Psalm 89 - Righteousness and Justice as a foundation for war
 14 Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne;
      love and faithfulness go before you. 15 Blessed are those who have learned to acclaim you,
      who walk in the light of your presence, O LORD. 16 They rejoice in your name all day long;
      they exult in your righteousness.
This is another Psalm that talks of God’s great works, and as we see in so many other places in the OT, those works include violence, killing of the enemies of God’s anointed, and punishment of God’s people for their lack of faithfulness. Yet, God Himself is only attributed to have positive attributes. To an atheist, this paints of a picture of a God with split personalities. To me, it paints a picture of a God who is just.
I don’t know when our notion of what is just got so skewed. As a nation (the United States) we seem to think that letting evil rulers live is the right thing to do, as long as they kill their own people without bothering us about it, as long we don’t do it. We seem to have lost the notion of being just. We seem to think that killing evil people just makes us evil. The notion of punishment is completely lost, in that we allow for others to punish us, but remove from ourselves the right to punish others. How can one be punished without a punisher? And who would rather be punished by? An evil dictator who just wants you dead?  Or a benevolent God and His faithful servants who are simply defending the peaceful and the helpful?
It has never been a question of whether war is the answer to anything. It’s a question of what it’s an answer to. War is an appropriate answer to war. It is an appropriate answer to evil and an appropriate answer to those will kill us for no reason but that they want control of the world. The latter was our reason for attacking Germany and Japan in WWII; the former for fighting in Korea and Vietnam. And it is for both reasons that we are now warring in the Middle East.
Now, the difference between our warring and God’s is that God has only righteousness and justice as His foundation. As nation, we’re a mixed bag, and a mixed up bag. We have God’s faithful who understand His mandate for the faithful to defend the helpless and the righteous against evil in the world, and God’s faithful who believe that peace is the ultimate value, and that you cannot have peace if you respond to evil with war. You then have those who don’t know God, who want to go to war out of simple self-preservation and control, no better than those who attacked us on 9/11; and you have those who don’t know God and so replace His values with their own. The result is a nation made of 4 groups of people (at least!) who cannot agree on what to do and/or cannot agree on why. It’s the type of internal struggle that breaks up the church along one axis, and our nation along the other. I cannot help but read scripture and see what God wants us to do, and that is to defend His faithful, and defend the descendants of David. That means protecting and defending the Christians and Jews of the world, most notably the United States and Israel. It also means loving the rest of them as Jesus would have us love, and bringing them justice through war, against evil and murder.