We all remember Sept. 11. As the news came in and the magnitude of this disaster became known, it didn’t feel right not mentioning it in some way to the people you talked to.

I remember rummaging through my vocabulary, “Horrific. Unbelievable. Catastrophic.” lively word I could think of seemed poor and inadequate. No word seemed able to describe the situation truly, let alone to express my thoughts and feelings.

By now our heads have been crammed with facts and statistics, rehearsed over and over by the media I seem powerless to turn my head from: 18 terrorists on 4 planes, 2 out of Boston, 1 from Newark, 1 from Washington. 266 passengers. 8:45 am, the North Tower, around the 90th floor, 18 minutes later, the South Tower. 110 stories tall.

Then there are the personal stories. The firemen. 1-lusbands calling their wives, wives calling their husbands on cell phones just minutes before the plane crashed or the tower collapsed. Family members walking through the streets of lower Manhattan waving photographs of a loved one who worked in the towers and hadn’t been heard from. The CEO of the company that occupied five or so of the top floors of one of the World Trade Center towers who was late getting to work that day because he wanted to accompany his child to kindergarten for his first day: and when he got downtown he realized that the 700 employees who worked under him and made it on time to work that day had died.

Beyond the facts, beyond the shock and the grief, beyond questions about airport security: Who are the terrorists who sent the suicide pilots? Where are they hiding? What should the President do in response? How can this kind of thing be prevented in the future? Beyond all that, can we make any sense of it all? It was, after all, a senseless act of mass murder, carefully planned and executed by the crudest means yet overwhelmingly effective. They did not come to take land or property, to liberate slaves or set hostages free. There was no apparent territorial, political, or economic advantage for the aggressor. They just came to express hate Make no mistake about it. Hate is a very powerful, and a very destructive emotion.

One political analyst being interviewed on television as an expert offered this analysis: “I hate to say it, hut I think today is the day America ran out of luck.” Can you imagine drivel more trite than that? But can we do any better, or is it just naive optimism to dream it even possible to understand? After banging our heads against a wall. are we, too, basically left with the idea that we were unlucky and thousands of lives were lost?

What means do we as Christians have for discerning alt this? By Christians I don’t mean decent Americans who believe in God and think Jesus was a good man who was nice to people and told stories that make good children’s books; by Christians I mean those who in faith and repentance bow before Jesus Christ as almighty God and submit to His writ ten Word as the standard of truth. Do we as Christians have some means whereby we can wade through the madness and decipher meaning, something by which we can go through the twisted senseless ness of it all and decode a message? Because. if we can, we have light to shed on this situation for those around us who have only questions—and I dare say it would be our duty to share that light. But if we can’t, we’re groping around in the dark with everyone else.

“Bomb Afghanistan” exclaimed the lady in the checkout lane. A simple solution. She didn’t seem confused in the least. The message was clear. Regrettably, that is perhaps a course of action that the President and his advisors had to con sider. But that is a message for the President of our government, not me. Is there a message for you and me? Might God he telling us something?

One young man who worked on the 57th floor of the World Trade Center shared on a radio interview his remark able eyewitness account of the crash, of the evacuation, of the collapse, and of the numbing horror of seeing it all in person. Then his voice stopped trembling and turned defiant. Insistent. “I’m sorry,” he said, “this cannot happen here. This simply cannot happen here.”

But it did.

Hatred so strong it was worth dying for. Flying lessons. A knife. An airplane full of fuel, and an enormously tall building full of people. That’s all it took. Why couldn’t it happen here? Heartbreaking tragedies like this happen all the time all over the world. Not on such a huge scale. because the buildings aren’t so big, and perhaps the jetliners aren’t as easy to board as they are where freedom and security have, until now, been pretty well taken for granted. But peace, safety, and prosperity are not the norm on this planet. Are we in America somehow exempt from the scourge of misery that is ever hanging over places like Africa, India, the Middle East, Yugoslavia, Columbia? Do we have a permanent claim to “most favored nation” status with God?

It has happened here before. Littleton. Colorado. Oklahoma City. South Central Los Angeles. And there are places in America—our inner cities—where peace, safety and prosperity are terms that don’t apply. But Wall Street?? Your neighbor hood?

Why not?

