is battling self-gratification.

     The desire for what is forbidden and what is known to be wrong and what is visceral and what is lustful and what is passionately wanted for the sake of self-pleasure, self-promotion, self-prestige, self-plunder, self-power or whatever else, that wages war against the conscience.  And everyone has a conscience which functions to one degree or another.

     And according to Romans chapter 2, every man knows something of the law of God written in his heart, right?  There is a moral sense in human beings that even a Saddam Hussein or an Adolf Hitler possesses.  What happens is, war breaks out on the inside, between the yearnings for self-gratification and moral conscience. 

     And some people win the war in terms of conscience.  Conscience is assisted by religion, and I'm not even talking about Christian people, by religion, by expectations, by habits that they've been trained with since they were children, by the fear of retaliation from governmental force.  And so they're not as bad as they could be.

     Other people, conscience becomes the victim of self-gratification.  They become the criminals, the mass murderers, the demagogues, the dictators, the rulers who massacre whole populations of people, all the way up the ladder.  So the desire for what is forbidden and wrong wages war against what is right.  You could say morality battles gratification.

     James says that's where war starts.  And when the hedonistic's desire for self-gratification dominates, the war goes from the inside to the outside.  Because now, in order to gratify himself, there have to be some victims.  To get what he wants, he's got to rape somebody or plunder somebody or kill somebody or steal something or destroy something.

     And so in verse 2 he says, "You lust and you don't have.  So what do you do?  Your self-gratification has won.  You want it, but you don't have it.  So you kill to get it."  That's it.  You're envious.  You want what somebody else has.  You can't get it.  So you fight and you make war.  That's the war of self-gratification, going from the inside to the outside.

     You ask yourself why a man like Hussein does what he does.  The answer is because self-gratification lusts have overpowered conscience.  I don't know anything about the man's background to know whether his conscience was exercised at any point in his life to a noble point, but it seems to me that it was not.  And you put a man in a position of ultimate authority where he answers to absolutely no one, and you will find conscience having a very difficult time winning its victories.

     What happens is, lust leads to passion.  Passion leads to war.  Whether they want pleasure, power, prestige, wealth, it drives men to kill.  It drives them to destructive behavior.  It drives them to deadly aggression.  And if they don't get it, they're unfulfilled, and they'll make war.

     Hussein's invasion of Kuwait was such a war.  Revenge, hatred, lust for money, lust for oil, lust for power, and, believe me, he is not through.  He doesn't want just Kuwait.  He wants the world.  He's an evil aggressor, classic, absolutely classic.

     There's a second component that creates war, second element, and that is what we'll call just protection, just protection.  There are wars and elements within war caused by the desire to defend, protect, liberate and free the victim of the evil aggressor. 

     Paul spoke about this.  Look at Romans 13.  No one can understand how to view war without understanding Romans 13.  It is one of many New Testament Scriptures.  We'll look more deeply at it next Lord's Day and at a number of other New Testament Scriptures.  But for this morning I want to read it to you and make a few comments.

     Romans 13:1 and following, "Let every person be in subjection to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those who exist are established by God." Make this general note in your mind.  Government is a God-given mercy.  Did you hear that?  Government is a God-given mercy. 

     Government is given its primary task, to protect innocent people from evil aggressors.  That is the primary role of government.  Government has overstepped the bounds of its Biblical responsibility, its God-given responsibility in many, many ways, but this is it, initially and substantially. 

     "Therefore," verse 2 says, "he who resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God, and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves."  God puts government in place to control sinful man.  Otherwise, sinful man will run amok.  It is government and the institutions of government, law, police, the courts, jails, the right of capital punishment, all of that, that restrains man and gives conscience some help in winning the war.

     That's God-given, or sinful men would run amok in the world, to the destruction of everyone.  And so if you resist the authority, you're resisting the God who gave the authority for the preservation of society. 

     And then in verse 3 he puts some leverage in the hand of authority, and some power, "For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil."  In other words, the government exists to make people who do wrong afraid.  And if government can't make them afraid, then they're going to continue to do wrong.  Very simple.

     If they do not live under the fear of just and swift punishment, then conscience cannot win against passion, the passion of the fallen heart.  So he says in verse 3, "Do you want to have no fear of authority?  Do what is good.  You'll have praise from the same."  You don't have to live under fear if you just do what the law says, and God has given the law for the preservation of mankind.

     And then in verse 4 he says, "Look, the authority is a minister of God to you for good."  Whether on a local level, with the police, on a national/international level with the armies of nations, they are there to protect you from evil aggressors.  "If you do what is evil, be afraid," look at this, "for it doesn't bear the sword for nothing."  Why does it bear the sword, to do what?  To use it.

     Government is not symbolic.  Government is not a pageant.  Government has real power, and its power is in its sword.  Now, what do you do with a sword?  Rap people's knuckles?  No.  Spank them?  No.  You kill them.  That's what you do with it.  You take their life away.

     What restrains ultimately the evil aggressor is the power of the sword, the deadly force that government can bring against ultimate acts of evil.  That's God-ordained.  In fact, he says, "not only does it not bear the sword for nothing, it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil."  Never does government act in a more God-intended way than when it takes the life of an evil-doer to protect the innocent, to preserve life in a society.

     I personally am convinced that based upon the Word of God America and the allies' response to Hussein is a noble war.  It is a just war of protection, motivated by the noble cause to deliver an embattled people victimized by an evil aggressor.  It is even an unselfish war.  For they are not us.  They are a people of a very different culture than we are.

     You say, "Now, wait a minute?  Aren't we really motivated by oil?  Aren't we really motivated by prosperity?  Aren't we really motivated by economic