Light Brings Salt

 

Volume 3, Issue 39                                                                        October 9, 2005

Iron Range Bible Church

Dedicated to the Systematic Exposition of the Word of God

 

 

Food for the Soul
Joe Boot


One terrifying day Howard Rutledge's plane was shot down over Vietnam. He managed to parachute out but landed in a village where he was beaten, stripped, and thrown into prison. Thus began a brutal incarceration, lasting seven years, that can only be described as a living hell: eating rotting soup and animal fat, in the company of spiders the size of a human hand and rats the size of cats. He was cold, alone, and tortured, left in pools of his own waste, chained in agonizing positions and being eaten alive by insects feasting on his open sores. He later wrote a book of his experiences called In the Presence of Mine Enemies, where he describes those years and how he stayed sane through the horror. His words are so telling, I quote him in length:

"Now the sights and sounds and smells of death were all around me. My hunger for spiritual food soon outdid my hunger for a steak. Now I wanted to know about that part of me that will never die. Now I wanted to talk about God and Christ and the church. But in Heartbreak [the name they gave to their prison] solitary confinement there was no pastor, no Sunday-school teacher, no Bible, no hymnbook, no community of believers to guide and sustain me. I had completely neglected the spiritual dimension of my life. It took prison to show me how empty life is without God, and so I had to go back in my memory to those Sunday-school days in Tulsa, Oklahoma. If I couldn't have a Bible and hymn book, I would try to rebuild them in my mind… Most of my fellow prisoners were struggling like me to rediscover faith, to reconstruct workable value systems… Everyone knew the Lord's prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm, but the camp favorite verse that everyone recalled first and quoted most often is found in the Gospel of John, third chapter, sixteenth verse ["for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life,]… how I struggled to recall those scriptures and hymns… The enemy knew that the best way to break a man's resistance was to crush his spirit in a lonely cell. In other words, some of our POWs after solitary confinement lay down in a fetal position and died. All this talk of scripture and hymns may seem boring to some, but it was the way we conquered our enemy and overcame the power of death around us."(1)

The Bible is not just another book. It stands out above Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, or other religious writings. These soldiers were not trying to recall nursery rhymes or even Tolstoy and Blake; instead, they desperately tried to remember the words of the Bible. Something has kept this book, to this day, at the top of the best-seller list every year. Whatever we may at present believe or think about the Bible, the influence for good that it has exerted upon the globe is immeasurable.

Sadly, many people approach it in a purely theoretical way, considering the Scriptures to be just another topic of conversation, like music or fashion. But the Bible does not come across as a piece of literature merely to be studied and analyzed. The POWs in Vietnam were not trying to recall Bible verses for their literary beauty or to play deconstructionist games; they were seeking to draw on the Bible's power to feed their souls in a time of desperation.

I have yet to meet a person whose life was in a terrible mess who claimed that atheism suddenly revealed a truth that changed his or her life for lasting good.

Ultimately, the most visible evidence for the truth of the Bible lies in the changed lives of those who embrace its message. Talk of reliable texts and compelling archaeology may convince the mind but do not often touch the heart. If the message is true, surely it will work in practice. Millions of Christians around the world confirm that it does. The God whom we meet in its pages, most wonderfully in the person of Christ, speaks to us personally and meets us where we are. Jesus offers not simply moral ethics, but himself, the Son of God, in relationship, to change us from the inside out. Consequently, when we look in the Bible we see ourselves, as if in a mirror, as it describes us and our failures and points us to God by whose power we can be transformed.

The message of the Bible mends broken lives and has the power to transform society, not by pointing us to ink on a page, but to the God it reveals. Empty ideologies leave us spiritually starved, but Jesus said, "I am the bread of life" (John 6:35), and the proof is in the eating.

(1) Howard and Phyllis Rutledge and Mel and Lyla White, In the Presence of Mine Enemies (Fleming H. Revell, 1973).

 

The Beachhead
How a Mosque for Ex-Nazis Became a
Center of Radical Islam   


MUNICH, Germany -- North of this prosperous city of engineers and auto makers is an elegant mosque with a slender minaret and a turquoise dome. A stand of pines shields it from a busy street. In a country of more than three million Muslims, it looks unremarkable, another place of prayer for Europe's fastest-growing religion.

The Mosque's history, however, tells a more-tumultuous story. Buried in government and private archives are hundreds of documents that trace the battle to control the Islamic Center of Munich. Never before made public, the material shows how radical Islam established one of its first and most important beachheads in the West when a group of ex-Nazi soldiers decided to build a mosque.

The soldiers' presence in
Munich was part of a nearly forgotten subplot to World War II: the decision by tens of thousands of Muslims in the Soviet Red Army to switch sides and fight for Hitler. After the war, thousands sought refuge in West Germany, building one of the largest Muslim communities in 1950s Europe. When the Cold War heated up, they were a coveted prize for their language skills and contacts back in the Soviet Union. For more than a decade, U.S., West German, Soviet and British intelligence agencies vied for control of them in the new battle of democracy versus communism.

Yet the victor wasn't any of these Cold War combatants. Instead, it was a movement with an equally powerful ideology: the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in 1920s
Egypt as a social-reform movement, the Brotherhood became the fountainhead of political Islam, which calls for the Muslim religion to dominate all aspects of life. A powerful force for political change
throughout the Muslim world, the Brotherhood also inspired some of the deadliest terrorist movements of the past quarter century, including Hamas and al Qaeda.

The story of how the Brotherhood exported its creed to the heart of
Europe highlights a recurring error by Western democracies. For decades, countries have tried to cut deals with political Islam -- backing it in order to defeat another enemy, especially communism. Most famously, the U.S. and its allies built up mujahadeen holy warriors in 1980s Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union -- paving the way for the rise of Osama bin Laden, who quickly turned on his U.S. allies in the 1990s.

Munich was a momentous early example of this dubious strategy. Documents and interviews show how the Muslim Brotherhood formed a working arrangement with U.S. intelligence organizations, outmaneuvering German agencies for control of the former Nazi soldiers and their mosque. But the U.S. lost its hold on the movement, and in short order conservative, arch-Catholic Bavaria had become host to a center of radical Islam.

Political and social groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood now dominate organized Islamic life across a broad swath of
Western Europe. These connections are frequently little known, even by the intelligence services and police agencies of these countries.

(Johnson, "The Wall Street Journal," July 12, 2005, A1)

 

Something to Think About

If we preach the whole counsel of God, we shall be accused of extremism, not only by the world but also by the professing church that cannot endure sound doctrine.