T'S THE NEW YEAR, BUT THE OLD ONE IS STILL VERY MUCH with us. This life will not be long enough to erase from our brains the searing images of September 11.

After Ash Tuesday—September 11—we have no words left. As writer Dan Fahrbach said in a reflection at the Church of the Advent Hope in Manhattan on the following Sabbath, we have used up all our big words on small things. Silence is unbearable, but speech is too weak. What happened was unspeakable.

But, as he also said, there are words from long ago that do speak. We turn to any page in the Bible and find meaning in stories and sayings we had never thought of.

So I turn to four passages of Scripture. In 40-plus years of preaching and writing I have never used these texts. These ancient words suggest four scenes that speak directly to the searing images that came out of New York and Washington on September 11.

It's the Ashes
In Genesis 18 we find Abraham talking with God, arguing that He should spare Sodom and Gomorrah, and he says, "I . . . am . . . dust and ashes" (verse 27).*

And on September 11 we watched in unbelief as our TV screens showed the South Tower crumble and collapse just before 10:00, then the North Tower about 30 minutes later. Here one moment, then gone. The distinctive New York skyline, so familiar, a landmark, especially at night with the World Trade Center lit up, suddenly changed. Before our eyes, a gap opened up where an hour before the twin 110-story buildings had been.

It was surreal, horrific, worse than any scary movie. We wanted to stop the video, press the rewind button, but there was no rewind button.

The images just before the astonishing collapse were even more wrenching. People trapped high above the street, with the fireball getting closer. Those faces looking out in terror, some people standing at broken windows looking down. And then, worst of all, a man trying to climb down the outside, making a little progress but then losing his hold; and the bodies flying through the air, one couple joining hands as they leaped to their death.

The editors of Time magazine rushed into print a special edition, with pictures and words right out of September 11. In it they described screams, and bodies crashing from the skies, and streets awash with blood.

We are dust and ashes. In a moment everything changed. "Before Tuesday, we all thought we were going to get richer and richer and we would all live forever," wrote historian Leo Ribuffo. But after Tuesday, getting richer, earning that promotion, traveling the world, no longer seem to matter.

With the trauma of Ash Tuesday and the ongoing anxiety over war and anthrax in its wake, we've been receiving all sorts of mail at the Adventist Review office. We get a lot of mail in normal times, but now it's as though people are so full of emotion that they just have to find a way to express it. Some of the mail is wild and irrational: unstable people become unglued at a time like this. But other materials are powerful. There's no way we can put all the worthwhile stuff into print, but one poem (we received many poems!) stood out: "It's the Ashes," by Martin Weber (see below).

Crain's Chicago Business, in a special issue on Ash Tuesday, described the dramatic changes in the world of business. "If anything, the terrorist attacks were the ugly finale to a gilded age for business. In their wake it's clear that the drivers of the great bull market of the 1990s—profits and productivity—must now take a back seat to people, security, and . . . armed conflict." They quote investment banker Daniel Donoghue, who says: "The whole thing shakes your basic beliefs."

Chicago's Aon Corporation had some 1,200 employees working in the South Tower of the World Trade Center on floors 92 and 98-105. The massive insurance brokerage had a sophisticated disaster-recovery plan, which ensured that its computer files in New York were backed up in Chicago and that every client contingency was met—but it had never drawn up similar plans for the potential loss of its workforce.

We are dust and ashes. September 11 showed us that the places we thought the safest—the place where we work, domestic airlines—can turn to dust and ashes in moments.

We are dust and ashes. We are, after all, very frail. We can't secure our safety.

But like Abraham, we can turn to God. Have you noticed how the churches are suddenly full? How the atheists have all fallen silent?

We know it; we have seen it: We can't make it on our own. We need something solid; we need Someone who is a solid Rock.

Don't Look Back!
Abraham pleaded with God until the Lord agreed to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if He could find even 10 righteous there, and Abraham went home, confident that the cities would be safe. But he was wrong: not even 10 righteous people could be found. In mercy the angels grasped the hands of Lot, his wife, and two daughters, saying, "Escape for your life! Do not look behind you nor stay anywhere in the plain" (Gen. 19:17)."But [Lot's wife] looked back behind him, and she became a pillar of salt" (verse 26).

