War in the Gulf: A Biblical Perspective, Part 3
Selected Scriptures
As you know, this morning we are returning to a special, brief series on a Biblical perspective on the war. And this will be the third and the last message in the series.
I'm sure you have been startled to some degree, as I have, at how this war has produced an amazing outburst of American patriotic emotion. In fact, the highlight of the Super Bowl was not the finish of the game, as great a finish as it was. The highlight of the Super Bowl apparently wasn't even the playing of the game, but rather the playing and singing of the National Anthem by Whitney Houston, because it elicited an unbelievable, and, I think, unequalled display of national pride, as people literally went outside themselves, running the gamut of emotion all the way from cries and shouts to tears and sobs. It was really an unequalled scene, certainly in our lifetime.
We feel good about ourselves in America. We like being the knight on the white horse. We like being Superman to the rescue. We need to feel good about ourselves in a time of growing crime problems, drug problems, abortion, economic downturn. When it seems like we've lost control of so many, many things, it feels good to have control of something.
America feels good about being macho, too, about displaying such unequalled military power. And it seems as though all of the emotion that we feel about feeling good just kind of bursts out every once in a while when we get an opportunity to sing the National Anthem.
But apart from all of that emotion and all of that feeling, how are we to understand the war? Not how are we to feel about it, but how are we to think about it? How are we to understand and comprehend its elements?
So we decided that we would approach the war and ask some basic questions. Question number one, why does war happen? And we endeavored to answer that general question out of Scripture. Question number two was another general question, can war ever be moral? We endeavored to answer that by way of reason and by way of revelation out of Scripture.
And that brought us to the question that we are considering now, the third one, which is a more specific one, how are we to understand this particular war in the Middle East? And we learned in our message that this conflict goes way back, to God's covenants with Abraham and Abraham's seed, the Jewish people.
In Genesis, chapter 12 and following, God identified a people that would come out of the loins of Abraham who would be the covenant people, and God promised to give them the land, the land of the Middle East, as we know it now. God said, "It is your land. I want you to go into it eventually and conquer it. I want you to be my instrument of judgment, my weapon of doom, on all of the godless, God-rejecting, truth-hating peoples that are there, wipe them out and take the land."
God also pointed out to them that in order for them to be His instrument of judgment and to possess their full entitlement to that land, they would have to be a holy people, a righteous people, a people obedient to God. The story is sad, because, though the land was rightfully theirs by promise, they never have been able to take it, because they've never been a holy, righteous and obedient people.
"If," God said, "you do not obey me, you will not only not take your land, but your enemies will be victorious." And we have watched that scene played out again and again and again throughout human history.
So it was out of the promises of God to the people that we call the Jews that the Israel-Arab conflict was born. When they were told they were entitled to all of that land, it was already in the possession of some of the nations listed in Genesis 10 in the table of nations and some of the tribal people listed in Genesis 15, who occupied its territory in their nomadic style. And then added to that were those that came out of the loins of Ishmael, Arab peoples, those that came out of the loins of Esau, more Arab peoples. And so this massive people group is in unending conflict with the Jews over that land.
Those idolatrous, sinful, God-rejecting people groups are not to have that land, ultimately. They have it now, because Israel is unable to defeat them because of her spiritual apostasy. So the conflict ebbs and flows through all of the years and the centuries. And during all of Israel's history, she has experienced conflict with Arab neighbors. A deadly kind of animosity exists even today, as she fights to survive, to conquer, to be conquered, in this ongoing battle.
So we know, then, that this war is to be understood as a part of a long, longstanding saga of conflict. Now, behind it is not just two people groups, as it were, battling for what they both perceive as rightfully theirs, but behind it also is Satan himself. In Revelation, chapter 9, it tells us that Satan seeks to destroy the woman who brought forth the child, the child being the Messiah, the woman being Israel, the nation, which gave birth to the Messiah.
Satan has always, will always go after the people of Israel to destroy them, because if he can destroy them, he can destroy the promise of God, which would therefore destroy the faithfulness of God, which would therefore destroy God, which would therefore destroy everyone whose hope was in God. And so Satan is forever after Christ, the child, and Israel, the woman who brought forth the child.
So you have it, then, the descendants of Esau, the descendants of Ishmael, the descendants of a number of the nations listed in chapter 10 of Genesis, the descendants of many tribal peoples, also indicated in the book of Genesis, are there surrounding Israel, as it says in Genesis 16:12. And the conflict is fomented and fueled and fired by a satanic effort on the part of Satan and his demons to wipe out the people of God, thus to end the reign and rule of God and to destroy God's integrity and so forth.
Now, all of these people groups existed in sort of a milieu of commonality and yet great distinctiveness. They were tribal, nomadic peoples who were connected in ancient times by some common ancestry and in more modern times by a common religion, but they were very diverse and very much in conflict with each other, as you well know.
