What the Afghanistan Situation Reveals

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Hey everyone good morning I am in Alaska still and it's right before we start our day so I have a few minutes to share some thoughts on what's going on in Afghanistan.

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I just wanted to say it is absolutely gorgeous here. My wife and I are loving it. I feel like everyone should go to Alaska at some point in their life.

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We feel like we hit the jackpot because right now the cruise lines are down because of COVID and so prices are very deflated.

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They're usually a lot more expensive to come here but you might want to check.

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Maybe it's still that way if you're trying to get over here. Of course now it's starting to get colder but I'm going salmon fishing for the first time in my life today.

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I'm very excited about that. The salmon streams yesterday we went by this river they're just salmon are everywhere and it's incredible.

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I think because of last year they didn't have as many fishermen come through they did not have as big of a catch that means there's more salmon this year so I'm excited about it's a historic opportunity but as we are enjoying things here

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I am NOT ignorant of what's happening in Afghanistan. I just wanted to share with you a few thoughts hopefully quickly here.

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I wrote a post on Monday about some of my thoughts. I'm gonna use that. I'm grieved over what's happening in Afghanistan and I really am.

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It's the inevitable result of poor decisions and I am praying for all those in harm's way.

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I can't even imagine. I've seen the shots you've seen of people clinging to a plane as it's taking off from the capital city and some of them falling to their death.

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It's absolutely heartbreaking. I saw a post on Monday and this really got me to reflect of a missionary couple in Afghanistan ready to die at peace.

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They're working in the underground church and they know because they're foreign and they're Christians they will die when the

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Taliban finds them. And I wondered am I ready for that? If that situation came to me how would

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I react? And I think it's a good thing to reflect on. God gave us taste buds.

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He gave us eyes to see. He wants us to enjoy the fruit of our labors and the things that he put around us.

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But the things worth dying for, the ultimate things, the people, God himself, these are things that are worth living for as well.

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And are we living for them? Are we ready to die for them? And so I am thinking about the people who are over there, especially our brothers and sisters in Christ.

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I have a couple thoughts about this whole debacle and I want to try my best to expose

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I think some of the ideas that the assumptions that even social justice minded evangelicals make about culture, about love.

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I think there's a red pill that people are waking up to something's wrong right with our either our foreign policy or something was wrong and how we manage the situation in Afghanistan.

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And I want to point out I think what some of those things are because I think they expose deeper. It's an iceberg.

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There's deeper things behind it, deeper assumptions that if we get this correct, if we understand why this whole experiment in democracy failed over there,

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I think we can avoid some of the perils that we are making in our own society. So that's part of my motive.

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Some of these are in the form of a question, some of these concerns I have. So the first question is, will our general government ever be trusted again?

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Abandoning those who chose to be loyal to the United States and Afghanistan when they could have arranged to protect many of them ruins our country's credibility the way pulling out of Vietnam did.

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Right now is not a time to ruin our country's credibility. China and Iran both see it. Apparently they both made statements,

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Iran about their enrichment program of uranium, China about Taiwan and the United States better back off Taiwan.

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They are emboldened by this action. This is a much less safe world because of what just happened.

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I cannot overplay this. This is not good. If you're going to pull out, at least have a good exit strategy.

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And there could have been one. And instead we let our own allies there stranded. I was reading about one person, four years working for the

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United States as a translator. His family is in harm's way. I don't even know if he's alive right now. I don't know where he is. Meanwhile, Biden's talking about bringing 30 ,000 and it'll probably be more refugees to the

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United States. I don't know how you vet all these people this quickly. There could even be Taliban operatives in that group.

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Who knows? This is just a Trojan horse in my mind. But as he's saying this, there are

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Americans and people that were allies with America who are vetted, who are stuck. I mean from the military that pushes critical race theory, the

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Joint Chiefs of Staff is pushing critical race theory in the name of equality and tolerance and diversity and inclusion and oh man, this is what love's about, right?

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No, because that's love in the abstract. It's just loving these ideas. It's using these ideas for power.

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It's the virtue signal. It's not real love. If the Joint Chiefs really believed in, and our

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Commander -in -Chief especially, really believed in these things that they say they believe in, wouldn't you think that they would love the people who have been loyal to the

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United States in Afghanistan? Wouldn't you think that they would have had an exit strategy? Instead of treating them like an afterthought?

