REBUILDING GAZA? HOW ABOUT AIDING THE INNOCENT?

By James Wilson

            Even today the cultural tendency for people in authority is to ignore bullying until the victim protests.  After that the default is to blame the victim; everything was fine until he began to make others uncomfortable.  This is especially so if the victim has fought fire with fire.  Sometimes – if the victim perseveres – the bullies are confronted.  In any case, it should surprise no one that this dodging of responsibility by authorities translates readily into relations among nations.  The policy makers at the macro level are the spiritual and cultural siblings of those who make the rules in family and school communities.  And the first rule is the victim is not allowed to take matters into his own hands and just fight back against the bullies.  Said victim is to wait upon the goodwill of the very authorities whose inaction permits the bullies to flourish.

            That said, why – in the name of all that is good – are the United States, Western Europe, and the United Nations rebuilding the Gaza Strip without so much as a dollar going to rebuild Israel?

            The destruction in Gaza is a tragedy.  This is especially so when we consider the vast majority of casualties are civilians and the destruction of homes and schools is a mutilation to the survivors.  But the civilians of Gaza elected Hamas to be their government; they are not innocent.  Truth is the present tragedy began when Hamas kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teens.  Fact is Hamas fires about three thousand rockets into Israel each year with the sole intent of killing Israeli civilians; about that number has been fired this summer alone, and the tunnels destroyed were equipped with handcuffs and tranquilizers meant to facilitate the murder of many more – after being taken alive.  Reality is Hamas – the legitimate authority in Gaza – places civilians between its weapons and the Israelis in hopes that many will die and world opinion roast the “ruthless” Israelis for defending herself.  So far the strategy is working well.  The UN investigates war crimes allegations against Israel without a word about Hamas targeting their own civilians by using them as human shields.  American journalists report ceasefire after ceasefire shattered without mentioning who did the shattering.  Apparently our media is too delicate to tell it like it is.

            We give half a billion dollars to the bullies to repair damage done when the victim struck back.  We give nothing to restore the innocent party.  Of course some will say – and it’s true – there is much less damage done in Israel.  But since when does the fact Israel is so much better defending herself than the Palestinians are at attacking her a moral failing?  Since when is the sixty-six year absence of Jewish aggression in the Middle East compared to five wars of extermination and God knows how many murders evidence the Israelis deserve anything but sympathy and support?

            The predecessors and founders of every Muslim/Terrorist organization were mentored, supplied and suckled by the remnants of Nazi Germany after the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem spent the war as Hitler’s guest.  They have proven worthy heirs, and their movement is resurgent in the Europe from which so many Jews fled after World War II.  My Dutch friends told me when we volunteered together in Israel that if I wore my IDF baseball cap on the streets in Rotterdam at night I would likely not survive the night.

            Yet the Father God who creates the world and redeems it through His Son in the Power of His Spirit is sovereign – whether we acknowledge Him or not.  This God said in the Old Testament before He paid for it on the Cross in the New; justice is to roll like a river and He will save His people.  Israel does not need our help to prevail.  We need to help Israel and so align with Israel’s God if we want His blessing.  Yet it remains a matter of simple justice any intelligent person can comprehend.

People on the fence over this ought to check out the 1960 film, Exodus.  It illustrates the story textbooks only tell, complete with the Nazi forebears of the Islamo-fascists of today and the merciless brutality of the so-called Palestinians when one of their own tries to walk in truth.  Some will opine that this movie is fiction, but the real fiction is the absurd notion that Hamas – or any of the other Islamo terrorist outfits – have even the remotest claim to any moral high ground.  Or that their goal is anything but genocide – beginning with the Israelis and moving on to the people of our land.           

