Almost Gone

“And say, How have I hated instruction, and my heart despised reproof; And have not obeyed the voice of my teachers, nor inclined mine ear to them that instructed me! I was almost in all evil in the midst of the congregation and assembly.” (Pr 5:12-14 AV)

I finished reading the book of Judges this morning.  Every time I read it, it disturbs the soul.  The account is given of a concubine who is sexually abused for an entire night, resulting in her death.  The husband of this concubine cuts her body up into twelve pieces and sends her remains among the twelve tribes of Israel. The nation requires the city of this crime to give up the guilty parties.  They refuse, so a civil war ensues wherein the guilty tribe is almost completely exterminated.  Whenever I read this account, the depth of depravity disturbs me.  How could a nation fall that far?  But you know what?  This happens daily in our beloved nation.  Hundreds of times a day, some poor young lady is abused and murdered.  It is so commonplace, our sensitivities are no longer stirred.  What happened?  How did we fall this far?  The answer is above.

The immediate context of the above passage is a man guilty of adultery.  Solomon is warning his son that if he goes down that road, it may very well lead to a life that is completely enveloped in sin.  Especially of the immorality is a habit of life.  This wickedness leads to all sorts of other wickedness.  Hollywood likes to portray promiscuity as a light thing.  They ignore the natural consequences of such a lifestyle.  They never tell you that living that way leads to all sorts of problems.  But again, how did we get this way?  The answer is above.

When a person or people completely ignore wisdom, it is bound to end up in unabated wickedness.  When a people or person completely ignores instruction and becomes callous towards reproof, there is little hope.  The hypothetical young man above has almost fallen in every area of life he possibly can fall.  No wonder our nation is in the mess we witness today.  We have rejected our Judeo-Christian heritage in favor of an evolutionary humanism that rejects all moral absolutes.  What is tremendously interesting with our current concern over the Wuhan Flu is how deeply our foundation lies.  If we are truly a secular nation that believes science over truth, then why are we so against the effects of the Wuhan flu?  Isn’t this nature’s way of enforcing the survival of the fittest?  We have ignored our teachers.  We have closed our ears to reproof.  Not we face an unseen enemy and all of a sudden we have found our core values.  The value of life.  The value of the individual.  The moral imperative to preserve life.  Yet we kill babies.  We are a schizophrenic society.  We are almost totally consumed with evil because we reject the teachers of the Bible which founded our nation and define our culture.  And we wonder why things are as bad as they are.