Greetings. This is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth, where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith. Today, one of the least told, but most crucial clashes between the Islamic East and the Christian West, and that is the siege of Malta. Oh boy, I love this story.

As we continue to examine the 1,400-year interaction between the religions of Christianity and Islam and the respective cultures that they produce, we observe the inexcusable blind spot of the contemporary Christian West in its dealings with Islam, a blind spot that refuses to examine how our forbearers dealt successfully in the past with an aggressive Islam that threatened to overwhelm them, and what that same West did poorly when they failed to resist with the necessary strength and resources.

We have been comparing and contrasting the respective sides, the Christian West and the Islamic East, under four major headings, and that is religious faith. Religious faith does drive the engine of heart and mind, and leadership. No society or civilization triumphs without strong leaders, and military power. Every great civilization is a martial civilization. And culture.

Every great civilization produces and in turn relies upon a productive, flourishing culture. Now, I've devoted an entire lecture to these four areas, and it'll be available soon on CD. But suffice it to say that when one or the other of these sides saw an uptick in these areas, it prevailed over the other. We are being lulled to sleep by our leadership when, instead of speaking in bold and frank language that we face a clash of civilizations, we coin deceptive euphemisms, that we are in a war on terror. Oh, terror, let me remind you again, is a cowardly tactic.

It's not a deadly worldwide opponent. No, in World War II, we did not fight a war on blitzkrieg. No, an aggressive, dangerous foe, the German nation, declared war on us. In World War II, we did not declare a war on kamikaze. No, we declared war on a treacherous, militant foe, the Empire of Japan.

Both blitzkrieg and kamikaze were tactics employed by our enemies. They were not enemies per se. So, too, terror is only a limited tactic employed by our enemy, militant Islam. They employ terror because that is all they can do for now. If Iran is able to perfect nuclear weapons, do you think they will hesitate to use them?

What will we do then when Israel or several American cities lie in smoking radioactive ruin? Will we declare a war on nuclear annihilation? Well, if we want to know what our enemy would do with all of the military strength in the world, with unlimited reach with which to bring it to bear upon their enemies, the Christian West, that's us, we need to look no farther than history to those days when the Islamic caliphs had all of these things at their disposal. And there's no finer example of all of these forces in play than the siege of Malta. What was the siege of Malta?

Well, Malta is the chief of a series of small islands off the southern tip of Sicily. It is a strategic island in that it sits in the midst of the Mediterranean Sea, a nexus in the crisscrossing traffic of sea ships, and is supplied with several of the best harbors nature could provide. It came to be the focus of a truly epic battle, Malta did, because at the time, it was the last obstacle to the Islamic Ottoman Empire's complete domination of the Mediterranean Sea, and thus all of Europe. Oh, the Ottoman Empire seemed invincible at the time, conquering everything in her path.

Constantinople, you may remember, fell in A.D. 1453 after numerous tries, and that should teach us, too. Even as the attacks on the Twin Towers should have, that militant Islam keeps trying until they achieve their objective. It was the Ottomans who swept into and overran the entire Balkan Peninsula and would continue to the very gates of Vienna, Austria.

Now, the greatest caliph in the entire majestic span of Ottoman history, Suleiman the Magnificent, reigned as sultan in Istanbul and saw the opportunity to bring all of Europe under his sway and to be the one who would bring Muhammad's prophecy to fulfillment, that all of the world would come under the rule of Allah and his religion, Islam. The first minor obstacle that stood in his way was this pesky island of Malta with its crusader order of the Knights of St. John. The great Suleiman was not unfamiliar with these vestiges of the crusading orders.

Having originally begun as the Hospitalliers in the era of the Crusades, the Knights of St. John or the Knights of Malta were a mere shade of their former power and glory. They had served the Crusader states as the protectors of the pilgrims and the Knights of Hospitality to the traveler and stranger. They provided food and medicine and lodging for all and alike, demonstrating kindness and Christian love in real practical ways. They were also a military order in that they bore arms to protect the Christian pilgrim to the Holy Land.

Additionally, they had become adept seamen, raiding the Alam and shipping that traversed the Mediterranean, costing Suleiman the magnificent small fortunes every time they did so. But the Knights of St. John would not go away easily. While the order was indeed small, it was nevertheless committed to its original vision and had the advantage of a tough, determined master of the order, John de Lavalette. Note this, O Christian. Right out of the gate, the Christian Knights of Malta had the power of a clear, stated purpose and vision in conjunction with a strong leadership that would not waver.

This would prove invaluable to their success as events bore down upon them. One must ask himself in America, do we have a clear vision of who we are as Americans, and do we have the strong leadership to take us to that vision? Now, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, had originally granted the island of Malta as a possession of the Order of St. John in A.D. 1530. The Knights of St. John set about immediately strengthening and fortifying the harbors and battlements surrounding the cities of this string of islands surrounding Malta. They heightened and widened the walls surrounding the city and they dug deep trenches around them.

