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[biblicalmusings]

Hiroshima’s Castigation of Humanity’s Best Attempts at Peace

Early one August morning, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was preparing to return home from the town where he had spent the last three months on business. He worked for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan as a draftsman, and was working over the summer on a shipbuilding project. He was on the bus heading to the station with two of his colleagues when he realized he left his ticket behind. His friends continued on while he returned to the company dormitory to retrieve it. Once he did, he began walking back toward the shipyard. Mr. Yamaguchi remembered the day well: “It was a flat, open spot with potato fields on either side. It was very clear, a really fine day, nothing unusual about it at all. I was in good spirits.”

But that would change in an instant for him and the approximately 300,000 others in Hiroshima that day, Aug. 6, 1945. “As I was walking along I heard the sound of a plane, just one. I looked up into the sky and saw the B-29, and it dropped two parachutes. I was looking up into the sky at them, and suddenly... it was like a flash of magnesium, a great flash in the sky, and I was blown over,” he explained. (Richard Lloyd Parry, The Times, “The Luckiest or Unluckiest Man in the World?”, March 29, 2005).

The plane he saw was the Enola Gay. It had just completed its mission of dropping the first atomic bomb (called “Little Boy”) ever used in a military operation. He continued, “When the noise and the blast had subsided I saw a huge mushroom-shaped pillar of fire rising up high into the sky. It was like a tornado, although it didn’t move, but it rose and spread out horizontally at the top. There was prismatic light, which was changing in a complicated rhythm, like the patterns of a kaleidoscope. The first thing I did was to check that I still had my legs and whether I could move them. I thought, ‘If I stay here, I’ll die.’

“Two hundred yards ahead, there was a dugout bomb shelter, and when I climbed in there were two young students already sitting there. They said, ‘You’ve been badly cut, you’re seriously injured.’ And it was then I realized I had a bad burn on half my face, and that my arms were burned.”

Mr. Yamaguchi’s story is one of thousands of first-hand accounts of the horrifying devastation that single bomb created. One patient of Michihiko Hachiya, who was the director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital, recounted this story, which Hachiya kept in a diary along with dozens of other stories he heard from patients at that time:

“The sight of the soldiers . . . was more dreadful than the dead people floating down the river. I came onto I don’t know how many, burned from the hips up; and where the skin had peeled, their flesh was wet and mushy . . . And they had no faces! Their eyes, noses and mouths had been burned away, and it looked like their ears had melted off. It was hard to tell front from back” (Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 1986, p. 726).

With one bomb, approximately 140,000 people were killed. Every person who survived had his or her own account of the suffering they witnessed, and those accounts numbered in the tens of thousands. “People exposed within half a mile of the Little Boy fireball . . . were seared to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away. ‘Doctor,’ a patient commented to [Dr.] Hachiya a few days later, ‘a human being who has been roasted becomes quite small, doesn’t he?’ The small black bundles now stuck to the streets and bridges and sidewalks of Hiroshima numbered in the thousands” [Rhodes, pg. 714-715]. The magnitude of the destruction is beyond comprehension. No words can adequately describe it.

How Could We Do This?

The capacity of people to kill each other entered an entirely new and never before imagined age that day. For the first time in history, the dreadful prophecy that mankind would completely destroy itself if it weren’t for the return of Christ was actually conceivable (Matthew 24:22). Yet instead of being chilled by such destructive power, over the next several decades, ever more powerful atomic weapons were developed across the globe in an arms race between the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War. The most powerful weapon ever tested was the Russian Tsar Bomba, with an explosive power nearly 3,000 times that of the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Today, the nuclear arsenal of just the United States and Russia (to say nothing of India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, France, China and other countries known to possess nuclear weapons) is sufficient that the inhabited portions of the earth could be destroyed multiple times over.

Why did the United States drop the bomb in Japan that day? To end the war faster. Japan was all but defeated, yet their national pride kept them from surrendering. The American military was gearing up for a massive land invasion of Japan, so they reason that if the bomb could be used and proved effective in forcing Japan to an unconditional surrender first, then the lives of perhaps tens of thousands of American servicemen could be spared. In his history of the Second World War, Winston Churchill summarized the thinking behind the decision: “To avert a vast, indefinite butchery, to bring the war to an end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands upon its tortured peoples by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions, seemed, after all our toils and perils, a miracle of deliverance.” [Rhodes, p. 697].

