9-11, twenty-five years on--

 The first I knew that something dreadful had happened was when I got a phone call from my son, checking to make sure I was in the country and not traveling.

"I'm in town; I'm heading down to a dental appointment - why do you ask?"

And Shannon proceeded to give me the most concise and complete information I would get all day. He said a plane struck the World Trade Center and it had collapsed. I, of course, thought 'small aircraft' - which couldn't have much of an impact (only one tower had collapsed, at the time of his call).

"No, a jet," he told me. And I proceeded to listen to news radio while driving to the dentist and then back up to St Jude's in Burbank for our regular Tuesday afternoon "prophetic intercession" prayer group.

We were all stunned but so grateful to be gathering together for intentional prayer - that was very important to each of us.

I noticed, in a matter of days, that nearly all my friends were very traumatized by the event, considerably more than I was. And I realized it was because they were watching television: they kept seeing the planes go into the towers; they kept seeing the towers collapse.

But I didn't have access to broadcast or cable television at that point. I saw some still photos online but I wasn't glued to a screen, watching it play out, over and over again. And our brains don't know from "instant replays" - it's effectively the same onslaught, repeated.

So I was grateful not to be connected to all the voices competing for my attention, the "if it bleeds it leads" philosophy of mainstream news.

On the first anniversary, I rented a DVD compilation of footage and saw all sorts of images that I'd never seen (e.g., people jumping from the floors above the impact) and I wept and prayed all over again. Later anniversaries I've watched United 93, in part because I find its "real time" approach to the story especially effective. It's easy to forget how long it took "the powers that be" to recognize what was going on (there was a military test exercise scheduled and that caused a lot of confusion: is this "real world" or is this part of the exercise?) and, ultimately, the courage of the passengers and crew to fight for control of the airplane and, failing that, to at least make sure the plane wasn't used as one more massive bomb in a terrorist assault against the United States.

I occasionally watch just the beginning of Working Girl (yes, Harrison Ford, Melanie Griffiths, and Sigourney Weaver) because its opening sequence brings me to tears every time, a hero shot of the World Trade Center. And I'll often continue and watch the entire film because it's charming and I enjoy the performances.

So now, twenty-five years later, I have a very hard time understanding what New York City has done to itself. The German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, famously said that history teaches us that man learns nothing from history - and I think this is an example of that very dynamic at work.

Over these past twenty-five years we've had a concerted attack on the very idea of "truth," our society cynically returning to Pilate's query to Jesus Christ, "what is truth?" We've confused victims and oppressors; we've fostered empathy for criminals and toughened our skin against the legitimate complaints of their victims. We have lost our mooring as a culture and are starting to spin. We may have occasional pauses in the destruction but, in my opinion, the ultimate solution will be seen coming in the clouds, the return of the True King. My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus Christ, Creator, Savior, and King.

"Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts..." (Psalm 95:7b-8a).

Finally, an amazing account and a different perspective to consider:

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil--

The Fall: Adam and Eve in the garden, choosing to disobey God, and creating consequences for all of humanity. 

We tend of think of this as the mythic past, to the degree that we think of it at all, but it's always been compelling to me: the shocking reality that Adam was present with Eve when she took and ate the forbidden fruit. The immediate blame-shifting: "what have you done?" "The woman YOU gave me handed me the fruit and I ate it." Eve spoke the truth when she said the serpent beguiled her (I always wonder why she thought she wasn't even supposed to touch the tree? Did Adam expand the prohibition when explaining it to her?) and, though she took the fruit and ate it first, this is considered Adam's sin - he was culpable, he knew better, he could have stopped her ...and instead he joined her in that sin.

But that all happened a long time ago, right? Even though it broke humanity's relationship with God, even though it introduced sin into our very genetic code, it doesn't impact us now - it's just something we have to live with.

But I've come to see it does impact us now - in fact, I think we are daily tempted to consume the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, so that --essentially-- we decide, independently of God, what is evil and what is good.

How often have you heard someone say, "I could never believe in a God who ...insert your chosen example here..."? 

How frequently we set ourselves up as judges over God! Or at least over His word (as if the two could be severed), like all those places where the LORD instructed Israel to completely destroy a particular enemy. And before that, what about Noah and the Flood?! If we believe the story at all, we are inclined to judge it: how awful God was, how cruel, how murderous! All those innocent babies...!

There we are, exercising our independent knowledge of good and evil, deciding we know better than God, presuming there is no external and overarching universal standard.

At a certain point in my life, I decided to take God seriously, to stop assuming that "we know better now," simply because we were born later in the timeline of history - talk about chronological snobbery! So I started to read the Bible very differently and one of the things that I realized is that death has a very different meaning to the LORD than it does to us - it is both less important and more important. I don't think we were meant to die, to be mortal in the way that we are now (that came with the Fall) but, that having happened, we are ALL going to die and it's not the worst thing that could happen to us. (Here's an aside: have you ever pondered Revelation 9:6? And in those days men will seek death and will not find it; they will long to die, and death flees from them. Kind of a creepy thought).

Sometimes death is a mercy - if you live long enough you will have seen someone suffering from disease or some other debilitation to such a profound degree that you find yourself asking God to just let the person die. Sometimes death cuts short the devastation of sin through which we're rampaging. Another issue I had to recognize is that the death of those judged communities and people groups (all the inhabitants of Jericho, for example, except for Rahab and the family members she had with her in her home), does not mean that all those souls were damned. There is a future judgment at which the dead, the great and the small, will be judged by their deeds, and by the presence - or absence - of their names written in the Book of Life (see Revelation 20:11-15).

So all those innocent babies who perished in the flood, they aren't damned because their parents might have been (or not - we have no idea who will attend the wedding supper of the Lamb, apart from the condition of our own souls - and perhaps a few very close spiritual friends. And, even then, we doubtless have surprises ahead).

My inclination to judge God vanishes when I put myself into right relationship with Him, or at least closer to a right relationship with Him. Jesus said no one comes to the Father except through Him. Jesus said unless we come in the manner of a little child we can't come at all. Fundamentally, GOD is big and I am little. Psalm 131 is one of my favorites: O LORD, my heart is not proud, nor my eyes haughty; nor  do I involve myself in great matters or in things too difficult for me. Surely I have composed and quieted my soul; like a weaned child rests against his mother, my soul is like a weaned child within me. O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time forth and forever. I am not a frantic, wailing infant. I am not a surly, sarcastic teenager - I am a young child, weaned, able to rest against my mother without clutching desperately at the breast. I am teachable.

God knows the whys and wherefores, God knows the answers. God knows good and evil on a much more profound and complete way than I can even imagine. If I trust Him with my salvation, how can I not trust Him to have superior knowledge of good and evil? Lord, give me grace to agree with you quickly!