Day 4148 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Isaiah 59:4 NIV

agnizes the agonizing

And that amongst all things and everyone as are all done and did within this den of what is sin now so superficial and yet soul-reliant that one can no more separate the stains from the spirit than they might make red into blue. No, rather it seems with those who’ve eyes to see that we indeed are through. We’re finished. We’re anymore so fake and flimsy that we’ve made friends and family with everything from evil to enmity. In fact, we love those things more than we love our friends and family!

They’re in fact the very basis of our every identity as has been so widely chosen for us by a culture of such chaos as to both chase corruption and yet never recognize the cost.

Instead we seem to have not merely accepted the downfall but are still actively seeking out ways in which to inspire it to fall further apart. Wanting for ways to waste more of our days doing more of those things which the Word says ought not to be done. Doing only whatever we’ve either always wanted to do or even just recently learned of another having done, their then doing thereof bringing with it a curiosity as to not whether or not we should do it too but such a fascination that it was done that we can’t wait to try it ourselves.

This world’s basically devolved into an endless sampling extravaganza in which we all do so much so extra and unneeded that, again, we seem as if we can’t see the dilemma. For if we did we’d surely not keep doing as we sadly keep doing.

And what do we keep doing?

Well, this verse from Isaiah seems as good a start as any other. For no, around here nobody wants for justice as, well, we know what justice is and how, well, we’ve walked a little too long and thus a bit too far on only the wrong side thereof to welcome it too precariously close. And no, there is no case plead with integrity as all of humanity seems to have forgotten what integrity is as we’ve rather so integrated ourselves with a rather unanimous ungraciousness and indignity that now all of humanity hates the mere suggestion of even personal responsibility.

And indeed, most if not all of our arguments seem to lean more often than not to outcomes such as ‘because I said so’, nearly every word which proceeds forth from our mouths is either false or foul, and, well, I think it’s pretty easy to see all the trouble we continue to conceive and just how much evil we’ve all but insisted be born into our lives and thus unto the world in which we live them.

Indeed, a good list to begin with!

But wait! There’s more!!

Here’s yet another doozy from what is Paul’s second printed letter to Timothy:

“People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.” 2 Timothy 3:1-5

And sure, I’ll give you all the time you may possibly need to convince me that we’re not all at least some of those things, after all, these are shared on the internet and thus open to discussions had in comment sections in which you’ve absolute freedom to say whatever you want to say and can take however many days it may require for you to so research your response.

Problem is that be it days, weeks, years, you ain’t gonna find one because there isn’t one here.

There is no response to our continued rebellion. There is no making reason of our many rejections of basically everything better than whatever this is that we’ve become. There is no justifiable justification for our lack of judiciary judgmentalism.

Other than this longstanding and obviously either pride or fear-based assumption that judging isn’t anything that we’re any of us meant to do.

Make no mistake, we most certainly are as the Word of God commands us to test the fruit so that we can tell whether the tree we’re talking to, trees like me and you, are either good or bad and thus to be either partaken of, partnered with or simply avoided altogether and at all cost.

No, we count no such cost as we rather consider nothing at all. We question nothing. We raise no concerns, disbelieve all consequence, disavow anything we’ve done that’s proven detrimental to the crowd, even just avoid anyone who dares to disagree with the way we’ve come to assume we should live under what we alone so often consider crowns that allow for what is this seething arrogance that you just can’t ever manage to shake off or flee from.

It’s everywhere!

Truly, it’s daily as if our vanity and ego are these billows of smoke that continue to rise from hearts boiling inside beliefs for only more of those things that only continue to prove us lost without the guts to admit it. So lost in fact that as soon as we do something we shouldn’t we instantly forget it so that we can pretend we’re penitent and have thus repented of it.

But indeed, as a dog returns to its vomit and a hog to its wallow, so too do we go back for another swallow of all that’s hollow and horrific.

All because we’re all so in love with it that it would just break our hearts to break ranks and be done with it. No, we can’t allow ourselves seen as those who seem not interested in doing as the world insists we do. Don’t want to be those found outside the know, not then knowing the things that everyone else is talking about or fleeing from. Can’t risk being rejected because we refuse to take any further part in the furthered fall of a mankind who all seem quite content to continue fleeing from God and thus failing the same.

No, we’re only here to not displease man. We’re here to make sure that those around us always hear only from us the pleasant things they want to hear. We give our lives to surrendering our minds to the many lies believed by mankind so that we appear kind unto those more than willing to kill any how pick any hill to stand on other than those of garbage that most have chosen to claim.

