[Another revisit originally posted January 13, 2013, reposted October 11, 2014 and August 10, 2015 , still and even more so relevant to our times though probably getting outdated in a rapidly changing world.—Admin1.]
[AST] Isaiah 5:20-21, 24, 25:
Woe to those who speak of evil as good and of good as evil;
who make darkness into light and light into darkness;
they make bitter into sweet and sweet into bitter!
Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes,
and in their own view, understanding. . . .
they have abhorred the Torah of HaSHEM [YHWH] Master of Legions,
and they have scorned the word of the Holy One of Israel . . . .
Yet still His wrath has not ceased and His hand is still stretched out.
The prophet Isaiah laments that the people who have been divinely chosen to model YHWH’s WAY of life as a nation miserably failed to be the true light to the gentiles. Exactly how did they fail? They knew “good” and “right” and yet they lived just the opposite, termed “evil” in their Elohim’s sight. To find out specific details of their failure, read the prophets of Israel who mince no words and in fact use graphic language, calling Israel an unfaithful wife who commits spiritual adultery. You get the idea that adultery, unfaithfulness is tantamount to idolatry in the metaphorical language of Scripture.
The words of Israel’s prophets continue to reverberate through the ages in the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures. When we look at the world today and its value system turned upside down, we can easily relate to the prophets’ lamentations about their times.
Image from jonathanstanfield.com
Here’s a lamentation by a non-prophet, just a simple observer of the world today, ‘yours truly’.
There is a saying that ‘art’ imitates life though sometimes you wonder if it is life that imitates art. Substitute ‘multimedia’ for ‘art’ and look at the invasion of family living rooms by one insidious influence of an invited guest which never leaves but worse, dominates personal and family life. This guest? Television. Its conventional fare is constantly pushed upon televiewers so that you wonder if censors are a thing of the past. Anything goes, it’s a free-for-all; even advertisements pander to baser instincts and the children are exposed to salacious images and language way before bedtime, in fact during “family time.” [Update 2016: But never mind television, techtoys in the hands of children opens them up to the NO-CENSORSHIP world of the WorldWideWeb, the Internet—unsupervised, accessible anytime anywhere, pandering the best to the worst, child-in-wonderland indeed!]
There is no more comfortable position left for a conservative value system, or a biblical world view which is condemned as ‘narrow’ if not ‘irrelevant’, nay, obsolete! Sodom and what Babylon symbolized have resurrected and become the new ‘normal’. Liberal feminist friends are aghast that I don’t believe in evolution, and seriously wonder if I was ‘left behind’ in biblical antiquity.
[Update 2016: Think about it—there is a difference in 3 words applicable to this: “natural”, “normal”, and “legal”. “Natural” refers to original creation, as the Creator has intended. “Normal” refers to what has become accepted by the majority that imposes its thinking/values upon the minority and in due time, majority demands that laws adjust according to what has become widely acceptable, i.e., legalize the behavior. On the opposite end of this pendulum, some religious laws demand legal limitations on the female gender such as the covering of their face as well as the legal extreme, execution of sexual aberrants. ]
Homosexuality is not a “sin” nor a “gender choice” because they are “born” that way, like it’s “natural” and they’re simply being who they really are. The Bible is condemned for condemning it, such that apologists strike back by explaining God did not create “Adam and Steve.” If so, the Bible would have ended in Genesis 2. Gays and lesbians coming out of the closet is likened to race issues and ‘women’s lib’ demanding equality. That has progressed to same-sex couples who now want to redefine “marriage.” It has become a major political issue at least in the USA. Women mate women, men mate men and because they can’t reproduce themselves, they adopt children and are, admittedly, very conscientious parents but for certain, also influence the next generation’s thinking about same-gender-choices. It is good that children have loving gay parents, but that still does not make it right in the eyes of the Creator who designed two genders to ensure procreation among humans as well as animals. Just think: had Noah loaded only one gender of his family, could they have obeyed the Creator’s command to “go and multiply” even if they wanted to? Certain Christian denominations have allowed gay pastors in the pulpit as well as perform same-sex marriages with the blessings of their congregation. If they’re still teaching from the same Christian New Testament and ignoring Paul’s epistle to the Romans, that’s their congregational choice.
I better quit on this subject before I end up with hate mail and labeled homophobic. Don’t get me wrong, I respect gay rights and have no problem recognizing same-sex civil unions, I’m simply discussing here how tables have turned in the last half of the 20th century and in this second decade of our 21st the same momentum keeps going in the same direction. Pandora’s box has indeed been opened to unleash unbelievable trends that the previous generation had not imagined possible and perhaps that is why there is a gap between the older and the younger and why generations do come and go. But then again, if the whole world turned homosexual, we will finally not only control the population but end humanity as a created species by the 7th millennium. [Update 2016: the LGBT movement has asserted itself aggressively, sparking controversies, the least of which concerns toilet topics, as in which ‘Restroom’ do transgenders use, Male, Female, or an extra provision, maybe two extras for the third sex?]
Virginity is old-fashioned, outdated, abnormal, embarrassing, if not outright weird. While extra-marital affairs among men of stature are frowned upon, TV and Hollywood tell us these are about as normal as choosing a different fare from your regular menu. In fact why bother with marriage when living together is the acceptable norm. Television’s most popular series show how the general public continue to respond favorably to situations, plots, reality shows that would have been unacceptable, frowned upon condemned, or outright censored once upon a time, not so long ago, within a generation’s lifetime. Life imitates art, that’s for sure.