James A. Wilson is the author of Living As Ambassadors of Relationships and The Holy Spirit and the End Times – available at local bookstores or by e-mailing him at

praynorthstate@charter.net

TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE VERSUS THE LARAMIE PROJECT: TRUTH OR DARE

Child's Reaction at Gay Pride Event in Australia

By James Wilson

If a single event galvanized the movement toward recognizing homosexual marriage it must be the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in October 1998.  Shepard encountered two men in a Laramie, Wyoming, bar and left with them.  They later pistol whipped, tortured, and lashed him to a fence.  Death came six days later in a hospital; his murderers serve consecutive life sentences.  His case is the catalyst for anti-hate laws protecting gays; it is the spiritual catalyst for re-defining marriage.  The narrative is that Shepard was killed by heterosexual rednecks venting homophobic rage; it says we must guarantee it never happens again.  Films, theatrical and book projects have told the story – the most famous being The Laramie Project.  Trouble is, the narrative is a lie.

The torture and murder of this 21-year-old man was as brutal and criminal as it is portrayed to be.  But Aaron McKinney – principal killer – was Shepard’s sometime lover. His motive for the crime was to steal some ten thousand dollars worth of meth-amphetamine from Shepard.  McKinney has admitted in interviews that he fabricated his anti-gay rage defense; he has also admitted the drug theft was his motivation.  Although some law enforcement people deny Shepard was a drug dealer police investigator Ben Fritzen declares drugs and money were the motivation for the attack.  As horrible as was this crime, it had nothing whatever to do with Shepard’s sexual orientation, his being a sometime male prostitute, or any sort of intolerance. 

Yet judge after judge – in defiance of law and constitution – and now some state legislatures – decide for “tolerance” and “marital equality” in an effort to prevent a repetition of what never happened in the first place.

Principal battlegrounds right now are federal courts of Australia and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in the US.

Some argue the facts don’t matter.  Tolerance and acceptance – they say – is a good in itself and we should continue our national march in this direction regardless of its sources.  (Never mind the legalized bigotry practiced against business people who wish to operate their businesses in accordance with traditional and even Biblical values.  This list lengthens on a daily basis.)  But this logic presupposes the kind of tolerance/acceptance expressed in authorizing gay marriage is good for all concerned.  Reality is it is bad for all concerned.

In every nation hosting gay marriage long enough for studies to be conducted the gay marriages are documented to be inherently unstable and short-lived – with noteworthy exceptions.  Homosexual fidelity is (usually) found to mean returning to the relationship after adultery; authentic monogamy is rare.  Domestic violence occurs at much higher rates than in the heterosexual community.  Worst – in my view, but difficult to document, -- is the reality that gays imagine they will find peace in marriage but – when nothing changes – a deeper despair than before.  Their problem is not intolerance.

Heterosexual unions also suffer.  Straight couples become less likely to marry when marriage definitions are neither stable nor reality-based.  Married couples become more likely to divorce.  Children of hetero homes, subjected to a drumbeat of politically correct propaganda, are more likely to become relationally confused and de-stabilized.  This is much more prevalent for children in gay households.  Nobody wins.

Do we want to subject our children to a game of cosmic truth or dare?  Of course not; nobody – gay or straight – wants that.  But given the flight from reality inherent in the debate over marriage – all over the world – and the outright lies most media report as truth while suppressing the facts of such pivotal cases as the Matthew Shepard murder, there is little that reason can accomplish.  This can only lead us – I hope – to contemplate the bankruptcy of our fallen reason against the wisdom of the King of the universe.  He says He perfects His strength in our weakness.  Let us fall on our faces and beg Him to do just that.

The National Day of Repentance is October 3-4 – Yom Kippur.   Repentance is neither more nor less than the re-focus of our attention on God and away from our binding dysfunction.  Today the question of what marriage is – and how committed Christians are to it– is at critical mass in Australia and the United States – and perhaps other nations as well.  Would all who honor God on this day pray for the resurrection of authentic marriage in heaven and earth?  Would we re-commit to practicing it in the grace of the Lord Christ?  That would be a two-pronged act of repentance.

Our God provides a road to abundant life.  Time has come to be walking it to the exclusion of all others.

