Proverbs 16:2 All the ways of a man are clean in his own sight, but the LORD weighs the motives.
Lysander Spooner said: “Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it.”
I have heard the words ‘ethnic cleansing’ being bantered about these days within the rhetoric used over national disputes. The idea is unsettling to the soul and mind to think that this option might be used again in our time. Ethnic cleansing. Those two words sound so tidy, don’t they? Let’s just eliminate a portion of the population and clean things up with a bit of ethnic cleansing. Let’s get rid of the unwashed so we all can feel good about our way of living. Yuk, this cleansing does not feel clean at all.
History has a way of repeating itself. No matter how much we say, “These atrocities will never happen again!” – we end up doing them again. God says in His word that past events will repeat. Eccl. 1:9 What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Until we come under the Lordship of our God and His leading – all the terrible thing that men do will repeat themselves until the day God calls everyone to account.
The concentration-camps, killing-fields, and misguided use of child soldiers will keep happening as long as there is an idea that ethnic cleansing is a viable answer to a nation’s woes. If an individual man cannot control his own personal impulse and wavers so easily over an ethical line and becomes base in character, then how on earth can nations made up with these individuals be expected to step up to the righteous plate and do what is right? Nations are made up of individual people with beliefs who together become a nation and project their beliefs nationally.
Anger and jealousy are vindictive emotions and as long as the humanistic heart keeps making decisions from that foundational standard, there will be no changes on earth because the said emotions are leading them. Man with his flawed perception in charge of God’s earth will bring pain and suffering as long as God is ignored.
The human condition, no matter how well-educated, is corrupt and devious at best and downright evil at worst. Jer. 17:9 The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is? This is why something like ethnic cleansing can gain momentum and take on an agenda of its own within the ideas and conscience of a so-called civilized people.
Man will continue to look elsewhere, rather than within himself to find someone or something to blame for his personal selfishness. Humanity will continue to war with everyone who is different and if the day ever comes when the perceived social outcasts are all destroyed, we will then turn on ourselves, because we are incapable of establishing any ethical boundaries when left to our own lusts. James 4:2 You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous of what others have, but you can’t get it, so you fight and wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it. 3 And even when you ask, you don’t get it because your motives are all wrong–you want only what will give you pleasure. We need a righteous savior to save us from ourselves.
Government legislation can make laws that force us to get along so to speak, but only God can change our heart to genuinely accept the unconditional right of existence of another person, language and race who God has made. Psalm 86:9 All the nations you have made shall come and worship before you, O Lord, and shall glorify your name.
If there is to be any ethnic cleansing, then let it be God doing the cleansing within each one of us of different ethnicity. Let’s clean up our own house per se, and then we will see clearly to help those who are struggling to find their rightful place on this earth. Matt. 7:5 You hypocrite! First take the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
Yes, Lord, start with me so I may see your purpose for each person you have created. Psalm 51:2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin! 7 Purify me from my sins, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. Help us all to be clean and ready, to be a hand extended of God’s grace in this world that needs cleansing through salvation in Christ Jesus. Amen.
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Amen…this needs to be in every heart
Yes! Let it begin with me!
So true. So good a reminder.
Let there be Peace on earth and let it begin with me.
Di