On one occasion, people came to Jesus reporting the latest atrocity that ruthless Roman governor, Pilate. had committed against the captive Jews whose land the Romans occupied (Luke 13:1-5). This time it was especially scandalous. He had the victims cut down right in the sacred courts of the temple while they were engaged in an act of worship. so that their blood was mingled with the blood of the sacrifices they had brought to the altar.

The people bringing this news were not a bunch of agnostic and cynical 21st Century Westerners. They were 1st Century religious Jews, theists. It would never have occurred to them to dismiss the whole thing as had luck. They approached the news with a theological framework in place through which they could interpret and make some sense of the news of the clay. And they came to Jesus, much like we go with news to people who basically share our opinions, to talk it over and reassure one another that our opinions are more or less correct. They would have assumed that Jesus would share their opinions and agree with their reactions to the latest hit of news from Jerusalem.

Jesus immediately cut through all that without any comment about Pilate, the Romans, and the political aspirations of the Jews. Jesus cuts right to the most vital issue that confronts those people with whom He is speaking. There is a God, lie is not merely a religious doctrine or an academic construction. lie is real. He is holy; He is all-powerful; He is all-knowing; He is all-seeing. And they must deal with 1-lim, because He made them, and He is their Judge. He it is who stands behind the swirling and bewildering flow of events we call history, exercising perfect control in bringing about His inscrutable will and purpose. Whatever else He is accomplishing in the events occurring around us. He is speaking a message to us through them. lie is revealing something about Himself to us in them, and His written Word provides the code to decipher that message to us.

What about you? Jesus asks. Did those Galileans who died deserve to die more than those who did not? Did those Galileans who did not die deserve to live more than those who died? We’re not considering things here on the level of Pilate’s guilt or innocence. To prove that point, Jesus says we don’t have to talk about a barbaric massacre. We could as easily consider a freak accident (Luke 13:4), because we are considering things on the level of what God has done or has allowed to happen (however you prefer to phrase it). Jesus thus brings up an other news item of the day. A tower, somehow structurally weakened, suddenly collapsed, killing 18. Why? Why them, and not others nearby? Did God spare others because, measured against His holy standard, they were found less deserving of His wrath? Is the reason why you’ve escaped disaster up until now because you are better than others?

Jesus doesn’t leave things in the form of questions. “I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish!” (Luke 13:5).

What does Jesus mean? The disasters you’ve seen befall others have not passed you by because you are less guilty, but because God is graciously, patiently extending to you the opportunity to repent and seek His mercy. And, furthermore, if you do not, eternal disaster awaits you too.

September 11, 2001 was a wake-up call. A warning. I’m not talking about a warning from terrorists, from Osama Bin Laden, or Saddam Hussein, or any who are responsible for that unspeakable evil. Those who carried out this attack are guilty of the most heinous crimes against humanity and deserve the full punishment man is able to inflict. In this tragedy, among everything else that can be said, the most pertinent thing for us to pay attention to is this: You, personally, got a message from God on Sept. 11, 2001. It could have been you. Why wasn’t it? Not because the people in your town are better than the people in New York City. Just as it could he said in 1945, the mothers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not more deserving of tragedy than the mothers of Tokyo, or New York, or Columbus, Ind. On Sept. 11, 2001, you got a message from God. A warning. A wake-up call.

It could as easily have been you, freshly showered and dressed in suit and silk tie stirring your cup of coffee one minute, and standing naked before al mighty God, the Creator, the Judge, who dwells in unapproachable light, the next. Standing before Him as He waits for you to give an account. To explain your life— what you did and what you didn’t do, all of it, what you said and what you didn’t say, every single word, what you thought and what you didn’t think, every moment.

“But unless you repent, you too will all perish.” How often do we get such a message so forcefully and fearfully delivered? Pay heed! Wake up! Quit playing around! This is serious. Are you right with God? Maybe you’ve come to church most of your life, and you’ve gotten away with the outward reputation that you are right with God, hut you know it’s a lie. You’ve been busy in church activities for years, but you know in your heart that there isn’t a drop of genuine love for God. And now you know—it could have been you.

But it wasn’t you. God is gracious. You’ve been warned. What are you going to do? Wait for the fear to subside? Relax? Wait for the next crisis—you can panic then? But what if it is you next time?

