Preparing for Purim

A Good Read

So . . . I have had a BUSY day of Facebook. No sooner did I read a link from one friend and share it – another friend posted an idea, prayer, teaching, current event equally pressing. If we were sitting all together in one room – I don’t think I could have fully heard what all my friends were saying!   Reading, one by one though, what they thought was important enough to share, I could hear.

The most galvanizing were reminders from pastors:

·      Christ is in the boat with me – literally and corporately. (The Comforting Presence)

·      How to pray right.  (We Are Praying Wrong)

They enabled me to listen calmly to Israel’s Prime Minister’s address the United States’ Congress. *  Mr. Netanyahu reminded me that tomorrow is Purim – the Jewish holiday of one woman’s courage to thwart a Persian man’s plan to annihilate the Jews.

 . . . Queen Esther exposed the plot and gave for the Jewish people the right to defend themselves against their enemies. The plot was foiled. Our people were saved.

 Today the Jewish people face another attempt by yet another Persian potentate to destroy us. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei  . . . tweets that Israel must be annihilated -- he tweets. . in English that Israel must be destroyed.

. . .

But Iran's regime is not merely a Jewish problem, any more than the Nazi regime was merely a Jewish problem. The 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis were but a fraction of the 60 million people killed in World War II. So, too, Iran's regime poses a grave threat, not only to Israel, but also the peace of the entire world. 

And the Prime Minister reminded us of how the world has changed since 1979 when

. . .  one of the world's great civilizations [was] hijacked by religious zealots -- religious zealots who imposed on them immediately a dark and brutal dictatorship.

That year, the zealots drafted a constitution, a new one for Iran. It directed the revolutionary guards not only to protect Iran's borders, but also to fulfill the ideological mission of jihad. The regime's founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, exhorted his followers to "export the revolution throughout the world."

He then said:  

Iran and ISIS are competing for the crown of militant Islam. One calls itself the Islamic Republic. The other calls itself the Islamic State. Both want to impose a militant Islamic empire first on the region and then on the entire world. They just disagree among themselves who will be the ruler of that empire.

In this deadly game of thrones, there's no place for America or for Israel, no peace for Christians, Jews or Muslims who don't share the Islamist medieval creed, no rights for women, no freedom for anyone.

So, when it comes to Iran and ISIS, the enemy of your enemy is your enemy.

I think back to two books and movies that changed me: The Diary of Anne Frank, and On the Beach by Neil Shute: an eyewitness account of Nazi occupation, and a frightening real imagination of the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.

Praying the world’s leaders will quickly turn to God in Christ to calm the storms that threaten to swamp us – and that we -- His church -- will not give up praying.**  

We know that in this way we cannot ever really pray wrong. God hears us, and the distant god of our culture cowers in defeat.

*Benjamin Netanyahu's address to Congress

**Esther 4:14