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Just Another Essay



Let’s All Go to the HolyLand End Times Amusement Park

Essay Posted Aug. 22, 2006 by James E. Nelson

John 2:11 tells us that Jesus did his first sign miracle at Cana of Galilee. That was almost 2,000 years ago. A couple of weeks ago Hezbollah did a little bait and switch magic show of their own in the same town. Political regions and borders have changed. Spellings have changed too, so the made for television faux-massacre occurred in Qana, Lebanon according to the papers, but it’s the same town where Jesus turned the water into wine two millennia before.

A couple of weeks ago the Israeli army bombed a parking garage, containing a long range missile launcher, in Qana. Several hours later a building with many people purportedly living there (although there is scant evidence for that) thirty or forty yards from the parking garage collapsed. Hezbollah claimed it was bombed by the Israelis. More than a few Western investigative reporters suspect that Hezbollah imploded the building in order to create the perception of a massacre. Already dead bodies of children were even brought in for the event and then later (when the western media was in place to watch the show) brought back out of the building and put back into the same ambulances that brought them in the first place. The latter was an elaborately staged media event. The former was never intended to be filmed, but a savvy television crew got it on tape. The whole show was choreographed by “Mr. Green Helmet,” a Lebanese man who has been identified as the official describing another “horrific” faux-massacre in the same area ten years earlier. He’s been dubbed “Mr. Green Helmet” because he can be seen in news footage from ten years ago wearing the same green helmet and claiming similar devastation that never stood the test of investigative reporting.

Every week something newsworthy happens in Biblical places. It gives Middle Eastern news an air of unreality, as if the events are occurring in HolyLand End Times Amusement Park rather than a real place in a real time. More often than not, rather than mourning the violence and destruction of life, Christians are distracted by prophecy, waiting for the big fireworks show at the sunset of time, just like they do at Disney Land.

The newest war, for the moment in a state of cease fire, between Israel and Hezbollah is typical of the phenomenon. Scores of people are dead. Hundreds left completely homeless. Thousands flee as refugees. And all the Christians can blog about is a giddy hope for the end of the world. And in this sense, too many Christians are no different than Mr. Green Helmet. Both are willing to twist real events into a theater of the absurd for our “entertainment” and the igniting of our passions. (In the case of Mr. Green Helmet, for the cause of Hezbollah and for the Christians, in the hope of making a convincing case that it is finally time for the Second Coming of Christ.)

The Middle East is one of the most cantankerous regions of the world, along with the Balkans, central Africa, the “-stans” (Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, etc.: the Turk/Persian region of the former Soviet Union stretching south and east from Georgia and the Black Sea well into the Himalayas). Throughout history much of the world’s unrest has emanated from these regions. As long as the unrest remains local and contained, we ignore it. When it breaks out on a big enough scale to make the news channels, we cluck our tongues and comment that they’re at it again. But when precisely the same thing happens in one particular region of the world—HolyLand End Times Amusement Park—as it has done repeatedly for thousand of years, we suddenly get all excited. People turn to their Calendar of Events for HolyLand End Times Amusement Park (that is, the book of Revelation) hoping that this time it’s the start of the really big fire works show.

The Old Testament can be read in more than one way. It is a testament of God’s dealings with a family → clan → tribe (and eventually) → nation. The back story before Abraham is how humans got involved with sin and then pretty much forgot about God (the real God, the Creator, anyway). The Old Testament is the story of how the real God, the Creator, worked his way back into the consciousness of humanity through the true religion of the Hebrew people (which the real God revealed to them), and how all that ultimately led to “the fullness of time” when Jesus Christ came upon the scene.

But since this story takes place in real history in a real place on the globe, the Old Testament is also a record of the factional fighting, wars, and intrigues between the kings, emirs, and tribal leaders of the region. It all started with Lot being hostage by some terrorists and Abraham sending in his crack Mossad unit to defeat the alliance of terrorists and get the hostage back (Gen. 14). It’s been pretty much the same story ever since. The Persian and Ottoman Empires were pretty good at eliminating the internecine violence. The Romans and British kept it at a minimum. Other than those brief periods of history, it has been a story of Rachel weeping for her murdered children.

But because it takes place at HolyLand End Times Amusement Park instead of the Balkans, or Chechnya, or Uganda, our blood begins to boil in excitement and expectation rather than weep with Rachel.

Jesus said two things that relate to the current state of affairs. “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mt. 24:26). And, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Mt. 5:4)

Ah, that we could love the world and its people more than a future event. Ah, that we could see these people as humans rather than actors on a stage. Ah, that we could see Jesus Christ in “the least of these” rather than only looking heavenward for his glorious appearing. Maybe then the Kingdom would finally come in its fulness.