Something weird and intense happened to me last night (early morning, actually). I had just finished writing my latest previous article for ClashDaily.com, and it was really hitting me how badly our nation has been and continues to be undermined by the voracious termites of bogus, misplaced “white guilt” and political correctness. I was feeling pretty low about it, reflecting on how once upon a time, in the aftermath of an attack such as 9/11, our president’s first reaction would not have been to go on TV to declare that “Islam is peace” and then rush off to the nearest mosque to pray with the very same people who prayed and studied and ate with the actual 9/11 hijackers themselves — at a mosque inside the D.C. beltway. Instead, an old-school American president would have rounded up those ragheads and put them in internment camps until the war was over and won. And he would have publicly called them ragheads, too. A real American president would demean and demoralize our mortal enemies, not coddle them.
Even the legendary Ataturk, hailed by generations of his countrymen as the heroic father of modern Turkey, banned the Islamic headscarf in his country many decades ago, realizing what it symbolized as an impediment to his nation joining the modern civilized world after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. George W. Bush, on the contrary, saw fit to verbally chastise those of us Americans who might be bothered by seeing Muslims in headscarves here among us after 9/11 — speaking at the aforementioned mosque on 9/17/01, Bush expressed deep sympathy for Muslims who might feel self-conscious or threatened when wearing head coverings here in America! Bush praised Islam at length, and lambasted anyone who might give Muslims a hard time in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. Bush thought he knew better than Ataturk himself. As we know, Turkey has slid backward in recent years, badly, closer to Islamic theocracy and now even apparent support for ISIS. The headscarf ban has been lifted there lately, after years of controversies over it.
So anyway I was despondently thinking how it has been decades in the making, the deliberate dissolution of the United States by liberals and “progressives,” and that those who say we’ll eventually break up into smaller countries are probably right. There just aren’t enough patriotic people left with the belligerence and convictions to confront and defeat the anti-American termites, and those that remain are dying off, not having many kids, and so forth. We are turning into an unrecognizable perversion of what our forefathers fought and died for, and built. It’s as if generations of Americans have been taught to be ashamed of our country, and to just fail or refuse to defend it.
So I’m thinking about God in all this, and wondering if He has any kind of message for me, for us, for America, having to do with our cultural and territorial disintegration. I grab my New International Version of the Holy Bible, and flip it open. My eyes light on the page, and it is the opening of the Book of Joel, in the Old Testament. The first lines of Joel are these:
1 The word of the Lord that came to Joel son of Pethuel.
An Invasion of Locusts
2 Hear this, you elders;
listen, all who live in the land.
Has anything like this ever happened in your days
or in the days of your ancestors?
3 Tell it to your children,
and let your children tell it to their children,
and their children to the next generation.
4 What the locust swarm has left
the great locusts have eaten;
what the great locusts have left
the young locusts have eaten;
what the young locusts have left
other locusts[a] have eaten.
5 Wake up, you drunkards, and weep!
Wail, all you drinkers of wine;
wail because of the new wine,
for it has been snatched from your lips.
6 A nation has invaded my land,
a mighty army without number;
it has the teeth of a lion,
the fangs of a lioness.
7 It has laid waste my vines
and ruined my fig trees.
It has stripped off their bark
and thrown it away,
leaving their branches white.
8 Mourn like a virgin in sackcloth
grieving for the betrothed of her youth.
9 Grain offerings and drink offerings
are cut off from the house of the Lord.
The priests are in mourning,
those who minister before the Lord.
10 The fields are ruined,
the ground is dried up;
the grain is destroyed,
the new wine is dried up,
the olive oil fails.
11 Despair, you farmers,
wail, you vine growers;
grieve for the wheat and the barley,
because the harvest of the field is destroyed.
12 The vine is dried up
and the fig tree is withered;
the pomegranate, the palm and the apple[b] tree—
all the trees of the field—are dried up.
Surely the people’s joy
is withered away.
It rocked me, how fitting that is. I read on. The rest of the Book of Joel (a very short book) again describes “an army of locusts” and details in apocalyptic language how God eventually redeems the nation to abundance and splendor through various tribulations until the people return to Him. That’s all a common theme in the Bible.
Every once in a while I get a “God shot” like that. Sometimes they come often for a period. I just wanted to share that one with you.
This last part of Joel also hit me as especially compelling:
9 Proclaim this among the nations:
Prepare for war!
Rouse the warriors!
Let all the fighting men draw near and attack.
10 Beat your plowshares into swords
and your pruning hooks into spears.
Let the weakling say,
“I am strong!”
11 Come quickly, all you nations from every side,
and assemble there.
Bring down your warriors, Lord!
12 “Let the nations be roused;
let them advance into the Valley of Jehoshaphat,
for there I will sit
to judge all the nations on every side.
13 Swing the sickle,
for the harvest is ripe.
Come, trample the grapes,
for the winepress is full
and the vats overflow—
so great is their wickedness!”
14 Multitudes, multitudes
in the valley of decision!
For the day of the Lord is near
in the valley of decision.
15 The sun and moon will be darkened,
and the stars no longer shine.
16 The Lord will roar from Zion
and thunder from Jerusalem;
the earth and the heavens will tremble.
But the Lord will be a refuge for his people,
a stronghold for the people of Israel.
Blessings for God’s People
17 “Then you will know that I, the Lord your God,
dwell in Zion, my holy hill.
Jerusalem will be holy;
never again will foreigners invade her.
18 “In that day the mountains will drip new wine,
and the hills will flow with milk;
all the ravines of Judah will run with water.
A fountain will flow out of the Lord’s house
and will water the valley of acacias.[d]
19 But Egypt will be desolate,
Edom a desert waste,
because of violence done to the people of Judah,
in whose land they shed innocent blood.
20 Judah will be inhabited forever
and Jerusalem through all generations.
21 Shall I leave their innocent blood unavenged?
No, I will not.”
The Lord dwells in Zion!
The light shines in the darkness, indeed.
