Indifferent

#529

A female school teacher started working for me on weekends, saying, “she needed to make some extra money”. She had a masters degree and was a sixth grade teacher. In dictating to her, she asked me if, “I really believed what I was dictating about God”. She said, most of the teachers and the people I know are very indifferent about anything spiritual, moral, ethical. Perhaps this is the reason our schools are in the mess we find them...the teachers do not believe in morality or have ethical character.

At a NEA convention, a black choir sang an anthem in which they mentioned God. The President of the NEA apologized to the convention members because of the use of the word God in their assembly.

General William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, said one man told him that if he really believed in the Christ that he preached he would never stay silent for a minute. He would have to tell someone about such a marvelous salvation every minute of every day. Martin Luther King, said from the Birmingham jail, he could forgive the people who called him hateful names but he would never forgive his friends who remained silent. So it is with our blessed Lord, he will forgive those who treat him hatefully but he will never forgive his supposed friends who remain silent at an “indifferent” world.

My guide in Israel, took me to the famous Hadassah hospital and I saw, in one of the rooms, a memorial window to Miss Gertrude Weil, from North Carolina. She had contributed much money for the hospital. I said, “I will remember this marvelous lady and so many of her family in North Carolina”.

He said, “let me take you to another hospital where you can see men who have lived through Israel's greatest days and are now dying from Israel's victory. Outside the hospital, there were these words, “INVALIDS”. He said, “these are some of the most valid men I have known but from their tortures their minds will never be well again”. He introduced me to a young doctor who had decided to spend much of his time with these men because he had experienced the torture of the Palestinian madness. He told me he had been born to an influential family in Jordan. As a brash young man he had risked going into Israel because he wanted to visit the great Mosque. He was jailed as a spy in Israel and spent many months before he escaped from Israel but the Palestinians thinking he was Israeli, had captured him and put him in a Palestinian prison. There, he found that the Palestinians were more cruel to one another than anything he had experienced or imagined before. He was not prepared for the torture inflicted on him by the Palestinians. He told me that his mind was in a state of complete distortion. He had experienced some time in the desert and the isolated mountainous areas of the desert completely desolate without foliage of any kind. In his mental torture, resulting from physical torture, he told me of his walking continuously through these vacant hills...totally lost...without any inclination of direction. It was at this time that he escaped from a bombardment of the prison and some way left the West bank and got back into Israel where he too became a patient at the hospital for the invalids or insane. Much of his mental condition was reclaimed and he decided to stay with Arab friends in Israel where he was able to start a medical practice again. His interest in me was from a Christian standpoint, he had found a New Testament from which he was studying and he was doing a “comparative anatomy” between the Old Testament of the Jews, the Christian New Testament and the Koran. He had tried to contact some of his family in Jordan but they wanted nothing to do with him. He told me he could not understand how the Christians he had known in Palestine as well as some in Israel could be so indifferent to the Jesus in the New Testament.

I did not have the time to talk with him about the importance of reason and truth which is ever present in the New Testament of the Bible. I would have told him that I have never been able to understand the Christian's indifference to the Christian message...it's transforming power. (Rom 12:2-4) I told him there would be a transparency which only God could provide...without God you cannot know God. I told him that the cornea of the eye is very transparent, but the fingernail of the hand is very translucent although both are made of the same histological tissue. The cornea of the eye, a tough transparent histological tissue, the fingernail, a tough translucent tissue. I reminded him that only study would reveal to him the knowledge he sought. Judge Brandeis reminded us that light makes everything clear. Once in Italy, I was at the church of Saint Francis of Assisi. Saint Francis said, “you live the Gospel and you use words if you must”.

In today's world, there is a 5th Gospel, the Gospel of Oprah. Her new age thinking is like a palm reader or witch doctor. Like the lesbian woman who just became a Bishop in the Episcopal Church, many church people are in a state of absolute confusion. You can join every church, walk every aisle, sign every membership card, but if you show indifference toward the salvation and atonement of a savior you are no better off than one wandering around on vacant hills...lost...without direction.