December 7, 2014|10:37 am

In 73 years (I was born December 5, 1941, two days before Pearl Harbor) I have never seen the world situation more volatile.

The Pearl Harbor attack is loaded with personal as well as geopolitical lessons. To learn them is to make oneself less vulnerable to the adversary's surprise attacks. Here are a few:

1The spiritual is everything.

As discussed in Part 1, Pre-Pearl Harbor Japanese culture was a blending (syncretism) of the Samurai spirit made sacred through Shintoism and the Zen Buddhism of that period. However, all cultures even atheistic ones ultimately arise from and try to sustain themselves through mystical spirituality.

Marxism embraced the Hegelian idea that history was being guided to the "paradise" of pure Communism. Mao and his Red Book became the spirituality of the destructive Red Guard Movement in the late 1960s. Crowds lined up in bitter cold to see the embalmed remains of their gods Lenin and (for a while) Stalin in Red Square. North Koreans pray to the founder of their atheistic state, sanction marriages, and lay flowers at the base of his statues. Goebbels dressed Hitler rallies in mystical spectacle.

Even professed Christians are sometimes guilty. Some pastors in the American slavery era tried to get biblical sanction for the hideous institution that saw fellow human beings made in the image of God as chattel.

Sociologists Pitirim Sorokin and Samuel Huntington, as well as historians like Will Durant, David Aikman, and even Edward Gibbon (in a back-handed way) have demonstrated the primacy of the spiritual in the development and behaviors of civilizations.

The Bible, however, gives us not mere theory, but literal truth, when it says, in Ephesians 6:12, "We are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places..." (NLT)

The ultimate enemy in the Second World War was not the Japanese Samurai warriors or the German Nazis, and is not now Islamic terrorists, would-be global tyrants, young black men, white policemen, illegal immigrants, Barack Obama, House Republicans, or any other individuals or groups varying partisans see as villainous.

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Pearl Harbor: 4 Spiritual Lessons We Can Apply Personally (Pt. 2)