Animals of another stripe

As I eat my Taco Bell dinner, I sit at the computer and look at the news from sources around the world. I usually go to wn.com, which links you to stories from all kinds of sources- even Aljazeera, which is surprisingly neutral in straight news, although quite radical in its op-eds. Now this blog is usually a happy place, so I won't go into a lot of details of the stories I read in shame tonight. Forty-five killed in Iraq as the US moves out and murderers under the guise of Islam target those brave enough to try to make a real nation out of their pile of dust. A government meeting becomes a place of butchery in Somalia, as murderers again try to prevent the establishment of a civilized government, under the guise of wanting only Shiera law. Yeah, a legal system that depends upon killing all its opponents, that's a good system there. In the laughably named Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire, the Belgian Congo, the Congo Free State, maybe even Disneyland) "rebels" decide the best way to rebel against a government that only exists in the world's collective imagination is to rape at gunpoint every woman in a territory that they can lay hands on, fleeing into the jungle whenever the totally impotent UN "peacekeepers" show up. These are more than unbelievers, my friends. Hear the words of St. Jude:

10But these speak evil of those things which they know not: but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves. 11Woe unto them! for they have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward, and perished in the gainsaying of Core. 12These are spots in your feasts of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear: clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; 13Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.

As I thought over these "people", I remembered my experience in church this week. Now, the worst thing a pastor can say to me is "open your Bible to the xxth chapter of St. Fillintheblank", because, invariably at the moment I have grasped what he's trying to point out I will start reading ahead. This week, whilst Pastor Dave was drawing conclusions from the dinner Abraham and Sarah were serving to the Lord and His two angelic sidekicks, I was reliving Lot's last night and morning in Sodom. And I though about how these groups aforementioned were just about like the citizens of the Plain; nothing more than conscienceless beasts, rutting and killing for no other reason than to please their warped emotions. Yes, I said for NO OTHER REASON; The Shi'ites in Iraq can claim they want to establish a government by their "faith". The Somalis can claim they want their kind of "law". The rebels of the DRC (mostly, as I understand it, Rwandans who must have raped all the woman in their own tiny little hell-hole and now want to ravish the prone body of their incoherent neighbor) can claim they want to establish their "ethnic group" in charge. But all they really want to do is kill and rape; if you put them all together on an island and let them establish all the things they claim they're fighting for, they'd just kill and rape each other out of existence. Because that, and nothing more, is all they want and live for.

So, as I prayed for a little insight on the subject beyond, "let's just put a big fence around them and let them eradicate each other", Jesus whispered into my ear this little tidbit:

Matthew 11 New International Version

23And you, Capernaum, will you be lifted up to the skies? No, you will go down to the depths.d If the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Sodom, it would have remained to this day. 24But I tell you that it will be more bearable for Sodom on the day of judgment than for you.”

And in Luke 11:32:

The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now one greater than Jonah is here.

The point being, yes they are animals. But they have a limited excuse that the availability of the Gospel has not touched their hearts to the extent it has in our "civilized" nations. And yet we rape, we kill; we have every means at our disposal to effect our salvation, and to turn our lives in repentance once Grace is conferred, and do we? Are we even thankful that God has seen fit to bless us with life in a nation where these things are the oddity and not the norm? And if grateful, what do we do with it? God sees me condemn these people and asks, "And what would YOU do in that life? I brought you and called you to pray for grace, not to suggest additions to hell's playroom. Shelve your self-righteousness and follow Me."

Lord, when it seems that men are irredeemable and unreachable, when my every instinct wants to beg you to bring down judgement on this earth, remind me where I would be without you, if people had thought me Irredeemable and unreachable; strengthen me to forgive and pray.