James A. Wilson is the author of Living As Ambassadors of Relationships and The Holy Spirit and the End Times – available at local bookstores or by e-mailing him at

praynorthstate@charter.net

ONCE MORE INTO THE BREACH WITH GLADNESS

By James Wilson

            America is more pro-life now than at any time in the last half century.  Close to sixty per cent of us believe human life begins at conception and close to eighty per cent believe it just plain wrong for taxpayers to fund the termination of unborn children.  This attitude squares nicely with the Christian scriptures although it is squarely out of step with most governmental leaders.  (More on that later.)  This pro-life majority came about as the fruit of thousands fighting the culture wars God’s way instead of their way.

In Luke 10 Jesus sends seventy apostles out to share His revelation throughout Israel and Judea.  His instructions were explicit: bless everyone they could; hang out with them and enjoy their company; meet their needs as the Holy Spirit provided; and share their stories of encounter with the Living God.  The world thinks this a silly way to fight a war, but that depends on the war and the objective of winning.  I praise God for our military people who stand ready to protect me and my family from violent invasion, but I don’t want to be protected against the lost.  I want to be able to reach out to them as I was reached out to forty-five years ago.  Most people who want abortions are lost beneath the pressure of their circumstances.  Forty Days for Life has one of the best track records for relieving people in crisis of that pressure.  They are one of the principal reasons for the current pro-life majority in America.

Founded by David Bereit and Shawn Carney in 2004; they gathered volunteers to stand in front of abortion clinics and do what Jesus told His seventy friends to do – in that order – nothing more and nothing less.  Mareza is one of the people who got blessed in that first campaign that saw a near thirty per cent reduction in abortions in Bryan College Station, Texas.  She encountered a lone volunteer standing on a wintery morning in front of the clinic she and her friend entered to abort her baby.  The man said, “God bless you.  God bless both of you.  Actually, God bless all three of you.”  Through her tears – even now – Mareza says she marched into the clinic, turned around, and marched back out – still carrying the child inside her womb.  Fueled by word of mouth, the movement went national in 2007 and was soon an international phenomenon.  Today six hundred twenty-five thousand volunteers conduct semi annual campaigns in five hundred forty cities in twenty-four nations. 

Forty Days has never wavered from their basic strategy of blessing.  They count nine thousand unborn lives saved, not to mention the physical and spiritual trauma to moms they avert.  (Abortion is not the safe procedure it is advertised to be.)  More than one hundred workers have left their clinic jobs and nearly sixty centers have closed in the wake of the peaceful and loving witness of these humble people.  Appointments for abortions tend to decline by seventy-five per cent on days the volunteers are on duty.  Their ministry addresses the number one cause of death in the world today – abortion – and gives people involved an opportunity to choose life.

The Fall campaign begins Wednesday, September 24, and runs through Sunday, November 2.  The theme of every Forty Days campaign is 2 Chronicles 7:14 – If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek My Face and turn from their wicked ways I will hear from Heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.  It is not about getting the rest of the world to change; it is about us who claim the Lord as our own.  Readers who want to participate can go to www.40daysforlife.com to contact the ministry in their own community.  Those in live in or near Redding or Chico, California can contact PrayNorthState and I will connect you with local leaders in those cities.

About government leaders being out of step with the pro-life majority…  Elections come in November.  Most pro-life people – indeed, most Christians – pay little attention to whether candidates reflect their values – in pragmatic action – when choosing their voting preference.  We are too busy rejecting the guy we don’t like in favor of the guy we dislike less.  This is especially prevalent in state and local elections in which we tell ourselves these candidates have no impact on issues of life itself.  The trouble is, they do.  California’s legislature cannot reverse Roe v. Wade, but they can and do vote to fund thirty thousand abortions each year with taxpayer funds.  They do vote for bullet trains and scholarships for illegals instead of benefits for veterans, school curricula that teach traditional values, and crisis pregnancy centers. 

Whether a person is pro-choice or pro-life – in the actual decisions and priorities they make – is a harbinger of a fundamental mindset.  A pro-life mindset is a fundamental and across-the-board blessing at any level of government; a pro-choice or a lukewarm attitude is a force for business as usual. 