And every day it’s always the same.

Nothing new under the sun as Scripture puts it.

Rather that which was done before is being done again. That which was won before is being wanted again. That which we lost remains just as lost as it was when we first didn’t realize it gone.

It’s all the same as it’s always been.

Just us walking this world waging what’s a war against His Word, His will, His wrath and His wanting us all to avoid the latter via coming unto a humbled appreciation of both the former.

Alas we have no such common fear of God. No such cognizance of His continued asking us to come back to sense. No worry to be won in regard to His Word nor will within what is a world that finds more reason in rebellion and thus spiritual retardation than it does in repentance and righteousness. No, the only righteousness we seem to know is only that known as self-righteousness and it itself is a cancer born of the same exact ingredients as the trouble and evil considered conceived amongst us here.

It all comes from this perception that has us all all but perfectly convinced that we can do no wrong, have then done no wrong, and thus, yeah, need only to continue doing all we’ve ever done as, well, if it wasn’t wrong then they why endure the arduous process sure to be proven in our doing anything any different?

Thus we finish the ride on this crazy train and come back full circle to nothing new being ever done under the sun.

And that even despite nearly everyone having by now heard the Name of the Son who came to save they who are the lost, which, if you’ve not heard that part as of yet, that’s all of us. Yes, we are all the one who left the 99 as we’ve all gotten it in our mind that justice is something that we alone can define, that truth is too, that our lives are ours, that those of those around should agree always with however we’re living ours if they want to keep living theirs.

Yeah, we’ve actually proven that last one.

People still acting on it all the time in fact.

And rather than being stirred back to reality any time that we see the sheer brutality of this monstrosity that is humanity, no, we just chalk it up as another tragedy and then go right back to business as usual.

All because things have become so bad down here that we’re literally desensitized to the decay. We don’t see the darkness anymore. We’ve walked within the sinful shadows of both society and ourselves for so long now that we simply don’t know that it doesn’t have to be the way that it’s so clearly become. We don’t understand that our understandings are now so warped and wrong that so too have we become. We don’t see the dumb inside so many of the things we do. Don’t care to consider what better we might be missing as is in plain sight hidden inside those better things that we don’t do.

Rather we just continue to press the gas and live so fast that we’ve no time to reconsider our direction for the destination to which we’re already arriving.

Indeed, I am convinced that, while contrary to the song, Heaven is not a place on earth but it’s really starting to seem as if hell might be because it sure does seem as if we’re getting closer to the heat with every passing day.

Trust me, I’ve been working outside in the 90’s all week, and as brutal as it’s been at times, it’s nowhere near as agonizing as seeing what’s both become of society and what society then continues to become.

Truly, I cannot count the number of times that I’ve looked up to find that I feel as if I’ve somehow been transported to a different world than the one in which I grew up. I don’t recognize anything anymore. Don’t recognize anyone. In fact, a friend of mine from school that I grew up with, lived in the same neighborhood from third grade all through until we graduated, she just moved into the neighborhood in which I’m living now and all it seems she brought with her was yet another reminder of both what once was and what all has changed and what all I might have missed along the way.

And it’s a true heartbreak to find yourself journeyed back some 20 years in an instant to a simpler time in which the world was so vastly different.

And it’s even more jarring having to come back to whatever this is that the world’s become in those decades since we’d last seen each other.

Because things haven’t gotten better. I mean we were promised flying cars! And instead all we got are cars that drive themselves and that because people just decided to give up. To stop caring. To stop trying. To actually stop driving which, when I was a kid, that was one of the single most exciting progressions in the process of growing up. Me and all my friends couldn’t wait to drive, feel the wind in our hair and the power in our hands and the horses under our right shoes.

Yet today that’s just one more excitement, one more passage, one more piece of evidence of our growth and maturation that we’ve chosen to lose.

Because nobody cares about anything anymore.

Not even ourselves.

Rather we’ve accepted an approach to life in which nowadays kids can’t read, teens can’t drive, relationships won’t last, marriage is the leading cause of divorce, drugs are legal, obesity is skyrocketing alongside such downsides as diabetes and heart issues, companies and corporations treat us as nothing but marketing targets, the government sees us as just a number that either we owe them every spring or another pitiable mouth to feed, our families are falling apart, our houses are too, cars aren’t worth buying anymore, everything is spying on us through cameras and ai’s tracking our every move.

This is the life we like?

