Elisabeth Elliot: Our God is righteous. He is just. He is reasonable. But He doesn't necessarily give you and me His reasons.

Lisa Barry: And isn't that just what we're seeking from God most of the time? We want answers. We want to know what in the world He was thinking of when He let this and that happen. As we'll find out today, sometimes we get the answer we're looking for. But more often than not, we don't. How are we going to deal with God's silence? Be angry? Elisabeth Elliot talks about that next as we begin this Friday edition of Gateway To Joy.

Elisabeth Elliot: "You are loved with an everlasting love." That's what the Bible says. "And underneath are the everlasting arms." This is your friend Elisabeth Elliot, concluding my talks today on the subject which certainly wouldn't be your first choice, I don't suppose, but it's the subject of anger. We have been talking about anger all this week-talking about how easy it is for us human beings, with our very, very limited vision, to get angry with God because He doesn't explain Himself.

As one old lady said, "Sometimes I don't understand God." Well, who in the world understands God? I love what Evelyn Underhill said. "If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped." That's true, isn't it? If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped.

There are times, however, when it is required of a true Christian to be angry. Remember Jesus tearing into the merchants in the temple? He calmly set about preparing their punishment. He made a whip and He used it. The Old Testament is full of God's anger with human beings. Our God is righteous. He is just. He is reasonable. But He doesn't necessarily give you and me His reasons.

But don't forget His love. Even as He hung on the cross, He prayed for His captors. Merciful High Priest He was, touched with the feeling of our infirmities, able to sympathize with our weakness. But there's also a time for anger.

I have here a column by George Will, which really grabbed me and I thought, "We need to think about this." It's entitled: "It's a Choice: A Wicked One." George Will is a member of the WASHINGTON POST writers' group. This is what he said.

"'The Unforgiven' by Metallica was the song 18-year-old Melissa Drexler asked the disc jockey at her New Jersey prom to play when she returned to the dance floor. She had just tossed her six-pound, six-ounce baby boy into a trash bin next to the blood-stained stall in the restroom where she had given birth.

Metallica's song begins, 'New blood joins the earth and quickly he is subdued.' It's just another song of adolescent self-pity, the not altogether intelligible gist of which is the usual of that genre. Society, the unforgiven, is oppressive, subduing the new blood of youth. But the society that helped shaped Miss Drexler, the 18-year-old girl who dumped her baby into the trash bin, that society seems not to have inhibited her noticeably. She seemed to be enjoying herself, said a friend about Drexler's post-partum dancing.

Medical examiners have determined that the baby was alive during the birthing process, which occurred early in the prom. He was soon discovered by a maintenance worker, who thought the trash bag was unusually heavy. Unsuccessful attempts were made to resuscitate him. Miss Drexler will be charged with something. Maybe murder. Maybe endangering a child. Maybe conducting a partial-birth abortion at a prom without a license.

Who taught Melissa Drexler to think or not think in a way that caused her to regard her newborn baby as disposable trash? Many people and things, no doubt. She has grown up in a society that does not stress deferral of gratification. It's not her fault that the baby arrived during the school prom, for Pete's sake. She has come of age in a society where condom-dispensing schools teach sex education in the modern manner, which has been well described as plumbing for hedonists.

If she is like millions of other young adults, she has spent thousands of hours watching movies and television programs not designed to encourage delicacy of feelings or to suggest that sexuality has morally complex dimensions and serious consequences. If she is like millions of other young adults, she has pumped into her ears thousands of hours of the coarsening lyrics of popular music.

She certainly has grown up in a social atmosphere saturated with journalistic approbation of, and collaboration with, the political program of reducing abortion, which is the killing of something, to a mere choice, like choosing to smoke a cigarette, only not nearly as serious.

However, foremost among the moral tutors who prepared Melissa to act as she did is the Supreme Court. By pretending in Roe versus Wade not to know when life begins, the court encouraged looking away from the stark fact that abortion kills something. Ignoring elementary science, the court said preposterously that a fetus is 'potential life.'

But as Walker Percy, an M.D. as well as a novelist wrote, 'It is commonplace of modern biology that a life begins when the chromosomes of the sperm fuse with the chromosomes of the ovum to form a new DNA complex that thenceforth directs the ontogenesis of the organism.'" In other words, when the man comes together with the woman and the egg and is fertilized, this forms a new program into that human being that is being created in the womb.

"Percy continues, 'The onset of individual life is not a dogma of the church, but a fact of science. How much more convenient if we lived in the 13^th century, when no one knew anything about microbiology and arguments about the onset of life were legitimate? Biology does not allow one to be agnostic about when life begins.'

Conscientious people can disagree about the appropriate moral and legal status to be accorded the life that abortion ends, but science complicates, to say no more, the pro-choice movement's project of making the world safe for the likes of Melissa Drexler--the project of presenting the ending of an inconvenient young life as akin to a bowel movement. Pregnancy is a continuum. What begins at conception will, if there is no natural misfortune or deliberate attack, become a child. If it becomes a child at a prom, it must be attacked quickly, lest the whole night be a bummer.

The barbarism at the prom is being termed a tragedy, calling for compassion all around." Here I think George Will has very clear insight for us. I'll read that sentence again. "The barbarism at the prom is being termed a tragedy, calling for compassion all around. No. An earthquake is a tragedy. This was an act of wickedness, a wicked choice. A society incapable of anger about it is simply decadent." A society incapable of anger about it is simply decadent.

"Perhaps the brevity and brutality of the life of Melissa's son will accelerate the transformation of the nation's vague unrest into a vivid consciousness that today's abortion culture, with its casual creation and destruction of life, is evil."

I remind you again of George Will's title to this column: "It is a Choice, a Wicked One." The difference between a tragedy and a choice. We live in a decadent society. The word means deteriorating, decaying, declining, in intellectual, aesthetic and moral qualities.

"Instead of righteous anger and outrage, there is a bland acceptance. We shrug. We say, 'They're only kids,' until of course the evil touches us. Moral evil in high places is tolerated here in America. Police dishonesty is winked at. Many who ought to be in prison are not, and some who are innocent are still in. The language deteriorates continually, calling wickedness 'tragedy' and failing to recognize the vast difference."

There is a time to be angry and there is a time to refrain from anger. Heavenly Father, have mercy on our country. "O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain, America, America, God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea."

Open our eyes, Lord, to the wickedness. Give us that divine anger and help us to do whatever You show us that we can do to stem this tide. We pray in Jesus' name.

Lisa Barry: And with that, we bring today's program to a close. If you'd like a taped copy of this one-week series, you can purchase that through Gateway To Joy. We also have a beautiful calendar just for 1998 that you'll be proud to hang in your home. So for information on how to purchase either of the items I just mentioned, feel free to give us a call here at this number: 1-800-759-4JOY. That's 1-800-759-4569. Or you can write to us at Gateway To Joy, Box 82500, Lincoln, Nebraska, 68501. Our Internet ministry address is gatewaytojoy.org. This week's devotionals on the Web feature excerpts from Elisabeth Elliot's book, LOVE HAS A PRICE TAG. Gateway To Joy has been a production of Back to the Bible.

Monday Elisabeth begins a brand-new series, so be sure and join us then for another Gateway To Joy.