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Rebellion and Exponential Evil

For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but threw them into hell and locked them up in chains in utter darkness, to be kept until the judgment, and if he did not spare the ancient world, but did protect Noah, a herald of righteousness, along with seven others, when God brought a flood on an ungodly world, and if he turned to ashes the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah when he condemned them to destruction, having appointed them to serve as an example to future generations of the ungodly, and if he rescued Lot, a righteous man in anguish over the debauched lifestyle of lawless men, (for while he lived among them day after day, that righteous man was tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard)–if so, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from their trials, and to reserve the unrighteous for punishment at the day of judgment, especially those who indulge their fleshly desires and who despise authority” (2 Peter 2:4-10)

Many people do not know that the French Revolution was so secular, anti-church, anti-God, anti-Christ, that in their rebellion, they attempted to change the seven day week to a ten day week.[1] After that, the Russian Revolution attempted to change the workers’ weeks to six days, five working followed by one day off in a constant cycle, though the calendar remained the same. It was to optimize production I’m sure, since we know the Bolsheviks[2] were moral, caring people and had no interest in destroying the traditions and practices of practicing Jews and Christians. Their rebellion was, amongst other things, a rebellion against God, His six days of creation and His seventh day of rest (Genesis 2:2-3).

In earlier days, many scientists founded themselves upon the idea that nature was orderly and discoverable because the Creator was not a God of disorder (1 Corinthians 14:33) nor was He capricious; He was a God who invited inquiry (Isaiah 1:18) and discovery and enjoyed revealing Himself through His handiwork for His glory (Psalm 19, Romans 1:19-20). Then followed the Theory of Evolution[3] which was widely embraced not because of the science, but because of the philosophy: It offered an escape hatch from God. Today many scientists may claim that they “cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door”[4] because philosophic materialism (practical atheism or agnosticism) is the only basis for science. They act as though this is a normal, neutral, and necessary thing, but it is not. Copernicus, Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Newton, Faraday, Kelvin, Pasteur, Planck, Einstein would disagree. But as one atheist philosopher has said, “I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”[5] The materialist atheist scientists and philosophers rebel against the foundational premise of “In the beginning God” (Genesis 1:1).

Remember how we used to divide history into “B.C.” (Before Christ) and “A.D.” (Anno Domini, Latin for “In the year of our Lord”, i.e. “After Christ”). Well in college I learned that a change had taken place. Some inclusive people thought it might be offensive to center history around Jesus Christ, since a whole lot of people don’t believe in the eyewitness testimony of His resurrection from the dead. So they changed the designations to “B.C.E.” (“Before Common Era”) and “C.E.” (“Common Era”). Still, no matter which abbreviations are used, if one asks the question: “Why did the years start getting renumbered a little over two-thousand years ago?” The answer remains the same: Jesus Christ. I expect someone will realize this eventually and begin the push to change the dating of the year from 2018 to 14,000,000,008 so as to coincide with their dating of the Big Bang instead. (The rebellion against “In the beginning God” continues.)

According to the Bible, God created our first two human parents and placed them into the Garden of Eden, a garden so large that four rivers flowed through it, two of which were the Tigris and Euphrates (Genesis 2:14). From this description we might well ascertain that God first placed humankind somewhere within or near what today is Iraq. When I was growing up, primary schools taught us about the beginnings of civilization in Mesopotamia, which is in that of the Tigris and Euphrates. Of course, more recent “discoveries” place our origins in Africa. “Humans first evolved in Africa” we are told succinctly by Smithsonian.[6] This seems wonderfully inclusive, of course, but sounds more like a simple rejection of the biblical narrative to me: “If you know anything about human evolution,” one writer tells us, “it’s probably that humans arose in Africa…. The idea that humans evolved in Africa can be traced to Charles Darwin. In his 1871 book The Descent of Man, Darwin speculated that it was ‘probable’ that Africa was the cradle of humans because our two closest living relatives—chimpanzees and gorillas—live there.”[7] To me, this is not science; it is atheistic speculation, rebellion against the biblical narrative of Genesis 2:8-14. We will believe anything, except what the Bible tells us.

Rebellion against God disconnects humanity from meaning, purpose, truth, reality, and accountability. Everything soon becomes fragmented and divided as self-seeking, pleasure seeking humans become the animals evolution says they are. Life is food, shelter, pleasure, procreation, and survival of the fittest. Conscience is unnecessary. There is no reason to ask why some people act like animals; they are. We might then ask why all people are not acting like animals.

But the one who does not find me brings harm to himself; all who hate me love death” (Proverbs 8:36).

