War Dogs

 As of this writing, three hundred people are dead and well over a thousand wounded to varying degrees of severity. No matter how they try to spin it, this was an unprovoked attack on a civilian populace, and that they took hostages, which they later killed as well, only rubs salt in the wound.

I’m sure others will dissect this event in detail and lay out what the obvious geopolitical ramifications are likely to be, but I’m a simple man and have come to a handful of simple assumptions. They’re not earth-shattering by any means; they are quite obvious, but sometimes, we miss the obvious and fail to understand the gravity of something that just occurred.

The first thing that most will likely overlook is the speed with which nations can go from probability of conflict to inevitability of conflict. It’s like flipping a switch. One event, and you go from a tenuous ceasefire to a hot war. The Middle East has never been a peaceful place, and Israel has never been a carefree country with no enemies, but there was always a sense that the cooler heads were trying to keep things from going to all-out war. This does not seem to be the case any longer.

War isn’t coming; war is here, and like a vortex, it will drag the world in, compelling everyone to choose a side. That our commitment is half-hearted at best, and politicians are forced to make statements condemning the violence because the polling tells them to does not bode well for the viability of long-term support Israel will need going forward. It’s no surprise; the Bible told us it would be so.

Make no mistake, this was a well-planned, coordinated attack that had many moving parts and took a long time to construct. This wasn’t a handful of men with slingshots and bottle rockets; there were individuals who had been living among the people they slaughtered, who had integrated and pretended to be docile and peaceful. That reality should be a teachable moment for every nation with a high number of unvetted migrants streaming across its borders, but it won’t be because willful blindness is very hard to cure.

By the time a nation wakes up to the reality that it’s been invaded, it’s already too late. The coming chaos will not be contained in the Middle East but will become a global issue. It will spread like a brushfire in high winds on a dry day.

Given that every intelligence agency got caught unaware that no one got a hint of what was being planned, perhaps they should drop the word intelligence altogether and admit that their reputations are undeserved. This wasn’t just a failure but a catastrophic failure, and innocent people paid with their lives.

There are war dogs, and there are mad dogs, and you send the war dogs out to deal with the mad ones. American politicians can encourage self-restraint until they are blue in the face, but I get the feeling it will be in short supply. Once you massacre women and children, any expectation of a quarter or peaceful resolution is done and gone. The only thing left to do is make the cost of what your enemies did so unbearable and astoundingly high that they’ll think twice about ever doing it again.

While modern-day prophets and prophetesses regaled the church with stories of being beamed to heaven from porta-potties and how you’ll get a pet dinosaur when you go to heaven, other more sober-minded souls have been warning ceaselessly about the hour that is coming, and the darkness that will blanket the earth. They were ignored and rejected because it’s markedly easier to hear about unicorns in heaven than wars and rumors of war on earth.

The days about which the church was warned were coming are now here, and those found unprepared to meet them head-on have no one to blame but their own indifference. There will be a tipping point when men can no longer pretend they’re not living in the days they’re living in, and when they will have to acknowledge that what they are witnessing is what the Bible warned of, even if they, themselves, did not believe they would be here for it. What they do with that realization and how they react will be telling.

Going by what the Bible tells us, many will fall away, grow bitter, and begin to persecute those who remain faithful. Given the Bible’s success rate at predicting future events, I wouldn’t be so quick to roll my eyes or say that could never happen here. We’ve made that mistake one too many times, and the things we said could never happen have, and much worse to boot.  

Revelation 6:3-4, “When He opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature saying, “Come and see.” Another horse, fiery red, went out. And it was granted to the one who sat on it to take peace from the earth, and that people should kill one another; and there was given to him a great sword.”

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.