Turning Justice into Poison
 12 Do horses run on the rocky crags?
      Does one plow there with oxen?
      But you have turned justice into poison
      and the fruit of righteousness into bitterness- 13 you who rejoice in the conquest of Lo Debar
      and say, “Did we not take Karnaim by our own strength?”
There are certain things a man just doesn’t do. You don’t drive your car to work on the sidewalk. You don’t build a tree house on a city light pole… and you don’t brag about your ability to war when God is the one who gave you strength, and you merely an instrument for His justice.
I’ve written a lot about the use of war to achieve justice in the world, and I still believe in it. However, I see in these verses an exaltation from God to temper that attitude.
The army that God is with is the one He uses. The army that God blesses is the one that gives Him credit, without bragging about their own strength. A contrary attitude does not make the war wrong, but it does take the justice accomplished by it, and it turns it into poison.
As God gets surgically removed from the United States, through the courts, through intellectual elitism, and secular morality campaigns to turn behaviors that distance one from God into seemingly harmless behaviors that are to be celebrated, our wars will become more and more about glorifying ourselves, and less and less about glorifying God.
I believe President Bush intended to glorify God in the wars he waged. I know I did, and such belief was vilified as evil, oppressive, and imperialistic. In the meantime, we freed Iraq from a ruthless dictator, planted a democracy in the Middle East by our brother Israel, and showed through the Surge a strategy that could win in Afghanistan. And in private, President Bush prayed, and let Himself be a vessel for God’s purposes… or at least I think he did so in the beginning and in the end. For the tween years, he did too much to placate contrarian views, and not enough… his inconsistencies cost us lives, and his party the White House.
As a Christian I support wars that accomplish God’s justice… assuming I think I know what that is. However, I should not support wars that only result in the glory of the United States. I want our wars to result in statements like, “That was God’s justice” and not “The United States is just awesome.” Don’t get me wrong, this is the most awesome nation in the world, and it will take more than Barack Obama’s misled policies to ruin that fact… but a truly great nation does not war for its own glory, though that nation be great. A truly great nation goes to war to accomplish God’s justice… and when I no longer see God’s justice accomplished, then I will stop supporting it.