Light Brings Salt
Volume 3, Issue 39
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
"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
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
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
(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
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
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
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
Political and social groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood now dominate
organized Islamic life across a broad swath of
(Johnson, "The Wall Street Journal,"
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.