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Real flesh -and -blood tangible concrete people right there. Not abstractions, not ideas, people.

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And we're being, I've gotten the emails, the messages from people in the military, it is being shoved down the throats in certain sectors of the military, this critical race theory junk.

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And in the name of tolerance and all that is good in the world, yet the same military that's pushing this stuff, the same

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Joint Chiefs, I'm talking about the policy decision -makers, they won't take responsibility for abandoning people to whom they owe an obligation.

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No one seems to want to take responsibility. The buck keeps shifting. And that's another, it shows that the character, the quality of our leadership is going down.

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And it's a very scary thing, I'm gonna be honest with you, that no one's taking responsibility, it seems like, for this.

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So that's the government. Social media, the Taliban spokesperson

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Zabihullah Majahid enjoys free reign on Twitter. President of the United States, Donald Trump, can't go on Twitter, but the

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Taliban spokesman can. So that's interesting. The Taliban was using WhatsApp, apparently a lot, to communicate in order to execute their plans.

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And like I said, China smells weakness. Iran smells weakness. You have

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Abdul Ghani Baradar, who will probably be the next president of Afghanistan, met with China counselor

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Wang Yi in July. How much of this is also the result of resources being given to enemies of the

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United States, from bigger enemies like China? Now they have our infrastructure, our weapons, everything that was given from the

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United States to the Afghan government is in the hands of Taliban now. This is one big, this is a very concerning thing, guys.

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This is a very concerning thing. And it reveals a number of things. So that's one of the first things that I wanted to mention, though, that it reveals is the nature of true love.

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Protection, preservation, the things that we honor the military for, loving your country ultimately, right?

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At the rock bottom of this. I mean, why does the military exist? To protect its people. That was what many people thought, and who signed up to go to Afghanistan, thought they were doing.

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And what, in the long run, in the end, we're finding a military, a

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Joint Chiefs of Staff, devoted to pushing critical race theory, but not devoted to helping the very allies who assisted them.

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And this is a disgusting thing to me. And I just want you to think, ponder in your own minds, what's the nature of true love?

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Is it loving abstractions? Is it saying, I love the world, but not loving any of the people in it? Or is loving your neighbor loving the people close to you?

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Loving the people that are proximate to you. And these are real tangible flesh and blood people, that to whom you have responsibilities and obligations.

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Something to really think about, because we have a notion being pushed, this very abstract, distant view of love, that does not value actual tangible people so much as it does just the concept of love itself.

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Supposedly. The other thing I wanted to point out, and this is, I want to kind of attack the notion of principle pluralism here.

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So, I'm going to sort of reverse engineer this. I'll start here. Principle pluralism is a buzzword that I heard a lot when

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I was in seminary, that there's this neutral space that exists. And this was kind of a way of navigating the disagreements between LGBTQ lobby and Christians.

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How do they exist? Well, the principle plurals, and they can have their ideas, but they're going to have a neutral public area where they can interact.

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Who controls the neutral public area? There is no neutral public area. That's part of the problem here. To have a quote unquote neutral public area, where freedom of conscience and the freedoms outlined in our

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Bill of Rights are respected, you have to have a virtuous people, and you have to have a Christian people for our particular form of government to work.

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We've had centuries of British common law influenced by Christianity. We've had, the founders made it very explicit, a virtuous people is necessary for self -government, for the kind of government the

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United States has. You need a religious people, a virtuous people, and ultimately a Christian people.

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And the problem is, when, and we're finding it out right now, as soon as the

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Christian influence starts to wane, so does, so do those liberties that are so enjoyed by the people of the

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United States. Social justice, I believe it is a religion. I've done podcasts on it. You can get, when it comes out, my newest book,

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Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict. I talk about this more. I think I make a pretty tight case for it, that social justice is a religion.

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And when you have a secular religion that takes over, sometimes you're going to, well, all the time, you're going to see those rights start to wane.

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And the things you thought were secure are not as secure. We can see that in many cases.

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I think of the cake baking situations to be just one of them. But you do not have the same privileges or rights or things that you enjoyed before when, as Christianity is waning.

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And I think, what does that have to do with Afghanistan? I think our leaders think it's possible to just plant democracy or American notions of equality in Afghanistan.

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So, whether you're talking about 1789, the Constitution and all of that, or whether you're talking about today and the egalitarian ideas,

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I mean, you have the embassy of the United States flying the rainbow flag in Afghanistan, right?