A miracle for whom? The men and families of the men who would have been sent to the shores of Japan to fight the enemy in conventional warfare if it weren’t for the bomb, yes. But certainly not those who lived in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nor for the billions born since who have lived in the shadow of the Bomb.

This is the peace that mankind produces.

Apocalyptic Forerunner

When trying to picture the events Jesus talked about that will happen before He comes back, I don’t think it’s entirely off-base to imagine the desolation in Hiroshima, and multiply it the whole world over. In that coming tribulation, every citizen of every country of the world will be at risk.

I recommend looking up the book The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (which I have been quoting from in this article), and reading its final chapter, “Tongues of Fire.” As I read its account of Hiroshima’s devastation—beginning months in advance with the American military preparing an island from which to launch this and other attacks on Japan, and concluding with page after page of firsthand survivors’ recollections of the misery they witnessed that day—my heart began to pound. Rhodes makes a chilling statement:

“‘There was a fearful silence which made one feel that all people and all trees and vegetation were dead,’ remembers Yoko Ota, a Hiroshima writer who survived. The silence was the only sound the dead could make . . . They were nearer the center of the event; they died because they were members of a different polity and their killing did not therefore count officially as murder; their experience most accurately models the worst case of our common future. They numbered in the majority in Hiroshima that day.” [Rhodes, p. 715, emphasis added).

There is only one thing that can give us hope in the face of such unspeakable evil and the fear that ensues from living in an age where to be utterly destroyed remains a possibility: God’s promise of salvation.

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared . . . I heard a loud shout from the throne, saying, ‘Look, God’s home is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever’” (Revelation 21:1-4, New Living Translation).

There is a day coming when no one will ever have to worry about destruction from bombs, guns, chemicals, tanks, landmines; a day when there will no longer be a feeling of unease that somebody in a different country might come hurt you and your family simply because you are a different skin color, religion, culture or have something they want. God will enforce His law of love, which mankind has so blatantly torn to shreds.

At that time, He will take the earth—destroyed, tattered and burned as it will have been by mankind—and remake it. All the death, the sorrow, the evil, the hatred, the legacy of humankind’s aggression against God and each other will be destroyed and forgotten. He will raise all those killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and all those who have died in every war or accident or by natural causes through all of history—and they will be given a new life. A life free of hatred, sorrow and suffering; instead full of love, service and joy (Revelation 20:5, 12).

Whatever happened to Mr. Yamaguchi? After getting his bearings and finding cover at an air raid shelter that terrible day, his wounds were bandaged, and he spent the night. The next day he and his companions managed to return to their hometown—Nagasaki. Despite his wounds, he reported for work two days later, Aug. 9, 1945. At work, he and his boss were having a conversation when the second atomic bomb detonated above the city, killing tens of thousands more as the first had done in Hiroshima. Mr. Yamaguchi was not injured in the second blast, and he and his wife both went on to live into their 90s. They both died in 2010, and are survived by three children. He is the only person officially recognized by Japan for having survived both atomic blasts, though there were many others.

“The reason that I hate the atomic bomb is because of what it does to the dignity of human beings,” he said in an interview. “I can't understand why the world cannot understand the agony of the nuclear bombs. How can they keep developing these weapons?” (Michael W. Robbins, Military History, “Japanese Engineer Survived Atomic Strike on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” July/August 2009).

There will be a day Mr. Yamaguchi will have his wish fulfilled. God speed that day.

(A version of this article was originally published at ucg.org here)

[biblicalmusings]

Consistency of Judgment

Growing up, it was drilled into us that morality in leadership is paramount. Right at my formative age of 9 years old, the president of the United States was impeached for lying about a sexual encounter he had with a young woman, not his wife, in the Oval Office. Articles were written excoriating the moral failures that made this possible, and the sick American culture that would elect someone like that (or defend him).

