Twenty-one years later, a
worse global conflict ensued. At the close of World War ii, the United Nations was established to keep the peace.
For 58 years, the primary purpose of the U.N., as stated in its charter, has
been to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in
our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” Yet more than 250 local and
regional armed conflicts have occurred since, and no world peace is remotely in
sight. Instead, a new threat to peace exists—global terrorism.
“The United Nations is on the
verge of demonstrating finally and fatally its moral bankruptcy and its
strategic irrelevance,” wrote the Washington
Post’s Charles Krauthammer. “Having proved itself impotent in the Balkan
crisis and now again in the Iraq crisis, the United Nations will sink once
again into irrelevance. This time it will
not recover”
Why has the United Nations so
utterly failed?
All Bark, No
Bite
The problem is that, akin to
all of the great treaties, pacts and institutions created throughout mankind’s
history with the noble intention of institutionalizing world peace, the U.N.
contained within it, from its very beginning, the seeds of its own destruction.
On the occasion of the 50th
anniversary of the U.N. back in October 1995, Time magazine passed comment. “Never again would one country
bulldoze a path of conquest over a neighbor. Never again would the great powers
lock in a titanic death struggle ravaging the continents. More than that, the
causes of war would be extinguished. Tyranny, injustice and deprivation would
never again blot out the light of the world. Governments of good faith would
band together under the universal benevolence of something called the United
Nations.
“How beautiful. How brave. How
naive” (Oct. 23, 1995).
How naive indeed! President
John F. Kennedy, addressing the U.N. in September 1961, pragmatically
recognized that if the U.N. vision failed to materialize, mankind would face
dire consequences. “Mankind must put an end to war—or war will put an end to
mankind. … Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when
this planet may no longer be habitable. … The mere existence of modern
weapons—10 million times more
powerful than any that the world has ever seen, and only minutes away from any
target on Earth—is a source of horror, and discord and distrust. … _Together we
shall save our planet—or together we shall perish in its flames!”
Sir Anthony Parsons, British
ambassador to the U.N. from 1974 to 1982, realistically appraised the
organization thus: “The U.N. has been a disastrous failure …. It set the
standards and adopted conventions on everything you can think of—torture,
women, children, civil rights—but does nothing to enforce them” (Time, op. cit.).
And there is the central core
of the U.N.’s failure. It simply lacks the vision, the motivation, the will and the power to enforce
its decisions! Thus it has progressed not one inch, since its inception, toward
its primary purpose of “[saving] succeeding generations from the scourge of
war.” In fact, in certain instances, it has been cynically used as a platform
upon which to further the prospects of that scourge.
No Justice
The impotence of United
Nations leaders to enforce U.N. resolutions has led to the organization
becoming a sounding board for the selfish goals of petty demagogues and tin-pot
nations that realize they can hold the chief human benefactors of mankind, the
English-speaking peoples, to ransom and work overtly for the destruction of
their individual and collective power.
The cruel cynicism of European
nations working in concert with Third World nations has ousted Anglo-Americans
from key U.N. posts and committees. In 2002, the U.N. decided that the U.S. was
unfit to serve on the Human Rights Commission, replacing it with Sudan! A brief
look at Sudan’s record on human rights reveals it as one of the world’s prime
offenders in this arena. Then this year, the U.N. managed to vote 33 to 3 in
favor of electing the terrorist-subsidizing nation of Libya to chair its Human
Rights Commission!
Such actions by this
pretentious world body do not just render it an abject failure, but leave it a
sad laughingstock to anyone with common sense.
To add to its sins, at a time
when (despite all the liberal-socialist media and political comment to the
contrary) the cia, mi5 (UK intelligence agency) and bnd (German secret service) all possess
ample proof of Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of biological warfare and
mass destruction, the U.N. has elected Iraq
to chair its disarmament committee!
But why worry? What does it
matter? If all the U.N. is capable of is passing ineffective resolutions with
no intent whatever of backing up their implementation, what does it matter
whether it be Iraq, Saudi Arabia or outer Mongolia chairing these committees?
After all, the U.N. has passed 17 resolutions over the past 12 years demanding
the disarmament of Iraq, and had the current U.S. president not had the courage
to step out and quell Saddam’s crazy cruelty, who knows where it all may have
ended.
What is more, there exists no
world body to hold the U.N. to account. So this toothless tiger, this moribund
mass of self-congratulatory, cynical fat cats representing the world’s
aspirations for peace, continues on as not more than a gravy train for the world’s
diplomatic corps, fiddling away while the world burns in the brushfires of
local wars that soon will join in the greatest of conflagrations ever witnessed
by man!
A Providence Journal-Bulletin (Providence, R.I.) editorial that
described the U.N. Security Council as a “hypocritical and ineffectual debating
society,” commented, “We hope that some way might be found to make the United
Nations … much more effective in dealing with its original core mission—protecting world security …. If such
repairs aren’t made, the United Nations will go the way of the League of
Nations, whose failure to deal seriously with fascist aggression paved the way
for World War ii” (March 18).
That’s a scary statement.
Scary—but real, oh so real! And this is not just an isolated view.
