Everything I Do Is Somebody Else’s Fault
For centuries The Day of Atonement was a major holiday in Israel. Every year on the Day of Atonement, the High Priest would take two male goats; one goat he would kill and offer up on the altar to cover the sins of the people for a year And the second goat, after he laid hands on it and confessed the sins of the people to God, he released into the wilderness, symbolical of God never remembering the past year’s sins again. (See Leviticus 16, celebrated six months after the Passover)
This Second Goat We Have Called the “Scapegoat”
To scapegoat means to take punishment out on an innocent party. That is what is happening in Egypt right now; Coptic christians and Evangelical christians (app. 250,000) are being singled out as the scapegoat by the Muslim Brotherhood for their internal problems. With somewhere between 10-15 million (in a country of 85 million), Egypt has the largest Christian population of any Middle Eastern country – for now.
The crazy thing is that the pushback against the government of Mohammad Morsi, the elected president of Egypt until early July, came not just from Christians—but also middle class youth, political liberals, and secular Muslims—all of whom opposed the leader’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and his imposing a strict Islamist regime.
Not since the fourteenth century has such mayhem ripped through the land of the Nile. So why the rebel-martyr cries of millions of Egyptians? “We will sacrifice ourselves, our souls and our blood, for president Morsi,”
The uncomfortable truth is that the Muslim Brotherhood blames Christians for ousting Morsi, and thus anti-Islamic.
That is why Christians are gone into hiding; they are like sheep without a shepherd, they are huddling in their homes, afraid to walk down the streets, frightened to attend worship services lest a bomb be thrown through the church door killing them as they stand to pray.
A ten-year-old girl was gunned down as she was walking home from her Bible study class. It is like living in a pogrom as Christians are being scapegoated for Morsi’s fall.
The numbers keep changing but estimates say that some 100 orphanages, schools, book stores, etc. have been destroyed.
The Muslim Brotherhood is an international Islamic terrorist organization that was founded in Egypt in 1928, whose bloody footprints reach into many countries. Its objective is to turn the Middle East into a caliphate, a Muslim theocracy, under sharia law as it existed back in the 7th century.
Their creed best explains them: “Allah is our objective. The Koran is our law. The Prophet is our leader. Jihad is our way, and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations.” No wonder the Egyptian Christians are feeling their wrath.
Pray for the Christians in Egypt as they are being scapegoated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Best Is Yet To Be!
Pastor Bryant