It’s been a disorienting five years or so, then, to see the goalposts moved completely by seemingly every person in a leadership position not just of my Church, but of most churches, in support of Donald Trump. A man whose moral failures aren’t difficult to discern, but are in the open for everyone to see; and worse, he never apologizes for it and sees doing so as a sign of weakness. I could write on and on about the other troubling aspects of his presidency (the one I’m mourning the most right now is his refusal to accept responsibility for his mistakes, and instead continuously casting blame to everybody around him to distract), but there is no shortage of articles that detail his every moral failure, and frankly doing so would just make me angry.

When something is wrong in this world and it’s beyond my control, I shift my focus to extracting a personal lesson from it. “What can I do differently from those I’m so sorely let down by? What behaviors can I model differently so I don’t make the same mistakes and errors of judgment they are making?” I’ll ask myself.

So in this case, my personal lesson is this: Be consistent in judgment as much as possible, and don’t be so proud as to refuse to admit when I was wrong if I do change my position. If any of those leaders would ever just say out loud that Trump is a morally corrupt person, but they feel he’s less of an evil choice than the alternative for reasons X, Y or Z, boy would it make a difference. But I just don’t hear that. Or if someone were explain that their position had changed on an issue that they previously felt was so important, and the rational reasons why were X, Y or Z, boy would that make me respect them. But I just so rarely hear that.

As I try to model behavior for my son and anybody else who I might mentor along the way, add this to the list of ways I want to be different. God knows it’s a long list and I’ll need His help.

[biblicalmusings]

Facebook Is A Sign of the End of the Age: “The Love of Many Will Wax Cold”

How the online social networking tool is eroding Christians' ability to respect, honor and love one another in the era of hyper partisan politics—and what you should do about it.

Everybody always wonders when Jesus will return, watching world events to discern whether they portend the events He said would precede His coming. One of those events is that “the love of many will wax cold.” Just before saying that, Jesus also said, “many will be offended, will betray one another, and will hate one another” (Matthew 24:10-12).

Here’s how it’s going to happen: via Facebook.

How do I know?

Because my friends on Facebook—or at least the ones who the algorithm shows me, or maybe just the ones who seem to post the most frequently—post all kinds of really dumb things. And I know what they’re thinking about me: “He posts the worst stuff.”

At best, there is the rare pregnancy announcement, engagement, health update or even rarer, thoughtful point of view about some topic. But at worst, it’s hyper partisan politics, often repeating dehumanizing points of view about others—those whose politics you disagree with, those who live in other countries, people who have a point of view different from yours. It’s on both sides of any issues, and it toxically creates a political issue out of even non-political issues.

And you know what? When somebody posts something negative like that on Facebook, the vast majority of the time I would have never known that’s how they felt about that. But now, I do know. And it makes it a little more difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt, to understand where they’re coming from, to respect them—to love them.This is not new of course, Paul warned of disputes over fables and endless genealogies in the early Church (1 Timothy 1:3-6), which caused division and which promoted unstable-minded people. But what is new is how easy it is for everybody to broadcast to hundreds or thousands of people all at once their stance on every minute issue at any given time, often with no shame nor any sense of inhibition—and we all sign up for this and participate in it willingly.

Obviously, as we get closer to the end, there will be other sources of offense for peoples' love to wax cold. But, by using Facebook we're just adding all these additional little stumbling blocks now, while external conditions are still pretty great. Look, Jesus knew the intents of the hearts of everyone around Him, and at one point all He could do was weep because of it. And despite that, He still went through with His crucifixion. But we aren't Jesus. Adding the stumbling blocks of our friends' Facebook posts is really self-defeating. 

So, I’m convinced the only way out is to delete Facebook. And Twitter. Those platforms do two things very well:

1. Radicalize you by exposing you to extreme opinions of people, whether you know them or not, which engages your sense of righteous indignation and infuriates you over how those people are the worst, entrenching and intensifying your own opinions; and

2. Shocks you by causing you to learn who, among your own friend group, agrees with those people, and erodes your respect for and ability to love them.

If a church required its members delete Facebook when they join, that would be the spiritually healthiest church in the world. Let's preempt our own love waxing cold and delete the tools that are doing the most damage to our ability to love like Christ did.

[biblicalmusings]

“How do you not be part of the world but still be a light?”

The election of Donald Trump is in some ways the best thing that could happen to us. He has shaken up our assumptions about how things work and as a result, it’s caused us all to have to form an opinion.