This November suppose we let the less objectionable know less objectionable will no longer cut it with us.  Just as we can choose to go to war, but only in God’s way of blessing those we name enemy, so we can choose to vote only for candidates who bless our culture – not just those who don’t make it too much worse.  God is in this for the long haul, as is Forty Days for Life.  It’s our turn now; once more into the breach with gladness.  Once more into the breach for forty days and once more into the present with our eyes on God’s declared future.

James A. Wilson is the author of Living As Ambassadors of Relationships and The Holy Spirit and the End Times – available at local bookstores or by e-mailing him at

praynorthstate@charter.net

CHOOSE THIS DAY LIFE OR DEATH

By James Wilson

            I will never forget the inner healing session I conducted with the distraught widow of a member of my congregation in Virginia a quarter of a century ago.  Her husband had hanged himself in the entryway of their home and she found his body when she returned from grocery shopping; their six-year-old found it with her.  During the inner healing session she had a vision in which The Father allowed to see her dead husband – alive with Him.  When He asked her if she had a message for her husband she replied, “I want to beat the stuffing out of him.”  The Father answered, “Well, he owes you at least that,” and she proceeded – in the vision – to punch him until she was out of breath.  She opened her eyes and said to me, “Now I can forgive him.”

            That may not seem like a very Christian way to forgiveness – it doesn’t to me at least – but reality is the husband brutally injured the wife and young son.  He left himself in the front hallway deliberately and with calculation.  We do not belong solely to ourselves; we belong as well to the God Who created us and the loved ones we invite into covenant with us.  G. K. Chesterton calls suicide an ultimate expression of a will to destroy.  That young widow was entitled to express her own rage.  When it was done – in the vision and not to the husband’s physical self – she was truly able to forgive and begin to heal and move on.

            Equally burned into my memory was the time I had to forcibly restrain my own mother from swallowing a whole bottle of pills in our front hallway.  I literally held her by the throat until she spit them onto the carpet.  Another time I restrained her as she screamed she would drive her car off a cliff; I had my brother disable the car.

            Please don’t misunderstand me.  The despair that can drive a person to want to end his own life is real and compelling.  It runs in my family and I neither question it nor mock its gravity.   On top of this, there are mind altering drugs that can produce suicidal thoughts and motivations; some of these may have played a role in the death of Robin Williams.  But if we learn anything from the Word of God and our own pre-disposition to admire sacrifice and sacrificial heroism it is that only a life lived for others has meaning.  Our original fall from grace was all about human beings deciding to live for their individual selves instead of for God and each other.  Jesus Christ came into the world to restore the natural created economy of sacrifice with His own sacrificial death and resurrection.

            Suicide is an ultimate choice to seek one’s own good at the expense of others.  The greatest irony is that it turns out to be the enemy of all life doing a number on one more victim every time.  Attempted suicides for whom intervention was successful are virtually without exception the first to admit how grateful they are.  It may sound like old fashioned guilt-tripping but it is appropriate to point out that every person has forged interdependent and covenantal relationships that carry mutual obligation.  The so-called right to die is a non sequitur; rights are for the living.

            When my mother entered the last stage of her battle with an atypical form of tuberculosis she asked me to do something that was unthinkable for me as a Christian.  She wanted me to connect her with a Dr. Kevorkian type who would usher her out of this life.  I told her I would gladly prevent doctors from taking heroic measures to extend her life, but under no circumstances would I play God by facilitating the termination of her life.  Once she knew I was serious – over the next few days – she became interested in asking Jesus Christ into her life for the first time in her life.  When she actually popped the question she said it was because she had never known the peace she saw in me even when the world was crashing down around me.  We prayed and that peace entered her even as the Spirit of God entered.  Four days later she lapsed into a coma and went home.

            Had I cooperated with her expressed desire for suicide assistance she would not have gone anywhere.  Our choices are seldom easy, but they really are that simple.  Jesus says, “I came that they might have life, and that abundantly.”  This is true, and it is good.

James A. Wilson is the author of Living As Ambassadors of Relationships and The Holy Spirit and the End Times – available at local bookstores or by e-mailing him at

praynorthstate@charter.net