God Counts the Children

On the last morning of February, an American cruise missile hit an elementary school in Minab, Iran.

The Pentagon's own preliminary investigation owns it. Outdated targeting coordinates. One hundred fifty-six people died, and one hundred twenty of them were students. By spring, UNICEF was counting the children killed in this war in the hundreds.

I love this country. I wore its uniform. I am not writing this despite that. I am writing it because of that, and because I answer to a King before I answer to a flag.

So the question has to be asked out loud, in church words, because the church is mostly not asking it. Where does a Christian man stand when his own nation's bombs kill children?

The question God already answered

Before the walls of Jericho fell, Joshua met a Man with a drawn sword and asked him the question every patriot in every century has asked.

"Now it came about when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, a man was standing opposite him with his sword drawn in his hand, and Joshua went to him and said to him, 'Are you for us or for our adversaries?' He said, 'No; rather I indeed come now as captain of the host of the LORD.' And Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and bowed down, and said to him, 'What has my lord to say to his servant?'" (Joshua 5:13-14)

Are you for us or for them. And the answer, given to covenant Israel, standing on covenant ground, on the eve of a war God Himself had ordered, was No.

God does not enlist. He commands. He did not come that day to take a side. He came to take over, and the only question that survived the exchange was the one Joshua asked from the ground: what does my Lord say to His servant?

Hold that. If the commander said No to Joshua, He is not wearing anybody's flag in this war either. The question was never whether God stands with America. The question is whether you stand with God, and the rest is what that standing costs.

Start with the verse men will reach for

Somebody is already typing Romans 13, so let us go there first, and read all of it.

God did give government the sword. That is not liberal squeamishness or conservative invention. It is the plain text, and I am not going to blunt it. But read the job description that comes with the sword: "for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil." (Romans 13:4)

On the one who practices evil. That is the sword's assignment, written by the same God who issued it. A second-grader at a desk in Minab was not practicing evil. Whatever Romans 13 authorizes, it does not authorize that. Quoting it over dead children is not submission to Scripture. It is using Scripture as a bomb shelter.

And notice where Paul put the verse. One sentence earlier he told Christians, never take your own revenge. The same word family carries across: what is forbidden to you privately is assigned to the state narrowly. A boundary that tight is not a blank check. It is a leash.

God audits the wars of nations that never knew Him

Here is something most men have never been shown. The Bible opens the book of Amos with God indicting nation after nation for how they fought their wars, and almost none of those nations were His.

Damascus, for threshing Gilead with iron. Ammon, "Because they ripped open the pregnant women of Gilead In order to enlarge their borders." (Amos 1:13) And Moab, judged for what it did to Edom, one pagan nation brutalizing another, no Israelite anywhere in the story: "Because he burned the bones of the king of Edom to lime." (Amos 2:1)

Sit with what that means. Nations outside the covenant, nations with no Bible and no prophets and no temple, are held to a standard in how they kill. God has been enforcing it since before Rome existed. There has never been a nation exempt from that audit. Not Assyria, not Babylon, not Moab.

Not us.

And the oracle sequence has a shape every American Christian should feel in his chest. God circles the neighboring nations one by one, and the crowd cheers each verdict, and then the eighth oracle lands on the hearers themselves. The men shouting amen at judgment on everybody else discover the sermon was aimed at home the whole time.

America is not Israel, and that changes everything

The counterfeit theology under most Christian war-cheering is simple: we are the good guys, so our wars are His wars.

Israel could talk like that once, and only Israel, and only because God had made a covenant with her at Sinai that He made with no one else. Even then, the wars of total destruction were fenced to a named list of cities inside one strip of land. For every city beyond that fence, the law required an offer of peace first and spared the noncombatants (Deuteronomy 20:10-17). The exception was the exception, and God wrote the fence Himself.

That covenant reached its end at the cross. The promises landed on Christ, and the holy nation now is not a country with borders, it is the blood-bought people gathered from every country, including Iran. When Peter calls the church "a holy nation," he is handing Israel's title to a people, not a state.

