Oddities & Sureties

6/17/2020

Oddity of oddities: The Song in My Head 

For two days in a row now, the SIMH is Cindi Lauper’s “True Colors”—how strange is that.There is one line in there which can be used to explain this, although I must confess this line was not the clear memory, just a tucked away one: “I can’t remember when I last saw you laughing – If this world makes you crazy and you’ve taken in all you can bare” (because that’s about the way I feel, lately.)

Well, I wrote in the last blog about the madness which has invaded my country and that I didn’t have any answers for her; that the inmates were running the asylum, etc. And low and behold, it has become worse! It is incredible that the Seattle fiasco (CHAZ or CHOP—it isn’t any wonder they don’t know what to call it!) is going on in America. Wondering what is going to become of the group and the area and who is going to win the debate concerning their grievances? Me, too. It surely must come to an end. While it is true we’ve never seen anything like this before, we did live through the ‘60s when riots all over college campuses occurred, students sitting in president’s offices for days; dorms being forced to house whoever showed up, students not going to class but running wild in the streets throwing anything they could pick up at the authority!

This went on partly because of an unreasonable war (Vietnam) and for an added freedom to indulge in drugs at will and live in an antinomian state (where no moral law is obeyed and if a law is written that inhibits one’s personal desires it does not have to be obeyed.) This abhorrent behavior ran rampant for a while, finally being squelched as the attention-getter of the media when some bigger fish-to-fry came along. But, the historical influence of the era made normal activities less than prudent which today are the norm and people of my generation are the last ones to even recall how things were before. 

“Tune in, Turn on, Drop out!” was the cry of the Timothy Leary crowd. Sit-ins occurred on most campuses at one time or another, altering the flow of normal business and normal schooling to no true improvement, only chaos. The “changed” generation produced the likes of politicians who say things so inane as “if you want to read what’s in the bill, you have to pass it first”….and the same generation produced the people who actually did put into law a bill not one legislator had read! The miserable end of the useless war left an entire veteran community with little hope of any respect, though they simply obeyed their leaders.

Today, we ask the police departments to protect lives and properties to their own peril and when a few undisciplined and/or untrained make horrible judgment calls, riots occur demanding the “defunding” of a police system? And some demagogues find it a career building opportunity? Let’s tear down another generation’s norms for our newly formed and (no doubt) better norms? Or, let’s show we can best live antinomian, we know that’ll work!

What causes these seemingly generational deviances? The slow, but definite eroding of absolutes. Plain and simple. The removal of respect for and dependence on our God-breathed Bible as the absolute standard for truth and justice. (I learned 47 years ago that the true Word of God is found in a King James Bible.) Most doubters love to rush to the portion of the Bible where God dealt with a nation and will point at the absolutes and say “if that’s God, he’s barbaric!” thereby showing a failure to understand the Lord’s purpose at the time, and religion never comes to see what the Lord Jesus Christ actually did for the world His Father loved. 

You know, Jesus said to His disciples once, “Greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friends,” then when Christ gave the Apostle Paul the message to bring to us He said, Christ died for “ungodly” “sinners” who were “enemies” of Almighty God—in other words we gain knowledge of the message after completion of His work on our behalf—Christ died for ALL, God has forgiven us ALL our sins (see Rom.5:6,8,10,11 & Col.2:13.) Seeing the purpose of God as His book of truth comes to completion (probably around AD 68) tells us what and where absolute truth sits. 

No, it’s not found in the changes at the whims of whatever prevalent political persuasion has come along. No, it’s not found in an altering of our preferences to a new thought or philosophy. And, there are no better heroes to follow. The truth of the world is this: A system has been put in place to usurp the authority of God’s infallibility. It was started by the events of the garden of Eden, (and if you doubt those events: a serpent talking with a woman, etc., I suggest you study Mt. Hermon) and the evil of that system grew in direct proportion with the earth’s population, until the usurper’s followers massively outnumber the Creator’s followers, that due to the freewill He gave them while full knowing the direction mankind would take—but, He loved us in spite of it. 

But, He did not leave us without testimony, nor without hope. Individually, from Acts 9 (about AD 34), till the next great descent from Heaven (at present almost 2000 years), our Creator has given us the greatest testimony of Himself possible: the virgin born Son of Almighty God has come and died for our sins, was buried, and was raised again for our justification. The only requirement for standing fully justified before “God, the righteous judge” is for us to believe on Christ for a sealed salvation. That comes by trust. We need only hear, believe, trust that what has already been done for us by Christ is sufficient.

I hope you have done that and are willing to testify of your moment of salvation to all that come your way.

Thanks for reading, the Elder