Defense

WED., SEPT. 3, 1986, 6:19 AM
FARM, STUDY

The word, o son, is the one used for the war making capability of your country. It is more acceptable to appropriate money for defense than for war, and there is a certain defensive quality to the military. Yet your country’s policy is not limited to an honest defense of your actual land… and there is a good deal of the principle that “the best defense is a good offense.”

My interest, of course, is primarily in the spiritual nature of this defense effort, and I am quite willing to share this interest with you… and encourage you to think more in this way. I am aware of the danger to the life that flourishes here in the earth posed by the nuclear weapons ready to be used, and I work in many ways to forestall any use. As I have told you, the earth is a special place for the growth and development of spirit, and I am not disposed to destroying this unique environment.

Even so, spirit is My major concern, and the spiritual aspects of defense are what you must understand more fully. Positively, there is an admirable quality of honor and integrity to defense. If good, peaceful, helpful aspects of your culture are being clearly attacked, it is honorable to defend them… to maintain the good. Still, it is frequent that what is “good” and being righteously defended is only your perception of good, and may not be so to others. Your economic system, for example, is certainly beneficial to many, in your land and abroad, and thus is good, and should be defended. But it also is oppressive and unrewarding to many others and thus cannot be defended as a universal good.

As I have told you, when the system is endangered through its willingness to help those in need, of this I approve. But then the defense of the system may entail more hardship and be based more in greed than in concern for both justice and mercy.

Your political system offers maximum freedom for individuals and groups, and I do love freedom. However this does include the freedom to exploit others, and the freedom of those with power and money to exert their wills over others. Freedom does not produce all good, and when I influence I often restrict freedom… for higher purposes. So what is legitimately defensible is the capacity to give freedom but also to curtail it when its exercise brings more harm than good.

In Nicaragua it is very hard to define the freedom that must be defended by killing people and destroying property. Your country’s action in this small land is defense at its “least defensible.” Restoring freedom is a worthy goal, but the realities of life there make this almost impossible without great harm to those for whom the freedom is intended. In Nicaragua the spirit in people can grow and develop as well under the present government as under any your country would sponsor. So much for defense.

In a different use of the term… to what extent must I, the Triune God, be defended? You do not live in a time when clear religious wars prevail, and yet one of the principles of opposing communism is to defend the belief in Me as the supreme ruler of this universe and of individual lives. In one way your country approves of this basis for defense, and yet there is almost as much rejection of Me and the life of the spirit as there is in “atheistic” countries.