How We Got Here

Some are in shock, others are in denial, and others still are in mourning. Of the three, perhaps the mourning is most fitting for what this nation has become, and how quickly it has become it, but other than the jubilant forces of darkness that seem to be winning one battle after the other, most everyone else is asking themselves how we got here.

Even those banging the ‘it can’t get any worse’ and ‘we know how the story ends’ drums like crack addicted monkeys seem to have calmed down, realizing that it can, and has, and will get worse, and though we know how the story ends, we have to get to the end with our faith intact, and without falling into the pit of compromise so many seem to be head diving into.

I am a realist by nature. When you grow up poor and are uncertain as to where your next meal will come from most nights, optimism soon takes flight, and all that is left is the reality of hunger. I don’t speak of my early childhood often, because it’s something my family got through, something that made us all the stronger for it, and something that knit a bond of love and certainty as to the others’ willingness to step in and help out if the need arose.

But I digress. Today’s post is supposed to be about something else altogether, and it is important enough wherein I will save the childhood stories, and trips down memory lane for another time.

Those who choose not to acknowledge their own complicity in regards to this nation’s descent into darkness will be quick to point to the changing times, the entertainment industry,  mass media, or another of a hundred convenient little scapegoats.

Did these things have a hand to play in how we got here? Most definitively, but by a large percentage, far ahead of any one thing, blame must be laid at the feet of the church, who fell asleep at the wheel, and refused to wake up thereafter for whatever reason.

The moment the words sin, repentance, hell, and righteousness stopped being trumpeted from the pulpits of America, we began our descent, and we haven’t stopped descending since.

The wolves in suits make quick work of the Bible, butchering it mercilessly as though it were some fattened hog ready to be meted out rather than the inerrant, absolute Word of the Most High God. For some unexplained reason the widow of Zarephath gets more contemplation, sermons, and exegesis on ‘Christian’ television than Christ’s Sermon on the Mount ever will, while sin and depravity are treated with kid gloves as though they were not cancers in the Body of Christ. All this, to the cheers and adulation of those who love their sin more than they will ever love God, and who just want some sort of numbing agent to rub on their burdened consciences.

It is the church’s compromise that has led to this, it is the church’s compromise that began all this, and it is the church that God will judge first, with the fierceness of His righteous anger.

Rather than identify the cancer growing our midst, rather than attempt to remove it, and excise it from the Body, we’re busy calling each other names, playing the ‘my ministry’s better than your ministry’ game, and actually debating whether Paul the Apostle was the antichrist, and if we should rip the Pauline Epistles out of the Bible altogether.

A more cynical person would say we’re looking to pick these foolish fights, and focus on tertiary issues just because we don’t have the stomach for the real fight, and don’t want to confront the darkness that threatens to swallow us whole. A more cynical person would say that the church has become nothing more than an amalgam of sleek and fattened cowards who would betray even their deepest held convictions for the sake of retaining their positions and possessions. A more cynical person would say these things, but then again so would a realist, I fear.

With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr.