Mark's Views, Perhaps — from behind my eyeballs
It seems it was just yesterday I read the amazing news that Turkey had reached out to Israel and they had patched things up diplomatically.
Now I see this on the Drudge Report:
And I wonder if ISIS means this as a signal to Erdogan, Turkey’s leader.
Whatever the case, may God use His people in the area to convey His love and provision. May the Gospel’s message of forgiveness and peace shine its brilliant light amid such evil and darkness.
Are the ones in orange pictured above among these now?
“I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God” (Revelation 20:4).
I don’t know enough to pretend to know the eternal status of those 21 Eygptian Copts slaughtered on that beach. But I thought of the Revelation scene(s).
I also thought of this angle: Read it all
Joel C. Rosenberg reports:
That is the first line of my most recent novel, The Auschwitz Escape. But while the book was fiction, I’m afraid that line is proving as relevant as today’s headlines.
We are watching genocidal conditions emerging in the epicenter.
This is as dark as any time I have ever seen in the modern Middle East.
Even the media and the politicians are finally using the term genocide to describe what is going on in Iraq. Read it all
CAPTURED!!! The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody.
— Boston Police Dept. (@bostonpolice) April 20, 2013
Following an intense manhunt that caused chaos in Massachusetts and riveted the rest of the nation, law enforcement finally captured the second Boston Marathon bombing suspect on Friday night.
Following a short standoff in the backyard of a residence in a Watertown neighborhood, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was taken into custody and arrested by Boston Police.
Praise God, the authorities have the young Tsarnaev! (Yes, young; he’s only six months older than my youngest!)
This afternoon I prayed for Dzhokar a bit. (And for others involved.) I prayed he would be captured alive and with no further deaths and mayhem. (Yes, yes — of course he deserves to die. That’s not the point of this post, OK?)
I prayed for this young fellow because The Authority — the King of Kings — still seeks for him. (Apparently, Allah presently has this alleged terrorist, aka Boston Bomber #2.)
The Good Shepherd looks for a lost lamb for whom He gave His life!
How many followers of Jesus will pray for this young man’s redemption?
If you are a Christian, will you pray for his salvation?
Joel C. Rosenberg just posted to his blog:
Friday was a potentially game-changing day for Israel. For the first time since 1970, Iranian-made missiles were fired at Jerusalem from terrorists in Gaza. Missiles were also fired from Gaza at Tel Aviv. Air raid sirens were blaring in both cities this evening, rattling residents because of their exceedingly rare nature. As I write this late Friday evening, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Security Cabinet have been meeting for several hours behind closed doors. One decision has been made for certain: Israel is now calling up 75,000 reserve soldiers, not the 30,000 that were just approved on Thursday.
The big question now: Will the Palestinian terrorists’ attacks on Jerusalem, Israel’s political and religious capital — and Tel Aviv, its largest population center and its commercial capital — trigger an IDF ground invasion of Gaza?
Israel is certainly moving rapidly to prepare for such a possibility.
I just remembered asking: What do Israel’s enemies make of the result?
Maybe there’s no connection between that and this.
Update at 2:20 pm Pacific: BREAKING: Israeli officials tell nation to prepare for 7 weeks of war:
Home Front Command asks local authorities to prepare for seven-week fighting period […] The Home Front Command sharpened instructions for the Tel Aviv metropolitan area and southern residents and, accordingly, communities located in a range of between 40-75 kilometers from the Gaza Strip must enter nearby, protected spaces the moment blasts or sirens are heard. If there is no protected space in the vicinity, residents should enter the nearest structure or stairwell. In light of the long-range rockets fired over the past few days, these instructions apply to all communities within a 75-kilometer range and not only in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area.
First, from the Times of Israel:
The Israeli Air Force on Wednesday launched a series of airstrikes in Gaza City, killing Ahmed Jabari, the head of Hamas’s armed wing — the equivalent of an army’s chief of staff — and his son, Mohammed al-Homs. Palestinian sources put the death toll at up to nine by evening.
[…]
Hamas’s armed wing warned that in assassinating Jabari, Israel “had opened the gates of hell on itself.”
Next, from a blog post by Joel C. Rosenberg: Read it all
That was yesterday.
By evening I had noticed…