Religious fanaticism vs tainted principles

We have seen, openmouthed, a new attack to the freedom of speech. Its result? Not only the death of 12 people who loved freedom, in a country where freedom is in its DNA. But also, an aimed shot to tolerance and plurality.

My thoughts fly to a reality unknown by many. A reality with no easy solution, without magical recipes or remedies available to governments, policies, or good intentions.

I think that it is a mistake to lay out this debate from a political perspective. But it looks like for the governments and the society there seems not to be another answer.

We all know that the European governments invested thousands of millions of Euros, years of work, and they gave in some of its ancestral liberties, to achieve integration for the numerous immigrants they have received along the way.

But many clear evidences show that those integration policies did not succeed nor the multicultural and mediation policies.

I believe and I am convinced, as many others, that we are living a war. It is not a battle between the brutality of the sixth century and the democracies of the 21st century. Not between the weak and the strong, not between empires and vassals, but a fight between tainted principles and religious fanaticism.

Both corrupted, both mistaken, both destructive.

Looking at all this, is there an answer that could bring peace? Yes, but it is painful one and will require courage.

What I mean is that the answer involves weakness and an apparent failure. The quest for the answer makes us raise our heads and fix our eyes on a bloody Cross in a mountain called Golgotha. Only there we can find the peace that the world needs. 

For Muslims, the peace is found in the victory of the honor over the shame. For the Western world, peace means the absence of conflict. For the Creator, peace is not a victory or an absence, the Peace is Jesus Christ, the Messiah.

This peace is not a subjective feeling or a quiet state. Achieving this Peace will require to turn our head to that cross and to give the most valuable human treasure: our own lives, so that the values and principles of this new kingdom will give us a commitment for peace.

And it is here where the Church, the real Church appears. Not the one that rises for proclamations and declarations but the one that, with courage and the fullness of the Spirit, boldly confesses that the only answer that can overcome the battle between tainted principles and religious fanaticism is the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

All the power of the Islamic fanaticism, or the blindness and deafness of the Western Christian world, cannot be compared with the power of Christ.

In response to what we have lived in France these days, the growing advance of the bloody Islamic State and a blind and lost society that does not find its balance, the Church of Christ, his people, cleaned by the precious blood of Christ, arise to fearlessly say: “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth!“

Isaiah 45:22

Miguel Juez is an evangelical pastor with Syrian roots. He lives in Barcelona (Spain) and works among muslim inmigrants. Juez  created, with other evangelical leaders, the CREMAS group (Maghrebi Christians). He is also a member of PMI.