THOUGHTS
An earthquake in the making
I was listening to the radio the other day and heard someone say, “I don’t tolerate evil.” I was in agreement with that statement until I got to thinking about who determines what evil is. Of course, in my Christian worldview I know what evil is: it is anything that opposes God and His laws. Today there is a clash of worldviews that could be compared to the rift in the earth produced when tectonic plates shift. The San Andreas Fault, for example, is in certain places a widening chasm in the earth. Opposing worldviews are cultural macrocosms as such. Two immovable objects, as in the earth’s plates, “bump” into each other and the pressure builds up, resulting in an earthquake or a shifting of the earth’s surface to alleviate the tension . . . a moving apart. If our culture were being monitored on a seismograph, ominous warnings would be transmitting to the earth. The idea of what is evil and what is not is determined by your worldview, the framework in which you assess events in your life and in the world around you. Clashing worldviews are bumping into each other on a regular basis nowadays giving rise to great schisms between people, nations, tribes, and cultures. Some people don’t want to commit to a particular view so they straddle the abyss hoping to keep a foot on both.
Many Christians are in this position as indicated by the latest Barna poll showing that even evangelicals are being lured by the lust of the world. They are teetering, trying to keep their balance, maintaining their “tolerant” point of view and revealing their reluctance to take sides, or even compartmentalizing themselves into their religious lives and the real world. They waver and weave and struggle to avoid the inevitable: to either choose a view or free-fall into the black hole of compromise and lukewarm faith.
Are we getting better and better?
Unless there is a fixed standard of right and wrong/good and evil, men will ultimately choose evil. Unlike what the popular culture teaches us, we are not getting better. A quick perusal of the newspaper should have convinced us of that.
What does evil really look like?
Evil does not usually start out as looking like the darkness it is; it is generally wrapped in a pretty package that sits enticingly at our doorstep beckoning with reasonable words like tolerance and moderation and diversity. “All paths lead to the same place” is soothing and instills confidence and assurance that each man can do what is right in his own eyes, yet the tremors on the seismograph are indicating trouble ahead.
What are the consequences of humanistic worldviews?
Terrorists kill and maim innocent people for the sake of a god that demands murder and lies. This god does not sound like the God I know, unless He is schizophrenic and I know He is not. He is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Pedophiles prey on little children because children can give consent and because it is beneficial to them, according to pseudo science. Fixed law based on the Ten Commandments says otherwise, yet the culture is wavering on this issue because some of the pedophiles are icons of the culture. The stealing of the modesty and purity of little children does not move them; the murder of their trust and innocence evinces only fleeting notice.
The institution of marriage is the first institution ordained by God and the mainstay of thriving civilizations, but modern man is wondering if it doesn’t need to be more inclusive.
Sodomy, a behavior that brings horrendous consequences to society and to those who engage in it, is held up as a right. Modern man looks the other way and hopes for respite from rocketing STD statistics, infertility, disease and death to our children.
Infanticide historically has only been practiced by those who are pagans; yet modern man worries about the health and privacy of the mother and sacrifices a fully formed infant to the altar of autonomous decisions about our bodies.
Public libraries sport computers that spew pornography to children, but the “right to read” trumps innocent vulnerable children who go to the library to discover the world of information and make-believe.
I could go on and on but you get the message.
Many of us have been feeling the tremors for a long time, hoping that the building pressure doesn’t get too intense. But it continues to build inexorably toward resolution.
Thankfully, we have a God who is interested in the affairs of men and who died to make mankind holy, and who has given us a knowledge of a fixed standard of His laws written on our hearts, causing us to walk in His statutes and ordinances.
As we celebrate Thanksgiving, let us be thankful for those “tablets of stone” within us, guiding our consciences and our lives to be light in a dark world. Thank Him for the opportunity to provide that resisting tectonic plate against the culture that will result someday in a cataclysmic event that will bring His Son to reign on the earth. Let us be thankful that we were chosen before the foundation of the earth to live in this pivotal time of history, to be accounted as worthy to walk out our faith in spite of opposing worldviews.
May you have a time of reflection on all He has done for us during this season of Thanksgiving, knowing to Whom our thanks must go.
In Him,
Judy Smith
State Director