BENT WORLD

Gunfire! Apparently from two boys ages eleven and thirteen. Four precious little girls and one teacher from a middle school in Jonesboro, Arkansas, are dead, and another ten are wounded.

Righteous indignation should be the order of the day. "Ye that love the Lord, hate evil" (Psalm 97:10).

"The earth was filled with violence," the Bible says. Change the verb tense, and you have a description of our present world. What should one expect in a society which glorifies violence in movies and music, television and books? What should one expect in a society where schools are prohibited from teaching the Ten Commandments, and parents take no pains to bring their children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord? What should one expect when even children learn to use drugs, and gang activity abounds? We shouldn’t be surprised. We have sown to the wind, and we are reaping the whirlwind!

Twenty years ago Malcolm Muggeridge wrote:

Good and evil provide the theme of the drama of our mortal existence. In this sense, they may be compared with the positive and negative points which generate an electric current. Transpose the points and the current fails, the lights go out, darkness falls, and all is confusion.

The darkness falling on our civilization is likewise due to a transposition of good and evil. In other words, what we are suffering from is not an energy crisis, nor an overpopulation crisis, nor a monetary crisis, nor a balance of payments crisis, nor an unemployment crisis — from none of these ills that are commonly pointed out — but from the loss of a sense of a moral order in the universe. Without that, no order whatsoever — economic, social, or political — is attainable.

Men looking for illumination will not turn to their laboratories and their computers, but to the Bible and their Creator.

John Gibson