They called in several military engineers to help them design brand new battlements and fortifications that would prove crucial to withstanding the assaults and bombardments of the Ottomans. The Knights of St. John were not relying upon assurance of diversity and tolerance, sweetness and light from the religion of peace. They were preparing for what they knew would be coming, an all-out assault upon them, with no quarter given. And that assault finally came in A.D. 1565, when, after years of preparation, Suleiman the Magnificent assembled a flotilla of nearly 200 ships, boarded the flagship himself, and set sail for Malta.

His purpose was twofold, eliminate these pirate knights from the face of the earth, and execute the strategy that would be recommended to the Allies centuries later by Winston Churchill in World War II. That is, attack all of Europe through the soft underbelly of Sicily and Italy. Malta would be a slight speed bump on the expressway to bringing the civilized world under the sway of the law. Well, Churchill would not find the crack German units in Italy to be anything of the kind, a soft underbelly, no. And neither would Suleiman the Magnificent find the Knights of St. John on Malta to be soft, either.

When the flotilla finally arrived, disembarked, and lay siege to its first target, the fortified archipelago island of St. Elmo, that was lying astride Malta, the sultan had over 30,000 sailors and janissaries, modern cannon and arms, and sumptuous supplies fit for assault. How many knights and soldiers do you suppose held Malta? 30,000 maybe? 20,000? 15,000?

Oh, no. By the time reinforcements arrived, and the head of the order, John de Lavalette, tallied their strength. They were comprised of 550 knights and about 4,000 Maltese men capable of bearing arms. From their fortress walls, the Knights of St. John watched the ships disgorge their seemingly numberless host upon the shores of the island. With great pomp and ceremony, Suleiman's general, the highly decorated Pasha Mustafa, who had seen victory from Syria to Austria while he set up his colorful tents and unfurled his ornate banners in the Mediterranean sunlight.

The sight was so impressive and glittering that it almost blinded the defenders of the city. But unlike other Christian forces Mustafa had faced in the past, the Knights of St. John were not struck with fear at the mere sight of military glory. They were a hardened military order, seasoned in fighting throughout the Holy Land. They knew the Ottoman artillery and leadership and had faced the fearsome Janissary on numerous occasions. They may have been waning in their power and influence, but they still retained their substance of toughness and tenacity.

Mustafa would have to prove his glory in the crucible of blood and steel at Malta, making the Ottomans regret that they ever left the cheering, friendly confines of Istanbul for this tiny, windswept island in the middle of the Mediterranean. General Mustafa lay siege first to the Fort of St. Elmo, located at the northern tip of Malta. Manned by a hundred knights and about 500 Maltese soldiers, they faced the full brunt of Ottoman artillery and assault. First, hours of withering fire would pour into the stone walls and brick city, then a full-scale assault by the Sultan's Janissaries.

The most feared warrior of the Middle Ages would attempt to scale the walls and overwhelm the defenders. The fort was rubble within a week. Still, the defenders hung on, hunkering down during the endless bombardments and miraculously repulsing wave after wave of Ottoman Janissaries, obeying the orders of their master, Jean de Lavalette, to defend the last man. For over two additional weeks, fighting in the smoking ruins of their fort, the 600 held on. Oh, by the time the Janissaries overran what was left of the fort, slaying everything that moved, only nine sailors survived from the defenders of Malta.

Everyone else had stood his ground and died in place, but they had exacted a fearful toll on the Alamans. Over 4,000 Ottoman Janissaries and sailors had died, including the admiral of the fleet, Pasha Turgot. Not only had the 600 knights and Maltese who died there fought as men possessed, but the Knights of St. John had established three forts at strategic points on the surrounding islands, such that the Ottoman's admiral found his entire fleet in a murderous crossfire, which is precisely how he died.

True, the Ottomans had gained their objective, the fort at St. Elmo, but a few more victories like this, Admiral True Goh remarked before his death, and there would be no one to return to Istanbul. It must be noted at this point, in the very teeth of such valiant resistance, that the Knights had sent out an all-points bulletin to every king and capital in Europe, begging for assistance and relief. England and Germany were consumed with internal matters and religious wars. The Spanish king, Philip II, who was in the best position to help, he just sat back and watched events unfold.

Perhaps the most heinous of all was King Francis I of France, who was actually in alliance with Suleiman the Magnificent. Oh, are you shocked? France, a nation allied with the enemies of Europe and Christendom. Oh, France, doing absolutely nothing to stem the threat to Western civilization, even as they do today. The more things change, the more they stay the same, right?

