The Purpose Driven Death

I'm reading Mark Steyn's book, America Alone, which I touted this past Sunday in my sermon, "The Real Jihad," (which, if you've got room for 13.5 megabytes, you can download here). Steyn makes this point:

"[People] who send me e-mails headed 'Nuke Mecca!' might like to ponder the bigger strategic impact on a billion Muslims from Indonesia to Yorkshire, for whom any fallout will be psychological rather than carcinogenic. Rubble is an insufficient solution, unless you're also going to attend to the Muslim world's real problem: its intellectual rubble." (More…)

Steyn believes the West's real problem is Saudi Arabia, not Iran, and that the Saudis' main export is not oil, but Wahhabism, an Islamic theology that advocates violence and the imposition of Sharia law. Since the early 40s, the Saudis have sponsored one private Islamic school after another all over the world (including many here in the USA). They also insist—and their host countries have allowed it—that the schools be directly accountable to the Saudi government for the content of their curricula. Through these schools, hundreds of millions of Moslems around the world have been radicalized. In Steyn's opinion, we need to cut off Saudi oil imports and shut down their schools, amongst other steps to take.

He believes that the solution to this world war must deal with the Islamic mindset, which he calls intellectual, but which I would say is spiritual. In fact, I believe Wahhabism is what the Bible terms a "strong man." Jesus used the term in Mark 3:27: "But no one can enter the strong man’s house and plunder his property unless he first binds the strong man, and then he will plunder his house."

A strong man can be a ruling evil spirit, i.e., an actual being, or it can be a mentality or both. So, to state Steyn in theological terms, Wahhabism is the strong man that needs to be bound.

It is the strong man that propels homicide bombers to blow innocent bystanders and themselves to bits, in order to gain instant entrance into a heaven that would otherwise be virtually inaccessible to them. Binding this strong man will take more than a few hundred charismatic Christians yelling at the devil in concert for five minutes, and then singing "He is Lord" until they convince themselves He is. Both the proclamation and the song are fine as clarion calls to battle, of course, but the air-conditioned sanctuary of First Church on a Sunday morning is not where the war is being waged.

Winning the war on terror needs to begin with the West asking God's forgiveness for our being every bit as immoral as the jihadists say we are. How can we foster freedom in the Middle East when we are slaves to sin? The fact is, we export licentiousness, not freedom, and they hate us for it.

If and when the West is willing to repent—and I fear repentance will require a much harder blow than 9/11—then perhaps God will relent and leave a blessing in His wake (see Joel 2:12-18). But I doubt He will grant us deliverance from Al Qaeda unless we cry out for deliverance from our sin.

Then we can turn our attention to the making of true peace in the Middle East, by exporting the Gospel of Peace. We should have done so 85 years ago, after World War 1, instead of carving up that region willy nilly to satisfy our lust for oil.

As my colleague, Eric Holmberg, says, Islamist homicide bombers will not stop killing Jews until they meet the Jew God killed for them.