Since they thought it foolish to acknowledge God, he abandoned them to their foolish thinking and let them do things that should never be done. Their lives became full of every kind of wickedness, sin, greed, hate, envy, murder, quarreling, deception, malicious behavior, and gossip. They are backstabbers, haters of God, insolent, proud, and boastful. They invent new ways of sinning, and they disobey their parents. They refuse to understand, break their promises, are heartless, and have no mercy. They know God’s justice requires that those who do these things deserve to die, yet they do them anyway. Worse yet, they encourage others to do them, too. (Romans 1:28-32)Sounds a lot like today, doesn’t it?
The apostle Paul was writing almost 2000 years ago about a dysfunctional culture, one in fact that for all practical purposes died in another couple of hundred years.
It doesn’t take more than a cursory reading of the paper, or of the internet to see that things are like that today.
Of course, what is funny in some ways is that someone in each culture going all the way back to fourth century BS Greece said something of the same. All cultures see themselves as bad and much worse than the one right before it.
I sure do today. Although the world was not perfect when I was young, it was a fat lot better than today. Immorality is rampant, teenaged girls are getting pregnant out of wedlock at amazing numbers, politicians are immoral and caught regularly in bad situations, crime is bad, young people’s involvement in stealing from each other and others is worse. It just seems that things are going to hell in a handbasket.
It is easy to say that it is the end times, but these things have happened before and will happen again. This culture is going down the tubes and others will come up, flourish and go down the tubes too. what is happening has happened and will happen again.
Kind of depressing, but true.
No comments:
Post a Comment
To comment, post your comment and click the anonymous button. It would be nice if you signed it so I could know who you are.
You are welcome to say anything you want as long as it is nice. If I don't like it, or it is ugly, I will take it off, place it into the garbage disposal, grind it up, and allow it to be flushed into the Gulf of Mexico where it will be eaten by a fish and then excreted where it will lie on the bottom of the ocean until it is covered up by other comments.