So no modern nation gets to claim the sword of Joshua. Not Iran. Not America. My country is a nation like the other nations, ordained by God the way Rome was ordained, and audited by God the way Moab was audited. The verse about "My people who are called by My name" was spoken to covenant Israel about covenant land. It was never a promise to us, and I have said that on this site before this war and will keep saying it during it.

An error is not murder. It is also not nothing.

The honest man in the back of the room now says: it was a mistake. Bad coordinates. Nobody targeted a school. And Scripture has a category for that distinction, so let us use the whole category.

The law of Moses separated accidental killing from murder. It refused to execute the man whose hand slipped. And it still cost him almost everything: he fled to a city of refuge and stayed there, exiled from his home and his land, and the law explicitly forbade buying his way out (Numbers 35). Unintentional blood was not avenged as murder, and it was never once shrugged off as a rounding error.

Scripture also knows a middle category we keep pretending not to see. The man whose ox had gored before and was not penned bears guilt when it kills (Exodus 21:29). The man who built his roof without a parapet bears the bloodguilt when somebody falls (Deuteronomy 22:8). Foreseeable, preventable death sits closer to guilt than to accident, and "outdated coordinates" in the middle of a months-long bombing campaign is foreseeable, preventable death. The teenager writing that targeting process knew schools existed.

And when blood was shed in Israel and nobody could even be blamed, the nearest town's elders still had to come out, before God, over a broken-necked heifer, and formally deal with the innocent blood (Deuteronomy 21:1-9). Unclaimed blood still demanded a reckoning. A nation that answers dead children with a news cycle and a shrug is operating below the standard the Torah set for an unsolved crime in a ditch.

God counts the children

The book of Jonah ends with God explaining to an angry prophet why He spared the capital city of Israel's worst enemy, and the reason is a number.

"Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?" (Jonah 4:11)

Scholars go back and forth on whether that describes the children or the whole spiritually blind city. Either way, do not miss what God is doing in the sentence. He is counting. He has a number for the people in an enemy capital. The number is His argument for mercy, and He extends the count all the way down to the livestock. The last word of the book is God defending His pity for the population of a city His own prophet wanted burned.

That God has not changed. He said through Ezekiel that He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, and if that is His heart toward the guilty, His heart toward a seven-year-old under rubble is not a mystery. God counted the children of Minab. He knew the number before the Pentagon did, and He knew their names, which is more than we will ever know.

Your flag did not make those deaths acceptable to Him. Nothing makes the death of an image-bearer negligible to the God who put His image there: "Whoever sheds man's blood, By man his blood shall be shed, For in the image of God He made man." (Genesis 9:6)

Where the man stands

So where does a strong Christian, a real patriot, stand? On five feet of ground, and he does not move off it.

He grieves. "Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep." (Romans 12:15) The verse does not check citizenship first. If your first response to a destroyed school was to check who fired the missile before deciding how to feel, the verse has found you out.

He refuses to celebrate. "Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, And do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles;" (Proverbs 24:17) The proverb even warns that God watches the gloating and is displeased by it. There is footage online of men cheering these strikes with crosses in their bios. That is not patriotism. It is the thing Proverbs says God turns from in displeasure.

He prays for enemies, because his Father commands it and models it: "But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous." (Matthew 5:44-45) Sons resemble their Father, and the Father sends rain on Iran.

He tells the truth about his own country, because that is what love does. The prophets who tore into Israel's sins loved Israel more than the court prophets who blessed everything the king did. A man who cannot say "my nation did wrong" does not love his nation. He worships it, and there is a commandment about that.

And he remembers which kingdom holds his passport. "For our citizenship is in heaven" (Philippians 3:20). We live here the way exiles lived in Babylon, commanded to seek the welfare of the city and pray for it (Jeremiah 29:7), and that verse sits three lines from the most misquoted promise in America, so hear it plainly: seeking this country's welfare includes refusing to bless what is rotting it.

