Biblical Morality Has a High Price

Each morning I do the USATODAY crossword puzzle online. It is found in the Life section of the paper. (Strange calling it paper since there is no paper involved.) The puzzle generally takes me from thirteen to twenty minutes though I have had a few puzzlers that have taken longer. I close the puzzle when finished and can't help but see the "news" from the entertainment world. I am both fascinated in what is happening and not at all interested in joining the fan clubs.

You see, I am fascinated that the writers expect the readers to hang on every word about these celebrities. I don't know who most of them are. I don't follow any of them. I suppose there are many people who follow these people as idols. They learn to talk and look like their idols. I am not slightly interested.

It seems that people follow the most popular trend so that they won't be left out of the conversation. They must know what's going on. They must be valued by others by that knowledge. They must be included in the "group."

Maybe that's why morality is so fluid. The right thing is what everyone else is doing. It justifies itself because with the reward of being included. Thus, normally moral people will get caught up in a riot because everyone else is doing it.

Wasn't that Ayn Rand's point in her book Fountainhead? Even bad plays were all the rage when given amazing reviews. Everyone wanted to be in the crowd who had seen it and praised it. The movie Titanic proved her right. It was one of the worst written movies I have ever seen and, yet it was a blockbuster. It didn't matter whether or not it had any substance- everyone was going to see it and if you wanted to be anyone you better go see it too.

The beatings that Christians suffer today are not physical. They are castigated and separated from the rest of society. They are said to be the immoral people because morality is what everyone else is doing. A thin benevolent philosophy covers the immorality of the world. It gives candy to its children until their teeth rot out because it claims to love them. It takes a mature Christian to recognize evil when everyone they know is saying Christianity is the evil. Many immature Christians adapt their morality to fit with the morality of the world.

And what happens if you hold your ground? Eventually, the world takes action against you. It will not let your business enter a city. It will attempt to get the legal system to call your statements hate language. It will call you names a line you up as perpetrators of all that is wrong with the world.

I see fewer people coming to church. It isn't that there aren't plenty of professed Christians around. They could fill their churches every week but stay home because they no longer have to go to church. The society around them isn't going. They can join the churchless crowd with impunity. There is more right by staying home in this society than by going to church. Naturally, we will see them all again at Easter. I wonder how long that will last.

Yet, something has got to turn this all around or I don't see much morality in the future. I suppose that's how you get to the apocalyptic movies of Divergent, The Maze Runner and Hunger Games. Each of these presents a morality that has been forgotten by its society. This morality seems to be introduced rather than remembered. No one explains why the protagonists are moral. They don't reveal where the morality originates. Maybe they don't know.

So, get ready if you decide that you will not be a part of the new morality of this world. It may remember the morality of the Bible some day but today the world is following the slavery of immorality. It will defend this immorality to the end because ambivalence means that there might be sin in what's going on. Thus, the world will immediately force its social hatred on those who stand for  biblical morality. It will bring legal action eventually if nothing changes.

And committed Christians won't be the most popular people around.

1 Peter 4:3-4 (ESV)
³  For the time that is past suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry. ⁴  With respect to this they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you;