As the people ran from the towers on September 11, the police screamed, "Don't look back!" Then the towers collapsed, and a cyclone of dust, debris, and death roared down Broadway.

We saw the images: men in white shirts and ties, carrying bags; girls in jeans, running, running for their lives, gasping for breath, terror in their eyes, but even then unable to tear unbelieving eyes away from the sight as the cloud of death bore down upon them.

And then, images from hell. A woman with earrings and pearls around her neck, and boots covered in the dust of death, mouth open, hands spread apart, eyes terror-stricken, standing in a gray fog of destruction. Dirty, bleeding survivors walking through a nowhere land of ashes and paper.

Eric Bothwell works on the 29th floor of a building in Manhattan. His office is about five blocks from where the World Trade Center stood. On the morning of September 11 he looked out the window and saw in the air paper thick as a ticker tape parade. Rushing to the window, he could see the North Tower burning five blocks away. Just then the second plane went through the South tower.

It's the Ashes by Martin Weber So this is what it all comes down to . . . Ashes. Gigahertz computers and wireless uplinks, mahogany boardrooms and executive washrooms, leather portfolios and power lunch clubs . . . Everything amounts to ashes. Corporate strategies and market share, stock prices and interest rates, quarterly profits or losses . . . The bottom line is ashes. Office policies and politics, promotions and retirement plans, Brooks Brothers suits and the bodies inside . . . All end up in ashes. It's not the economy, after all. It's the ashes. Save us, O God, from our ashes.

Everyone in his building immediately evacuated, using the stairs. Once on the street he and his boss realized there was no transportation available except walking. So they set out for his boss's home six miles up the island. Unfortunately they had to go north, past the towers. They went over one block to stay away and could see where the planes went in. They realized no one would be alive above the entry points because of the flames enveloping everything. Hurrying on and getting two blocks north they heard the first tower coming down. It was a horrendously frightening thunder that went on and on.

They could see the cloud coming and ran with some cameramen trying to get away, but it caught them. It instantly filled their eyes, noses, and mouths. Using his necktie for a filter so he could breathe, Eric joined hands with his boss because, though side by side, they could not see each other. Struggling northward, they gradually worked their way out of the thick cloud, and he saw water in the gutter. In order to breathe, he scooped it up and rinsed out his mouth.

Those who were there in New York on Ash Tuesday tell us something we couldn't get from the TV screen. It wasn't only the seeing; it was the hearing and the tasting. We can imagine the screams and cries of panic and terror; but they tell us that you could taste the death. Here's a line from the Time special issue: "You could taste the air more easily than you could breathe it." People in the city far away said it: You could taste Ash Tuesday.

That cloud of death that roared down Broadway has covered every one of us, no matter where we live. I wake up in the early morning and find that my wife has been awake for a half hour. "What's the matter?" I ask her. "I woke up thinking of that planeload of people that went down in Pennsyl-vania. Sometimes it's the towers coming down that's in my head."

We know it in our gut: the world changed on September 11. We can never feel as secure again as we felt at the dawning of that day.

The days ahead are suddenly uncertain. The world is at war, but it's a war unlike any war in history. Where will this take us? We cannot know. That government must take action is undeniable; but any action is fraught with foreboding. The "enemy" does not marshal armies, tanks, and airplanes; the enemy attacks like a viper, suddenly, in a way we do not anticipate.

You have to go back a long while in America to a situation that took lives as did Ash Tuesday. A long while —140 years. That also was a time of uncertainty and foreboding, and Abraham Lincoln said: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthral ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

The future stretches out before us like a huge, dark unknown. I tell you this, my friends: Give that unknown to God. I tell you this: the sun will come up tomorrow, because God is still in charge. He hasn't abdicated the throne of the universe.

We are in a war, and it's much bigger than the war on terrorism. We are in the great struggle between good and evil, be-tween Christ and Satan. God lets bad things happen—He doesn't bring them, He permits them, but not forever. The day is coming when God will say: "That's enough! No more of this killing, this destruction, this unchecked evil, this suffering, this death. Enough!"

Jesus will come back to make everything right. So put your hand in the hand of Jesus. That hand was nailed to the cross for you. He will hold you firm and tight.

