Day 3883 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 1:32 NIV

Cancer Culture

It’s widely known that cancer is a bodily illness that eats away at the healthy tissues typically relied upon to keep one, well, healthy. It’s this consumptive force that knows nothing of enough, never finds that it’s found itself full, never reaches the point in which it’s taken enough from the host into which it has invaded as if a horde bent upon the utter destruction of the hope that said unwitting participant may have had for what was a life they were in fact living far better without this new dread as to whether or not they might end up dead.

Yes, cancer kills as it weakens a body to the point that there’s just no fight left. And again, having all experienced this to some degree or another, it’s a fact we all know quite well.

The scary part is that we still think it mostly just an unseen organism that feasts upon the cells of those it seeks to end.

Never really seem to see that we have become the cancer ourselves.

No, because we don’t want to see it, this outcome we’ve come to find within what barely remains of a life barely alive. We don’t want to admit that we’ve had a hand in it, played our part within this general tearing down of the better hopes and blessed dreams for bigger and brighter things that many may have had at one time. No, rather we’re all both willfully blind and blinding even further to the fervor in which we ourselves seek to destroy the insides of those outside our own lives.

Simply because we’ve lost our ability to care as to the cost we incur as we charge into the hearts and minds of those probably doing just fine without the many deadly ideas and deceptive ideals that we’ve ourselves chosen to buy in such gross supply that we’ve more than plenty enough to share with as many as we might delight to invite into our chosen dances with every danger from death to its despair.

Indeed, whether or not we even like it down here at where everything from our guards to our gods have all fallen solemn in a silence that grows more deafening by the day, yes, whether or not we even like living this way the fact remains that rather than change we’d instead prefer just not be alone. For we know that going this alone is nothing of a feeling of home as home is meant to be where the ones like us who like us live with us. And so we seek within this life the lives of those who look like they might like us or who live like we like to and all gather unto this singular aim to embrace the living of this life this way.

What way?

The one described in much better and more precise detail than I ever could as offered through the hand of Paul by the hand of God in this passage found in Romans chapter 1, verses 21-31 specifically.

“For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.”

And since God had seen and sees still that we seek mostly to only keep doing the same, seeking His fame in the frame of things without life to give as they’ve themselves no life to live, indeed thus we see God’s just response as verse 24 continues: “Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.”

Yes, forever praised, just not by us, no, not this people and most certainly not this place.

For rather than praising our Creator we seek incessantly both the praise of and the offering of our praise to those who exist to do only as little in the way of living a good life that we ourselves choose to. Indeed, we see this scene play out every single day within what’s become a world not walking, not crawling, not thinking but in fact running away from God. All because we’ve become a world not walking, not crawling, not merely just thinking about the things we love more than Him but we are in fact running with so many things that have no recollection of Him at all.

And thus we continue in verse 26.

“Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.”

A matter anymore celebrated with parades and colorful bumper stickers showing forth the many stolen colors of what remains God’s promise to not do unto us what we still deserve having done, perhaps even more so than those who met their end as the world was flooded so as to erase our filth so piled sky-high within it. No, we never stopped said stacking, this indeed now all but violent attacking of the very sanctity of everything from marriage to the life that it was meant to create.

Indeed, verse 28 goes on. “Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.”

Inventing ways of doing evil.

If there’s a line in Scripture that better defines what society’s become I don’t know what it is nor where to look.

For just look around! Every day we see a novel evil sweeping new souls off their feet and away from life. We live within this time in which we take so much for granted that we deserve to be granted not the stay of execution we wish to find but rather a push to the front of the line. I am daily amazed that God gives us more days. I cannot fathom the fullness of His forgiveness as I myself look even in the mirror and see someone I often feel unworthy of such an opportunity.

No, there should be no freedom to be found in regard to what we’ve so obviously found reason enough to do enough that it all but simply defines us.