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You think this is compatible with those people who believe in Islam? This is offensive. Some of them,

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I've read, favored the Taliban just because it was less offensive to their

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Islam. So, the flawed thinking is that you can just go into a country that does not have the cultural elements that America has had, that have been crafted for hundreds of years, and you can just plant democracy there, as if it's a universal, or equality, this universal human value.

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And that it'll just work. I mean, that's the kind of colonialism the United States engages in. It's not the normal kind of colonialism where you go and you look at the resources and businesses come in and people settle.

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No, this is the kind of colonialism where you're just trying to get them to adopt your ideas and you're not getting anything in return.

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Just adopt your ideas of equality. And it's not working, and it hasn't worked, and now it's a red pill for everyone.

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It doesn't work. I think of what MacArthur said when the United States went into Japan.

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We need to send an army of missionaries over here. From the ground up, they need to be different to basically to adopt the kind of government that the

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United States would want them to have. And so, some situations are, if you're going to go in there long term and be there for a while and try to plant democracy, quote unquote, at the very least, you're going to need to change the culture somehow.

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And you're not going to do it just by introducing these abstractions that offend them. The other thing here is, was that the only option?

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If you can't change the culture, right, which in Afghanistan would require changing the religion, is the form of government they really need a republic or a democracy?

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Maybe they're better off with a benevolent but heavy hand that limits the options that they have to commit crimes against one another.

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They're not going to have self -government. What I'm saying is, there's inevitably going to be a heavy hand, and now they have it.

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Now they have it. Now the Taliban is going to be that heavy hand. And so, my personal thinking is, if you're going to, if you're at war, you defeat the country, and then you get out.

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And I do understand that there is, I think, the lesson of World War One was you don't want to build up bitter resentment in a country that is defeated.

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And so, I think there's sort of this commitment has arisen to, well, we got a nation built there. But that nation build idea has extended beyond just picking up the rubble and helping them get back on their feet.

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It is now, it is basically making experiments of these places to see if we can plant little

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Americas. I mean, look at the letter that George Bush wrote about this. Look at the Twitter and what millennials are posting.

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I mean, Bush said, you know, all the forces that were there for progress. And he's so encouraged by all the young people under 25 in the population, as if they're going to be the key to the future.

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They're going to embrace equality. People on Twitter who are young millennials, you know, oh, there's such a missed opportunity for women here.

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That's the concern. That's the concern. CNN, there was a journalist over there who, you know, confronted the

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Taliban on their treatment of women. And are they going to let women go to school? But even in that, it's funny, she treated them, she said to her anchors that they were nice.

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She said, oh, it's to be expected that they didn't let me in the palace because I was a woman. But would they ever treat any group of conservatives in the

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United States that way? No, they were bitter enemies. They would never go to a

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MAGA group and say, well, you know, it's to be expected their ideas on the border or something. They would never do that,

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CNN. But they will treat people that are members of the Taliban this way.

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And it shows you what their real purpose is. And it's one of the things I want to drive home. Egalitarian utopians, whether they know that they're that or not, their purpose is to basically promote egalitarianism.

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They're missionaries for it. And whoever stands in their way is an enemy. And sometimes those who are closer to them, like Christians in the

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United States, like conservatives in the United States, are more enemies to them than someone like the

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Taliban. But we're both on the enemies list because we believe in a certain form of hierarchies.

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The Taliban believes in a very different form of hierarchy than Christians in the United States. But both believe in hierarchies that are antithetical to this egalitarian social justice agenda.

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And so, I guess my whole point in bringing this up, because I went on a little tangent there, is that there is no neutral space.

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There's this interesting thing that's happened in the Western world where secular humanism has been running off of the inertia of Christianity for so long.

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Many secular humanists adopt so many of the notions that are unique to Christianity because they're products of it.

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And they just don't understand where they got it from. But that's how they're operating. And they try to base it on different things.

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But you're not going to get this without Christianity, this kind of respect for quote unquote human rights.

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That's my firm belief on this. It is, you look at the rest of the world, these are foreign concepts.

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These are just, they don't have the same kind of understanding that people in the West have.

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And they should not be expected to. Without completely changing their entire way of looking at things, they're not going to have that same outlook.

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So, that is the flaw of principle pluralism. And that is also the flaw of trying to do this nation building, these nation building efforts in places like Afghanistan.