I’ve been personally going through quite a bit of soul searching, trying to deeply assess my personal beliefs. What beliefs do I hold that are simply the byproduct of the way I was educated in our school systems, the media I consumed, the times I lived in? And conversely, which of them do I hold out of real conviction? Overall, what proportion of my values are aligned with the values I should have as a Christian? And even more importantly than whether my values are aligned with God’s, are the underlying motivations for that alignment personal conviction based in an active life full of the fruit of those convictions? In other words, do I hold Christian viewpoints simply because it’s the right thing to do, or do I hold Christian viewpoints out of true love for God and do I therefore bear the visible daily fruit of that love?

So I ask, how do you be apart from the sins of the world, but still be a light in it? What does it look like in the mucky-muck?

Perhaps all the headlines and what’s going on are distractions from Satan. I look around on social media and see one friend slamming “liberals” and promoting Trump as if he were the next Messiah. And in the same feed I see people posting links that they support “Standing Rock” on the issue of the pipeline. Others say they “stand with the immigrants.”

None of these things is inherently wrong to take a stance on one way or another. But a huge part of the problem today is that everything is politicized.

To what degree do we see what’s happening in our (beloved, blessed, wonderful) country and take sides based on what we feel is right—but not think critically, deeply and soul-searchingly about where our motivations come from for taking the stand we do on that issue? Even moreso, how shrewdly do we exercise judgment in determining whether taking a stand in a public way on social media reflects on our role as lights in the world? 

Some issues that we as ambassadors from another kingdom will have an opinion on will perhaps reflect the stances taken by a political platform, and with the politicization of everything, those may be the vast majority of the stances we take. In these cases I think it makes it that much more important that we have evaluated our stance before posting, ensured it’s out of the right motivation and using the right basis (the Bible), and that we are consistent across every post we make—so that anybody who knows even a little bit of what you post can see the clear evidence of your biblical worldview. Determining whether to even post in the first place is also a good idea—does this help me meet my goal to be a light in this dying world? Does my perspective point to God? These criteria can be hard to meet—and fuzzy in application sometimes. But they’re the right questions to ask.

That’s not to say we should never post, never speak out against anything—that can make our religion seem empty, weak and useless. 

What it really comes down to is this: Our number one life goal needs to be to reflect God’s way to those around us. That’s number one. So we should have a personal strategy for how we do that—most importantly in how we personally live our lives day to day. But also importantly, how we present ourselves online—and in some ways, having a strategy here is more important because anything you do online can be seen worldwide by those who would never come in personal contact with you.

Ideally, this strategy should flow naturally from within because we are genuine, having worked out who we are and what God’s will is for us through deep prayer, meditation and through searching out God. But most of us have personal hangups that make it hard to always be authentic—and of course, we are a work in progress, which means who we truly are inside is sometimes ugly, still in the process of being refined. So in lieu of this lofty standard, consider writing down the way you’d like to be perceived as a light in this world—what qualities do you want to convey? What tone would your posts be in? This can help you figure out what issues would you speak out on. When you are really passionate and want to post something, you can determine whether your stance—which presumably you’ve taken based in your biblical worldview and convictions—is worth sharing because it points people to God, or not. Does it cause division, or does it bring unity?

Of course, keep in mind that the darkness hates the light, so even pointing people to God will make some very angry. But this gets back to the tone, to your role as an ambassador, your motivations and what you choose to speak out on. How to be persuasive will differ for each subject. 

[biblicalmusings]

"The consent of the governed"

Our role in the US as citizens is to give legitimacy to the United States government. We do this through voting, serving and being involved. Is it possible that we have it backwards when we say not to vote, not to be engaged at all? Not that we should all be running for president. But we are to submit to authority. And in our system of government that authority lies in us. We are to overcome [the sins of] the world. But we are also to be a light in the world. Paul said we couldn't come completely out of the world. There are scant few examples of people in the Bible who held authority in non-Israelite government but those who did (Daniel, Esther, Joseph) all wielded that authority with righteousness. They didn't completely check out. Are we perhaps allowing one area of responsibility granted us by God (by being born when and where we are) to be one where we bury our talent? Should we let our government get worse while we stand by complaining from the sidelines? Or should we exercise our authority as given us as citizens of this country to fight the evil to what degree we are able?