Evolutionary theory has been used by some in the past to justify slavery of certain groups of people who were seen to be lower on the evolutionary scale, produced by nature for servitude and enslavement. (Sort of a scientific caste system.) Evolution was used as the basis of eugenics, the science of improving the human population by doing away with the undesirable “stock” (as if it was just a pile of atoms or animals and not human at all). But I’ve gotten ahead of myself…

“No-fault divorce” was introduced by those lovely Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution. California (bastion of much regressive progressive thought) introduced no-fault divorce to America in the late 1960’s. What wonderful progress, the “right” to divorce for any reason no matter what one has promised or who may get hurt. (Wait, I thought the mantra was, “Do what you like so long as no one gets hurt”?) Since humanity is a religious animal, it built an altar to Self and sacrificed spouses, children, families, and society upon the altar.

For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24, NASB) “Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate” (Mark 10:9).

Rebellion.

In 1960 “the pill” was introduced. Sex, for many, had already became divorced from procreation. And then not too long after that in 1973, Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Court. Mothers won the right to mangle, poison, and destroy their own children in the womb, most often for the sake of convenience. (Undesirable stock, remember.) People desired sex but not children or the responsibility. Science helped. Evolutionary theory which made children just blobs of tissue, not human, helped. Having no accountability before God helped. Now millions of babies have been sacrificed on the altar of sexual idolatry and Self. Don’t lecture us about twenty-people executed during the Salem Witch Trials. And school shootings cannot hold a candle to the amount of children killed daily in abortion clinics. Rebellion against Genesis 1:28, etc.

They did not repent of their murders… of their sexual immorality” (Revelation 9:21).

In the past decade or so we saw an ever growing exponential push for the acceptance of homosexuality, homosexual rights, and the oxymoron called “homosexual marriage”. Something that was hush, hush or even laughed about decades ago was suddenly in vogue. Of course, as recently as the 1960’s homosexuality was declared to be a mental disorder. The removal of it from the list of disorders was not scientific but was simply a matter of cultural change.[8] My agnostic buddy, whose field of study is evolutionary biology, remarked that homosexuality goes against evolutionary theory and questions why it would be championed by any scientists, etc., at all. But the elites in academia, the media, and Hollywood who know best for us all decided this tiny minority was to be given privileged status and then systematically (in ways that would make William Randolph Hearst Sr. proud) pushed, advertised, and made homosexuality sympathetic. The goal was to indoctrinate minds.

Yet the Bible calls homosexuality a sin and “unnatural”: “For their women exchanged the natural sexual relations for unnatural ones, and likewise the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed in their passions for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in themselves the due penalty for their error” (Romans 1:26-27). As Dr. James Montgomery Boice said, when preaching on this passage, fornication and adultery are still natural because they involve the use of the male and female bodies according to their proper functions; homosexuality is unnatural because it divorces male and female bodies from their natural created use. But we have divorced ourselves from God, creation, meaning, function, and humanity. We worship Self and, well, some have theorized that the utmost worship of Self may very well be the sexual relations with someone who reflects the image of Self.[9]

The rebellion rages.

When the Supreme Court ruled that homosexual “marriage” was a Constitutional right in June 2015, I wrote that transgenderism would probably be the next push “over the next ten years.” How wrong I was! Within months of that ruling, Bruce Jenner was being paraded around as a woman in all of media, including on the cover of Vanity Fair.[10] Glamour Magazine named him one of its 25 women of the year (underscoring the divorce from truth and reality). Entertainment Weekly named him one of the entertainers of the year. Barbara Walters named him the most fascinating person of 2015. He won a Teen Choice Award, made Time Magazine 100 list, was put on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Suddenly he had a cable show and a book deal. Next thing we knew, Facebook was offering the choice of identifying oneself as one of over fifty genders, Target stores made a policy that people could use any bathroom which tied in with their personal gender identification (as opposed to their DNA gender identification), and Barack Obama’s administration was using the strong arm of government to push schools to allow children to use any bathroom they wanted. Children. Rebellion against Genesis 1:27.

Indignation grips me because of the wicked, who have forsaken your law” (Psalm 119:53).

And it is said the “slippery slope” argument is fallacious?

Suppose fifty, five hundred, or fifteen-hundred years ago someone said, “I feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body”? They would have either been put away in an institution (Dr. Paul McHugh, formerly psychiatrist-in-chief at John’s Hopkins, has said that transgenderism is a mental disorder.[11]) or they would have been considered demon possessed. How filled with self-loathing and/or how deceived must someone be to say, for instance, “I desire that my genitals and reproductive organs be cut off and replaced by that of the opposite sex”? How is it possible that a society could be swayed to facilitate and encourage this? It would have to be a godless society, one which has “exchanged the truth of God for a lie”, one which is “futile in their thoughts… their senseless hearts… darkened”, one that “invent(s) ways of doing evil” (Romans 1:24-32).

