Today, every Christian heart should weep. Every man in every nation should tremble in fear of God, who will deliver His flock and vanquish evil, for today, a great evil has been done. Of the 30,000 Christians in Mosul two months ago, all have left. Ethnic, or religious cleansing, has been acccomplished. There are no churches; no Orthodox, no Catholic, no Protestant. The Assyrians are gone; the Chaldeans are gone, the Syriac Orthodox are gone, the Armenians are gone; the Syriac Catholics are gone; the Protestants are gone; the Syriac Catholic Patriarch has been burned; there are none left. Mosul, until recently a city with many Christians, now has fewer Christians within it than Saudi Arabia harbors within her hostile borders.
God have mercy. Lord, save thy people, and bless thine inheritance, and let this iniquity not go unpunished. At the dread day of judgment, those responsible for this dreadful evil will have to answer for their sin; may God have mercy on them.
We must also take pains that Christianity never tolerates the fundamentalism that is eating away at the Islamic faith like a great cancer. It is beyond horrible to note that there appear to be some Christians who are allies of the Islamic state. They sympathize with Muslims for hating and persecuting the Orthodox and Catholic Christians, owing to the sheer calumny that those Christians are "alcohol-drinking, pornography-watching, sexually promiscuous, picture-worshipping Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic." While the Abomination of the Desolation may have referred to the destruction of the second temple, or Caligula's erection of a statue of himself as Jupiter therein, is such desolation of the Christian faith not also an abomination, in its own right?
As Christians, we have a duty to oppose tyrannical, fundamentalist sects within our own faith, that seek a spirituality closer to Wahhabism than to the Apostolic faith, such as 9Marks. 9Marks as an organization encourages pastors to subjugate their parishioners, imposing strict control over them, disciplining them, for among other things, questioning their authority, not allowing parishioners to resign and leave for another church, and encouraging parishioners to shun fellow parishioners who disobey, in the manner of Scientology.
Just as this blog decries the Society of St. Pius X for attacking, on theological grounds, the idea of religious liberty, and thus implicitly favoring anti-Semitism and religious intolerance, and the Moscow Patriarch, for remaining subservient to the leadership of an expansionist regime that shoots down civil airliners, we also are forced to decry 9Marks, an organization on the other end of the fundamentalist spectrum, for its seeming attempts to align itself with Islamic fundamentalist, and to impose a similiar system of discipline in Baptist, Presbyterian and non-denominational Protestant churches in the United States and elsewhere (including one particularly unpleasant church in Dubai, according to Wartburg Watch, which has been carefully documenting their abuses, and is linked to from the right).
We Christians have not lived up to the standard God has set for us. We have committed abominations in the name of the Lord; we have vanquished, despoiled and ultimately left desolate the abodes of our brethren, thus repeating the Abomination of the Desolation. Consider these abominations: the Crusades, the massacres of Vlad III Țepeș, the Inquisition, the murderous Piedmont Easter, an event so terrible that I shall not link to an article describing it,, the persecution of Catholics in England and Scotland, and the persecution of Old Believers by Patriarch Nikon in Russia, are most dreadful sins against the Gospel of Christ. Let us not repeat our past mistakes, but clean up our act, and through peaceful evangelism, steer our brethren away from venomous and rapacious cults, such as 9Marks, lest our faith degenerate into the abomination of fundamentalist Islam, that we ourselves may cause no more desolation.
Pray for the safety of all persecuted Christians, and all those suffering in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world on account of faith. Pray for your brethren.
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