“But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away!” (2 Timothy 3:1-5)
We remember where we were when we first heard that Middle East terrorists flew two airliners into the World Trade Center buildings on September 11, 2001; and when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed by Timothy McVeigh in 1995. There are many other major events that have occurred over our lifetimes, but none more recent than the Boston Marathon bombings on Patriots Day, April 15, 2013.
I was in a meeting and saw a text alert on my phone that bombs had exploded at the finish line. For the rest of the week, all of us were glued to our televisions, eagerly awaiting the news about who could possibly perpetrate a violent act that would again take the innocent lives of Americans who were simply enjoying their day.
We began to see pictures of two young men – who were later identified as native Chechnyans -one of whom ironically became an American citizen on September 11, 2012. Here this 19 year- old kid takes the Oath of Citizenship with 2,500 other immigrants from 130 countries at a naturalization service held at Boston’s TD Garden. He pledged in that oath to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” Yet just 7 months later, young Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was not an American citizen, perpetrated violence to such a level that it shut a major city down for a week and initiated the largest manhunt in American history.
I heard a new word last week to describe how a young man goes from that proud day he became an American citizen to a point seven months later when he becomes a terrorist and murders three people and injures hundreds of others who were simply enjoying The Boston Marathon. In just seven months, this Islamic kid had become “radicalized” by Islamic extremists. Muslims are actually peace-loving. However, there are extremists in their faith that convince young Muslims that America is a wicked, evil country and needs to be destroyed. It’s called “Jihad” or a holy war waged on behalf of Islam.
What’s evil is what these two brothers did on unsuspecting, law-abiding citizens. Billy Graham noted that evil is a great mystery. When he spoke at service after the bombing in Oklahoma City, he said: “There’s a mystery to it. I’ve been asked why God allows it. I don’t know.”
Let’s agree on this one point: We will learn a lot about what happened in Boston, but we will never be able to understand the evil that we saw at work that day. It just cannot be understood.
As the verse above notes, we are promised that things will get worse and what we saw happen at the Boston Marathon is just one example of what Paul’s letter to Timothy prophesied.
The Apostle Paul warned us that the “last days” would be unbearable. Those “days” have already arrived just as the prophets predicted. We live in a world where wrong is now right and right is wrong. For example, in a graduation prayer case in Santa Fe, Texas, a federal judge declared: “The court will allow that prayer to be a typical non-denominational prayer…The prayer must not refer to a specific deity by name…[such as] Jesus…”. Adding insult to injury, he went on to say, “And make no mistake, the Court is going to have a United States marshal in attendance at the graduation. If any student offends this Court, that student will face up to six months incarceration…Anybody who violates these orders…is going to wish that he or she had died as a child when this court gets through with it.”
Indeed, right has become wrong when school children can be sent to jail for the mere mention of the name Jesus in public.
The last days began when Jesus ascended to heaven and will end when he returns to judge. That is what most Christians refer to as the “end times”. We can’t make sense of what’s going on in our world today, but the Bible teaches us to lean on God when we don’t understand.
I don’t know about you, but I’m doing an awful lot of leaning lately.
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