Listen to His promises:
"Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. In my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also" (John 14:1-3).

"Let your conduct be without covetousness, and be content with such things as you have. For He Himself has said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you'" (Heb. 13:5).

"He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress; my God, in Him I will trust'" (Ps. 91:1, 2).

Beauty for Ashes
In the book of Isaiah we read a wonderful prophecy of Jesus. He will "console those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness" (Isa. 61:2, 3).

I grew up in Australia. The Great South Land is the driest continent on earth, but it nevertheless has large areas of bush. When fire breaks out, it goes like the wind—it creates its own wind. The oil from the eucalyptus leaves forms balls of gas above the trees, and the fire leaps from treetop to treetop like a runaway train.

When it is over, the bush stands stark, black, empty. Smoldering tree stumps, carcasses of kangaroos and wallabies that couldn't outrace the speeding flames, and a thick layer of ash. Desolation, death, everything black.

But those ashes contain the seeds of new life. The blackened tree trunks send out new leaves; plants and wildflowers emerge from under the ashes. In fact, the shrubs and trees of the banksia require a bushfire to crack open the hard nuts containing the seeds.

And, says the Bible, God gives us beauty for ashes. He gives us hope instead of despair; He sets the world singing.

On September 11 and the days that followed I found it difficult to concentrate. It was so hard to write, because those terrible images out of New York City and the all-pervasive uncertainty drained my energies. During that time snatches of a gospel song kept coming back to me. It's not one of my favorites or one that I have sung often, but there it was, never far away, speaking in my inner ear: "Tell it to Jesus, tell it to Jesus."

Others on the Adventist Review staff reported a similar experience—not the same song as mine, but a hymn or song that kept coming back. For a church pastor it was "This is my Father's World."

Jesus gives songs in the night. Jesus gives beauty for ashes.

Out of the ashes in New York many people are turning to God. There, and in many other places, people are turning back to God.

God wasn't the author of Ash Tuesday, but because God is God, He is bringing beauty out of the ashes. He is working right now.

Maybe He is working in your life, calling you to come back, to get right with Him or with someone you know.

Maybe Ash Tuesday was the day you got a whole new perspective on your life. Maybe now you know what really counts, what you really want in life.

And God wants to use us to be instruments of hope and grace: while so many people are anxious, He wants us to bring peace. While so many are afraid, He wants us to bring hope.

He wants us to roll up our sleeves and get out there among the ashes, just as Jesus did 2,000 years ago.

The cloud of death shut out the light. It was so dark that Eric Bothwell couldn't see his boss right next to him, holding his hand.

But up above that cloud of death the sun still shone out of a clear blue sky.

Trampling in Ashes
"‘You shall trample the wicked, for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day that I do this,' says the Lord of hosts" (Mal. 4:3).

This is one of the strangest passages of Scripture. Is heaven to be a place where God's redeemed gloat over the death of the wicked?

No, it's the eternal home where God wipes away all tears, and there is no more death, mourning, crying, or pain; where the old order of things has passed away (Rev. 21:4).

The passage is telling us that evil is a terrible reality; but one day evil will pass away—it will be ashes.

For a generation now, people have been fed the lie that everything is relative, that right and wrong, good and evil, are meaningless ideas. Even after September 11 a few voices have attempted to rationalize or relativize the attacks on the towers and the Pentagon, but most people refuse to give them the time of day.

We saw the face of evil, and it was diabolical. Diabolical in planning. Diabolical in execution.

For anyone who recognized the face of evil that day, the Malachi passage isn't about vengeance but about God's plan for the future.

A future without terrorist attacks.
A future without sudden, cruel death.
A future without fear.

"For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former shall not be remembered or come to mind" (Isa. 65:17).

"The great controversy is ended. Sin and sinners are no more. The entire universe is clean. One pulse of harmony and gladness beats through the vast creation. From Him who created all, flow life and light and gladness, throughout the realms of illimitable space. From the minutest atom to the greatest world, all things, animate and inanimate, in their unshadowed beauty and perfect joy, declare that God is love" (The Great Controversy, p. 678).

Because God is God, that future is assured. Welcome to God's future, dear friend!

*All Scripture quotations come from the New King James Version.

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William G. Johnsson is editor and executive publisher of the Adventist Review.