Month: October 2015 (Page 2 of 2)

Police Cars: “In God We Trust”

October 6, 2015 / Allan Babcock

Police Agencies Defy Critics and Show ‘In God We Trust’

By ALAN BLINDER and RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑAOCT. 3, 2015

Sheriff Johnny Moats’s department vehicle in Cedartown, Ga., the seat of Polk County. He bought the “In God We Trust” sticker with his own money after he heard that Missouri sheriffs had begun displaying them. Credit Kevin D. Liles for The New York Times

CEDARTOWN, Ga. — The chief deputy to Sheriff Johnny Moats of Polk County appeared in an office doorway one morning this month with a message he knew would delight his boss: Another Georgia lawman had heeded Sheriff Moats’s suggestion to add “In God We Trust” decals to official vehicles.

It was a small part of what has emerged as a big moment for the national motto, which has long been cherished by many Christians, criticized by those who say it infringes on the separation of church and state, overlooked by plenty and safeguarded by courts. In recent months, dozens of Southern and Midwestern law enforcement agencies have added the axiom to squad cars, usually to the vexation of vocal, often distant critics, and at the personal expense of sheriffs, police chiefs or rank-and-file employees.

“If it’s on my money and it’s on the state flag, I can put it on a patrol car,” said Sheriff Moats, who wrote to Georgia’s sheriffs this year to promote the motto’s placement on law enforcement vehicles. “Just about every single day, I have another sheriff calling and saying, ‘I’ve done it’ or ‘Can you send me a picture of your patrol car?’ ”

Sheriff Johnny Moats in the Polk County Public Safety Complex, where inmates painted a mural of the Ten Commandments. Credit Kevin D. Liles for The New York Times

Some officials contend that their display of the motto is elementary patriotism, a four-word way of “standing up for America, standing up for our country,” Sheriff Moats said. Others in law enforcement say the stickers are a response to the battering their profession’s reputation has taken after more than a year of high-profile killings and extraordinary scrutiny.

“With the dark cloud that law enforcement has been under recently, I think that we need to have a human persona on law enforcement,” said Sheriff Brian Duke of Henderson County, Tenn. “It gave us an opportunity to put something on our cars that said: ‘We are you. We’re not the big, bad police.’ ”

But critics worry that displays of “In God We Trust” on taxpayer-funded vehicles cross the threshold of constitutionality, even though the courts have repeatedly brushed aside challenges to the motto, which Congress enshrined in 1956. Explanations like the one Sheriff Duke offered have not curbed those frustrations.

“This motto has nothing to do with the problem of police forces’ shooting people, but it’s a great way to divert attention away from that and wrap yourself in a mantle of piety so that you’re above criticism,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, a co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a Wisconsin-based group that has demanded that law enforcement officials stop exhibiting the motto. “The idea of aligning the police force with God is kind of scary. That’s the first thing you’d expect to see in a theocracy.”

A pattern has developed: A police or sheriff’s department begins using the stickers, and Ms. Gaylor’s group sends it a letter, arguing that the practice is unconstitutional and that the agency should desist. The dispute attracts attention, and more law enforcement agencies join the trend; indeed, some appear to relish the opportunity to tweak a critic.

In Texas, for instance, the police chief of Childress, Adrian Garcia, drew attention when he denied Ms. Gaylor’s request and, in a letter to her posted on the department’s Facebook page, asked “that you and the Freedom From Religion Foundation go fly a kite.”

Ms. Gaylor disputed suggestions that the foundation had unwittingly fostered the spread of the stickers. “I don’t think it has a thing to do with us,” she said.

Protests and warnings from critics like Ms. Gaylor also seem to be of little concern in places like Polk County, a few minutes from the Alabama border, where about 41,000 people live in a rural area dotted with churches, Confederate battle flags and fried chicken restaurants. The small atrium of Sheriff Moats’s building features a pair of murals painted by inmates, including one of the Ten Commandments on tablets that are more than six cinder blocks tall. A painted golden banner reading “In God We Trust” hangs above them.

