I write this on a Sunday morning when less than half of our nation goes to church. When I was a little boy so many people went to church on Sunday morning the neighborhood was a ghost town. Preachers preached people prayed and they fellowshipped. Certainly, it was not a perfect world. But a strong world it was.
Now, we live in a society where people with flamboyant sexually deviant lifestyles lecture us on morals. Transsexuals who have mutilated their sex organs to imitate the opposite sex lecture us on human biology. Pro-abortionists who gloss over the execution of unborn babies as an act of freedom lecture us on human rights. Communists whose ideology has presided over the deaths of over 100 million people in the 20th century lecture us on economics. Satanists lecture us on Christianity.
There seem to be innumerable things in our society today that are paradoxical and wrong. All of the above finger-wagging lecturers are honored and given an unlimited platform to spew their sweet poison into the souls of the world. This witch’s brew has stupefied millions sitting in the church pews this morning.
Few preachers seem willing to stand in the churches this morning and urge their congregation to assault the gates of hell. Those preachers who do encourage their congregation to put on the armor of God and fight could be thrown out by the worshipers whose ears aren’t properly soothed and who think preachers are to affirm and Christianize lukewarm lives.
This paradox, this contradiction, this smashing together of opposites, this mingling of oil and water is artificial, it’s unreal. It’s like a mammoth disentombed from an ice cave. It needs ice so it doesn’t decompose. But this world pretends it’s alive, that a man can get pregnant, and that we need a biologist to tell us the mammoth is dead and what a woman is. It seems everyone is participating in a charade. It’s like a precursor of the strong delusion in 2 Thessalonians 2:11. This is a strategy designed to get deep into our minds so we feel crazy or rude to protest the obvious wrong of thinking a dead mammoth is alive in society. We are social creatures and our instinct is to fit in. This can, and has, made many of us stumble. It hampers our walk with God. Yahweh is not the author of confusion. That authorship goes to the god of this present darkness.
We must fight this with every ethical and holy strategy available. It may already be too late for us. Perhaps too many dominoes have already fallen. But we do not end with this world. The Word tells us we are strangers, that we are only passing through. There is a “big boat” coming, an “ark” so to speak that can withstand the fire. But perhaps the most difficult thing to do is reach out to those fully entranced by the zeitgeist of our times. As much as we might hate their ideology we are called to spread the Truth in love straight into the flaming heat of those who not only hate our Truth but our existence.
So I encourage you and myself to live not by lies. The Truth has set me free, it is now setting me free and it will set me free in the future.