Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Should Christian Go to War? No.

Episode Date: October 4, 2020

Patrick and Keith are doing another point/counter-point. Should Christians go to war? In this episode Patrick says the answer is no, based on Jesus’s teachings and actions. Jesus’s explicit rejection of violence before his crucifixion show us that his teachings on non-violence were not merely for private life, but also were intended to guide how Christians live out their whole lives, and function in society. In our next episode, Keith answers ‘yes.’ To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO and @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10 Minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. Right now, we are answering questions you're asking. A lot of these are coming from our Facebook page. So, follow 10-minute Bible Talks on Facebook, vote on your favorite questions, or you can just give your own, and you might hear it right here on the podcast. Only one head of state has used a nuclear bomb against his enemies. That's Harry S. Truman. He actually grew up around the corner from where I grew up in Independence, Missouri. And he was, by all accounts, a serious follower of Jesus. And he loved Jesus's Sermon on the Mount so much that he actually memorized parts of it. The sermon on the Mount, whether or not you recognize that name, is Matthew Chapter 5 all the way through the end of Matthew Chapter 7. And in that sermon, there are so many wonderful things that Jesus teaches about. In it, he says this, Blessed are the peacemakers for their

they will be called the children of God. Another famous one. You have heard it said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Another one. You have heard it said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If he slaps you on the cheek, turn the other cheek to him also.

Harry S. Truman loved this sermon, but he also faced a tremendous question during his presidency. He was in charge at the end of World War II. He understood that if the war continued, and it looked like it might continue on for several more years, it would quite possibly take millions of lives from both sides. And so he was faced with a choice. He had the nuclear bomb, and he could drop the bomb and end the war, or he could allow those millions of lives to be lost over the next few years. Well, we all know how the story goes.

Harry S. Truman dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, and in the process killed 350,000. people. These were both military people and a lot of civilians, men and women and children. But he was right. The war was won and perhaps millions of lives were spared as a result. Do you feel any of the irony in this story? That someone who truly loved Jesus and his teachings about loving their enemies could also be the exact same person who oversaw the annihilation of a third of a million people in just a moment? A few weeks ago, Keith and I took on both sides of a question, should Christians Sabbath? And today we're going to be at it again.

We're going to ask the question, should Christians go to war? Should Christians turn to violence under the authority of the state? Now, my answer to that question is no. Christians should not go to war, but Keith says yes. So we'll have one episode for each perspective. But before we do that, I need to make a few observations. And the first one is this. I know that we have many listeners to this podcast who are either current or former military.

My goal here is not to shame you any more than a podcast on sexual immorality is designed to shame someone who's struggling with that. Jesus' love and forgiveness truly know no bounds. But I do think that even if you don't agree with me, the conclusions that I draw on this podcast, I think that every Christian in the military really does need to reckon with what Jesus said and what he did about violence. Okay, a second observation. Whether you're on the left or the right, chances are that you personally see no problem with Christians being involved in warfare. You might justly point out that without military action, the military action of Christians actually, Nazis would still be in charge in Germany. Millions more Jews would have died in concentration camps. These are fair points,

and again, I think that they deserve serious consideration. But all that said, with those two observations made, I have an uphill battle. I have to convince people that what they've believed about the Bible, for at least as long as they've believed in the Bible, what they've believed may in fact be wrong. And worse yet, to do this, I'm going to have to challenge a conception of the state that most American Christians hold, and our audience is largely American Christians. We tend to assume that America is not Rome, that America is not Babylon, that America is a city shining on a hill, a pristine, maybe even a chosen nation of God. In this concept of America, it goes all the way back to the Puritans before our country's founding. The Puritans and the pilgrims, when they came here,

they thought that they would establish Christ's millennial reign on earth as in heaven. Now, we know how the story goes. They didn't actually accomplish that. And although there's no more Puritans or pilgrims alive today, their vision of America as a chosen nation, it's continued on. It still lives. From a biblical standpoint, I think that this is problematic. The Bible has always been intensely practical and honest when it comes to world powers like the United States. On the one hand, they are often envisioned as weapons in Yahweh's hands sent out for his purpose. So when we think about nations from this perspective, we see that their warfare often serves God's ends. Beyond that, they hold the sword for a reason. They bring order to society, which is much better than anarchy. And so the Bible can, be very realistic about the benefits of world powers. And yet, on the other hand, these world powers are always held accountable for their violence and idolatry. Assyria, Babylon, and Persia, those were the world powers back in the days of Israel. They are all described in exactly this kind of two-sided way. Let me give you one really compact example from the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah prophesied that the