The one in which criminals have more freedom than those who abide by the law? The one where being hateful and condescending gets you trending and makes you millions? The one in which kids want to be influencers more than doctors? The one in which everyone we meet always asks first what we do for a living as if it’s our jobs that make up the biggest chunk of who we are?

Indeed, as I seem to ask all the time, who are we?

What’s happened to us? Where did it all go so wrong and how did we even mess that up this bad? We can’t even do wrong right! And that because no matter what we do someone will with it find issue. Truly, every single day lived inside of this place is just this billowing fog of failure and foolishness seeping up through the floor of what is a rock bottom that for some reason only finds us digger deeper every day.

Haven’t we had enough? Are we not yet tired of the trouble and turmoil?

Sadly it doesn’t seem as if we are as, again, nothing new under the sun.

But then again I guess it’s hard to miss what you never really had or at least never had any real appreciation of. And so such things as justice, integrity, honesty, they’re all honestly things that we probably wouldn’t recognize if they walked among us.

A fact proven in how many of us didn’t, don’t and thus wouldn’t recognize Jesus.

Instead we killed Him.

All because He called us out, still calls us out. That’s why so many people have never read the Bible. It’s because it’s pretty clear what we’d find if we did. And, well, having our eyes opened to all the inhuman attributes that we’d allowed into our hearts, our minds, our lives, that’s not really anything that anyone wants to see. Not because I don’t think we don’t know it’s there. In fact I think we all do as whenever you take a moment to peruse the looks on the faces of those around you, there’s this common unhappiness, uncertainty, shame even that you’ll find staring back at you.

No, I think we know how far gone we’ve gone.

We just don’t want to admit that we know because then we might accidentally feel at least kind of obligated to do something about it.

And, well, we’re not about it. We don’t like doing things. Again, kids don’t even get excited to drive anymore. Although I guess I can kind of see at least some logical reason as to their growing trepidation in that, well, if you can’t read then you might struggle to both get where you’re going and manage to get there safely.

Indeed, it seems we’re reaping by the hour the consequences of our pride having been given the power to inspire us to become nothing less than walking betrayals of both everything we were created to be and thus everything better that we can still become. Some of said better considered inside such things as justice and truth and humility which allows for integrity to take on more meaning than our trying so hard to avoid the general meanness that’s sadly befallen an already fallen man.

Seriously folks, why do we give man such weight to man when so few men, and women, worry not about pleasing God?

As asked of us, or at least hinted at, why do we worry so heavily unto those who can kill the body but cannot harm the Spirit? If not simply because we’ve agreed to allow them to hinder the Spirit by our having chosen to willingly give our lives to worrying so much about our bodies that we want only for no harm to come unto them?

Such a common worry, and one held too so very deeply, that we still don’t really mind if anyone else harms Him as, well, He’s not us.

Or at least that’s apparently how we see it.

That Jesus, if He’s even there at all, that He can take all the hatred in our behalf as we instead agree to live only ever half a life in what are lives lived half alive because we dance somewhere in between the dead and the dying.

That’s the life that we’re all living.

And that because of all the good that we could be doing, the better that we should have always done, no, we’ve done none of it and know now about the same.

For no, there is no justice here, a fact I feel personally in having watched my sister have her life upended and then spend the better part of a decade trying to get someone to hold the responsible party responsible. There is no truth anymore as anymore we all endeavor only to live our own. There is no fairness, no equality, no equity, no humility, no honesty. Instead we chase only anger, hatred, hostility, such a growing swell of irresponsibility that all of society is crumbling and most folks just keep smiling and laughing and looking at those who lower their shoulder toward their crosses as those who’ve apparently crossed the line and lost their mind.

All because doing so is finally doing something right and this world doesn’t know anything about that nor then what it looks like.

And yet we allow their petty judgements to keep us from doing it because we don’t want to look silly to those so stupid as to continue denying the Savior and thus their own salvation.

Friends, my point is that for too long we’ve lost our lives to those willfully losing theirs thanks to their not realizing all they’ve lost inside them. We cannot continue to go along with this world so as to hopefully get along with and in the same.

Because this world is all but stoking its own flame and so to go along with them would inspire us to so the same as them.

But why would we want that seeing all that’s lacking down here?

Do we not want better than whatever this is that we’ve become?

I hope we do because I know He does and, well, while we’ve proven plenty willing to negotiate and compromise, that cross says He won’t.

Might then be time to seek something other than just a further share of a fallen and falling mankind.

Granted, don’t have to but looking around I don’t know why we’d not want to.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold