CHRISTIANS HAVE MADE LIFE CHEAP
Life has become cheap in America. Life means nothing to many. You might start with the sexual exploitation of women in prostitution and the sex trade business. But, soon you find that teens and even children are dragged into this dark place where sick men seek to fulfill their debauched desires.
It follows the black thread of moral breakdown. Marriage is on the decline, out-of-wedlock babies are on the increase. Some research suggests that more children live in one parent homes than in a home with a mother and a father. Children are not cherished but are seen as impediments to personal freedom and pleasure. Children have grown up for three generations in homes where parents have neglected their responsibility to teach their children right from wrong, love from lust, selflessness from avarice. Should we be surprised that the debauchery begins early and goes deeper with every new generation?
The degradation continues. Homosexuality has become all the rage. But it is not that people are exhibitionists and want to parade their profane proclivities before the watching world, they take measures to make sure we have to see it. Society is being forced to accept it, to even debase our own moral and religious beliefs so they can stand proud in their perversity. We must cheer them on. Society must make a special place for them. Homosexual marriage must be recognized and all those who are opposed will be jailed or shipped off to reeducation camps or marginalized. If you believe in morality, you are ghettozed into little quiet corners of society. The normal and predictable action from this point on is to put in jail any and all who dare to lift up a higher principle, a higher law, a stand based on faith in Christ. Christians have had their turn. We must now let others bring forth a better tomorrow.
To further cheapen the human being, we now have transgenderism. Men want to be women. A few women want to be men. I think there must be something in the water that is causing men to be so wimpy that they want to be women. But I wonder if it isn’t the lack of a father or a lack of parental discipline? Anyone with common sense knows that a four-year-old cannot or does not choose to be transgendered. It is all socialization of some sort.
Rule of law is no longer respected. We live in an age of social anarchy. It is the rejection of anything that gives order to a society or a culture. The purpose is to bring about a categorical change to the nation and to the world. There are immense consequences to this. The one that matters to me today is that it cheapens human life. We are accidents on the evolutionary twig. There is no reason, we are told, to believe that we are anything other than evolutionary accidents who have the misfortune to think and to ponder and wonder about the meaning of life. There certainly can be no god to create us, to form us, to make us in his image. If it was true and there is a God, then there would be morals and rules, and we don’t want that. So there is no God.
Now we are starting to see the deeper meaning of social anarchy. Lives don’t matter, black, white, or any other skin pigmentation. In major cities people are killing each other for fun. I don’t buy this business that claims that people live in despair and thus, kill each other. There is something much deeper and basic than despair. The rules have been removed and whatever is evil and dark in the human soul has been unleashed. It is as if the great Kraken of darkness has been released on the world and it consumes and destroys everything in its path.
We, as a culture, reject the rule of law. Police officers are the enemy and the glorious thing to do is to sneak up on them and execute them. They are just pigs in a blanket and they should fry like bacon. Their lives are worthless, nothing more than a feral hog that needs to be removed from society. Let’s get on with it, let’s have pleasure in killing those who seek to protect us.
Life is worthless. People kill for fun, kill for kicks, and kill as an act of protest. No, they kill so that society can enter into a hellish chaos. Life is becoming cheap.
The high ideal of the founding fathers was that we should be free. We had the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But, it was all expected to be lived out within boundaries of a world where morals and values, provided to us by the Judeo-Christian tradition and personal responsibility, would guide us. These are dead. We have no basis for morals or for law. We are living in a post moral age, a post normal age, a post human age. We now live at a time when humans are disposable waste, where men are raw animals who kill out of instinct.
It is a sad time and what most people do is hang their heads in sorrow. We withdraw into our homes waiting for the end to come while some are partying because of the absurdity of it all.
What has happened to the human soul that we allow this to take place? Where are the adults? Oh, I remember, they are the ones who commit sinful acts on the sly, hide their sexual perversions and unfaithfulness. The adults are the ones who cheat their business partner or their customers, or their spouses. It is all ok isn’t, as long as one does not get caught? But, the security breach at Ashley Madison should remind us of the words of the Books of Numbers, “behold, you have sinned against the LORD, and be sure your sin will find you out.” (Num. 32:23 ESV) The Apostle Paul reminds us that “the sins of some men are quite evident, going before them to judgment; for others, their sins follow after.”
The reader may ask, why do you think all of these are connected. The answer is very simple. Each one violates the Imago Dei, the Image of God in which we are all made. The image includes being made male and female. It means we all have infinite value because we share a subset of substance with God, which is the image of God that resides in us and in no other creature. We are unique and we belong to God. God, therefore has a say about whom we are and how we live our lives. It is at this point that those who are pushing the agenda, we are only mere animals, accidents of the universe, howl in disgust and revulsion. Yet not one of them is willing to live by the rules they have prescribed for humanity. They want to be treated morally.
The Imago Dei is something that we cannot escape. We cannot stop being the image of God. No matter how low we go, how deep the degradation, how evil the mind, we are still Imago Dei. What a horrible thing, to be made in the glorious image and yet live in the sewerage of sin and shame. We are broken, not because we are socially maladjusted, but because we have harmed and abused that image in which we are made!
Dear church, you are responsible for much of this. And we Christians will be judged for what has happened, at least in our country. Way too many have played at being Christians. We don’t want to look too pious, it’s just not cool. We want to dress like everyone else, talk like everyone else, hold the same values, and tell the same jokes. We want to be popular with the world. We skip the fellowship and covenant of the church to go and play. We do not gather to pray for and with each other. We certainly don’t want to hear the Word of God proclaimed by a man who is called of God! Not Cool! Don’t you know if you are popular with the world, it means you have abandoned your faith, your commitment to Christ?
Christians love themselves and their inner circle. And Christians will not allow anyone else into that circle who is not just like them. We cry over the loss or a dog or the abuse of a horse. We campaign for animal shelters and scathe others for not loving animals as much as we do. But we do not have at least that same compassion for the lost world. We don’t care.
Christians don’t stand up for the poor, the weak, those without a voice. Christians live openly immoral lives and they treat life as if it were cheap, as if only a few lives matter. When it comes down to it, we lived once in a world where the majority, if not professed Christians, at least honored Judeo-Christian morals and values. But if Christians will not live according to them, the non-Christian world is certainly not going to live by them.
Now we are scared and we want to protect ourselves. Perversely as usual, we think we can come up with some kind of program that will win the world back to our way of thinking. It is not going to happen. Who wants to be a hypocrite like us? We have made humans cheap, life cheap, grace cheap, and God cheap. We cannot turn back the hands of time and return to yesteryear.
All we can do is throw ourselves on the mercy of God for our own redemption. And perhaps, perhaps God will bring about another Great Awakening. It’s not going to happen as long as celebrity pastors and denominational leaders making their six figure salaries, dressed in their finest clothes lead us in a mockery of false repentance and prayer while they continue to live in their executive style.
I have always been impressed by the pagans in Nineveh, who heard the Word of God preached by an angry, peckish Jonah. He preached with all the resentment he could muster. But this was the result.
5. And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them.
6 The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes.
7 And he issued a proclamation and published through Nineveh, “By the decree of the king and his nobles: Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Let them not feed or drink water,
8 but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands.
9 Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.” (Jon. 3:5-9 ESV)
Who knows? Maybe God will turn and relent! It is time to stop listening to those who do not know the Word of God or who do not make the Word of God the only authority, and to take personal responsibility before God and repent. Seek God while he may be found, asking for our sins to be removed and for the Spirit to restore our salvation. And who knows, God may hear our prayers.