Neo-Assyrian Empire. So that was the superpower of his day. He said that it would be the means by which God punished Israel's unrepentantant idolatry and injustice. Now, Assyria is depicted actually as a weapon in God's hands being used for God's purposes. But check out what happens to the Assyrians in the end. So this is Isaiah chapter 10 verses 5 to 7. He writes, woe to the Assyrians. And he's speaking from God's perspective. So this is God speaking. He says, woe to the Assyrian, the rod of my anger, in whose hands is the club of my wrath. So check it out. How was Assyria depicted? Well, they're God's rod of anger. They're the weapon in his hand, but he's saying woe to them. Well, let's find out why. I send him Assyria against a godless nation. That's Israel. He's going to use Assyria in his hand as a weapon

to punish Israel for its idolatry and injustice. I dispatch him against a people who anger me to seize loot and snatch plunder and to trample them down like mud in the streets. But this is not what he, Assyria, intends. This is not what he has in his mind. His purpose is to destroy, to put an end to many nations. Therefore, the Lord, Yahweh Almighty, will send a wasting disease upon Assyria's sturdy warriors. Under the king's pomp, a fire will be kindled like a blazing flame. You see what happens, right? Isaiah gets it. Violent empires rise and they fall by the sword. God in his sovereign goodness uses their international warfare as a means of executing his will. That's the point. He says, look, Assyria, I've sent you out for the sake of my will, for the sake of my purposes. And yet, and yet, this does not absolve them of their sinful violence. In the end, they are judged. In the end, the Bible is incredibly sober about the cycle of human violence and warfare. Empires rise. Empires fall. Assyria was the sword of God's wrath in Isaiah. And eventually Assyria fell.

to the sword of Babylon, which eventually fell to the sword of Persia, which eventually fell to the sword of the Greeks, which eventually fell to the sword of Rome. And that was, of course, the sword, which was in charge in Jesus' day. Jesus understood this cycle, which was, again, repeated throughout the prophetic literature in the Old Testament. His disciples didn't. When Jesus is approaching Jerusalem and he's announcing the kingdom of God, his disciples, what are they preparing for? They're preparing for a revolution. They think it's time for Rome to fall under the sword of Jesus. He's just the newest empire to come along and he will conquer. And so what do the disciples do when Jesus arrives in Jerusalem? They go out and they

buy weapons and they proudly announced to Jesus. This is in Luke 2238. Sea Lord, here are two swords. That's enough. Jesus replied. The seed is kind of supposed to make us laugh and cry all at once. It's comical because two swords is not by any stretch of the imagination enough to overthrow Rome. So when Jesus says, yeah, two swords is enough, we kind of laugh. Two swords to beat Rome, I don't know. But it's also tragic. It's tragic because Jesus is exasperated here. He's not just saying that's enough, like two is enough. He's also saying, just that's enough. Stop. Don't you guys get it. My kingdom is not another bloody empire that continues the cycle of violence. My kingdom stops that wheel from turning, but his disciples, they don't get it. When officials from the high priest

come to arrest Jesus, Peter, he's still got the sword on him, so he draws it out and he swings away, and I guess he wasn't a very good swordsman because all he catches is one guy's ear. But again, listen to what Jesus does. Luke 2251, but Jesus answered, no more of this, and he touched the man's ear and healed him. Could Jesus have been more clear? What does he say to Peter? no more of this. No more of the violence, no more of the blood, no more of the death. He says no more of this. And how does Jesus bring his kingdom in the exact same way that he said he would in his sermon?

