An Israeli news article in 2007 by Paul E. Marek, brings current events into sharp focus. He remembers a wealthy German who survived World War II describing the situation that led up to Hitler. He said very few of the German common people were actually Nazis. They were quietly going about their lives, considering Hitler’s crowd just “a bunch of fools.” “So,” he said, “The majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.”

Marek goes on to describe how we are told that Islam is a peaceful religion. He says that the “peaceful” Muslims are irrelevant: “The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars world wide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or execute honor killings. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard, quantifiable fact is that the “peaceful majority” is the “silent majority,” and it is cowed and extraneous.”

Besides Hitler, the “peaceful majority” slept while the communists took control of Russia and China. Marek further reminds us of history. Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Bosnians, Afghanis, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians and many others, have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late. As for us, watching it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts: the fanatics who threaten our way of life.

Soul winners, we cannot be part of that “silent majority.” Too many Christians are like the German common people: going about their lives oblivious of the gathering storm. Americans have been given a freedom to witness that is rare in history. Most Christians over the centuries, have had to hide their faith, or risk imprisonment or death to share it. Today, more than half the world is basically hostile to the gospel. Some have estimated that over 50,000 Christians are martyred every year.

The burning question is: what are we doing with the precious freedom that we have? History tells us that that freedom was bought with blood and lost fortunes. Many Christian leaders are beginning to question how much longer we will have that freedom. Only God knows but His commission still stands to go and make disciples.

Sharing our faith with another person is our top priority as believers. But Satan has us moving so fast that it is difficult to stop long enough to personally share the gospel. But it only takes a second to hand someone a gospel tract or plant it where it will be noticed. We must share the gospel with anyone who will listen, and not forget to put a copy of the good news in their hands if they are too busy to listen.

Rob Bell’s latest book, Jesus Wants to Save Christians (Zondervan, with Don Golden), is his most substantive yet. It’s nothing less than a holistic, biblical theology of salvation—written, paradoxically, in Bell’s typical sentence-fragment style. CT senior managing editor Mark Galli sat down with Bell, founding pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to probe him on some of the more striking statements in his book.

You say that “something has gone terribly wrong with humanity.” What do you mean?

I was born in 1970, a child of the Enlightenment. We put someone on the moon. We’ll figure out cancer soon enough. Look what we can do. And yet more people than ever have died in the last 100 years from bombs. So, we have been taught, give Steve Jobs enough time, and he’ll come up with something.

At the same time, Rwanda, 1994—we didn’t step in there. Then Darfur—didn’t we learn? So we have this profound sense of empowerment coupled with a profound sense of disempowerment, and I think you have a lot of people with a profound sense of angst.

Note the mentions of Rwanda and Darfur. In both cases, America was sending food and medical supplies, but there were major problems with the dictatorships there. My impression here is that Rob Bell would have liked to have seen the U.S. step in with our military. I agree that we should have.

As for his last sentence, that it really mean anything? If anything, this country has a profound sense of apathy toward anything that it is not interested in. People came out of the social experiment of the Sixties and discovered that sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll did not solve anything. Because they had already turned away from God and did not turn back, Americans have become apathetic to anything that does not affect their personal comfort.

Are you a pacifist, or do you think that a truly Christian church has to be a pacifist church?

My dad is a U.S. Federal District Judge and gets lots of death threats. On Father’s Day a couple of years ago, there were bodyguards in the driveway at our house. And I am okay with that. But I sit right in that tension. Sometimes people say no police, no armed forces, no anything. And the truth is, whether I am falling short of Jesus’ teaching or not, there are situations where I am really glad that there is a policeman standing right there and that he has a gun. So I don’t know how exactly you work that out in detail.

But my hope would be that as a Christian, you would have a larger imagination. Take Saddam Hussein. Your first impulse would be, “Man, if he wasn’t in power, it would be great—and the only way is to bring in a hundred thousand troops.” To me, the third way of Jesus is always asking if there is an imaginative, subversive, brilliant, creative path.

Here it would appear that Rob Bell would have rather that we did not step in with our military in Iraq. The dictatorship of Hussein was just as evil and potentially more destructive to the world. Why didn’t Rob Bell want the “the third way of Jesus Christ” to be used in Rwanda and Darfur? “Blessed are the peacemakers” sometimes means that the peacemaker has to carry a gun as Rob Bell showed us while talking about the threats to his father.

To be continued.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/april/26.34.html

“The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth: that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?” – BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

“The reason that Christianity is the best friend of Government is because Christianity is the only religion that changes the heart.” – PRESIDENT THOMAS JEFFERSON

“The Bible is the Rock on which this Republic rests.” – PRESIDENT ANDREW JACKSON

“It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.” – PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON (on September 17th, 1796)

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court said in 1824: No free government now exists in the world, unless where Christianity is acknowledged, and is the religion of the country.

An 1853 House Judiciary Committee conducted a one-year long inquiry when a group petitioned the government to remove Christianity from our government institutions. On March 27, 1854, that Committee brought the following conclusion:

“Had the people, during the revolution, a suspicion of any attempt to war against Christianity, that revolution would have been strangled in its cradle… At the time of the adoption of the Constitution and its amendments, the universal sentiment was that Christianity should be encouraged, but not any one sect… In this age, there is no substitute for Christianity… That was the religion of the founders of the republic and they expected it to remain the religion of their descendants.”

Two months later, The House Committee added these words to their previous ones: “The great, vital and conservative element in our system is the belief of our people in the pure doctrines and the divine truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Now can you picture the leaders of our government today making those same types of statements? Can you picture Nancy Pelosi or President Obama saying these same words? Four times in his speech in Cairo, Egypt, President Obama referred to the Koran as being “holy.” Would a true believer in Jesus Christ (as President Obama claims) make that kind of statement about a book that denies that Jesus Christ is the Son of God? No! People work very hard to draw comparisons between Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln. Listen to what Abraham Lincoln said about the Bible:

“I believe the Bible is the best gift God has ever given to man. All the good from the Savior (Jesus) of the world is communicated to us through this book.” – PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN

The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is fond of quoting from the Old Testament when she is speaking about environmental concerns. She has quoted the same verse at least six times since 2005. In April 2009 Nancy Pelosi said: “The Bible tells us in the Old Testament, ‘To minister to the needs of God’s creation is an act of worship. To ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us.’” I do not know what book she is quoting from, but it is not the Bible.

America needs to get back to God and we need to do it today! This country needs to get back to blessing God and not expecting God to bless us! Why should He bless the United States when the United States refuses to have anything to do with Him? America needs to fall on its collective knees and cry out to God and repent!