The idea to add the national motto to patrol cars here, Sheriff Moats said, came after he saw on Facebook that Missouri sheriffs had begun doing so. Sheriff Moats spent $5 of his own money to buy a sticker for his department vehicle, which he said spurred deputies to ask how they might do the same. Within a week, most of the department’s cars had the stickers.

“I don’t know why an atheist is so upset about us putting up ‘In God We Trust,’ ” Sheriff Moats said. “I’m not saying that they trust God. I’m saying that we, as the guys in this department who put this on our cars, we trust in God. And why is that a bad thing? Even if you don’t believe, you know God’s all about good.”

He maintained that the motto’s presence did not signal that his department would discriminate. “You could be a satanic devil worshiper, and as long as you’re a law-abiding citizen and you need help, we’re going to help you,” he said.

There is nothing new about government display of the motto. The United States began stamping “In God We Trust” on some coins during the Civil War, and it has been on all coins since 1938. The words began to appear on paper currency in 1957.

There have been a number of unsuccessful legal challenges to the motto, but the Supreme Court has never addressed it directly. And critics, including Ms. Gaylor, concede that they are unlikely to win a favorable ruling soon.

“The motto is pretty much immunized from constitutional challenge unless you can show really bad intent,” said Steven K. Green, a law professor at Willamette University and former legal director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “The likelihood of success is minimal. The likelihood of creating worse precedent is actually greater.”

So for now, Sheriff Moats said, there is little reason or incentive for him to abandon the stickers. When he stopped at Gran-Gran’s here one afternoon for a lunch of hamburger steak and banana pudding, customer after customer expressed support. One man asked whether Sheriff Moats happened to have with him any of the related “In God We Trust” stickers that have been sold at his office for $2 each. (He did, in his patrol car.)

The sheriff said that he had not yet received a letter from Ms. Gaylor, but that he had considered his response to a missive he knew would surely come.

“I’m just going to politely tell them that, as long as I’m sheriff of Polk County, it will not come off my car,” he said. “If the citizens of this county want it off my car, then they can vote for somebody else, and then maybe that person can take it off.”

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I “swiped” this from “The New York Times” to applaud these police. Besides those who object to the “flagrant violation” of the (wrongly interpreted) “separation of church and state”, some might object that this promotes a kind of “civil religion”—the old “God is America’s God” thing. But in these days when God is banned from the public square, I don’t think we have to worry about a civil religion!

True, every law enforcement officer who displays this bumper sticker may not be a Christian (God knows)—or maybe each one is—but even a general witness that gets his name before people is a good thing. Remember what Paul wrote: “Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry . . . What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed and in that I rejoice” (Philippians 1:15a,18). These officers aren’t preaching Christ. But they are “advertising” the Father.

So we can rejoice that God’s name is being “preached” on police car bumpers! And we can pray that God uses it to promote greater respect for law enforcement officers and from this that the One in whom we trust receives greater glory!

Saving Christians from ISIS

October 4, 2015 / Allan Babcock

When Isaiah wrote, “they shall mount up with wings like eagles” (40:31), he didn’t have helicopters in mind. But if Chloe Valdary gets her way, Middle East Christians may.

Writing in last Friday’s “Wall Street Journal”, Valdary (a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at the Journal) recalled how in 1975 air and sea missions saved tens of thousands of Vietnamese. Eventually they were resettled in the U.S. She advocates the same approach for the persecuted Christians in the Middle East.

Since the rise of . . . ISIS, about 125,000 Christians have fled [Iraq]. After ISIS took [the city of] Mosul in June 2014, the city’s Christians flocked to Erbil, the Kurdish capital. In Syria, once home to nearly two million Christians, at least 500,000 have been displaced during four years of war. It is ISIS policy to kidnap and rape Christian women and girls. The terrorist group has razed Christian sites, including monasteries dating to the fifth century. Last October the ISIS magazine Dabiq referred to Christians as “crusaders” and vowed to kill “every Crusader possible.”

