This is the season I do not want. Everything in me reviles at setting aside a time to war and fight and blow people into an eternity they may not be prepared for. Even Jesus said there will be war; but his prophecy was not an ordered demand. God did not carve out a place for war in his plan for this planet. Man did.
However, there is a place where God is at war and asks us to join his army for a season of it. It is war against anything that sets man against His Creator. God wars against the profusion of pornography and He defines it differently than we do. Anything that distorts or destroys His great plan for His world is pornographic even when people keep their clothes on. We must be his army on this earth but we must war with different weapons. (2 Corinthians 10:3) Angry words and chaotic protests do not represent Him well. Anguish and heart-wrenching grief prepares us for the war he calls us to wage. Unless we feel His sorrow for what evil has wrecked, His weapons for this war seem useless, weak, and ineffective.
We are called to hate evil but not the evil doers. We are called to fight against injustice but not with the same weapons that caused it.
If there must be a time for war, let’s fight against what stole this world from God. Let us protest prejudice, bullying, immorality, and every other broken commandment that becomes the brunt of a joke on a popular sitcom. Let us tear our grieving cloths and repent of our blindness to our own participation in such things. Let us learn how to blush again at indecency paraded before us. Because when we do, we become useful soldiers in the war God wages against the enemy of our soul. Then, a time for war is just another time for obedience. It is a time for the right word at the right time; the right action from a God-ordered nudge. If we fight the right war, nobody dies. In fact, they know life as never before.
Onward, Christian soldiers!
*Still Higher for His Highest, Oswald Chambers, October 23.