Confronting Evil

11/11/07

 

 

(The following was used with a PowerPoint presentation, the asterisks indicate slide changes.)

 

Many of the statements in this message were taken directly from Sean Hannity’s book “Deliver Us From Evil.”  These statements have been enclosed with brackets [ ] for simplicity.

 

*Today we honor our veterans, past and present.

 

Without their service and sacrifice America would not have the freedom it enjoys today.

 

Today, I have a message burning in my heart.  It is extremely relevant.  It is not in any way a typical sermon.  This is not going to be easy, but I’m not looking for easy words.  This day we are living in cannot afford easy words!

 

*Confronting Evil

 

Is it our responsibility to recognize and confront evil in the world?  If we say no, it will lead to our own disaster!

 

Evil exists. It is real, and it means to harm us.

 

Pray

 

*(Blank) Many believe today that the position of the church should be neutral.  The secular liberals are doing everything they can to silence the church.

 

This isn’t too hard of job because much of the church today has been silenced by their own will.

 

The only truth about separation of church and state is that the state is to stay out of the church!

 

I believe that our Lord Jesus Christ has a voice in all human affairs.

 

Secular progressive liberals believe in appeasement at just about any cost.  That mindset has affected much of the church today.

 

*59:19 …When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the LORD shall lift up a standard against him.

 

To lift up a standard against the enemy is to confront evil and resist it!

 

Romans 13 must be properly understood.

 

*Rom. 13:1 Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. ²Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.

 

*³ For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. ⁴ For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.

 

*Italian dictator Benito Mussolini would not fit that scripture.

 

This picture shows the headquarters of the fascist movement in Rome, adorned with a large stylized representation of Mussolini’s face. The word si, which is repeated over and over, is Italian for yes.

 

*Adolf Hitler personified evil.  He certainly would not fit Rom. 13:3!

 

*How could Saddam Hussein fit this verse?

 

*[More than 225 years after that Declaration, America has become, without rival, the world’s most beneficent [bə néffissənt] nation. As Ronald Reagan was fond of reminding his Soviet counterparts, we have the power to conquer any nation, but we don’t. We have the power to enslave any people, but we don’t. We have the power to loot any nation of its natural resources, but we don’t. Instead, America sends her young men and women to war to defend the weak. She sends her young men and women to war to defend the weak. She sends her resources to help feed the poor. And she offers a hand to any nation that seeks friendship and peace.]

 

1 Peter chapter 2 verse 13 must also be put in proper perspective.

 

*1 Pet. 2:13 Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every authority instituted among men: whether to the king, as the supreme authority, ¹⁴ or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right.

 

Peter and James did not submit to the authority that told them not to speak in the name of Jesus any longer!

 

*Acts 4:18 Then they called them in again and commanded them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. ¹⁹But Peter and John replied, “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you rather than God.

 

Scripture must be balanced with scripture!

 

*(Blank) Sean Hannity has written a book entitled “Deliver Us From Evil.”  I highly recommend this book.  Some of what I share with you today are excerpts from his book…

 

[How could anyone witness the horrors of September 11, or the mass graves discovered in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and dismiss the idea of evil?]

 

[And yet many people do—most of them political liberals. Even when they can bring themselves to acknowledge the brutality of a corrupt tyrant such as Saddam Hussein, they excuse it.]

 

[We are not denying that Saddam is a repressive dictator,” they say, “but we don’t believe we should have attacked Iraq without giving him more time to comply with the U.N. resolutions.” For the appeasement-minded liberals of our country, there’s always a “but.”

 

*It’s difficult for liberals to see such moral questions clearly, because most of them are moral relativists. They reject absolute standards of right and wrong. In their worldview, man is perfectible, human nature is on a path toward enlightenment, and the concept of sin is primitively biblical.

 

*(Blank) In their view, society’s unfairness compels people to break the law. To them people like Saddam and Osama bin Laden are not morally depraved murderers, but men driven to their bad acts by the injustices of Western society. The emphasis is always on giving bad actors—domestic and foreign—the benefit of the doubt, never on personal accountability.  After all, if we can blame external circumstances or internal imbalance, then we can avoid the messy business of calling the evildoers to account.]

 

[This kind of thinking is all too familiar from our courtrooms at home.]

 

[The justice system today is crawling with “experts” eager to exonerate the most heinous criminals on the grounds that they’re “genetically predisposed” to murder, rape, take drugs, or otherwise endanger the welfare of others; the media fills its airwaves with liberal advocates eager to sympathize with murderers on death row, instead of the families of the innocent victims.]

 

John the Baptist confronted evil in a leader!

 

*Lk. 3:19 But when John rebuked Herod the tetrarch because of Herodias, his brother’s wife, and all the other evil things he had done, ²⁰Herod added this to them all: He locked John up in prison.

 

*Blank [By blurring the lines between good and evil, liberals have rendered our society more vulnerable to evil’s influence. With secular liberals largely in charge of our cultural institutions—not to mention their influence on the courts and even our churches—America is increasingly ill-equipped to recognize, much less respond to, the evil that threatens our nation.]

 

[The founders of our country recognized the presence of evil in the world and in human nature, and arranged the structure of the government under the Constitution to protect against its ill effects. As James Madison, the father of our Constitution, reveals in Federalist Paper No. 51, the matter of evil was very much on the Framers’ minds as they debated the form and nature of the new government. “If men were angels,” Madison wrote, “no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.]

 

[John Adams warned, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”]

 

[Was it “warmongering” when the Greatest Generation defeated the Axis powers of Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Tojo’s Japan, and liberated untold millions in World War II? When Reagan’s courageous stand against communism—and renewed commitment to military strength—led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Soviet repression? When today’s brave soldiers rescued 26 million people in Afghanistan, and 24 million in Iraq, from brutal regimes?]