Some centuries ago, the Arab sort of disintegrated tribal peoples began to move together. And I need to give you a little bit of that background so you'll understand the scene a little more clearly today.
The Arab empire started to really come together because of the rise of a man by the name of Mohammed. And, by the way, that name means "highly praised." He was born in Arabia in 571 A.D., in the year of our Lord 571. He was born of a nomadic, tribal people living in Mecca, an Arabic people, and he claimed, did Mohammed, to be a direct descendant of Ishmael.
He wrote the Koran, which is the religious book of the religion of Islam. He wrote it. It is quite an effort to write, but he wrote it, I'm confident beyond fear of contradiction, he wrote it simply as a human agent of a demonic source who put it together. It became the holy book of the Muslim world.
In the year 622, he made his home in a place called Medina. And if you talk to a Muslim today, the two most sacred places on the face of the earth, he will tell you, are Mecca and Medina. And when his home was set in Medina in the year 622, that became, and is so stated today, as the official date of the start of the Muslim era.
So the Muslim era begins in 622 A.D. Before all of that, they were disintegrated tribal peoples, not really connected together. The connection came out of the religion of Islam, which began in the year 622. At that particular point, they broke all ties with Christianity. Many of those people groups had been influenced strongly by Christianity. Some of them had been influenced strongly by Judaism. But they broke all those ties, and they decided that they were going to follow the new religion of Islam.
They made Friday their holy day, particularly because the Jews made Saturday their day and the Christians made Sunday their day, and they wanted to make a statement that this was different than the Jews and the Christians. Their god was not the God of the Jews nor the God of the church, Christianity. Their god is Allah.
And it is not the same god as the God of the Jews and the God of the Christians. There was recently some kind of a meeting in Orange County in which the pastor of a famous church said, "We all worship the same God." I reject that as a Christian, and every Muslim on the face of the earth would reject that. Their god is not the God of the Bible. Their god is Allah. And anyone who worships the God of the Bible is a blaspheming, infidel apostate, from their viewpoint.
And so began their religion. Their mode of conquering and congealing together all of these assorted tribal peoples in the Middle East was conversion by the sword, and I don't mean the sword of the Word. I mean a steel sword, with a sharp edge. All wars were holy wars, to convert infidels. And it was simple, conversion or death. And they converted people simply because people didn't want to get their head chopped off with a sword. That is how Mohammed conquered for Islam.
And, even today, they still think like that. The Arab world believes that its conquering must be done by the steel edge of the sword. It must be done by death. They still maintain control over their people by sword. That's very clear. In fact, one of the reasons people in the West fear, in some ways, the death of Hussein is that, were he to be assassinated, they are afraid there isn't a living person in all of Iraq who could take his place, because anyone who would have that kind of capability has already been executed by him as a threat.
If you shoplift in Iraq or Iran or a Muslim country, you shoplift once, because as soon as they catch you, they chop off both your hands, so you can't do that again. You rape only once. As soon as you rape, the sword will ensure forever that you will never do that again. If you are engaged in drugs, you are taken immediately, when you are caught, with no time lost, into the city square, where you are killed with a sword in public view.
And people continue to ask the question, how is it that the Iraqis will go along with such a maniac? Why would they be willing to go along with him? Very simple. You don't go along with him, you're dead. The people who didn't go along with him are dead.
Islam has always conquered by the sword. It has always ruled by the sword. Islam, by the sword, conquered the Middle East. It had a very great effect, conquering even the land of Palestine. There were about 800 years of its massive power in the Middle East, from 622 for about another 800 years until the Middle Ages, when, finally, in the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church had reached such an apex of power that it began to take on the powers of Islam.
One of the enterprises of the Roman Catholic Church, as you well remember, was called the Crusades. And the objective of the Crusades was to move into the Middle East and take back all of the holy places that were in the hands of Muslims. And so they came back into the Middle East and they did that.
The result of the Roman Catholic power, the Crusades, which also gave the Roman Catholic Church the opportunity to massacre Protestant Christians at the same time, and also as a result of internal warfare among these Arabic people, caused the whole great Middle Eastern Islamic giant to go to sleep in the Middle Ages. And the whole thing just kind of faded away about 800 years after its birth. And the sleep lasted a long time.
But the sleep is over now, and the Arab Islamic giant has risen from his long nap. The agenda is still the same. Allah is god. We conquer for Allah. We conquer by the sword. We kill the infidels.
We destroy particularly the Jewish blasphemers, who are, by the way, the closest pocket of infidels to their world, and also are hated because of the tremendous conflict that goes back thousands and thousands of years. Not only do they hate Jews just because of the territorial dispute and the claim of the right to the land, but they hate them now because they are religious blasphemers.