Are the children confused? It’s a monkey-see-monkey-do world, they’re like sponges lapping up anything and everything. What’s normal for the parents gets passed on to them. Birth control is taught to children before they understand the birth process or how they were conceived. TV hosts feature children choosing to dress and act like their opposite sex as early as 5 years old, (see, they’re “born” that way!). Toddlers are dressed up like adults to compete like beauty queens, by their own mothers. Pedophiles make it as boy scout leaders, sports coaches; priests abuse altar boys, etc. And these are just sexuality concerns, there is of late alarming signs of how gun-toting youth exposed to violence in video games and films are acting out their vendetta against society, claiming innocent victims in movie houses, shopping malls, schools.
Image from www.sisodia.in
Since words influence attitudes, even language is being sanitized so as not to offend one’s neighbor, and that is a good thing. One has to mind one’s terms to comply with what is “politically correct” so that labels are not used to demean people. But while we’re sensitive to people’s sensibilities, just listen to how often the word “God” is linked with “damn” and nobody blinks anymore. I made a resolution once that I would change the TV channel if I heard the word uttered in any show, series or film; I often could not finish what I was watching. It got to the point that in my desire to finish one freakin’ movie, I started rationalizing — “the word “God” is not the True God’s Name, so what if the “G” word is uttered like an unbreakable habit together with other cuss words”? To my credit, I figured the mindless cusser would still be cursing the True God, he simply does not know His Name and therefore uses the generic word for deity. Now isn’t it interesting that “Satan-damn” or “Baal-damn” never made it into foul speech? As one writer justifies the Jews’ avoidance of saying God’s True Name, it would have been profaned had it been widely known and used. Perhaps so.
[AST] Exodus 20:7
You shall not
take the name of the Lord your God
in vain,
for the Lord will not hold him guiltless
who takes his name in vain.
I could go on and on with this list of how things have turned around from the standards set in YHWH’s TORAH or its shorter version of the 10 Commandments which is more familiar. You get to where you wish you could say as one play title says it, “stop the world, I want to get off!” But there is no other “world” to get off to; man is placed on one planet which was designed perfectly to sustain life, whether flora or fauna or human life. This beautiful earth is IT for generations who have been born and passed on. Humankind was given the mandate to steward one planet by the Creator Who, as Revelator followed up His initial instructions with how to relate as humans in communities of families and nations. Would the maker of any gadget such as a computer not provide instructions for users? The Creator has done the same by leaving His Revelation so that humankind could best fulfill the divine purpose for which they were created.
Image from calvarysouthbury.com
TORAH is Other-entered and God-centered. If each person thought of heeding God’s instructions, and showing as much concern for others’ welfare as much as his own, this would be a different world indeed. I know, I know, easy to say . . .the fact is man goes his own way instead of YHWH’s Way. Lucky for man, despite his insistence on his way, that is ignoring TORAH, our awesome and merciful YHWH has the last word!
The last statement in the Isaiah verse reminds us:
Yet still His wrath has not ceased
and His hand is still stretched out. [AST]
Here’s a timely reminder from YHWH’s self-description in Exodus/Shemoth 34:6 [EF]:
6 And YHWH passed before his face
and called out:
YHWH YHWH
God,
showing-mercy, showing-favor;
long-suffering in anger,
abundant in loyalty and faithfulness,
keeping loyalty to the thousandth (generation),
bearing iniquity, rebellion and sin,
yet not clearing, clearing (the guilty),
calling-to-account the iniquity of the fathers
upon the sons and upon sons’ sons,
to the third and fourth (generation)!
Exodus 20:6 [AST]
. . . but lovingkindness to thousands,
to those who love Me
and keep My commandments.
“I have to believe much in God because I have lost my faith in man.”
― José Rizal
Postscript: Relevant to this discussion are excerpts from The Soul of Evil from meaningfullife.com
For this is the root of all evil. Self-centeredness might seem a benign sin compared to the acts of cruelty and depravity to which man can sink, but it is the source and essence of them all. When a person considers the self and its needs to be the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, his morality—and he might initially be the most moral of men—is devoid of significance. Such a person is ultimately capable of committing any act, should he regard it as crucial to himself or to his self-defined vision of reality.
Ultimately, every good deed is an act of self-abnegation, and every evil deed is an act of self-deification. When a person does a good deed—whether it involves contributing a single coin to charity or devoting an entire lifetime to a G-dly cause—he is saying: there is something greater than myself to which I am committed. When a person violates the divine will—whether with a minor transgression or with the most heinous of crimes—he is saying: “My river is my own, and I have made myselfâ€; good is what is good to me, evil is what is contrary to my will; I am the master of my reality, I am god.
. . . . .So is the ego evil? Is this fundamental component of our soul an alien implant that must be uprooted and discarded in our quest for goodness and truth?
In the final analysis, it is not. For the cardinal law of reality is that “There is none else besides Himâ€â€”that nothing is contrary to, or even separate from, the Creator and Source of all. The ego, the sense of self with which we are born, also derives from G-d; indeed, it is a reflection of the divine “ego.†Because G-d knows Himself as the only true existence, we, who were created in His image, possess an intimation of His “sense of self†in the form of our own concept of the self as the core of all existence.
It is not the ego that is evil, but the divorcing of the ego from its source. When we recognize our own ego as a reflection of G-d’s “ego†and make it subservient to His, it becomes the driving force in our efforts to make the world a better, more G-dly place. But the same ego, severed from its divine moorings, begets the most monstrous of evils.