But now more evils are being stirred up. Attempts are being made to force compliance with the agenda of wickedness. Elected officials in this country are working toward passing laws against those who might try to help those who would like to leave the homosexual or transgender lifestyle.[12] No science, only opinion, backs up the legislation. They claim that such therapy may result in all kinds of emotional hurt and trauma. (They never cared that divorcing or having an abortion may result in similar traumas.) One commentator calls the California version of the bill, the “You Must Stay Gay” Bill.[13]

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter” (Isaiah 5:20).

We live in a nation that is now becoming so anti-Christian that a shameless U.S. Senator can grill a Christian nominated for Secretary of State, contemptuously grill him as to whether he believes homosexuality is a perversion.[14] In a great commentary written by Bre Payton we read:

“Despite Pompeo’s efforts to convince everyone that he believes all people ought to be treated equally  — and that he treats gay co-workers with respect — Booker still hounded Pompeo for thinking Wrong Thoughts…. [“Progressives” like Booker] routinely treat others with whom they disagree as non-persons…. the way Booker treats Pompeo in this exchange indicates his anti-religious Puritanism…. Booker clearly thinks people who hold views that vary from one very narrow vein of liberal orthodoxy must be purged and publicly humiliated.”[15]

It’s the new witch-hunting. We have seen a very popular U.S. Senator and former presidential candidate, scornfully grill a Christian person for his orthodox Christian beliefs saying it makes the Christian unqualified for a political appointment.[16] (Would this be done to a Muslim?) We saw Senators cast doubt upon the fitness of judicial appointees because they are orthodox Roman Catholic.[17] (Would they do that to an Atheist?) We saw how the Chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential Campaign had discussed infiltrating the Roman Catholic Church in order to turn it towards the progressive belief system.[18] Hillary Clinton herself declared that in order for women to be free to have abortions, etc., “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”[19] Have to be? How might that happen?

We now see that the weight of some state justice systems are brought to bear against Christian florists, bakers, and photographers because their conscience precludes them from participating in celebrations of homosexuality, etc.; yet bars can deny service to people they disagree with politically,[20] coffee shops can refuse to serve police officers,[21] etc. ad infinitum (or so it seems). Even though freedom of religion is constitutionally protected, the anti-religious have decided sexual inclinations trump religion when it comes to rights. Freedom of conscience is only championed for those with the “correct” conscience. Free speech is championed only for the “correct” beliefs and political positions. Freedom in commerce and business is championed only for those with the correct viewpoints.

Even now many antichrists have come” (1 John 2:18).

Brazen and insolent, they are not afraid to insult the glorious ones, yet even angels, who are much more powerful, do not bring a slanderous judgment against them before the Lord. But these men, like irrational animals–creatures of instinct, born to be caught and destroyed–do not understand whom they are insulting, and consequently in their destruction they will be destroyed, suffering harm as the wages for their harmful ways. By considering it a pleasure to carouse in broad daylight, they are stains and blemishes, indulging in their deceitful pleasures when they feast together with you. Their eyes, full of adultery, never stop sinning; they entice unstable people. They have trained their hearts for greed, these cursed children! By forsaking the right path they have gone astray, because they followed the way of Balaam… who loved the wages of unrighteousness” (2 Peter 2:10-15).

G.K. Chesterton exposed the foolishness of the new foundationless morality when he said (This is my modern translation of his words.):

“The new rebels denounce everything, but in denouncing everything they must take a moral stance of some kind. On one hand they rise up against those who would take a woman’s virtue/chastity, yet on the other hand insult women who wished to retain their virtue/chastity. They denounce marriage as insignificant and yet denounce those who treat their marriages insignificantly. They rage against war as a waste of human life and then philosophize that human life is meaningless and worthless anyway. They rail against a policeman for shooting a poor person and yet, through their materialistic principles, underscore that the poor person should have shot himself. They rail against those who would treat aboriginal tribes as if they were animals, and praise evolutionary theory which tells them humans actually are animals. They rail against the immorality of the politicians and the rich that tramples upon others and in their universities they rail against how morality stifles human freedom. They are always engaged in sawing off the branch on which they sit.”

