I think I miss the cold war. Is that a dumb thing to say? Oh well.
The world seemed simpler then. Of course it was not, but it seemed that way compared to our current erratic world order. There was East and there was West. The Soviet Union and their friends against the United States and their friends. The Russians against the Americans. Communism against capitalism. Red state vs blue state meant something different than it does now.
I was a Marine Corps tank gunner and tank commander during the 1980s, the high-water mark of the Cold War. The Marines no longer have tanks. You know you are getting old when the high-tech weapon you were in charge of now sits out in front of the local VFW. I am a dinosaur. When I explained that I trained to fight the soviets my kids would ask, “what’s a soviet?”. Ha, such is the transitory nature of human conflicts; I wonder how many of the issues we now fight over will have melted away in thirty years.
The Cold War lasted from just after WW2 until 1991. Both sides were armed to the teeth, but the conflict was mostly waged with espionage. Spies were the foot soldiers of the era. Both sides used the media, disinformation, subterfuge, political influence and shenanigans, even assassination when necessary. In the words of Markos Ramius in The Hunt for Red October it was “A war at sea. A war with no battles, no monuments… only casualties.”
The two sides, thankfully, never came to blows. We came close a bunch of times, the Cuban missile crisis for example. But cooler heads always prevailed. Instead we would use other nations as the face of our conflict, Korea, Viet Nam, etc. The Communists would use the local forces, so would we. But the U.S. would usually send in many of its own troops. We liked to run the show; it is fashionable to call this imperialism, but I think Americans simply do not like letting others fight our battles. That is why I had a tank. Admittedly, we have a habit of being a bit of a blundering giant.
It was a Cold War axiom that “the Americans play checkers, but the Russians play chess.” No argument here. But as it turns out, checkers won. In December of 1989 God gave the German people a Christmas present. The East German guards that patrolled the Berlin Wall, the most iconic symbol of the Cold War, were told to stand down. The infamous Brandenburg Gate was opened on December 22nd. East Germans poured into West Berlin to visit family they had been separated from and to goggle at shops and the freedoms they had been denied for so long.
If you must build a wall to keep your population from leaving, you probably need to reexamine your system of government. Communism, and all other forms of totalitarianism, always fail from both external and internal pressures. Eventually, humans need to breathe. Those people took sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall. It became a weeklong party. in less than two years the Soviet Union collapsed. The Cold War was over.
But there is another cold war. A much older one. It transcends and uses mankind’s political squabbles and petty turf wars. It is also fought in the shadows, behind the scenes, with propaganda and misinformation. It is cosmic in scope and spiritual in nature. Spiritual? Yes, spiritual. I know many of us reject the notion of a spiritual reality. If it cannot be seen, or measured, or weighed, if it cannot be detected by our instruments; then it does not exist. We genuflect before “science” even as we infuse the word with God-like authority. Yet our science is stunted. It has placed itself in a box that it cannot observe its way out of. Philosophical naturalistic materialism is the Spirit of the age. I use the word “spirit” literally. There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Most people are comfortable with the idea of a benevolent God. And they tend to love the existence of angels. But few of us want to ponder the darker side of the unseen realm, apart from the tingle we get from a good ghost story. There are malevolent forces at work in this world. Things the Bible calls “principalities and powers”. Beings and creatures that cannot be seen by us; forces far more sinister than international communism was at its zenith. I believe in conspiracies, but not human ones. Not because humans are not evil, we are. But we are not clever or disciplined enough, and humans cannot keep secrets. These beings can, and they hate you. They hate us because we remind them of what they hate and fear the most, the Creator of all things. You were made in His image. They hate that image. They hate the words of our hymns and the sounds of our prayers. They hate that I am writing this.
Some of you are thinking I have lost it. All that Bible stuff has made me crazy. But am I? Can you really look around today and conclude you are not living on a battlefield? Covid is a global catastrophe that has affected everyone on earth and has us at each other’s throats. Is it just a virus from a lab or a bat, or are there other forces at work? The political divide in this country, the most powerful and wealthy nation in history, seems to always have us on the verge of civil war. Can you really lay this at the feet of whatever political figure you hate this week, or are there other forces at work? We are losing young people at an alarming rate to drugs. 200 people will die in this country today due to overdose, mostly opioids; can we really just dismiss this as a cultural trend, or are there other forces at work? If you dismiss the existence of intelligent evil in this world you are just whistling past the graveyard.
Why do these beings exist? Why did God create them knowing they would rebel and cause so much trouble? Why does he not destroy them? These are all fair questions. I have no real answers. But they are probably similar to why we exist. Why did God create us knowing we would cause so much trouble? We are not told why this war exists or how long it will last. But we are told how it will end. The utter destruction of all God’s, and ours, enemies. Good overcomes evil. Truth overwhelms lies. Love will demolish hate. The meek shall inherit the earth.
I do not know why God allows this to continue. I do not know why he does not simply split the sky and end this conflict now. I do like to complain. But the longer I study his heart and his mind, the more I come to this uncomfortable conclusion: That if, somehow, I had all power, and all knowledge, with a perfect heart; I would allow things to unfold exactly as they have. Because there is an unspeakable glory coming as a result of it all. There may not be much comfort in that conclusion today, but there it is.
What are we to do until the end of this cold war that keeps flaring up and bringing us hell? We are to resist the forces of evil that are swirling around us, tearing at us, pitting us against each other. I confess I fail miserably at this, bitterness and hatred spring up too easily in my heart. “Resist the Devil and he will flee from you” the scripture says. May it be so. Until the trumpet sounds may we resist the urge to hate each other, it only makes our enemies happy. Until the trumpet sounds may we forgive each other. Until the trumpet sounds may we douse our rhetoric and be kind to each other. Until the trumpet sounds may we act like the One in whose image we have been made, like Jesus, only this will dismay our enemies. Until the trumpet sounds, may all our wars be cold.
“The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.”
- John
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
- The Usual Suspects
“The cold war is over; the world has become much more complicated.”
- Vladimir Putin