 

Solomon understood as a leader how critical it was to be able to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil…

 

*1 Ki. 3:9 So give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong. For who is able to govern this great people of yours?”

 

The writer of Hebrews emphasized how critical it is for believers to know the difference between good and evil.  We think it’s so easy, but we sure excuse a lot!

 

*Heb. 5:11 We have much to say about this, but it is hard to explain because you are slow to learn. ¹²In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! ¹³Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness.

 

*¹⁴ But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.

 

*Blank [America has faced evil before, from Nazi Germany to Soviet Russia in the twentieth century alone. Each time, we (and our allies) have had to overcome opposition from within as part of our battle against these enemies. For when it comes to confronting evil, the fact is that there are essentially two types of people: those who are willing to fight it, and those who try to excuse it—or, worse, deny it even exists. Throughout history, the appeasers have refused to recognize evil, let alone confront it. They make excuses for it, ignore and coddle it. And by refusing to fight, they nourish and encourage it. Every great champion of freedom in the modern era has had to overcome a prominent voice of appeasement. For Winston Churchill there was Chamberlain, for Ronald Reagan there was Jimmy Carter. Today, George W. Bush faces the modern secular progressive liberals.]

 

[Unlike President Bush, who has personified moral clarity and vision in the War on Terror, America’s liberal elite sneers at the notion that good and evil are legitimate concepts in our society. They mock the president for seeing the world in black and white terms, and hold responsible his Christian faith for inspiring the thought. They’ve even convinced themselves that Bush’s moral compass is a dangerous instrument—as threatening, some have hinted, as Islamic fundamentalism itself.]

 

[One challenge of a long and drawn-out war is that public commitment to the war effort can flag—especially in an unpredictable situation like the War on Terror, where a few weeks of dramatic battle can be followed by months of difficult activity behind the scenes. And if the public should lose its resolve to win, if its attention should wander from the evil that confronts us and the necessity of defeating it, victory will only stray further from our reach.]

 

*Dr. Peter Marshall, pastor of Washington, D.C.’s historic New York Avenue Presbyterian Church was and still is highly esteemed.  Catherine Marshall wrote his best selling biography, A Man Called Peter.

 

His son, Rev. Peter J. Marshall, has compiled many of the sermons his father preached during World War II.

 

I want to read just a portion of a message he spoke on September 15, 1940 prior to the United States entering World War II.

 

Read from the book…

 

*Blank [In 1935, as the fascist storm brewed in Europe, fifty thousand veterans demonstrated for peace in Washington, D.C.; that same year 175,000 students held an antiwar strike. Congress was forced to pass a Neutrality Act—the first of four to be enacted between 1935 and 1939, binding government from taking sides in any conflict, even to help Europe’s embattled democracies. Yet America changed overnight after December 7, 1941.]

 

[George W. Bush makes liberals very nervous, not just because he won the presidency back for the Republicans after eight years of Bill Clinton, but because he truly understands—and articulates—the bigger picture. Like most of America’s great leaders, he grasps the nature of evil. And he has risen to the occasion, exercising decisive leadership, all the while firmly and openly relying on God—a fact that disturbs liberals even more.]

 

[On February 10, 2002, the Baltimore Sun published an article claiming that Bush’s Christian references had upset Muslim listeners.]

 

[A group of Islamic extremists attacks us because we’re a largely Judeo-Christian nation that supports Israel, and we’re supposed to keep silent about our religious faith?]

 

[The day a president cannot invoke God as his guiding light, and the source from whom he and our nation derive strength and direction, is the day America ceases to be great.]

 

[The Iraqi regime was unimaginably evil, as the evidence has now proven beyond any doubt. We know that he ordered the mass extermination of Shi’ite Muslims, Kurds, and other political enemies on an unthinkable scale.  We have seen tapes of his medieval torture chambers, of rooms where unknown hundreds of citizens were raped, of mass graves filled with murdered Iraqi citizens.  Yet liberals still refuse to acknowledge that our invasion was a beneficial thing. They’re more tolerant of Saddam Hussein than they are of George W. Bush.]

 

Edmund Burke once said, “The only necessary thing for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

 

[Can it be that, since so few of us have had to sacrifice anything to preserve our freedom, we tend to undervalue this gift our predecessors bestowed upon us? Can it be that we’ve been so secure in our freedom that it’s hard for us to imagine the alternative?]

 

*Alvin Collum York was born to a poor farming family in Tennessee on December 13, 1887, the third of eleven children. On  June 5, 1917, at the age of 29, Alvin York received a notice to register for the draft.

 

Sergeant York was famous for both his being a conscientious objector and hero in World War I. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for leading an attack on a German machine gun nest, killing 25 German soldiers and capturing 132 others

 

He was the most decorated American soldier of World War I.

 

Until he was convinced that what the Germans were doing was evil and a threat to innocent people he didn’t want to have anything to do with war, let alone killing.

 

War is a horrible thing.  In a perfect world there would be no such thing, but it’s not a perfect world.

 

*Lk. 21:8 He replied: “Watch out that you are not deceived. For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am he,’ and, ‘The time is near.’ Do not follow them. ⁹ When you hear of wars and revolutions, do not be frightened. These things must happen first, but the end will not come right away.”

 

*We need to pray for and support our President; he really does see the big picture.

 

*We need to pray for and support our troops for being in harms way and never forget the sacrifice they have made and are making for freedom in the world.

 

* We are living in horrendous times.  We cannot put our head in the sand.  We cannot negotiate with the devil.  Appeasement will not work.  The church should be put on high alert.  The spiritual warfare we are in is real and vicious. 

 

*We begin with humility on our knees and then we stand firm on our feet.

 

This is a day for us to be called to prayer.