This message is not pleasant, but it is a light. If you know how much you need that light, you know there have got to be others around you that need it too. Others who have been shaken up by this tragedy. Maybe they’re even thinking, “it could have been me. What if it had been me?” Others who are not prepared for the answer to that question. Not prepared at all. They need to hear God’s warning from someone who has the means of decoding that message. It is your duty to give it to them. Don’t worry about of fending them. This is way too serious for such inconsequential concerns.

“How could this have happened?” Have you heard that question being asked? But to us, you know, Sept. 11, 2001 really shouldn’t have come as a great shock. I’m not suggesting any of you had a clue about the timing of the disaster, or about the agents, or the means they used. That truly was a terrible surprise But we believe, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men,” (Rom. 1:18). We believe that it is only the gracious patience of God that has kept that wrath from crashing down earlier and more broadly.

See the roof above you? It’s there, isn’t it? If it crashed clown, you’d feel it, But just because it has not crashed down yet doesn’t mean it’s not there. “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men.” Sept. 11, 2001, was not really a surprise to the Chris tian, given what the Christian claims to believe. We are those who believe that the whole flow of history is heading to a certain catastrophic, cataclysmic end. We call it Judgment Day, the Day of the Lord, the Great Day, the Final Day, the day Christ shall come to judge the living and the dead, the day of God’s wrath. On Sept. 11, we saw but a pre view. If you find that interpretation repugnant and distasteful, fine. But let there be no mistake, that is the biblical Christian religion, that is the revealed truth of God in Scripture.

Sept. 11, 2001, is a date that will stay with you for the rest of your life. It is not every clay that one gets such a clear, undisguised, condensed and unmistakable, close-up manifestation of human depravity. An earlier generation saw it with Adolf Hitler. We saw it again on Sept. 11. It’s always there all around us, in us—but it is usually better hidden. Now it’s in full view, and there is no way to relabel it and call it something else.

You hear the brightest, most educated commentators speak of it, stumped. Mystified. It fits in with no existing hu manistic, worldly definition of man. Evil. Yes, this is evil. But as to what evil is, where it came from, and where it lives, they don’t know. It’s one of those in soluble philosophical puzzles.

But we know where it comes from and where it lives. It comes from the heart that has turned from God, and it can only be tamed and ultimately vanquished by the grace of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I have spent a lot of time in past days trying to unravel the psychology of the 19 men who hijacked those four planes. They were taught to hate. They must have breathed, eaten, and drunk hate day in and day out from before they can remember. Hate is a powerful emotion, a great destroyer. And the first victim of that steady, unbroken diet of hate in these men was that vestigial shadow of the image of God, that human propensity to have regard for human life. That humanity, hate destroyed. For not only did these men have such disregard for life that they agreed to be the agents of destruction on a staggeringly massive scale, hut they laid clown their own lives for hate, in order to kill a multitude.

That brings to mind one last thing. Sept. 11, 2001 was, by way of stark contrast, a remarkable revelation of the saving grace of Jesus Christ. For while these 19 so hated their enemy that they laid down their lives to kill, maim. and destroy, our only hope in life and in death is pinned on the reverse—that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, so loved us while we were yet His enemies that He willingly laid clown His life in order to deliver us from a judgment and hell we richly deserve, and to secure for us an eternal life in the glory of paradise.

Nineteen men came to bury your lives in a vast rubble of terror and dread. Jesus died and, on the third clay, rose from the dead, pushed away the stone, and emerged from the tomb to bring you peace and hope. Because of Him, you can face a cataclysm exponentially more horrific than the one New York faced on Sept. 11. You can face the terrible day of God’s wrath and universal judgment, unafraid, Even more, you can face it with the confident expectation that it will be, for you, a day of unmitigated glory and joy and blessing, a clay in which you will rise to be with the Lord forever.

Jesus Christ is the message of God to you, and to the world. He is the good that can come from this evil, the only lasting good that can come out of this tragedy. He is the balm of healing and grace for wounds the doctors and rescue workers cannot reach. He is the Rescuer that can find the lost buried under the tons of metal and concrete and bring them home. He is the One who can reunite the families that have been ripped apart. He is our safety. He is our security. He is certainty amidst uncertainty, hope against despair, the love that will overcome evil, the One who alone can find and destroy our greatest enemy, the One in whom all nations can unite—Jesus Christ, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. To Him he alt glory, forever.