WHY DON’T WE ALL JUST GO HOME
AND SHUT UP!
© 2020 Philip A Matthews
Proverbs 16:2: “All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes; but the LORD weighs the spirits.
People think that whatever they do is right, but the LORD judges their reason for doing it.”
The more I look around at society today, the more I am dismayed by the utter foolishness of it all! There’s a lot of chaos happening and confusion going around. Disagreement, divisiveness, polarization. Very little agreement on what is right or wrong.
I posted the other day, somewhat just to gauge what kind of reactions I would get, that I believe “black lives matter, and that for centuries, they have been on the receiving end of much racial injustice. I believe that much of this injustice is systemic, i.e., embedded in the policies & practices of many social institutions of this society. I believe we have come a long way, but that we still have a long way—almost just as far—to go…” I believe that in certain circumstances & situations, black lives require special attention, protection, and allowances because of past documented discrimination, police brutality, racial profiling, and other maltreatment. But I do not believe in and cannot support the Black Lives Matter organization, simply because the organization, in addition to rightfully demanding justice for mistreated black people, promotes a host of unrelated movements and concepts that I cannot agree with because they are unbiblical. According to its own online manifesto, "What We Believe," BLM is pro-abortion, “queer-affirming,” anti-“nuclear family,” pro-same-sex marriage, pro-LGBTQ rights, and pro-Marxist, all of which I cannot support as a Christian. I do not condone violence, denial of civil rights, or mistreatment of any type against any person or groups of people, because of their ethnicity, sexual orientation, social class, or other differentiating condition, but I cannot make positive validations and affirmations for those other causes. I can say that “queers” have the right to equal social treatment, but I cannot be “queer-AFFIRMING.”
Immediately my statement got disagreement from, surprisingly, others who claim to believe in the Bible or have some religious leanings. One reader talked about her past abortion, which BLM would promote in their stated defense of “reproductive rights.” Another disagreed because, evidently, she also is pro-abortion and had other tenuous moral positions to defend. Another disagreed because he believes in listening and understanding and finding out WHY they did what they did, before judging someone. Of course, if something like same-sex marriage is morally wrong, does it really matter WHY a person believes it? Is there any biblical reason to justify it?
However, what impressed me most about all of this was the difficulty in getting people to agree on what is right and what is wrong these days. Everybody justifies their own little personal evil, while at the same time protesting some other evil in society or in someone else. “THAT’S bad, but what I did is not so bad.” And that tells us what is wrong with this society in a nutshell: We no longer agree on a MORAL STANDARD on which to base our laws, to determine right and wrong behavior, or to govern our personal actions and positions.
SOCIAL & MORAL INCONSISTENCIES
Consider the idea of EQUALITY as mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, one of our nation’s founding documents. It is utter foolishness to believe that “All men are created equal” when we can’t even agree that people were CREATED! Only 40% of Americans even believe in creationism and the rest say humans evolved. What sense can we get out of the words “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” when millions of us no longer believe in a CREATOR?! The Declaration says “we hold these TRUTHS to be self-evident”—but we no longer agree that absolute Truths even exist: Only 22% of adults and 6% of teens (Wikipedia)! Whatever, these “self-evident Truths” were taken from the Bible. However, only 24% of Americans even believe the Bible is the Word of God! (2017, Gallup).
Without God and the Bible, we have absolutely NO basis for the concept of equality at all. HOW are we equal? The only way all of us are equal is that we have EQUAL VALUE in the sight of God. We are EQUALLY LOVED by Him. We are EQUALLY MADE in the IMAGE OF GOD. Equality is certainly NOT true if we mean equal IQs, equal social or financial opportunities, equal upbringings & backgrounds, equal amounts of possessions, equal physical characteristics, or equal anything else. EQUAL VALUE in God’s eyes. That’s about it. But then, since we don’t believe in God and reject the Bible, equality is meaningless. How foolish that all these godless people are out in the streets fighting for equality that exists ONLY UNDER GOD!
We need to agree on something—morally. IF we cannot agree on ONE standard of morality, then there’s absolutely NO meaning at all to concepts like “fairness,” “justice,” “human rights,” or anything else supposedly “good” and “right.” Based on WHAT?! YOUR ideas? MY ideas?
A VIEW FROM ABOVE
What does GOD think about all this? Do you really think He would be more disturbed by the death of George Floyd or by the death of the store owner trying to defend his property? Is God more disturbed by the death of a black man killed by a white man or a black man killed by another black man? Remember, this is the God Who commanded “Thou shalt not kill!” So is He more disturbed by the unjust death of your black teen son or the premeditated murder of your aborted, preborn, black baby? One you scream hysterically about, and the other you just silently toss into the hazardous waste bin and try to forget about.
Oh, you say, we never agreed that abortion is murder. We don’t know if it is or isn’t. Well, in a country claiming to be established primarily on Judeo-Christian ethics, that’s a mystery, especially when we hear this theology from Psalms 139:14-16: “I will give thanks to you because I have been so amazingly and miraculously made. Your works are miraculous, and my soul is fully aware of this. My bones were not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, when I was being skillfully woven in an underground workshop. Your eyes saw me when I was only a FETUS. Every day of my life was recorded in your book [registry] before one of them had taken place.” So every day of the child’s life has already been recorded in Yahweh’s book, and in 9 months s/he will be here to start living out those days. Then what do we do? We go to Planned Parenthood, take a couple of pills, and flush that baby out! So much for God’s registry and His plans for that child!
