Howdy,
Given that tomorrow is the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of 9/11 I thought it good to take a break from our confessional Thursdays and give a sense of my own remembrances. To say a word about the world that created 9/11, and what we’ve experienced since then. Just to calm your mind a bit this is not going to be a “political” testimony, but a religious and a spiritual one. Let me first set the stage of what was going on in my own life in September of 2001 and what makes what I saw a little bit different from a lot of other people in the United States. This begins by the fact that I wasn’t here. I was somewhere a world away, and that has always affected my relation to the day.
In the winter/spring of 2001 I was on active duty in the United Stated Marine Corps, stationed at the time on Marine Corps Base Quantico, VA. I’d been there roughly two years and was winding down four years of active service. While my entrance into the military was a necessity brought on by a bad attitude and lack of interest in school it was without a doubt the best thing that ever happened to me up to that time. That’s not to say I’d found any spiritual control through military training. I was living a life consistent with a young man ate up with the flesh, in a kind of setting that did not particularly encourage running away from certain vices. In fact that spring I’d put myself in a good bit of trouble, and the Marine Corps being what it was back then figured the physical humbling I received was a sufficient means of punishment on its own. It was also decided that the best thing for me was to go somewhere else and separate me from some bad influences. In June 2001 I received orders to our air base in Iwakuni, Japan. On July 16th off I went on an overseas adventure, in a sort of exile.
I really liked Japan. It was a nice place to be. Weather, people, food, the job I had at MCAS was all a blessing. Things were pretty peachy, until they weren’t. At about 1am Japan time I had just rolled into the barracks after a night out when a call came in that everyone was to get dressed and be out front for formation, which was odd. It’s hard to explain to a world of smartphones, but the fact of the matter is we didn’t have google alerts, and not many Marines watched the news when we had the tv on.
We had no clue what occurred in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville.
Total ignorance. By the time I was riding around in a Humvee and then getting posted on the perimeter of the airbase word had gotten around that NYC was nuked, or maybe it was just a bombing, or someone had invaded. The Hearsay News wasn’t clear. One thing we were all sure of is that there was no way someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That was nuts. By the time I was relieved at some point that afternoon and went to the chow hall and saw the videos on CNN I was dumbfounded, still am. The sheer audacity and insanity of the event has stayed with me since. One thing was for sure though. There was no talking, no noise at all while we ate. We might have been Marines, but we weren’t dumb. We knew what this meant. We’d all joined a peace time military that was not going to be much longer. For those of us in Japan though nothing changed. Japan went on being Japan. Planes flew, people went to work, life moved on. Everything was different for us.
At that point I barely had nine months left on my contract and knew that I probably wouldn’t have a role in what came next. But the fellow sitting nearby who worked in my shop had barely arrived and had only graduated from Parris Island in the spring, when I was busy being a doofus, and yet here we were. It would be a couple years until he went to Iraq, and then Afghanistan, but he never really came back. Here I sit today. Thinking about 9/11 never ceases to infuriate me, sadden me, and cause me to lament.
First of all, Islam is an evil religion. Revelation 13 describes it as a horde of locusts that only knows how to destroy, for that is what the Beast uses it for. They are the shock troops of the coming Apocalypse. The fact the hijackers were able to do what they did was the result both of incompetence and evil passivity. A phrase that is popular today is suicidal empathy. It’s the kind of thing where you think you are helping, that you are the caring one showing mercy to those in need of mercy, yet it only ever turns out the way the story of the scorpion and frog does. The West right now is in a suicide pact with Islam. Many people can’t seem to understand why the elites in European countries (and the States) have opened the floodgates to it and seem to be allergic to stating the obvious when the Bataclan gets sprayed with bullets. The reason why they do not is because they themselves are given over by God to their sin. As I heard a preacher say one time sin makes you stupid. It blinds you to the reality right in front of you. It is why a leader of an LGBTQ+ group can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with and shout “Free Palestine” or the same type of feminist who warns about The Handmaid’s Tale will wear a head covering when visiting with an Islamic society. What brought about 9/11 was sin, and not just any sin, but our sin.
That’s not to say we deserved to be attacked. Such an idea is balderdash. No one deserves that kind of thing. Luke 13 is worth meditating on. However, it can be hard sometimes as Christians to think about this, but Amos 3:6 says, “If a trumpet is blown in a city, will not the people be afraid? If there is calamity in a city, will not the LORD have done it?” The 90s were the culmination in many ways of the moral descent that the United States went whole hog into beginning in the 1960s. In the political realm you had a President who committed adultery being prosecuted by a Speaker of the House committing adultery. Columbine was barely two years before. Our culture was sick, and there is a sense in which 9/11 was a shock to the system, at least it should have been. And to be sure there was an uptick in church attendance in the days which immediately followed. Research shows that by October there was a 300% rise in church attendance, with as many as one in four Americans seeking weekly services. By January 2002 though the wave subsided. Things were back to normal. Whatever “awakening” had taken place was soon past. Same was true for me. I had not attended a single chapel service since I arrived in July of 2001, but I went after that and even got Augustine’s Confessions and Calvin’s Institutes out of the base library (why they had either of them and why I grabbed them I have no idea). But that moment for me passed not long after, though within a year I’d have come to saving faith in Christ.
Where did America go from there? To war, which was just and right. God granted the civil sphere with the sword for a reason. We were right to prosecute judgment. Yet, our aims and purposes soon were bogged down in bureaucracy and a morass of pointlessness. The GWAT generation suffered from similar ROI issues as Vietnam, and while they did not have quite the negative evil on their return that Vietnam vets faced, they were hardly lionized the way WWII troops were and it has left them in a weird place. Veterans of an unpopular war, for reasons not quite sure. It is as much a spiritual danger to do a right thing for the wrong reason as it is to do a wrong thing for the wrong reason. War can have a unifying effect, or it can further break apart what was already headed that way. I think by 2026 we can tell which way things went.
In closing, there is no doubt morally and culturally our nation has slid further and further down the slope than anyone in 2001 could have ever predicted. The kind of moral perversity Bill Clinton did seems quaint in comparison to what is normal mode of operations today. Our country, our nation, our people certainly did not hear the loud trumpet warning sound from Heaven and we’ve reaped the reward. We neither dealt with the presenting evil, Islam, nor the culture that needed to hear the call to faith and repentance. It’s sad. God doesn’t always give us such a clear note, and our deafness and blindness to what took place has lead us down some terrible paths, many of which were created when we did not prosecute the war in the way that it needed to be, allowing all sorts of side quests to get in the way of true justice. As we witness this anniversary may we never see a louder wake up call then the one we received on 9/11. May we use this time wisely to see our folly, to turn away from our sin, and towards the light of the gospel of pure grace found alone in the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Blessings in Christ,
Rev. Benjamin Glaser
Pastor, Bethany ARP Church