Only Sicily would reluctantly promise to deliver help to the beleaguered defenders, and then almost too late, the Knights of St. John were virtually on their own against the best that the Ottoman Empire could throw at them. What the narcissistic, greedy, nationalistic, and strategically blind Europeans, as one historian calls them, what they did not realize was that Suleiman and his general, the invincible Mustafa, would sweep throughout Europe in the wake of their victory at Malta, and no one would be man enough to stop them. So, what Europe did not realize was that they had men of whom they were not worthy.

That is, the noble Knights of St. John standing in between them and the Ottomans. After taking St. Elmo, Mustafa turned his guns and janissaries on the other fortresses of Malta. He began to apply the same kind of tactics to those forts that he did to St. Elmo. It had taken almost one month to reduce St. Elmo, excuse me. The Ottomans would take another three months to try and capture the rest of Malta.

Oh, day after day, the air resounded with boom, boom of Ottoman cannon, followed predictably by the hideous cry of the sea of janissary hordes that would threaten to sweep over the wall of fortresses like Saint-Michel. In fact, on August 20 of 1565, the Turks managed to breach the walls of Saint-Michel with a series of mines, and thinking that the day was finally theirs, they flooded the breach with janissaries. However, there was one factor upon which they had not counted, the venerable grandmaster of the Order of St. John, Jean de Lavalette.

When he heard of the breach in the walls, he personally ran to it, where, as the historian Francisco Balbi puts it, at the threatened post, his presence worked wonders. Sword in hand, he remained at the most dangerous place until the Turks retired, unquote. A word must be said about this remarkable man, without whom Malta would certainly have fallen to the Ottomans. Jean Parisot de Lavalette was a lifelong member of the Order of Hospitalliers, now the Order of St. John. He had risen to the head of the Order in A.D. 1557, and at the time of the siege was 70 years old.

Think of this, Christian. How many ordinary civilian men are in the prime of their vigor at age 50 or 60, much less age 70? And yet here was this medieval man, without the benefits of vitamins or Viagra, who could still wield a sword and command a strict, disciplined military order. To illustrate with just two poignant examples, there was a moment in the middle of the siege when Mustafa, weary with his losses, and even his janissaries about to mutiny, when he sent an offer of terms to Lavalette, the Order of St. John, with all of its arms and possessions, could retire from the field in ships to a safe harbor in Sicily.

All they had to do was relinquish the city to the inevitable conquerors of it, the emissaries of the religion of peace, Mustafa and his armies of Allah. Well, the messenger bearing these terms was blindfolded and ushered into the presence of John the Lavalette. When the terms had been outlined, Lavalette ordered the messenger to be hung. The poor emissary begged for his life, and so Lavalette took him outside to the walls of the city, and around these thick high walls, the knights had dug an encompassing ditch deep and very wide. The emissary remarked in awe, Mustafa will never take this city.

Well, the Lavalette told him, tell your master that this is the only territory that I will give him, that is this deep ditch. There lies the land which he may have for his own provider, only that he fills it with the bodies of his janissaries. And as one contemporary historian observed, and I quote, at this, the poor messenger of the general dirtied his pants. Now, furious with rage, General Mustafa redoubled his efforts at taking the city when his humiliated messenger returned.

He took four captive knights, cut off their heads, nailed the bodies to crosses, and sent the macabre spectacle across the channel to the shore defended by the knights. Instead of quaking in fear, Lavalette marched out his Ottoman prisoners, cut off their heads, and fired them from his cannons into the camp of Mustafa. And by this act, he did two things. He demonstrated his own resolve to the Ottomans, who had done this very thing throughout their history. Lavalette was only reminding them of their own barbarity by doing it.

And then secondly, he sent a message to his own men. There would be no terms. There would be no surrender. Not now. As I pointed out to you before in this study, it must be remembered that men like Grandmaster Jean de Lavalette were medieval men, born and raised in a medieval culture.

And here we sit, and we judge so pompously from an admittedly weak and effeminate 21st century postmodern culture. So, before you judge and condemn a man like de Lavalette, at least spend some time understanding his time and place, keeping in mind that he was also a deeply religious man. Yes, a deeply religious man. I dare say more deeply religious than most of the shallow hypocrites out there today who condemn him. He understood and practiced his Christian faith as a military religious order and understood and practiced it more faithfully than most happy, clappy Christians in contemporary worship churches today.

As the historian Ben House puts it, and I quote, he had endured and survived the siege of Rhodes, naval battles with the Turks, the miseries of being a slave in a Turkish galley ship, and physical wounds from his battle. His rhetoric in wartime was like that of Churchill, his religious zeal like that of Cromwell, his strategic and tactical gifts like that of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, his personal bravery and example to the men like that of George Washington, unquote. The Lavalette also understood the nature of the threat that faced him and the entire West, for that matter, as very few contemporary Americans do today.

