Reality and Perception of Reality
This may sound like a lot of philosophical mumble jumble, however, it is critically important that a civilized society be guided by the absolutes, and not by various perceptions of what is.
The Bible starts by telling us that in the beginning, God. All good education should start with the same. It is obvious, even to the casual observer, that the universe in which we live was created, and that we were created, with purpose. For many, to ignore this means the undoing of the civilized world.
Today there is a war, yet this war is not between countries, races, or color. It is a war between truth and error. It is a warfare, like all warfare, that will yield many casualties, leave many disillusioned, and provide no hope or rest for many of the participants.
This war has been described in the Bible at great length. It is a war for the souls of men, a war that revolves around the concept of love, and has consequences that seem unimaginable.
The war, simply stated, is between God and Satan. Satan is like a lying political figure who is manipulating the masses by making promises that cannot be kept, and who is giving false hope to the hopeless. Satan eventually loses this battle, and all those who he used along the way will be discarded to a meaningless eternity which makes his deceptive practices all the more tragic.
The first, and perhaps the most important, strategy of Satan is to somehow persuade the participants that there is no war, that being used by the Evil One will somehow benefit those who fall prey to him, and that truth, or God, is relative, or does not exist at all.
The reason this is critical is because the war is about truth. Satan has been called the father of lies, and he is one who is a master of deception. Yet, the lies that he sows need to land in fertile mind soil.
In the book of Genesis, Satan approaches Eve in a way that allows her to begin to doubt the purposes and intent of God. Once truth has been challenged, for whatever reason, human reasoning takes over, and mankind begins to do what is right in their own eyes, rather than what is right.
In the book of Job we see Satan reluctantly attack Job. His attack was focused on the meaning of love. Satan was reluctant, perhaps, because he did not finish grooming Job, for Job was not about to accept the false definition of love. Satan counted on Job to define love in terms of his performance instead of God’s faithfulness. He counted on Job to see love as something earned instead of something given.
Job did not buy what Satan was selling. He, unlike his many friends and wife, understood love, and refused to redefine it to fit his agenda.
The first step in the destruction of a nation is to get the people of that nation to abandon the idea of absolute truth. This step is steeped in ideology, bathed in enablement, and supported by empty promises. It allows each person to do what is right in his/her own eyes, and approves and even applauds individual thoughts, even when the thoughts are mutually exclusive.
The process of moral decline begins in the educational institutions and would take about 20 years to complete. At first, there would be objections to the redefining of foundational truths, yet, in time, and through persistence of the enemy, the redefining becomes the norm, rather than the exception. In time, those who are steeped into the demoralization process lose the meaning of good and bad, and of right and wrong, and begin to believe that life is an accident that has no purpose, and therefore no future.
In June of 1987, the Supreme Court ruled (Edwards vs. Aguillaro) that creationism must be taught in public school if evolution is taught. What this decision did was not protect the idea of creationism, but it offered an alternative to evolution making both “ideas” acceptable.
What is taught in the public schools and universities eventually becomes the norm for our national leadership. Teaching evolution and creation at the same time teaches something that is mutually exclusive, and led a generation of students into a state of confusion rather than education.
The demoralization may have started with science and creation, but it did not stop there. Once the obvious, (the idea of God creating the universe and man with purpose) was no longer obvious, many other areas of life began a demoralization process of their own. Love, marriage, life (as in the case of the unborn) gender, and so forth, began to be redefined until truth was hard to find.
Lies and deception replaced absolutes in many ways, making life more and more confusing, and causing a generation to no longer seek truth, while minimizing those who did. The variables led us to be a nation without conviction who would defend any and all concepts, while abiding or holding to none. Eventually, nothing mattered. Life has no meaning, anxiety increases, hopelessness and despair lead to instability, and empowerment is lost to enablement.
The destabilization that resulted from years of redefinition eventually begins to disintegrate the economy, military, and national relationships. Chaos becomes the norm, and crisis begins a coup that will eventually degenerate into a military state where the freedoms that were once the bedrock of our nation no longer matter or even exist.
When that happens, we, the people would have already been groomed to accept the inevitable as the new norm, and those who desire to find, propagate, and live by the truth, become the new deviants to a “civilized” society.
The United States of America seems to already be in this final position. Those who proclaim that there is a God, one God, who created the heavens and earth, are minimized. To teach that God created man from the dust of the ground and woman from man, and that marriage is something that is to be a commitment rather than an arrangement between one man and one woman for life, turns truth seekers into haters. The proclamations that men and woman are different and that homosexual relationships are wrong become criminal.
When affirmation, comfort, and accommodation become more important than truth, there is no hope for a nation. When our political leaders make promises they cannot keep, spend resources we do not have, and lie, cheat, and manipulate people and facts to gain power and authority, we, the people, lose.
There is a time when God gives people what they want because they have decided that the absolute truths of God’s Word are irrelevant to them. In Romans 1:24-25 it states this: "Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen."
God is patient but not tolerant. He desires and waits for man to repent, however, there comes a time when God gives us what we want, and unfortunately, at that point, what we deserve.
Perhaps there is still time for us to repent, to admit our sin, and to allow God’s Son Jesus, to be our Savior. Perhaps God’s patience will allow us yet another opportunity. Time will tell.
We will know that happened when we once again seek the truth, not any truth, but the truth, and allow God, once again, to give us the definitions of life, rather than making them up ourselves.
In the Bible, the book of Judges, it was clear what happens to nations when each man does what is right in their own eyes. No nation can survive such an ideology, because it demands that truth be irrelevant, and truth is what sets us free.
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