‘God Allows Terrorists to Strike,’ Says Billy Graham’s Daughter
Because we have turned our faces from God and our attention to superficial and often sinful pursuits, He has removed his protective covering and allows acts of terror and mass murder to occur, according to evangelist and author Anne Graham Lotz. Most of Americans only cry out to God in the event of a tragedy such as 9/11 or Wednesday’s mass murder at a Charleston, South Carolina, church, ignoring Him and His ways the rest of the time.
“In the days of Noah, they were eating, drinking, getting married. There is nothing wrong with any of that. All of those are normal everyday activities. But in Noah’s day they did it all apart from God,” Lotz said on Jan Markell’s Understanding End Times radio program. “There was no acknowledgment of God. God was irrelevant to them. … I think that is where we are today.”
Preoccupied as our culture is with celebrities, entertainment and media-fueled controversies, we neglect to give God the attention He deserves, she argues.
“I look at some of the things that we get preoccupied with, whether it’s an entertainer or whose baby they are having, or on the red carpet, or footballs being deflated by a quarterback. We zero in on those things and talk about them and we have no idea that we are on the edge of the whole world collapsing around us,” Lotz said. “That is the strongest similarity of the days of Noah and our day.
“Today, we are consumed by superficial things. Some of the areas of the world they are not. If you go to Syria or Iraq, those Christians over there, I will guarantee you, are very focused,” Lotz continued. “In America, we are just neglecting God and ignoring Him. I just saw a piece about the rise of atheism, people walking away from the church. In fact, the Christian church is declining, according to Pew Research.”
Lotz argues that when He allows tragedies to happen, particularly ones large enough that they resonate on a national scale, He is using those events to call us back to Him.
“That is why God sends us wake-up calls. That’s why he allows the terrorists to strike or a tornado to rip through our city, because for whatever reason, we don’t seem to give Him our attention until we are desperate,” Lotz contended. “If we don’t give Him our attention, then He is going to allow things to happen to make us more and more desperate until we do cry out.”
But time may be running out for us to heed His wake-up calls. Lotz thinks America’s stance on three key issues may be about to push us past the point of no return: the pending Supreme Court decision on whether gay marriage is a constitutional right, our government’s increasing abandonment of Israel, and the rise of abortion.
“Those three reasons alone would demand that God judge America. We can point our fingers at them,” Lotz said. “Judgment starts at the house of God and we need to get our house in order. We need ourselves to get right with God and repent of our sins.”
Change, she says, also starts with the church, and that by faithfully praying and sharing the gospel, we may enable our neighbors to be “double saved,” both from God’s judgment upon our nation and from His eternal wrath in the afterlife.
“We share the gospel because people whom we lead to Christ right now, it’s almost like we save them twice,” she said. “We save them from an earthly hell that is coming during the tribulation period, which I think we are very close to, and we save them from eternal hell, which is when you step into eternity. The second death is the worst of all when you are separated from God forever.”