As we discussed just yesterday, we’re truly to the point in which the wickedness of man isn’t even hiding anymore. Rather we hear almost every day the louder ring of a round of applause being awarded unto any and all who help further the fall. Fall from what you may ask? The fall from life itself. The fall away from a better day, a brighter way, a more beautiful place and a more bountiful human race. And even that has long been grounds for the fights in which we delight upon this ground.

Down here it remains all about black and white rather than wrong and right. We care more about the color of our neighbor than we do the content of their character. We’ve been taught, yes taught, to look around and seek for ways to divide ourselves asunder. And then we’ve the audacity to wonder as to how it all got so bad and why it continues to only get worse.

Do we really not know or are we just trying so frantically still to find some way to still the realization that we ourselves have had a play in its slipping?

We do this very thing every time that we lower ourselves to not only doing the many wrongs we know we shouldn’t but even in every moment that we choose to approve of those doing more of the same. We’ve in every way become a people cheering in every way the every way that we all fail every day to seek for the better that we somehow see a people living as if we’ve already arrived upon.

Is this our better?

Is this what we sat out to search for?

Is what we see truly what we ever hoped to be?

Can we truly no longer imagine a better way?

Sadly it seems quite safe to say that no, many don’t seem to believe in better anymore. For if we did wouldn’t we fight for it? Wouldn’t we delight toward it? Would not we be willing to crawl closer if that’s what it took to find what we felt inside was something so worth the cost that we knew nothing of the consequence?

Alas, no, no we live anymore so worried about what we stand to lose should we stand for something that we just don’t. We don’t stand for anything. Too much to lose. Too many to offend. Too easy to hurt feelings and lose friends. Yes, the surest way to be “cancelled” is to stand against the cancer that is eating our culture in ways that so many claim they can neither see nor then have left any ability to believe they may have had a part in.

Friends, we’ve all played a part in this world falling apart.

But the only way to ever fix any of all the harm and hate we’ve caused to exist within this place is to start accepting the fact that we have ourselves to blame because we ourselves chose to fail.

We chose to fail.

And yet we indeed seem to have become a people who even use such judicial Scripture as Romans 3:23 to something of our benefit as if we see written within it some semblance of an excuse that we’ve crafted ways to use as an excuse to excuse what we do. For yes, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But why then care when verse 24 goes on to say that “all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus”?

After all, if we’re all a part of those all who in and thus from life did fall, and then too the very same all as those who are “justified freely by His grace”, well then what’s the problem?

For if all have fallen but He offers to forgive the same all, then we have nothing to worry about, right? We all messed up but He gives us all mercy. We all sin but the same all are those the Son came to save. So then it does seem as if He both knows that we’re not perfect, thus not likely to life the rest of life perfectly, and has in fact already made the way for our to be forgiven for whatever else we may choose to do that may end up being only one more wrong done.

What does it matter?

For if His patience is proven in our getting yet one more day to live this life in whatever way we may see fit, then so too much His mercy remain equally permanent.

So live it up, right? Run wild! Let loose! Hang ten bro!

Indeed, that’s how we’ve come to live, running each of us so wild through life that life’s anymore so loose that the only thing that remains tight in any way is our willingness to hang whomever we may need should they get in our way of going on our way to continue living this life the same.

That’s all we care about anymore. It’s not those around us whom we’re called to love. It’s not the widows who can get help from someone else. It’s not the orphans that plenty of charitable organizations exist to take care of these days. It’s not the ways in which we make more widows and orphans over such petty reasons as simply not agreeing with everything someone else is saying.

No, we’re more than fine handling those issues should they pop up, and finding ways to go back to ignoring them quickly enough.

Because that’s who we’ve become. We are a cancer that is eating away at the lives of those around us as if our fellow man exists as nothing but a smorgasbord of substances and selfishness that we ourselves can either learn from, lean on, look to or simply devalue. Yes, we have so learned to devalue life that many out there are living theirs seeking to secure the legal authority to end those they don’t want to be responsible for.

And yet we applaud ourselves every step of the way thinking that we’re doing such great work.

Yet what work have we done?