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I think I already mentioned this, but I had written, why are none of our leaders taking responsibility for this? It shows us the kind of leaders we have, and that should frighten us.

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And then I said this, it will be much harder for Christians living in Afghanistan to live their daily lives, despite those who believed in principle pluralism.

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There is no way to keep this unstable element from exploding without a dominant view that values freedom of conscience. How does this factor into, how does this factor into some of the things that we've seen from Christians?

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I think even like David Platt's book, Before You Vote. Just this ignorance about what's come before us, what's brought us to the point that we are at.

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And, you know, well, you know, the, we, Christian can vote for these egalitarians on the

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Democrat side, Christian can vote for Republicans, they can vote for whoever, but they shouldn't feel bad about voting for Democrats.

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The, you know, principle pluralism. We should be able to get along. You're not going to get along. You're dealing with totalitarians.

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That's plain and simple. Whether they're social justice totalitarians, or whether it's the Taliban, or whether it's the

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Chinese Communist Party. I just got done finishing a book on Mao Zedong, which was interesting and really scary of how

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China's been playing us for years. But these people are so subversive, and we don't see it.

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So much of the time, we just, we project our motives onto them. Well, we wouldn't do that, so they're not doing that.

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No, there's an evil world out there. There are evil people that want to hurt other people. There really are.

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Very bad people. And so often, people in the United States, especially on the conservative side, especially in the evangelical world, for whatever reason, who should, they should understand original sin and all of that.

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It should be just more obvious to them than it is to most people. They seem naive when it comes to this. The subversion of Marxists, the subversion of Islamic radicals, all of that.

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They just, it's a conspiracy if you talk about it. But it's really happening. And so, foreign policy also affects missions.

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I was going to say that as well. When you're, you know, calculating your vote, and what side am

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I going to vote for? I want you to think about, just from a purely Christian standpoint right now, missions.

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Think of missions. Would it be better if Donald Trump was in office right now for Afghanistan and the people of Afghanistan hearing the gospel?

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Or is it better with Biden in office? I'll let you ponder that. And the last but not least, this exposes,

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I think, the hypocrisy, a little bit of the Romans, the hard line. Romans 13 is a blank check to the government crowd.

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We heard during the COVID stuff that, well, Romans 13, Romans 13, Romans 13. Someone had posted on Facebook, I thought it was hysterical, a picture of the

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Taliban in the president's palace, and it just said Romans 13. That was the caption.

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I thought it was hysterical. And it's sad at the same time, but I thought this, it exposes perfectly.

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Romans 13 is about more so, it's actually not a treaty on government.

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It reveals some things about government, it does. But it's really about individual Christians and their personal morality, how they're supposed to interact as representatives of God, as living sacrifices.

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And it applies to the way that they shouldn't be going to jail.

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They shouldn't be breaking laws that are also God's laws, but enforced by the government. And Romans 13 has been turned into this blank check to government that you just got to submit no matter what.

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And this is, it's a horrible interpretation in my mind. It just neglects the context. But what do you do in a situation, let's say you're a

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Christian living in Afghanistan and the Taliban moves in one day and just takes over.

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I mean, are they the government now? I guess they are. So, you have to submit to them, right? Anything they say, just about, unless it,

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I guess, impacts preaching the gospel, right? That's the one exception, which just, I mean, that should be an exception because we're commanded to do it.

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But there's a lot of other commands God's given us other than preaching the gospel, right? So, are we, do you just pay the tax?

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Do you, the Jizya tax? To what extent does Romans 13 apply to this situation?

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And it's something I think it's good to chew on. And I think the more you chew on it, the more you'll develop an understanding of why it is perfectly, it's actually right and good.

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If you know really what's going on and if you see the subversiveness and how the

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COVID stuff, lockdowns and regulations are being used, it's the right thing to oppose those things. And it's not a violation of Romans 13.

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And so, anyway, I wanted to share all those thoughts with you. I hope that's given you some things to think about, to say the very least.

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Please pray, please. And this is serious. Please pray for our, the missionaries that are still over there, the people that are stuck and have been abandoned, essentially.

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It's the most sad thing to me. And I just pray that God is merciful to them in this situation, whether that's giving the grace to withstand the persecution if they're

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Christians or just getting them out of there. We need to see the grace of God in this.

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So, anyway, wanted to make that point to you. I hope that was helpful for some of you.