That should remind Western policy makers: Christians are not random victims, caught in the maw of Mideast strife. They are targets of genocide, much like the Jews during World War II. This entitles them to broad protection under the 1951 U.N. Genocide Convention, to which the U.S. is a signatory.

It is also worth noting that because Christians in Iraq and Syria are facing genocide—as opposed to displacement—there is a limited window for rescue. Unlike the thousands of refugees pouring into Europe, who are mostly escaping the violence driven by the sectarian war in Syria, Christians are facing a targeted campaign of annihilation. The U.S. ought to take that into consideration when prioritizing the resettlement of the additional 30,000 refugees the country is slated to absorb over the next two years.

Valdary goes on to note that a California Democrat has introduced in the House of Representatives a bill to require the secretary of state to “report to Congress a plan to expedite the processing of refugee admissions applications” for religious minorities threatened by ISIS. Valdary writes . . .

The bill hasn’t moved in Congress, partly due to inattention but also because the Obama administration seems to want nothing to do with it.

Mark Arabo has founded the Minority Humanitarian foundation, a non-profit whose mission is to get Iraqi Christians out before it is too late. Arabo . . .

. . . is essentially running an underground railroad to help Christians escape. “We are bringing them to America, Australia and France,” he said. “In the U.S. alone, we have identified 70,000 Christians who have been displaced and have matched them with 70,000 people willing to bring them in.” But that depends on the administration’s willingness to allow them to enter.

* * * * *

The scale of suffering in the world staggers my mind—and I see only bits and pieces on TV, the Internet and in print. This suffering is intentional. It’s persecution. Not as in, you might lose your job. But in, you will be killed if we catch you.

These are our brothers and sisters. Their fine points of doctrine may differ from ours. They may worship differently. But many certainly have genuine faith in Jesus. That makes them family. Whatever we believe about end-time theology, this is their Tribulation!

Should I write my representative and ask him to get moving on House Resolution 1568, the “Protecting Religious Minorities Persecuted by ISIS Act of 2015”? Should you? One thing I know you and I must do is pray. I’ve become so cynical about the government, and my faith in God’s intervention is sometimes weak. But, if not out of great faith, then out of desperation for our brothers and sisters, I (we) should pray for the Father to save his family from this demonic, antichrist evil sweeping the Middle East.

I know: something else to pray for. It never ends. The list always lengthens. But we are at war and the lives of our brothers and sisters in Christ hang in the balance. May our Father protect them. May he save them from the evil of ISIS. And may he, if he so wills, use even helicopters to “mount [them] up with wings like eagles.”

Ransom

October 1, 2015 / Allan Babcock

Watch people on your job, in the supermarket, around your neighborhood. Do they look like captives? In view of a verse I skimmed over recently (“Who’s the Greatest?”—https://theoldpreacher.com/whos-the-greatest/), they may be. Let’s give a little more attention to what Jesus said.

“For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve
and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Jesus, Mark 10:45).

In the 1996 movie, “Ransom”, Mel Gibson plays Tom Mullens, a wealthy father whose young son is kidnapped. After two attempts to pay the $2,000,000 ransom fail, Mullens realizes he may never see his son again. He angrily appears on TV and offers the money as bounty to whomever kills the kidnapper. The story unexpectedly twists and turns, but in the end Mullens gets his son back.

God didn’t. At least not until after crucifixion and resurrection. Because his Son was the ransom.

“For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve
and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Jesus, Mark 10:45).

This is why Jesus’ followers must be servants: Jesus himself came to serve. Throughout his Gospel, Mark has shown us Jesus serving demonized men by setting them free, serving sick people by healing them, serving a crowd of 5000 by miraculously feeding them, serving a dead girl by raising her to life, and so on. It all leads to Jesus’ supreme act of serving— giving his life as a ransom for many.