How hypocritical for BLM to be SO concerned about black lives, but still it is PRO-abortion: We black people abort—i.e., KILL—our babies at a rate 5 TIMES HIGHER than whites do, 1,800 per day, totaling 20 million black babies since Roe v Wade in 1973! In fact, 2/3rds of all abortions are performed on minority women, and, each year in NYC, more black babies are aborted than born! This is SELF-INFLICTED GENOCIDE, just like eugenicist, Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, planned all along!
In God’s divine mind, is He more displeased by social injustice, murder, or rape? By armed robbery or white collar embezzlement? Or lying and cheating on your taxes? Are there levels and degrees of evil and wrongdoing, some more “acceptable” to God? Or, really, is anything wrong? Says who? And what authority do they have to judge?
There’s absolutely NO way to “straighten out” this society unless we have a SINGLE, STRAIGHT MEASURING STICK! A MORAL STANDARD. But we refuse to agree on what that standard is or should be. My standard is mine and not yours, and your standard is yours and not mine. So everybody is “straight” by their own standard. This sounds just like Proverbs 16:2: “People think that whatever they do is right, but the LORD judges their reason for doing it.”
A NEW BUT ANCIENT PROPOSAL
So, let me make a proposal, a timeless one at that: I propose that we ALL re-adopt, or more FULLY adopt, as our MORAL STANDARD the TEN COMMANDMENTS and the PRINCIPLES OF JESUS CHRIST. They would tell us what is right and wrong, good and evil. If followed, these would bring a semblance of order to our troubled society. The Ten Commandments would govern our external behavior, and the Principles of Jesus, which emphasize LOVE, would reform and empower our internal attitudes.
The Ten Commandments would teach us to make a place in our busy lives for God, prayer, and spiritual meditation on what is truly valuable in this world; teach us that certain things deserve respect and should not be profaned; keep us from worshipping money and power, turning them into our gods; bring the hearts of parents and children back together for peaceful homes; forbid us to kill others; keep us from stealing; keep us from lying and being dishonest; keep us from being greedy and never satisfied, because unbridled desire drives everything wrong in this world; teach us to keep all of our sexuality within the confines of marriage between a man and a woman, thus better insuring that every child born gets love & transcendent training from a mother and a father, which, I guess, according to the anti-nuclear family folks, is a “bad” thing.
The Principles of Jesus Christ, NOT mere religion, would take us even further because they would govern our internal morality and spiritually reform us from within. For example, the Ten Commandments say, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” but Jesus says that “if a man looks at a woman and wants to sin sexually with her, he has already committed that sin with her in his heart and mind” (Matthew 5:28). That would not only eliminate sex outside of marriage, but also all the internal sexual immorality that drives these evils: pornography, sex trafficking, child molestation, and lots of other stuff. Or, as another example, the Ten Commandments tell us to treat our neighbors fairly, but Jesus tells us even to “love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which spitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). This would take care of police brutality, racism, immigrant kids in cages, all violence, all wars, all revengefulness, and a host of other social ills. The Principles of Jesus Christ would actually CHANGE people, REMOVE racism from our hearts, REPLACE hatred, prejudice, and selfishness with LOVE, and REFORM society from top to bottom! Wouldn’t THAT be nice?! If ONLY we could accept this!
CONCLUSION
But I hear voices of vehement disagreement in the background. “The Ten Commandments are way too antiquated to apply to our modern world. Everything has changed, and life is way too complicated now. And the Principles of Jesus? I hear people chuckling. Something 2,000 years old? Be serious, man! That stuff would NEVER work! Besides, I don’t believe in it! It’s NOT for me!”
Okay, so we cannot agree on a moral standard after all. Well, guess what?! In that case, we cannot agree on what is right or wrong. We can’t even say that anything is wrong. Neither can we say that anything is right. We can’t straighten this society out because we have NO idea what “straight” would mean! We all want to keep doing our own little things according to our own little definitions of morality. As the prophet Isaiah said, “We're all like sheep who've wandered off and gotten lost. We've all done our own thing, gone our own way” (Isaiah 53:6).
Thousands think they did George Floyd “wrong,” which they did, but thousands more don’t think it’s “wrong” to loot and burn. And not everyone looting was Antifa, white supremacists, rogue cops, or anarchists. Some were plain ol’ people doing their shopping opportunistically—and immorally. Millions demand their “unalienable rights,” based on the Bible, but utterly refuse to quit stealing, lying, cheating, shacking up, fornicating, killing their babies, drinking, drugging, engaging in homosexual activity, hating, fighting, mistreating others, watching porn—even RACIST porn, worshiping Satan & the occult, etc., etc., etc., ALL of which the same Bible teaches against!
How INCONSISTENT can we be? How HYPOCRITICAL? How “PICKY & CHOOSY?” You know what? WHY DON'T WE ALL JUST GO HOME AND SHUT UP! Whatever CHAOS happens, happens! Whatever CONFUSION reigns, reigns! And we better remember that we have DELIBERATELY chosen for things to be this way! EVIL IS HERE, BY OUR OWN CHOICE, RUNNING RAMPANT IN THIS SOCIETY, AND FROM GOD’S PERSPECTIVE, HOW DOES IT FIX THINGS TO TRY STOPPING ONE EVIL WHILE PERMITTING & PROMOTING A MILLION OTHERS!
OR, ONCE AGAIN, IT’S TIME TO REPENT AND TURN TO GOD, THE TRUE SOURCE OF THE GOOD & ETERNAL LIFE! WHY DON’T WE GO FOR THE REAL FIX!? AND WE HAVE A PROMISE: “[IF] my people, my God-defined people, respond by HUMBLING themselves, PRAYING, SEEKING my presence, and TURNING their backs on their WICKED LIVES, I'll be there READY for you: I'll LISTEN from heaven, FORGIVE their sins, and HEAL their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14).
God bless us all!