Now, what was it that precipitated the rise of the modern Middle East? What brought back the Islamic giant from sleep? The answer is very simple. On May 26, 1908, drillers were drilling for oil in a place called Masjid-al-Salaman, and in that particular place, they discovered the first oil well in the Middle East. That's in a place in Iran. And they believe that that really triggered the great modern rise. And we know that to be true.
It took them until the 1970s to harness what they discovered. And it was in the 1970s that they formed OPEC, which was an allegiance of the oil-producing countries that could then create control of the marketplace of oil. And that's exactly what they did. They embargoed oil in the '70s. They increased the prices rapidly. They changed the world's economy greatly. And you remember, at one point in time, in the '70s, the tremendous lines that we all were involved in waiting for gas and so forth.
You will, if you remember a little bit, remember back when I first came to Grace Community Church that gasoline was 19 cents a gallon. And the reason it isn't anywhere near that anymore is because there is a new source of control over the oil of the world. And they have systematically elevated the value of it. They have created the world economy that now exists, which involves an absolutely immeasurable amount of inflation and debt in the energy-consuming nations that are dependent upon them.
As a result of the discovery of oil and the development of their oil capability, money began to flood into the Middle East. In the '70s, the money was flooding into the Middle East so fast that the London Economist, that's the name of a paper like the Wall Street Journal, wrote that they could buy the Bank of America in six days, IBM in 43 days and all the major companies on all the world's stock markets in 15 years. Massive amounts of money pouring into the Middle East.
They now have more than half of the world's resources in oil, and some say it's as high as 65 percent. Their oil is very close to the surface, very easy to drill, very close to the sea for piping and shipping. It is of excellent quality. It is very low in sulfur, which means it burns very clean.
And, just to give you perspective, there are millions of oil wells, and one oil well can produce around 80,000 barrels a day. It is an immense, almost inconceivable potential for making money. The wealth of the world, then, has been shifted. It simply goes like this. The energy-consuming nations are giving all their money to the energy-producing nations. The energy producers own the energy consumers.
We are controlled, then, by the powers in the Middle East. So is most of the rest of the world. And the balance of power has shifted to what used to be, a few years ago, even 20 years ago, a third-rate, Third World, confused group of nomadic Arabic people and is now the center of world economy.
Can Israel survive such an immense economic power as surrounds them now? Can Israel survive such frightening military buildup as that money will buy them? Can the world halt the shift of power to the Middle East? Is this heading us toward Armageddon? For years, Christians wondered, why would the whole world gather to battle in the Middle East? Now we know. Now we know.
Israel could feel the power of Iraq, by the way, growing in the early '80s. By 1981, Iraq had developed, at a place called Osirak, nuclear capability. So the Israelis, in 1981, went in and destroyed it. They are hated by the Iraqis just because they hate Jews and always have. They are hated by the Iraqis and the other Arabs because they are infidels, worshipping God instead of Allah, and they are hated by the Iraqis because they destroyed the Iraqi nuclear capability in 1981. That is why Saddam Hussein is so set on destroying Israel any way he can.
Now, that leads us to the issue of how does Saddam Hussein fit into this? Who is this guy, and how does he fit in? His hatred for Israel goes back before they destroyed his nuclear capability. It goes back into his Arab world, the world from which he comes.
But to simply understand why he's doing what he's doing, all you need to know is this. He went into Kuwait for a very simple reason. It was economic. That's the only reason he would attack his own Arab brothers, because his drive for wealth and power and domination exceeds even his racial sense of kindred spirit.
Kuwait, you see, is very wealthy, beyond what you and I could ever imagine. Kuwaitis are more wealthy than Americans. And they have an immense amount of money. The United States has a huge deficit, billions and billions of dollars in debt. And we are in debt because we are in debt to the energy producers, because we are such a massive energy consumer.
Just to show you the difference, the little tiny country of Kuwait has $100 billion of its government surplus in overseas investments, $100 billion. It has $50 billion of private enterprise surplus in overseas investment, $150 billion in overseas investment. In Kuwait, there is no income tax. There is no tax. Education is free. Medical care is free. Everything is free.
In fact, for every child you have, the government sends you an extra $140 a month just to help you take care of that extra child. And if you decide to get married, the government will send you a check for $7,100 to help you get your new marriage started. They have so much money they don't even know what to do with it all. And they don't pay any tax on any of it.
While Kuwait has become immensely rich because of its oil, Iraq has become poor. Iraq had a surplus of $30 billion before it went to war with Iran. But in the eight-year war with Iran, it cost Iraq $100 billion, in effect. They went from $30 billion surplus to a $70 billion deficit. It bankrupted their nation to carry on that war that nobody won with Iran. And I have heard numbers as high as one million Iraqis died in that war, as well.
Now, Saddam Hussein knew that the only way to rebuild his country was through oil. The only way to conquer the world, for him, is through oil. But the problem was, Kuwaiti people, Kuwaiti government, and Saudi Arabia also, sold the oil cheap