It doesn’t matter what side you’re on. Babies should rest safely in the arms of their mothers. Toddlers should play happily in the sunshine. No one deserves to be captured, tortured, murdered, and returned to home, locked in a casket months after their first breath. Those precious little boys. Their mom. Is she alive? Does she know? I can’t even go there.
Every world leader called for a ceasefire, a ceasefire that never even phased Hamas. They’re still playing the game. Still weaponizing grief, emotionally terrorizing every Jew outside the walls of Gaza and anyone else who has a beating heart. They offer up the lives of Israelis and Palestinians alike, sacrificing them to their god of death. At every turn they unveil the face of evil, forcing the world to stare into deviations human beings are not built withstand. World leaders believed the ceasefire would open the path to peace and stability in the region. Joke’s on them.
I’m across the world. Life is moving forward. No vigils for the Bibas family here. The sun shines into my living room window, low on the horizon, as another shabbat falls. Another Friday night. I try to reason with myself, searching for some way to settle the pit in my stomach that is the silence of western Christian leadership on this issue. It seems, a year-and-a-half full of horrors later, we are still either too afraid of the controversy of Zion to engage it, or we remain unconvinced that the Bible in our hands is more than a book about us having nice, personal relationships with a loving God. Perhaps I am too hard on Christianity, but someone has to say it. We do ourselves no favors by pacifiying the flaws within our faith. Christian divestment from God’s chosen people is the wrong move. That doesn’t make us bad people. It makes us fools.
Only fools do not see the powers of the heavens being shaken everywhere in the world right now. Fools do not hear the cry of the innocent blood, but remain drunk on the wine of the prostitute while our pierced Lord in bloodstained robes stands at the right hand of the Father, interceding for His beloved. We in the pews are too weak and immature to notice. We don’t realize we’re suppose to be the ones praying–loud, hard, big prayers–for Him to reign on the blood-soaked land. But we’re too deceived by our ministry areas, mission trips, and building campaigns to notice. Too disillusioned by our own self-obsession to join the cry.
The Bibas children are not irrelevant to God’s redemptive plan, though Christianity in the West silences their murders as such. Israel is not an issue that is semi-adjacent to our faith, something that will eventually fade into the background and disappear. This land, these people–they are the center of the plan followers of Jesus claim to stake their lives on. It doesn’t matter whether or not you are Jewish. It matters whether you have faith in God’s promises. Do you believe God is going to do what He said?
Hamas doesn’t. They reject the truth that a God named Yahweh wants to bless Gaza through the family of Abraham led by their Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. As such, they are determined to exterminate the Jewish people in the most terrifying and visible way possible. They have set their hearts against Yahweh and His Anointed One. If they do not turn around, it’s a choice that will leave them in a far worse reality than the one they have created in Gaza.
It breaks my heart to write about that reality. God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. But babies can’t go on being brutally slaughtered forever. Truth and love, justice and righteousness…it’s hard. It’s why none of us can get it right. We’re all so broken by evil and blinded by rage. They hurt us, we hurt them, and on the game goes. And who wins? Never the babies in the caskets. Never the mamas with little ones in their arms.
It’s frustrating, at times, to write into what often feels like a vacuum of never-ending Christian ignorance. I love my fellow believers. I love the people we trust to lead us. But ears to hear, eyes to see–it’s as though no one has them. Western media keeps most of this stuff at arms length. Churches follow suit. It’s too political for church, too polarizing. The Bible presents us with questions our tomes of theology and doctoral degrees cannot always answer.
I ask them anyway. Because someone has to.
How many more babies have to die before we sober up? How many more toddlers have to come home dead and in pieces before we see Israel for who she is? Mourn with her? Meet her in her wilderness with bread and water? How long until the grafted-in recognize the groans of early labor and ready ourselves in obedience, standing firm, rejoicing in the deliverance of the people our God has bound Himself to?
Another shabbat comes. My prayer tonight is a simple one. May the death of the Bibas children bother us so badly that we would pick up the Bibles in our hands and ask for wisdom to discern the center God’s plan.
Deut. 32:43
Rejoice you nations, with His people;
for he avenges the blood of His servants.
He will take vengeance on HIs enemies,
and make atonement for His land and His people.
Two Precious Stones 