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Originally Posted by jediwill83
Votive, who my neighbor wishes to invite to his home is on them and I neither have authority over his property and neither will I dicatate what he does with what he owns.
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It seemed you made the issue about evangelism, but do you want to try evangelizing an uncontrolled mass of people invading your property, or do you need a home of your own, that you control, and can determine the limits of who can and cannot come in and for how long?
So, it's not about your neighbor at all. It's about recognizing that if the right to life, liberty, and property is a good thing (and it is), and that those lines of property are inviolable and given by our Creator (and they are and were), then as people join themselves at every level until a nation of people is born, those same rights to property extend to the national level. National borders are simply property lines.
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The same Bible that speaks of property lines also speaks of how to treat strangers in the land.
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Quite. Don't oppress them. But strangers who sojourned in Canaan after the conquest had to capitulate to the laws of the land, which means God's Law. To transgress that law required justice. So, not oppressing the stranger doesn't mean allowing the stranger to replace the population, import their idolatry and witchcraft, and over-throw the local culture, that is, become the oppressors of the native people, in this case, Israel, or, in our case, the United States (As an aside: if the USA falls, the ability to freely preach the Gospel around the world, also falls. Think on that a moment).
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We have not sent life to these lands....we have sent death and corruption.
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I wouldn't use a "we" here. That is collective guilt speech. You didn't export death to anyone. Nor I. And even though death has come to many people because of war, so has life, infrastructure, liberty, the possibility of deliverance through the Gospel, and etc. It's not a one side ideological reality. Ideology only paints in one color, and can't see the rest of what's going on.
To say that we've only sent death isn't the whole picture. That's not a justification for war. It's a description of reality despite the war.
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Would you withhold Gods mercy from them or see them destroyed every one?
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God's ways are not our ways. His mercy can come at a terrible price. Mercy is not indiscriminate compassion. There is a cost to be counted when mercy is extended. Mercy must be shown, of course, to receive mercy. But show it carefully, with Holy Spirit guidance. God will have mercy on whom He will have mercy, and will have hardness on whom He will have hardness.
We must not gainsay either His inclination to mercy or to hardness. God kills and makes alive. Not even sparrows fall to the ground dead without the Father.
It doesn't make God responsible for all deaths that occur around the world. But He knows about them, and He doesn't interfere or miraculously deliver even less than 1% around the globe on any given day. No matter who believes what, who prays to Him, even Apostolics or other Spirit-filled people.
The Gospel doesn't save anyone from going to the grave. Rather it saves those who have obeyed it from the power of the grave. Rome was overpowering and slaughtering, committing abortions and infanticide, full of sodomy and dissolution, and no one ever was called by God to take a political stance against the empire, but rather, to pray and intercede for it, that the church may live a peaceable life. The salvation of the leaders of those in the empire was a secondary concern.
Think about it. Of all the people God saved in the 1st century, only Saul of Tarsus was called to stand before kings. The rest of the Body served the Lord in their local community, winning the lost in their own hometowns. They had no control over the fate of the rest of the people of the world, for they could in no wise do anything, other than pray.
We can do nothing more than them. But in the meantime, make sure you are not doling out condemnation upon the sinners in our government and military who are not in your eyes being sufficiently merciful to the citizens of the rest of the world, even when they dole out death and heartache. They need your mercy, too.
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