We live in a pretty remarkable time. The smoke hadn't even cleared from the wreckage following a plane crash into a building in Austin, Texas when a suicide note from a very disturbed American was posted online for all the world to read.
I read Joe Stack's last thoughts this afternoon and was almost troubled to find myself in near 100% agreement with him. I, too, have been upset with my government for many years. Back in the late 1980s, after I quit a job working for defense contractor General Dynamics, I wrote a letter to the Joint Chiefs of Staff chronicling for them the abuses I had seen as a union CAD draftsman at their facility in Sterling Heights, Michigan. And as far as the Internal Revenue Service goes, what American hasn't been both totally perplexed and completely ticked off at that organization?
Here is the introductory paragraph in Joe Stack's suicide note:
"If you're reading this, you're no doubt asking yourself, "Why did this have to happen?" The simple truth is that it is complicated and has been coming for a long time. The looming realization that there isn't enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken. Needless to say, this rant could fill volumes with example after example if I would let it. I find the process of writing it frustrating, tedious, and probably pointless...especially given my gross inability to gracefully articulate my thoughts in light of the storm raging in my head. Exactly what is therapeutic about that I'm not sure, but desperate times call for desperate measures."
The similarities between the thoughts and background of Joe Stack and my own are pretty remarkable. He evidently knew how to fly an airplane and I successfully completed my FAA written examination back in 1985 while a student at Michigan Technological University in their electrical engineering program. I never completed my time in an aircraft to actually get a pilot's license, but since I was a kid I've been fascinated by anything that flies in the sky. And if you've read anything I've written over the past 15 or 20 years you know I'm no friend of big, intrusive government and the horrible bureaucracies which do its bidding.
So what's the difference between Joe Stack and me? While attending Michigan Tech in 1984-85, I came to faith in Jesus Christ. I honestly believe that without Christ I could very easily find myself tempted to do something similar to what Joe did today - fly a plane into a building housing offices of the Internal Revenue Service. You can't very well be obedient to the Lord's words in Matthew 22 while killing people simply going about their business: "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'
I had to dig a bit for the following guidance. I found it in the back of our church's Psalter Hymnal under Form Number 1 of the Lord's Supper and I think it applies to what transpired today:
"Wherefore we also, according to the command of Christ and of the apostle Paul, admonish all who know themselves to be defiled with the following gross sins to abstain from the table of the Lord, and declare to them that they have no part in the kingdom of Christ: such as, all idolaters; all who invoke deceased saints, angels, or other creatures; all who show honor to images; all who resort to or confide in sorcery, fortune-telling, charms, or other forms of superstition; all despisers of God, of His Word, and of the holy sacraments; all blasphemers; all who seek to raise discord, sects, and mutiny in Church or State;..."
I can see myself becoming one who would love to raise some discord and even a little mutiny in the state, but God's Word constrains me. This Great Tribulation we live in is hard on all of us, but it doesn't give us the right to kill or injure others as an expression of our outrage. Ultimately, when you come to realize, as I have, that everything happens according to His will, you learn that rebellion or outbursts against God-given authority are, in the end, rebellion against God himself.
Today Joseph Stack presented himself uninvited before God. His tax problems probably seem quite small to him now.
R.J.
