Hell, no!

One of the saddest stories I've read in recent months is Dr. Norbert
Vollertsen's eyewitness account of life in North Korea, "A Prison
Country," published in the April 17 Wall Street Journal.

It is sad not only because of what Dr. Vollertsen, a German physician, reports of his 18 months working in North Korean hospitals. The dying children, the patriotic assemblies at 6 a.m., the pervasive hopelessness: "In patients' eyes I saw no life, only lassitude and a constant fear" of a "repressive apparatus [that] uncoils whenever there is criticism. The suffocation, by surveillance, shadowing, wiretapping and mail interception, is total."

All this is human tragedy -- but it is not the whole story.

While working in the most primitive medical conditions, hospitals where "there were no
bandages, scalpels, antibiotics or operation facilities, only broken beds
on which children lay waiting to die," Dr. Vollertsen came to regard
these conditions as somehow normal. The real story came later, when the
doctor visited his driver, who was in the hospital for an injury. "As was
my custom on hospital visits, I took bandages and antibiotics -- basics.
On this occasion, I was embarrassed to see that ... this (hospital) looked
as modern as any in Germany. It was equipped with the latest medical
apparatus, such as magnetic resonance imaging, ultrasound,
electrocardiograms and X-ray machines. There are two worlds in North
Korea, one for the senior military and the elite; and a living hell for
the rest."

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Humanitarian agencies have withdrawn from North Korea because they know
the game that is being played: Steak for the ruling elite -- and
starvation for the great, unwashed masses.

All resources, humanitarian or
otherwise -- are distributed by the government -- to maintain power.
Those with deficiencies -- physical, mental, political -- are left to
die. Near the end of his report, Dr. Vollertsen writes, "As a German, I
know too well the guilt of my grandparents' generation for its silence
under the Nazis. I feel it is my duty to expose this satanic regime,
which has deified 'Dear Leader' Kim Jong Il, just as it did his late
father."

Mark the words "satanic regime" and "deified" leader well. God does not
isolate any of us from the consequences of our actions -- being Christian
does not give any of us a free pass from the moral and spiritual laws of
the universe -- not us or the nation we live in. If anything, Christians
are likely to be held to a higher standard, because they know the truth.
The Apostle Paul, writing in Romans, describes it like this:

What happened was this: People knew God perfectly well, but when they
didn't treat him like God, refusing to worship him, they trivialized
themselves into silliness and confusion so that there was neither sense
nor direction left in their lives. They pretended to know it all, but
were illiterate regarding life. They traded the glory of God who holds
the whole world in his hands for cheap figurines you can buy at any
roadside stand. So God said, in effect, "If that's what you want, that's
what you get." It wasn't long before they were living in a pigpen,
smeared with filth, filthy inside and out (Romans 1:21-25, from "The
Message," by Eugene Peterson, NavPress).

If North Korea deifies its government leaders, what does America deify
today? Mother Earth, goddess worship, celebrities, the personal freedom
of abortion, alternative life- and sex-styles, satanic clergy in the
military? Or is it Wall Street, Mall Street, or our military strength?
Following eight years of a God-hostile administration that glorified its
own lusts, we may be further down the road Paul described, the one that
leads to the forgotten hell that Dr. Vollertsen has reported for ordinary
people living under a godless Dear Leader like Kim Jong Il -- where man
is the measure of all things -- and deified leaders have only their own
lust for power to hold themselves accountable for their treatment of
their citizens.

Man is infinitely creative, and we in the West are much more advanced
than North Korea. For that reason our own living hell -- a nation without
God and his laws, witness the Ten Commandment debate now raging -- will
look quite different. But the end result, as Dr. Vollertsen so well
describes: "The people can't help themselves. They are brainwashed, and
too afraid to be able to overthrow their rulers. That's the medical
diagnosis" -- the end effect of the disease will be the same; we will
lose all that we value.

Hell has many faces in this life: Perhaps ours will be beautiful on the
outside, a genetically "perfected" face, yet inside, devoid of human
conscience; such a replacement for the human family, with its longing
for God, may be more to Satan's liking. Technologically wise, are we also pretending "to know it all, but illiterate regarding life?" Has our
consumer paradise stopped Columbine from breeding like the bunnies we've
replaced Easter with in our public schools? Where does the dark
undercurrent live in your community?

As Paul warns, and as North Korea demonstrates, there will be no free
pass for any nation that trades the worship of the living God for idols
of its own making. In delivering the Ten Commandments and the more
extensive Jewish law, God told Moses, "This day I call heaven and earth
as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death,
blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may
live..." (Deut. 30:19).

As a Christian, I have no interest in mandating any religious faith for
the inhabitants of this American nation. But as an American, the
beneficiary of the Christian ideals and values that built Western
civilization -- with its individual freedoms that make us so different
from North Korea -- I have every interest in demanding that the moral and
cultural principles undergirding freedom and democracy remain a part of
our law and custom, and be taught in our public schools, so that our
children may choose life.

As Christians, we have a moral obligation to say to those who would destroy what God has given us, not only, "no," but if necessary, "hell, no!"