Well Friends, over the last two days we’ve had a brief History and Bible lesson as to the disobedience of God’s rules, generally termed sin. Our fore-parents, Adam and Eve allowed the cunning, evil snake to beguile them into eating of the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, against God’s express warning not to, and thus sin was born. The Lord kicked them out of the lush garden of Eden and placed a curse of pain, sorrow and toil, plus physical death on them and all their descendants, as well as enmity between humans and snakes. So since then we’ve been aware of the difference between good and evil or right and wrong. But sin became so rampant that God regretfully wiped out all living things by means of a terrible flood, saving only Noah, his family and other creatures in the ark. But sadly, when the inhabitants of the ark replenished the earth, sin was still there. It had become like an inherited gene, which we all possessed deep down in our innermost parts, always lurking, just waiting to spring forth. And it did so when Noah’s descendants decided to build a city and a tower that rose to heaven. This did not please the Lord, so He stepped in and caused confusion with the city, Babylon, and the tower of Babel, then scattered the people all over the earth, corrupting the one language everybody then spoke into many different tongues, so they could not understand each other. But that did not stop our ancestors from disobeying God’s dictates. Some did it more than others; like the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, which the Lord eventually destroyed with fire and brimstone. Even after the Lord chose Abraham to be the father of His chosen people, sin remained with us. And those same chosen people, the Israelites, were right up there with all the sinful societies. Their sin was possibly looked upon as more disturbing since they’d been specially chosen by Almighty God to represent Him here on earth, and had experienced His awesome power and fulfillment of His faithful promises, yet on several occasions they turned away from Him to worship and serve man made idols. Oh Friends, that’s the worst thing we can do, for the very first law God gave the Israelites was, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods but me.’ (Ex.20:3) But when the going got rough, they eventually found their way back to Him, for deep down they knew that it’s only when we abide in God’s grace that a society can have lasting prosperity. The Israelites tried to atone for sin by offerings and sacrifices to God of unblemished animals and food, from which comes our modern day scapegoat; the one that takes all the blame, bears all the sins. But in time the Lord got fed up with all the blood sacrifices. As Samuel said to Saul: ‘Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.’ (1 Sam.15:22) And the Lord, in His great wisdom and overflowing LOVE, sent His Son Jesus to die on the cross as a blood sacrifice for all sins, past, present and future. That way Jesus became the one and only scapegoat necessary, and thus freed us from having to make sacrifices for our multitude of sins. But unfortunately, it seems that the prosperity of a godly society also brings an increase in arrogance, pride and excessive belief in our own strength, which tends to turn us away from the Lord, until we begin to endure undue suffering, which eventually turns us back to God again. It’s like an inevitable cycle. And my people, I sincerely believe that right now we’re at one such juncture. Western society in the last couple decades has taken a huge beating both from natural and man made disasters. We’ve turfed God out of our institutions and almost all our daily life is secularly aligned. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is no longer revered like He was even 30 years ago. And I believe it’s the main reason that Western civilization is on the decline. Just look back through history and you’ll find that most of it was based on a godly platform, where human depravity was either outlawed or verily frowned on, but now it’s become the common standard. Friends that doesn’t bode well for our society, for once standards are dropped or set too low, inevitable decline sets in. The Good Book and history both show that when a society reaches a pinnacle of prosperity, the most important, but also the most difficult thing to do is to keep it up there, because basic human nature gets lazy and lethargic when it becomes prosperous. Before prosperity sets in, we’re willing to work hard, save diligently and be careful with our time and money, but after that, hn, work becomes a dreaded curse, and we just want to play, have a good time, an immoral one at that, and fritter away our hard earned resources. Immediate gratification is the in-thing. The majority of our indicators are based on short periods. The stock market, that institution built on sinking sand, dedicated to Beelzebub, and run by his evil, able cohorts, moves everyday, every which way, often based on inflammatory, speculative rumours, even outright lies, but a whole heap of money is tied up in it. You can go to bed rich one night and wake up a pauper next morning, all on the whim of some financial guru. But yet we flock to the house that Lucifer built. Meanwhile our companies are judged on three-month intervals, often not enough time for those behemoths to gather all the figures together, so between that and wanting to impress the analysts whose opinion controls a lot of the market, all sorts of underhand dealings abound. Our spending habits are likewise terrible. In the old days we’d save for something then buy it, but now we just whip out the plastic, buy it on credit, then kill ourselves trying to pay for stuff we don’t need, and often don’t want, but since it looked so god in the showroom, or somebody else has it, we must have it too. The good, ole follow the Jones’ syndrome, which is a criminally, ungodly bit of fraud that’s been perpetrated on our society by the wealthy robber barons, to get us even more in debt and economic bondage to them. Friends, time and space have run out, but I implore us not to get too deeply involved in the things we’ve been talking about, else we’ll just put yourself in even greater jeopardy than we’re in already. More tomorrow, God willing. Till then, Much LOVE!…our God to obey…is truly the wisest way…
SCRIP-BITS 