The original Greek word is lutron. It refers to the price paid to release a slave or a captive. Hence the translation “ransom, the price of release, the means of setting free.” Writers have argued over the recipient of that ransom. Jesus doesn’t address that; he stresses the act. He would give his life as a ransom.

In that regard, Christianity is unique among world religions. Others teach various ways adherents must perform some act to attain blessings promised. Only the Gospel announces that Jesus has done what’s required to enjoy blessings promised. Jesus gave his life as a ransom to set us free.

There’s a second reason why Christianity is unique. It alone insists we are helpless, hopeless sinners who can do nothing to attain salvation. Look at Isaiah 53:4-6, a familiar prophecy that gives background for Mark 10:45 . . .

Surely he has borne our griefs,
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace;
and with his wounds we are healed.
We all like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—everyone—to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:4-6).

Isaiah calls us transgressors of the Creator’s laws and sinners (“iniquities”) against him. Consequently, we are alienated from (are not at peace with) God and sick. Like dumb sheep we’ve strayed from him. Like stubborn teenagers we’ve turned to our own way. Unflattering description. We’re better than that, right? Isaiah cements his case with this: All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away (64:6). However “right” we try to dress ourselves up, before the Holy God we’re wearing filthy rags. On Judgment Day we’ll shrivel like dead leaves and be swept away.

In the only explanation Jesus gave in Mark about why he would die, Jesus told the Twelve he would give his life as a ransom for many. Of this Isaiah prophesied 700 years earlier. Messiah would pick up and carry away our griefs and sorrows. Be pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities. Endure punishment so we could have peace with God. Be mortally wounded so we could be healed. Jesus would give his life as a ransom for many.

The New Testament writers echo the ransom-theme. “Ransom” (some form of the Greek lutrosis) is translated “redeemed” or “redemption” in each of these verses because ransom is the means of redeeming. Just as Tom Mullens was willing to pay the ransom to redeem or set free his son, so Jesus would give his life as a ransom to redeem or set free many.

♦When John the Baptist was born his father, priest Zechariah, prophesied, “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed (Greek lutrosis) his people” (Luke 1:68). John would go before Jesus to announce his coming.

♦When newborn Jesus was presented at the temple, a prophetess named Anna came up to him and began to give thanks to God and to speak of him to all who were waiting for the redemption (Greek lutrosis) of Jerusalem (Luke 2:38). According to the prophets, the holy city, now ruled by idolatrous Romans, would one day be redeemed. Anna recognized baby Jesus as the ransom.

♦Paul spoke of our Savior Jesus Christ who gave himself for us to redeem (Greek lutro-o) us from all lawlessness
. . . (Titus 2:14). Here Paul identifies “lawlessness” (breaking God’s laws which leads to God’s wrath) as the captivity Jesus gave himself as a ransom to redeem us from.

♦The writer to the Hebrews taught that Christ entered once for all into the holy place . . . by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption (Greek lutrosis) (Hebrews 9:12). Jesus, as the once-for-all ransom secured eternal redemption by his blood death.

♦And Peter explained, “For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed (Greek lutro-o) from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect” (1 Peter 1:18,19).

Money, regardless of the amount, is an inadequate ransom. Captive to our sins and God’s judgment, our lives, however full they may seem, are ultimately empty. Jesus is the only sufficient ransom for all sins, because he is the only perfect ransom and his blood is priceless. Only he can fill our lives.

Do the people with whom we work or shop or live look like captives who need a ransom to free them? Probably not. But things are not always what they seem. Probably you don’t look like a captive either. But apart from Jesus the ransom, you are. Believe it.

If so, you’re free. To do whatever you want? No. To freely follow in Jesus’ steps and serve others for his sake.

“For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve
and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Jesus, Mark 10:45)

ransom: Praying to the sun Stock Photo