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RAISED BY A KALASHNIKOV AK-47

“Don’t talk to me about God being a Father,” some people say bitterly. “My dad was terrible; he abused me for eight years. He failed me completely.” How painfully true - and yet, the fact it was terrible proves that you do comprehend what SHOULD have been, the ideal he failed to reach for you.

Is it possible for a Christian to understand the spiritual concept of “God as father” if their own father was always drunk, or delinquent . . . or even absent? Many disappointed dropouts say no. “Don’t talk to me about God as a father,” they bitterly respond when approached. “If God is like a father, then I don’t want to have anything to do with Him.”

Back in November, 2001, there was a story in TIME magazine about an Afghan fighter named Mukhtar. “He’s the best soldier I’ve ever commanded,” said his platoon leader, and the infantryman just shrugged. “I have been in the army for a long time,” he responded. “So I should be good at my job.” And TIME correspondent Hannah Beech Farkhar writes:

“Indeed, Mukhtar is a four-year veteran of Afghanistan’s draining desert war. BUT HE IS ONLY 15 YEARS OLD.”

So you do the math. This kid had been soldiering in the jagged terrain of Afghanistan, crawling through caves and eating dust since he was an 11-year-old boy. It was perfectly normal to see boys that age skipping along down a street with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, also known as a Soviet-made AK-47, capable of firing 600 rounds per minute, capable of hitting a target at 300 meters, capable of launching a grenade. The one thing it wasn’t capable of was bringing back a kid’s dad. This Mukhtar lost his parents when he was ten; both were killed by Taliban rockets while he was out getting water from a stream. He got home and found his mom dead, his dad dead, three brothers, both sisters, and even the family camel killed. The only thing still alive was their dog, which was bleeding and coughing up blood. Mukhtar took his father’s rusty rifle and put the animal out of its misery; three months later he joined the Northern Alliance and learned how to use a real gun, the legendary Kalashnikov.

“My life is dedicated to killing the Taliban,” he said. “I will spend the rest of my life finding the people who killed my family.”

Kids also joined the moujahedeen — 10 years old, 11, 13 — in order to keep their stomachs full. Over on the Taliban side, it was the same.

“Taken from their homes before their teens,” TIME magazine reports, “these kids are steeped in battle tactics and religious fanaticism. War orphans are especially prized by the Taliban because they have no home to which they can escape. . . . The Taliban insists the extreme measures of jihad require extreme schooling. ‘Children are innocent, so they are the best tools against dark forces,’ says a Pakistani Taliban fighter.”

Well, friend, it’s a sad, sad tale, and of course, it’s a story that spins itself out over and over again. The Los Angeles Times told of a 17-year-old named Mohammed Din Babamir who was forced to fight with the Taliban. When his commanding officer defected to the Northern Alliance, he was then forced to switch over and fight AGAINST the Taliban. Reporter Paul Watson concludes:

“An Afghan soldier knows it is safer to point his weapon at whichever enemy his commander may choose. So Babamir rolled up his sleeping bag, picked up his Kalashnikov rifle and headed to the next front in a country that has been at war LONGER THAN HE HAS BEEN ALIVE.”

And if you were to sit down with these kids, open up the Bible to them and carefully explain that the God of the Christian faith is like a Father, that the religion of Jesus Christ is all about adoption into a heavenly family, how in the world could they ever comprehend it? Father? Adoption? Home? Since early childhood, these words have had almost no meaning. Thousands of these smooth-faced children were lurking in crevices, avoiding land mines, and trying to avenge the death of a dad they could scarcely remember. How could they comprehend the deep and rich meaning of I John 3:1?

“How great is the love the FATHER has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!”

We’ve adopted as a kind of second textbook this week the great Christian bestseller, Knowing God, by J. I. Packer. This chapter 19, “Sons of God,” is built entirely around the biblical motif of “adoption,” and one would think that fatherless and abused people everywhere would simply check out of the study right there. By this writer’s admission, the concept of “Father” and “adoption” are absolutely central to the faith; in fact, as we mentioned yesterday, if you can’t grasp adoption, you can’t really understand Christianity itself.

“‘Since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place BY THE BLOOD OF JESUS,’” Packer quotes for us from Hebrews 10, “‘by a new and living way OPENED FOR US . . . let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith.’” Then he adds: “To those who are Christ’s, the holy God is a loving Father; they belong to His family; they may approach Him without fear and always be sure of his fatherly concern and care. This is the HEART of the New Testament message.”

And how can those whose hard life in the moujehedeen has robbed them of a father even fathom this? Packer has a very interesting response. Here it is:

“I have heard it seriously argued,” he writes, “that the thought of divine fatherhood can mean nothing to those whose human father was inadequate, lacking wisdom, affection or both.”

That’s exactly the kind of hurting person we’re talking about here. “Dad was gone; he was never there for me. Don’t tell me God is like a heavenly father.” You would think that particular evangelistic tactic could never work. However, Packer wades right into it.

“But this is silly,” he continues. “Many young people get married with a resolve not to make the mess of marriage that they saw their parents make: can this not be a positive ideal? Of course it can. Similarly, the thought of our Maker becoming our perfect parent — faithful in love and care, generous and thoughtful, interested in all we do, respecting our individuality, skillful at training us, wise in guidance, always available, helping us to find ourselves in maturity, integrity and uprightness — is a thought which can have meaning for EVERYBODY, whether we come to it by saying, ‘I had a wonderful father, and I see that God is like that, only more so,’ or by saying, ‘My father disappointed me here, and here, and here, but God, praise His name, will be very different,’ or even by saying, ‘I have never known what it is to have a father on earth, but thank God I now have one in heaven.’ The truth is that all of us have a positive ideal of fatherhood by which we judge our own and others’ fathers, and it can safely be said that the person for whom the thought of God’s perfect fatherhood is meaningless or repellent does not exist.”

I suppose there were half-starved boys in the scarred outskirts of Mazar-I-Sharif who shot at the enemy only because the army fed them. “This is a very good life,” said a prepubescent kid named Safaullah. “I can eat good rice, play chess with my friends and fire many interesting weapons.” Once in a great while the army even remembered to pay him his $25 a month. Yes, there are soldiers like that. But most of these teenaged commandos had, at least in the back of their mind, a preserved memory of what was taken from them. In a better world, there should be a home where they can live and be safe; there should be three meals; there should be a school they can attend. And when the sun goes down and the cold night air blows through Afghanistan, there should be a mom and a dad in that home to keep them warm, to love and nurture and train and protect. That’s what there SHOULD be, and the reality that they didn’t have it doesn’t mean that the ideal, the dream, is forever erased from their minds.

How is it for you right now, friend? We hear from many of you, and a good number of our Voice of Prophecy listeners did not have a successful relationship with Dad. But every letter that cries out about pain seems to also indicate that the writer knows what he or she is missing. That things are not as they should be. Well, that right there is the promise of Christianity. God offers to be our Father. Our ever-present, always loving, faithfully providing Father. We just keep going, over and over, to the wonderful promise of Isaiah 43:1:

“This is what the Lord says, the One who created you . . . ‘Don’t be afraid. I have redeemed you. I have named you. You are Mine.’”

Is this something we could interest you in? I have good news for you. It’s available right now. Adoption in today’s judicial courts can drag on for months. With God, it can happen before we say goodbye to you in about three minutes. In the war-torn battlefields of the world today, dads are killed and cannot be brought back. God offers to be a Father who will never leave or forsake you. In homes all around the world, fathers stay for a while and then, when an attractive whiff of perfume blows into the room, they follow it to more romantic pastures. In God’s family, you can know that Father will never find someone He loves more than you. Never.