Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

“Why does the Almighty not set times for judgment?
    Why must those who know him look in vain for such days?
There are those who move boundary stones;
    they pasture flocks they have stolen.
They drive away the orphan’s donkey
    and take the widow’s ox in pledge.
They thrust the needy from the path
    and force all the poor of the land into hiding.
Like wild donkeys in the desert,
    the poor go about their labor of foraging food;
    the wasteland provides food for their children.
They gather fodder in the fields
    and glean in the vineyards of the wicked.
Lacking clothes, they spend the night naked;
    they have nothing to cover themselves in the cold.

• Job 24:1-7

“Wouldn’t it be dreadful if some day in our own world, at home, men started going wild inside, like the animals here, and still looked like men, so that you’d never know which were which.”

• C. S. Lewis, Prince Caspian

Of course in Prince Caspian, we are talking about Narnian animals who have gone “wild.”  The “wild donkeys” mentioned by Job would be asses.  So, to add the epithets people ascribe to “wild donkeys,” they had surely gone “wild.”  Just connecting the dots here.  But remember, this is one of the many laments of Job who still wants that face-to-face with God.

But a bit of fiction in a fantasy story written about 70 years ago, seems to describe our world today.

But have we gone wild?  We have reversed our thinking on what gender is, what our history is, and the definitions of so many words have changed that is “up” still up?  Then there is the division within the country and the intense angry issues.  It is either wild or insane.

I have had discussions with people about change over the years.  Political change in the USA will almost always cost us: either in the pocketbook or our freedoms or both.  But to “prove” that change is good, they mention technological change, not political change, which proves nothing.  Yet, is the technological advances in the past few centuries a good thing?  It has brought on the issues that people say cause climate change.  If we had not advanced as quickly as we did, could we have corrected errors along the way?  Would we have even noticed that they were errors?

It was greed that fueled the rapid expansion, and it is power-hungry politicians that wish to rapidly change our government – changing so quickly that we will never pinpoint one wrong move or another that seals our fate.  Conservatives want change as much as liberals do, but they are usually in favor of a slow change so that we can monitor what works and what was a disaster.

What the secular world is blissfully unaware of, is that our troubles of today were caused by going further away from God, and the problems were caused by mankind, either making an initial mistake or compounding the mistake by trying to fix the mistake.

What should we do?  The best reason for change is to repent of our sins.  We do not need to repent for the past several hundred years of mistakes, just our contribution to it.  That concept of confessing the sins of our ancestors as if they were our sins is not supported by the Scriptures, and it is a bad idea.

Yet, there is one thing that does not change.  ^“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” – Hebrews 13:8.

We can rely on Jesus.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.