Thousands of Years

So far this summer season has brought plenty of adventures into my life. My family grew to 8 in May, my brother attended his new student conference in June, and come July I'll be in Scotland for the first time in almost 17 years. In addition to adventure, there has been a fair share of monotonous school work. I've been trudging through a business law course this summer and its been a doozy. Not only are we responsible for knowing what the law says now, but we have to know how it came to that point. 200 years of business law can get a bit tedious if you can imagine.

My brain has been shuffling things around and organizing everything into its proper place in time. And in addition to the work I've been doing, I find myself diving into the book of Revelation. In addition to all it has to say about the end times, I've found the depiction of man to be equally intriguing. You see, after everything man has been through from creation until now, we haven't really changed. The desire for wealth and sexual immorality have ruled man since the garden. It was that desire for wealth that led Eve to eat the fruit, wanting to have the status and power of God, to be "like God" as the serpent whispered to her ear. And it was sexual immorality that was at the root of every instance of Israel wandering from the Lord. 

Jesus said in Luke 16:13, "No servant can serve to masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money." Likewise Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that the sexually immoral will not inherit the kingdom of God. That tells you that these were still problems in the first century.

Today you don't have to look very far to see that man has continued to sink further into these sins. Only the smallest of fractions of married couples are both sexually pure, and the divorce rates are sky high as people "fall out of love" instead of admit to adulterous thoughts and behaviors. Names like Adelphia, WorldCom, Enron and Bernie Madoff. Even the 'legal' exorbitant bonuses paid out by Goldmen Sachs exemplify the corporate greed that resides just in America.

Not surprisingly, this is what we find in Revelation 17 and 18. Sexual immorality and the desire for wealth are there at the end as well. It might be painted up in a different shade, but red is still red. Man has been trying to police itself and clean itself up for a long time and it simply isn't working. With this extremely broad lens overlooking human history it would behoove us to examine ourselves. If these two sins have been dominating humanity for thousands of years, it is more than likely that Satan is trying to get his foothold in our lives through one of these areas.

There is nothing new under the sun. Now, we ought to examine ourselves. 

Pray with me: "Lord, make us pure in body and mind. Keep our hearts guarded from the world, and captured by Your spirit. Show us our shortcomings, and overwhelm us with Your grace. Make us a generation know not for our sin, but for our faith. Make us world changers. Amen"

-matt