The warning: court prophets

Now the harder word, the one for the church.

Israel always had two kinds of prophets. Jeremiah, who told the nation the truth and went in the cistern for it. And Hananiah, who stood in the temple and prophesied victory, smooth and patriotic and dead wrong (Jeremiah 28). Ahab had four hundred prophets with iron horns promising God was with the war effort, and one Micaiah who would not lie (1 Kings 22).

Every pulpit in America is currently choosing which one to be.

Elijah put the choice to a nation that wanted God and Baal both on the payroll: "How long will you hesitate between two opinions? If the LORD is God, follow Him; but if Baal, follow him." (1 Kings 18:21) And the text records the answer of a hedging people. They did not answer him a word. Silence is an answer. It is the wrong one.

A church that baptizes whatever its nation bombs is not being faithful to Romans 13. It is auditioning for Hananiah's job. That position is already filled, and its retirement plan is terrible. When the church cheers craters with children under them, it has not gotten more patriotic. It has left its post.

Jesus was handed a headline about state violence once, Galileans whose blood Pilate mixed with their sacrifices, and He refused every side's script. He did not rank the victims' guilt and He did not flatter the empire. He turned to the crowd and said, unless you repent, you will all likewise perish (Luke 13:1-5). The headline, in His hands, became a mirror. That is what this one is for.

You stand with God, or you fail

So here is the line, and I did not draw it. He did.

There are exactly two places to stand in a moment like this, because He left exactly two.

You can stand with God. That means grieving what He grieves, including children in an enemy country. Refusing to celebrate what He refuses to celebrate, whatever your feed rewards. Telling the truth He tells, about your own nation, at the cost of your own tribe's approval. Praying for the people your country is at war with, because your Father sends them rain. It will cost you. The crowd at Carmel stood silent because the cost was real.

Or you can stand somewhere else and keep calling it faith. Wrap the cross in the flag, cheer the craters, quote Romans 13 over the rubble, and fail. Not fail at patriotism. Fail at the only allegiance that was ever absolute, because Jesus said the man who is not with Him is against Him (Matthew 12:30), and He did not build a third category for men who mostly agree.

And if you are reading this from the wrong side of that line, the door is not locked. The God who drew it has been receiving men who cross it since the cross. He reconciled you while you were His enemy, and He will not turn away a man who comes over today. That is the whole reason there is still time to switch sides.

To the man who wore the uniform

One more thing, and it might be the reason God had you read this.

Some of you carried ordnance in other wars, and this post has been sitting on your chest since the first paragraph. Hear me. Your service is not on trial here, and neither is mine. John the Baptist had soldiers standing in front of him asking what repentance looked like, and he did not tell them to burn their uniforms. He told them to soldier honestly (Luke 3:14). And if there is a weight you have been carrying from what your hands did or could not stop, that weight is grief to bring to Christ, not a verdict He has passed on you. The verdict on men in Christ is already published: "Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." (Romans 8:1)

If the nights have been bad, do not carry this alone. The Veterans Crisis Line is 988, then press 1. Calling it is not weakness. It is a man refusing to let the enemy collect one more casualty.

Pray the count

Here is the one thing to do, and it costs nothing but your knees.

Tonight, pray for the mothers of Minab by name of place, since God already knows their names. Pray for the children still under care in Qeshm. Pray for the sailor who launched that missile, who may be a believer, who has to live with a set of coordinates for the rest of his life. Pray for your leaders to be given wisdom and restraint, and pray for Iran's, and notice that Scripture commands both prayers with a straight face.

Then, if you want words older than your anger, pray Psalm 10. It was written for exactly this: the helpless crushed, the arrogant sure nobody sees, and a God who has seen every bit of it and will vindicate the orphan so that man, who is of the earth, will no longer cause terror.

God saw the school. God counted the children. Stand where He stands, and do not let anyone, wrapped in any flag, talk you off of it.