He had been fighting it all of his life, realizing that the religion of peace divided the world into two camps, the Dar al-Islam, that is the House of Islam, composed of all true Muslims, and the Dar al-Harb, the House of War, that is everyone else, including you and me. When will our presidential candidates understand factors like this? Oh, therefore, it was to be no canon to the head of the West. There must be heads of the Muslims of the East shot from cannons to lay out in plain language the resolve and determination of the Knights of St. John. And this is precisely the signal that Mustafa and his men received.

With renewed martial fury, they swarmed at the walls of Malta, but the momentum had shifted. Each and every assault was repulsed. One devastating defense will serve to illustrate. For example, the Knights had constructed a sea-level artillery battle of battery, excuse me, of five cannons along the strategic Sangleya Peninsula, hidden from the view of passing ships. When Mustafa ordered an all-out assault on this peninsula, his ships approached their landing, loaded with janissaries and their siege equipment.

A contemporary account relates that to the utter horror of Mustafa. When the concealed cannons were finally uncovered and the fuses lit, it only took two salvos to sink all but one of the ships, drowning over 800 soldiers in just minutes. The colorful, intimidating ships, festooned with banners, jammed with Islamic death for the infidels, was now a bay full of flotsam and jetsam. The proud boasting, the terrifying cries of Allah Akbar. Where were they now?

The sea was silent and would no more give up her dead until the day of judgment. The unstoppable Ottoman military machine was being fed into a Christian woodchipper, and even the fearsome janissaries seemed to know it. Two other elements finally broke the elements down. Two other elements. Disease and relief from Sicily.

It is said that disease and infection have killed more soldiers in the history of warfare than blade or bullet. This would prove true of the Ottomans who invested the siege of Malta. Historians estimate that the combined Ottoman dead in a range from a high of 48,000 to a low of 25,000, right? Additionally, at just the time when Mustafa was loading his cannon ready to lift the siege, Don Garcia of Sicily landed a small relief force at St. Paul's Bay, which quickly lifted the spirits of the defenders. The Ottomans turned tail and sailed back for Istanbul, never more to turn the Mediterranean Sea into a Turkish lake.

The southern tide of Islam had crested here on this tiny, now bloody, rocky crag of Malta. The effect of the news in the capitals of Europe was electric. Finally, the Ottoman military machine had proved that it was not invincible. The victory at Malta would serve as a model for the later defense of Vienna and the naval battle at Lepanto. Everywhere, in pub, and church, and pew, at the dinner table, or on mother's knee.

The story of the siege of Malta was told in all of its glorious detail. Even the godless philosopher Voltaire noted, nothing is better known than the siege of Malta, unquote. Where is that knowledge today? Who can repeat it to succeeding generations as a model vignette of both a daunting determination of our militant Islamic foe when given access to the weapons and needs to wage all out war, but also of the resources, both material and spiritual, that it will take to match, defeat, and prevail over that foe? Those resources were there aplenty on both sides during those four months in 1565 on the island of Malta.

And it was only because a sovereign god saw fit to supply the knights of Malta with a faith in him. The military genius and the intestinal fortitude or guts to prevail in the face of overwhelming odds. Militant Islam does not yet have the full command of modern means in proportion to Suleiman the Magnificent. Not yet, at least, but they may have, or soon may have, access to weapons of mass destruction, and they do at least aspire to former glory like that of the Ottoman Empire. Just read their stuff, Christian.

I trust that God is even now raising up men like John de Lavalette and the Knights of Malta, a few who will lead the many. The Christian historian and philosopher R.J. Rushtuni has observed, and I quote, history has never been dominated by majorities, but only by dedicated minorities who stand unconditionally on their faith. Of which party are you, O Christian? Unconditional Christianity has always been in the minority, but it has always led when it stands unconditionally. The Apostle Paul understood this when he exhorted the Corinthian Christians.

In 1 Corinthians 16, he says, be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong, let all that you do be done in love. Here is a sermon I don't have time to preach, but understand, O Christian man, it's to you I now speak, Christian man. There is no contradiction between Christian love and a manly faith. The contemporary church is a feminized church with a feminine notion of love, while we stand in need for the immediate future for a godly, manly faith that's not afraid to fashion a whip to drive out infidels as Jesus did, or on the other hand, to gently heal a leper or restore a fallen woman to her integrity.

May the sovereign Lord of the Bible raise you and your boys raise you up as strong men like the Knights of Malta and their Grandmaster, John Parasol de Lavalette. This has been Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth. Now, we meet for holy worship at 10 a.m. on Sunday morning at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard. And we are a church that is stocked well with manly Christian men. And I invite you to join us on Sunday morning for holy worship at 10 a.m. on Sunday morning at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard.

And you can call us for more information or comment at area code 208-523-0196. 208-523-0196.