Well…

God is our enemy, Christ didn’t come, the Bible is a lie, truth is a weapon, pride is the victim, children aren’t protected, hatred runs rampant, division is our preferred direction, celebrities live our lives for us, we live only vicariously through others, the only world we know is seen on a phone as we sit idly by in a lazy life looking at the best life others are living as we’re living ours only to see ourselves as the unfortunate byproduct of a garbage food system made to profit those who produce chemical cures we call miracle drugs, and oh yeah, we do drugs, get drunk, watch porn, never go outside, stay up late at night, eat like it’s going out of style, live life utterly wild and all the while delight in an entertainment industry that’s left us so desensitized to seeing some get “unalived” that we mind not seeing the same play out every night on the nightly news.

Yeah, we’re doing a wonderful job!

And indeed, even though we know that there exists a righteous decree that says death is justified freely unto those who do such things, enjoy such things, embrace such things, seek such things, we not only do them, enjoy them, embrace them, seek them, accept them, expect them, no, we cheer them. We celebrate them! We live a way of life in which the heroes are those who hurt the most while those who are hurt are just the puny losers who couldn’t do anything about it.

Sound familiar?

“If you really are the Son of God then save yourself!” “Come down from the cross and then we’ll believe you!” “He was going to demolish the temple and then rebuild it in three days?” “Guy can’t even keep Himself from dying as the world below Him cheers on the suffering!”

Yeah, we’ve sure come a long way haven’t we?

Though actually I reckon we have. After all, which is worse: Mocking Christ or living a life as if He never existed at all? They’re both going to prove quite detrimental decisions in terms of the directions they inspire one to go as they’ll both end up at what will prove the same destination. Guess the only real difference then is just how depraved we seek to become before we depart.

Either way, looking at the world around us and the way in which we live this life, yeah, safe to say we’ve got a really good start!

But friends, the fact is that our start is not merely starting to fall apart but we’re just about to the dregs. And while I hesitate to say that I don’t know much further we can go in this way, as even thinking it seems to somehow be heard as something of a challenge to some, truth is that things are pretty rough anymore. We’ve arrived at such a degradation of our very existence and if we don’t do something about it, well, I don’t know how much further we’ll make it.

Why?

Because I can’t imagine that God’s all that willing to keep putting up with it. Why should He? Again, we know that so much of what we see isn’t how any of this ought to be. And yet still we see so very many not only doing wrong but cheering on those who do the same. And all the friends and fame, all the fortunes being made, they only continue to inspire more to fall in that same line and live that same life. Every single day more and more people are just giving up and choosing to go along.

But friends, He’s also made it clear as to where that way of life leads.

And it ain’t no place anyone should want to be, not even a place we should want anyone else to be.

So what are we doing about it? How can we contend we’re even trying when our own lives would just say that we’re lying?

It’s time for change, and yes, change starts with us. We have to choose to be the better we want to see, and that every single day. Otherwise, well, the world will just keep going this way and falling then further by the day. Further into what you may ask? Death. Destruction. Damnation in fact. And before you go getting all mad at me for say that this world is headed to hell and getting there fast, take it up with God as He’s the One who’s issued the promise that is given unto those who refuse to uphold the righteous decree spoken of here.

And while you’re there being again all angry with God because He dares ask us to live self-controlled and upright and responsible lives, you may as well ask Him to forgive you for all the times in which you yourself have failed and fallen short, and then too what you may do to then try and help to start snatching a few from the fire that’s coming.

And no, they won’t like you trying, much like none of us appreciated that Jesus did the same.

But hey, is it not far better to be hated for trying to help than asked by God why we didn’t?

Friends, it’s increasingly easy to see the evidence of God thanks to the lack of a reverence of God seen in the way of life this world’s chosen to live. Now we can either continue to live like the masses have chosen and continue then doing as most will seeking fun and fame and friendship along the way, or we can turn and repent and throw our lives on the mercy of His court.

For that’s a part of His righteous decree too, that any who so do shall be forgiven and made new. And well, looking around, yeah, I think new is pretty much our only last chance.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold