For behold, YHWH will go froth from His place, to punish the iniquity of the inhabitants of the earth, and the earth shall disclose the blood shed upon her, and shall no longer cover up her slain. Isaiah 26:21

Cover Up – It will be a day of terrible consequence.  It will be a day of monstrous revelations.  It will be a day soaked in blood.  The day that God uncovers all the ones slain because of unholiness on the earth.

A brief summary may be in order.  Between 1490 and 1890, conquerors in the Americas exterminated as many as 10 million natives.  The mass extermination of the American Indians ranks among the world’s greatest genocides.  South American exterminations may have been worse.  The French Revolution killed perhaps as many as 400,000 people.  The Philippine-American War (1899-1902) slaughtered between 200,000 to 600,000 Filipinos.  The Germans exterminated 80 percent of the Herero population in Southwest Africa between 1902 and 1907.  The Russian Tsars killed at least 400,000 Circassians.  Chinese dynasties were responsible for more than 500,000 deaths before 1911.  The Ottoman Empire (Turkey) slaughtered as many as 2 million Armenians, 750,000 Assyrians and 70,000 Kurds.  The Soviet Union slaughtered probably as many as 10 million, not including another 6 to 10 million who died from the results of terror campaigns.  We think of Hitler’s extermination of 7 million Jews, but Nazi Germany killed another 10 million Slavs, Romanians, mentally ill and “sexual deviants.”  Muslims in India killed as many as 1 million Sikhs and Hindus after Britain left.  The French killed at least 1.5 million in Algeria.  The Bangladesh War of 1971 slaughtered at least 1.5 million.  Rwanda counts 800,000 dead.  Pol Pot adds another 1.7 million.  The list goes on, even today.  Can anyone doubt that Man is worse than an animal?

As unsettling as these grim statistics are, they do not compare with the 50 million infants killed before birth in the United States alone.   Now whose streets will be covered in blood, whose hand will drip from the sacrifices to convenience?  The news carries headlines of  5,661 U S soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but every day 115,000 abortions terminate the lives of the innocent.  42 million a year around the world.  Where are the priorities?  What does this say about the value of life in this world?  Who do you think God will vindicate?

Isaiah tells us that one day all will be revealed.  God will remove the false shield we have used to cover up our atrocities.  No kasah.  No concealing, no covering.  How many of the slain will rise to accuse their oppressors, their murders?  It is a day so tormenting to even imagine that one would believe it to be a nightmare.  But life on this earth is the nightmare, as we shall see when God wakes the dead.

Awash in blood, what shall we do?  Yes, what shall we do to stem the tide before that terrible day when the earth in uncovered?

“This is what the prophets discovered.  History is a nightmare.  There are more scandals, more acts of corruption, than are dreamed of in philosophy.  It would be blasphemous to believe that what we witness is the end of God’s creation.  It is an act of evil to accept the state of evil as either inevitable or final.  Others may be satisfied with improvement, the prophets insist on redemption.  The way of man is a disgrace, and it must not go on forever.”[1]

Topical Index:  cover up, kasah, conceal, genocide, abortion, Isaiah 26:21