The Solution to All Our Problems

So it shall come about, when the Lord your God has given you rest from all your surrounding enemies in the land which the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, that you shall wipe out the mention of the name Amalek from under heaven; you must not forget.  Deuteronomy 25:19  NASB

Wipe out – What single word explains why the great empires of the world succeeded?  What made Babylon so powerful, Rome so feared?  How was it possible for Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Rome to control the whole known world of the Mediterranean for hundreds of years?  Shall I tell you?  The word is ruthless.  The empires were ruthless to their enemies.  They showed no mercy to those who stood against them.  They exterminated their opposition.

Oh, and by the way, God commanded Israel to do the same (but maybe for different reasons).

If you want to clean up the problem, and I mean really clean it up so that no traces are left over to fester into a resurgence, then you have to be absolutely ruthless.  Want to stop poaching of endangered species?  Want to really stop it?  Willing to do anything to stop it?  Well, then, I have a solution.  Kill on the spot anyone caught poaching—and then kill anyone associated or related to that person.  Kill the family, the entire village, the administrators, the transporters, and the consumers.  Kill them all—immediately.  No trials, no arrests, no juries.  Just execute them.  I can guarantee that within a very short time poaching will utterly stop.  It won’t stop if you arrest a few people.  It won’t even stop if you execute a poacher here and there.  The consequences of this act must be so severe and without remorse that even thinking about it scares people to death.  It will instantly become self-policing as anyone who knows anything about it will be sure to stop the process before it begins because everyone will die if it proceeds.

Now apply the same principle to illegal immigration.  To drug trafficking.  To human trafficking.  To any other social evil that plagues your society.  Make the consequences so horrible that no one would dare cross the line.  Singapore does that with drugs.  Guess what?  No drug trafficking.  Saudi Arabia has some similar thinking.  So does the Mafia.  When you break the rules, not only do you die but everyone near to you dies too.  Ruthlessness.

Now I ask you, why have so many Western countries failed so miserably to protect their citizens from drugs, human trafficking, illegal immigration, civil violence, capital crimes?  There’s a one word answer to this too.  Can you guess?  Morality.  Yes, that’s right.  The greatest deterrent to social tranquility is Western morality.  The adoption of biblical values as common expectations for civil behavior prohibits ruthlessness, and because ruthlessness is not an acceptable response to illegal or socially reprehensible behavior, evil is not curtailed.  No one can legislate morality, but you can certainly control it if you’re willing to exterminate the offenders.  In fact, every ancient human empire that has flexed its muscles across the world knew this truth.  We just lost touch with its power when the Church and the synagogue became the moral police of our civilization.  In the end, Western morality will destroy the West.

Does this seem too harsh?  Probably.  But there is another solution.  It’s the one that biblically-oriented followers profess and hope for.  Divine intervention.  The return of the King.  The God-fix.  History is not kind to those who have waited for this resolution.  Ruthlessness has prevailed for thousands of years.  At times even God employed that tactic (and we frankly hope He will again—but not on us, of course).  The more evil, the more lawlessness, the more civil destruction, the more we want a ruthless God to show up again.  We might not publicly say that because it wouldn’t be proper, but the Bible already tells us that there are times when this is the only real solution.  We just pretend that isn’t true.

Here’s the rub.  How can we be agents of the Most High and not exterminate the Amalekites in our midst?  As long as they exist, they corrupt us.  But, then, who are we to decide that it’s time for ruthlessness.  So often human ruthlessness has been an excuse for domination and tyranny.  Oh, it’s effective.  No question about that.  But is it right?  And there, right there, as soon as you ask that question, your morality gets in the way of fixing the problem.

Topical Index: Amalekites, ruthless, morality, empires, Deuteronomy 25:19