He loved his enemies to the point of death. He turned the other cheek. He blessed those who persecute him. It's exactly what he talks about in the sermon on the Mount. Jesus laid himself on that churning cycle of violence. And he allowed Rome and the Jewish leaders to crush him on that wheel, and just when it seemed that he would just be another nameless grape crushed under the foot of imperial aspirations, something wild happened. He rose again. He jammed

the wheel. He broke the cycle, and from him flowed resurrection power, which built a kingdom by love. It built an empire by grace and by mercy, not by violence, which called people to allegiance, not with threats of tyranny and destruction, but it called people to allegiance to his kingdom. with promises of peace and generosity. Every other empire rises by spilling the blood of his enemies. The kingdom of God is the only empire that rises by spilling its own blood for its enemies. Let me be honest with you. I'm like Peter.

I see the appeal of the sword. I get it. I'm like Harry S. Truman. I see the practicality of violence when you're holding lives in the scale. Like so many disciples, I find it hard to believe that Jesus really meant it when he said, that's enough and no more of this. I think it's a stad in a really strange day when followers of Jesus acknowledge, on the one hand, that that self-sacrificial love for enemies, that that was the fulcrum of God's plan to bring

heaven on earth. And yet, on the other hand, we end up calling that kind of sacrificial love impractical in the real world. It's almost as though we think it's nice and cute that Jesus laid down his life and that he refused the path of violence, but we are hard-cut realists, not idealist. And while that might work for the salvation of the cosmos, oh yeah, sure, you can die for that. It really doesn't do much good at the international negotiation table. We are assured that when Jesus said to Peter in Matthew 2652,

put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. We think he would just meant that for Peter, not for me. For the rest of us, if we draw our sword for the protection of self or for the protection of state, well, we've ennobled that. That is a noble thing. Jesus wasn't talking to me there. And never mind that Rome is depicted as a prostitute drunk on blood and revelation, and that God's people are encouraged to do coitus interruptus.

John says, come out of her, get out of there. But of course, we tell ourselves, My nation isn't Rome. My nation isn't Babylon. This isn't talking about me. Our forms of military violence are different. Are you sure? Are you sure? Jesus's sermon on the Mount wasn't just a tract for private morality. It wasn't just for me and my house and my little family. Whatever Harry S. Truman thought it was and whatever we might think it is. Of course, it's a call for personal morality. but the sermon on the Mount is also Jesus' picture of the new society that he intended to begin. He led the way by living it out in his life and apprenticing his disciples to do the same thing.

Jesus' vision of ending imperial violence, of establishing a kingdom built on sacrificial love, it is not a private affair for me to do by myself and to live a totally different way when I'm outside of my little private life. It is a worldwide affair. It's not cute. It's not impractical. at least if we take Jesus' own death under the foot of the empire as being neither cute nor impractical. And so for all these regions, Christians should not take up the sword for the government or for themselves. In fact, up until the generation of Constantine, early followers of Jesus refused to participate in the Roman military for this exact reason.

It was only after the emperor became a Christian that we needed to make a Christianity where violence was okay. and that's why all of us tend to assume that it's okay from that point forward. Here's the deal I've already gotten way too long on this podcast, and that doesn't leave me any time to deal with common objections. What do I do with Romans 13? Why didn't John the Baptist tell the Roman soldiers to stop warfare? What do we do with violence in the Old Testament? Those are great questions, and if you have them, I want to encourage you to hop onto our Facebook page. And you can ask those questions, and I love to dialogue with you there. You can send me an email. We love to talk. We love to have a little community around this. So this doesn't have to stop with the podcast. And obviously, Keith will be coming

back next Monday with a episode telling you why he thinks it is okay for Christians to go to war. So listen to that as well. Let me end with a little reading from the Apostle Paul. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. He was right. Our struggle isn't against flesh and blood. Our enemies are not physical rulers and authorities or other nations.

As he says here, it is the spiritual forces of evil which sit behind every realm. That's what Jesus has cast us out against to fight. We need to put on the armor of God and take up the sword of his word, not the sword of this world. Thanks for listening. enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps other people find this podcast more easily. Also, ask yourself, who could you share this podcast with? Texting an episode to a friend or

a family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.