Isaiah (6)

Your land is desolate,
Your cities are burned with fire,
Your fields—strangers are devouring them in your presence;
It is desolation, as overthrown by strangers.
The daughter of Zion is left like a shelter in a vineyard,
Like a watchman’s hut in a cucumber field, like a besieged city.
Unless the Lord of hosts
Had left us a few survivors,
We would be like Sodom,
We would be like Gomorrah.  Isaiah 1:7 - 9

One pair of eyes sees prosperity, another pair sees desolation. One person sees destruction and denies it, another person views apparent prosperity and recognizes within it the judgment of God. Our ability to compartmentalize life and to wall-off morality from our own personal peace and affluence can only mean that God is judging us - giving us up to our own ways, letting us do what we want, engaging in an orgy of self deception.

“Therefore God gave them over…” (Romans 1:24). Better to be chastened by God in any number of ways with any number of sorrows than to be given over by God to our own ways, to be intoxicated with pleasure, with success, with might, with prosperity.

In discussing the “mystery of lawlessness” Paul writes (2 Thessalonians 2:11 - 12) that, “God will send upon them a deluding influence so that they will believe what is false, in order that they all may be judged who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in wickedness.”

Within our cities we have decadent wealth and abject poverty, we have the powerful and the disenfranchised, we have innocent children with empty stomachs who may be shot today and become a statistic. The “strangers” in the above passage are not people from other countries, they are our warped and evil values - strangers to God’s goodness, His common grace, to our consciences - we call good evil and evil good as we turn our eyes, as we compartmentalize. It is not people who don’t physically look like us that we should fear, it is the deadening of our morality and compassion and common goodness that we ought to be deathly afraid of. People who are fixated about what language ought to be spoken ought to be more concerned about the morality that we practice. What does language matter if that language is not communicating compassion, grace, love, and concern? If maintaining language is all that important then let us learn the speech of Native Americans and try to be consistent.

When the church becomes one with society, when it becomes married to politics, when it fails to distinguish itself from the promiscuity of its times, when it countenances sinful living within itself - looking the other way, acting as if it will all go away - when holiness is something of which we are ashamed - when we insist on managing Jesus the way an agent might manage an entertainer - then indeed we are like a shelter in a vineyard, like a watchman’s hut in a cucumber field, like a besieged city...there just isn’t much left.

Well, not to worry, if it doesn’t directly affect us we need not be concerned.