Dear friends, do not be astonished that a trial by fire is occurring among you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice in the degree that you have shared in the sufferings of Christ, so that when his glory is revealed you may also rejoice and be glad. If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory, who is the Spirit of God, rests on you. But let none of you suffer as a murderer or thief or criminal or as a troublemaker. But if you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but glorify God that you bear such a name. For it is time for judgment to begin, starting with the house of God. And if it starts with us, what will be the fate of those who are disobedient to the gospel of God? And if the righteous are barely saved, what will become of the ungodly and sinners? So then let those who suffer according to the will of God entrust their souls to a faithful Creator as they do good” (1 Peter 4:12-18).


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To read more of my columns go to https://blogs.bible.org/author/stephen-j-drain/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar#Ten_days_of_the_week

[2] The Russian Social Democrats, the Marxist Leninists who became the Communist Party.

[3] And it is only a theory, a theory which can never be proven because 1) It was not witnessed by anyone, 2) It is not provable and repeatable, 3) If someone, according to these theories, managed to create something in the lab or in a computer simulation, then they would actually only prove the opposite: That an intelligent being was needed to make it all happen!

[4] A famous quote by Richard Lewontin

[5] https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/57677.Thomas_Nagel

[6] http://humanorigins.si.edu/education/introduction-human-evolution

[7] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-africa-became-the-cradle-of-humankind-108875040/

[8] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201509/when-homosexuality-stopped-being-mental-disorder

[9] https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/why-is-homosexuality-wrong

[10] How ironic it is that Vanity Fair takes its name from the book The Pilgrim’s Progress. As per Wikipedia: “Vanity Fair, a place built by Beelzebub where every thing [sic] to a human’s tastes, delights, and lusts are sold daily, where both are arrested and detained because of their disdain for the wares and business of the Fair. Faithful is put on trial, and executed by burning at the stake as a martyr

[11] https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/michael-w-chapman/johns-hopkins-psychiatrist-transgender-mental-disorder-sex-change

[12] https://housedems.com/article/reps-condemn-conversion-therapy-workshop-planned-downriver and see also https://stream.org/christian-read-bill/

[13] https://stream.org/californias-stay-gay-bill-reflects-rebellion-against-god/

[14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGi3Wb-4s5Y

[15] http://thefederalist.com/2018/04/13/corey-booker-hounds-mike-pompeo-agreeing-christianity-gay-sex/#.WuWjhsysp5k.facebook

[16] https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=bernie+sanders+applies+a+religious+test&view=detail&mid=6C993936EA1B5B12ACBE6C993936EA1B5B12ACBE&FORM=VIRE

[17] https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=diane+feinstein+amy+coney+barrett&&view=detail&mid=5E750CCFBEBF202F569A5E750CCFBEBF202F569A&&FORM=VRDGAR

[18] https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2016/10/13/fake-catholic-groups-and-the-catholic-spring-emails/

[19] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hillary-clinton-is-a-threat-to-religious-liberty/2016/10/13/878cdc36-9150-11e6-a6a3-d50061aa9fae_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.1a06d91e478a

[20] https://thepoliticalinsider.com/bar-kicks-out-trump-supporter/

[21] https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/09/us/oakland-police-denied-coffee-shop/index.html

"Rescued, ransomed, and saved because of the love of God the Father, through the regeneration of the Holy Spirit, thanks to faithful preachers and teachers of the Word, attained by the perfect life and merit of Jesus the Messiah, His substitutionary death and physical resurrection from the dead. Completely undeserved and gifted to me." The author would label himself a Christ follower, an Evangelical Christian with strong Reformed beliefs. He loves discussing and debating the two "taboo" subjects: Politics and Religion. He tries to read and listen to a minimum of fifty books a year and realizes that no matter what topic or genre, whether Bible, theology, Christianity, history, biography, philosophy, political, social commentary, pop-culture, or even fiction, they all tie together in the spider's web of worldview. His favorite authors are C.S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, James R. White, Gregory Koukl, R.C. Sproul, J. Gresham Machen, G.K. Chesterton, J. Budziszewski, and Peter Kreeft. He loves Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Voddie Baucham, Paul Washer, and Dwight L. Moody. He enjoys watching the YouTube channels of John Cooper at Cooper Stuff, Doug Wilson at Blog and Mablog, Alisa Childers, Allen Parr at The Beat, and Melissa Dougherty. His hobbies are generally reading and writing, music, hiking, and laughing. He has been writing songs/lyrics since the age of eight and has played in a few Christian Rock bands. He has written poetry, several biblical studies over the past decades, and has one finished book manuscript entitled, “Shaken Faith: When God Has Let You Down”. He has also written for the now defunct Examiner website as the Philadelphia Christian Perspectives Examiner. He wishes he could write some fiction.

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