Here is international security
affairs analyst Stephen Blank’s view: “[T]he U.N.’s role (or lack of a role) in
the Korean crisis indicates its
essential uselessness at keeping the peace either there or in Iraq. …
“Thus the U.N. validates
Winston Churchill’s observation that each of the appeasers of the 1930s sought
to appease Adolf Hitler and the other dictators in the hope that others would
be eaten before their turn came up. …
“If appeasement of those who
would rip apart international security continues, something will indeed turn
up, but it will not be peace” (Asia Times, Feb. 14).
This astute critic compares
the time we are in now to the great time of appeasement in the 1930s that led
to the world’s greatest war. Like its old progenitor, the failed League of
Nations, the U.N. has been constantly tested and challenged by petty tyrants,
with the same results. In respect of Iraq and North Korea, Blank comments,
“Certainly it is obvious to any unbiased observer that the U.N. is utterly
unwilling and unable to confront either of these aggressors of its own accord
so it is a useless reed insofar as the
defense of peace is concerned” (ibid.).
World’s Last
Chance
“I attended the San Francisco
Conference in 1945, where world leaders attempted to form a world organization
of nations. They called it ‘The United Nations.’ There I heard chiefs of state
ring out the warning that this was the world’s last chance.
“But it has failed. The United
Nations has no power over the nations. It has no power to settle disputes, stop
wars or prevent wars. The so-called United Nations are not united. This effort
has degenerated into a sounding board for Communist propaganda. Man has failed
his last chance!
“Now God must step in—or we
perish!”
Such was the summation of
renowned religious leader Herbert Armstrong when reflecting on mankind’s best
efforts to obtain world peace. In the final year of his life, Mr. Armstrong, an
unofficial ambassador for world peace who visited more world leaders in the
decades of the 1970s and ’80s than any other person, was present at the 40th
anniversary celebrations of the United Nations. He was one of the only four in
attendance on that occasion who had personally witnessed the founding of the
U.N. in San Francisco in June 1945. This wise, articulate and visionary apostle
of God looked beyond the inevitability of the failure of the U.N. to a far
better age: “This 40th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations may
trigger events to bring on the world’s last colossal world violence and
trouble, and usher in at last, after 6,000 years of human trial and error and
woes and sufferings, a united one world,
and world peace at last—a world truly to be built by the Lord Eternal” (Plain Truth, October 1985).
We are 17 years on beyond that
40th anniversary of the U.N. It has passed its 50th anniversary. Looking back,
we would have to admit that the intervening time has witnessed some of the most
dramatic of U.N. failures.
“Except the Lord
Build the House”
In the north garden area of
the United Nations building in New York City rests a sculpture by Russian
artist Evgeniy Vuchetich called “Let Us Beat Swords Into Plowshares,” a gift
from the then-Soviet Union presented in 1959. The bronze statue, based on the
age-old message of Isaiah 2:4, depicts a man forging a sword into a plowshare,
representing mankind’s desire to utilize the materials and energy once used for
war for the purpose of benefiting all men.
Worldly governments have
constructed a towering building to house a world organization to produce and
preserve peace. But there is an underlying reason why this structure can never
succeed.
Christ said, “Every plant,
which my heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up” (Matt. 15:13).
Think about it: God did not
build the U.N. These world leaders have not
sought His guidance. Their meetings are not
opened by prayer to Almighty God, but by a moment of silence. (Prayer might offend some of the atheistic members.)
God has not planted this
organization. It shall, therefore, be
rooted up. All human efforts to prevent World War iii, apart from God, will prove futile.
A little over 4,000 years ago,
men organized to build a high tower
to coordinate world domination. God intervened and broke up their building
(Gen. 10:8-11; 11:1-9). At the end of this “last hour” of human rule on Earth,
God will have to intervene, with force, to save man from the horrifying end to
which his failed attempts at world government would ultimately bring him (Matt.
24:21-22).
The U.N. was doomed from its
genesis because it left God out of its
plans.
This is the bottom line: No
man or organization built by man can ultimately bring about peace. Only man’s
Creator can and will! That is
the reason the U.N. is sinking into “irrelevance.”
The good news is that following the ultimate disintegration of the United Nations—which has failed dramatically to guarantee global peace—the united family of God is destined to impose, under the King of kings, Jesus Christ, a NEW WORLD GOVERNMENT AND PEACE AT LAST.
WHY I AM NOT A DISPENSATIONALIST; John Nelson Darby is recognized as the father of dispensationalism later made popular in the United States by Cyrus Scofield's Scofield Reference Bible. Charles Henry Mackintosh, 1820–1896, with his popular style spread Darby's teachings to humbler elements in society and may be regarded as the journalist of the Brethren Movement. CHM popularised Darby more than any other Brethren author. As there was no Christian teaching of a “rapture” before Darby began preaching about it in the 1830s, he is sometimes credited with originating the "secret rapture" theory wherein Christ will suddenly remove His bride, the Church, from this world before the judgments of the tribulation. Dispensationalist beliefs about the fate of the Jews and the re-establishment of the Kingdom of Israel put dispensationalists at the forefront of Christian Zionism, because "God is able to graft them in again," and they believe that in His grace he will do so according to their understanding of Old Testament prophecy. They believe that, while the methodologies of God may change, His purposes to bless Israel will never be forgotten, just as He has shown unmerited favour to the Church, He will do so to a remnant of Israel to fulfill all the promises made to the genetic seed of Abraham. I am not a dispensationalist; it is unbiblical and thoroughly evil.
No comments:
Post a Comment