Unless The Lord Guards The City

It’s been a tough few days for the Transportation Security Administration.  First we learned about auditors slipping mock explosives and weapons past TSA checkpoints 67 out of the 70 times they made the attempt.  That’s a 95% failure rate in an area that should have zero failures.

 

In 2004, testifying before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Condoleezza Rice said, “Those charged with protecting us from attack have to be right 100 percent of the time.  To inflict devastation on a massive scale, the terrorists only have to succeed once.”

 

In other words, even a 1% failure rate could be catastrophic. The TSA failure rate is 95%!

 

But it gets worse.  This week, John Roth, the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, told a congressional committee that his office found 73 airport workers whose names were listed in a federal database of possible terrorists.

 

“TSA acknowledged that these individuals were cleared for access to secure airport areas despite representing a potential security threat,” Roth testified.

 

Have you traveled by air much recently?  TSA still knows how to make the lives of travelers miserable.  They still bully too many disabled children.  They still pull elderly women out of line for extra scrutiny.  Yet they allow people known to the government as possible terrorists to work at the airport with full access to secure areas.

 

How does this happen?

 

Psalms 127:1 explains it simply.  “Unless the Lord builds the house, They labor in vain who build it; Unless the Lord guards the city, The watchman keeps awake in vain.”

 

God keeps giving America warnings.  He’s telling us that without Him, our systems of defense will fail.  But America refuses to pay attention.  We glibly go our way as if pleasure were the ultimate purpose in life.  Heedless of God, we rush forward “as a bird hasteth to the snare, and knoweth not that it is for his life.”  [Proverbs 7:23 KJV]

 

Even though good jobs are hard to find, police departments around the country are having more and more difficulty finding qualified recruits.  One of the main reasons is that they want officers who have never used marijuana or other illegal drugs.  Writing for the International Association of Chiefs of Police, Lieutenant Wade Derby of Pittsburg, California said, “Now more than ever, agencies are being forced to take a hard look at the idea of modifying prehire drug use standards to ensure enough candidates to fill vacancies.”