You

 It’s disheartening to see how much ground the darkness has taken. It’s the one thing I hear from friends and acquaintances alike, and I can’t say I’m not in the same boat, pulling on the same oar. Even though we knew that evil men and seducers would wax worse and worse, seeing it in real-time makes your gut twist, usually accompanied by a sudden loss of appetite. Yes, it has gotten this bad. Yes, it’s going to get much worse.

Do I want it to be so? No, I don’t. Does it matter what I want? Not in the least. Not everything is set in stone, but most things are. Although we are inclined to point to Nineveh and hope for lightning to strike twice, we must grudgingly remind ourselves that once was enough of a miracle to be included within the canon of Scripture. It was no small thing for an entire city to repent in sackcloth and ash. Hoping that a nation will do it is a stretch. Am I saying it’s impossible? No, nothing is impossible with God. Is it, however, improbable? Kind of.

If you throw a ball, you can guess the general trajectory based on the direction and strength with which you throw it. Unless you’re flicking a boomerang, chances are, whatever you’re throwing, pitching, shooting, or firing will continue in the direction the aim, force, and momentum it was set upon. Bullets only curve in movies, and even in movies, they wouldn’t dare stretch your credulity enough to make a bullet’s momentum stop, then retrace its journey to come back on itself.

What am I getting at? The further and faster we move away from God, the harder it will be to stop our decline and make our way back. It’s not like we’re headed for an iceberg with plenty of time to turn and avoid impact. We hit the iceberg some time ago, and as long as the engines don’t fail, we’re bent on reversing, then plowing into the iceberg over and over again until we are no more. The iceberg will be there long after we’ve dashed ourselves upon its mass. It existed long before we came along, and for as long as God will allow it to roam, it will wait patiently for men to come crashing into it. Sin is an iceberg. You don’t succeed in overcoming it by repeatedly crashing into it but by understanding the danger it poses and circumventing it.

Jude warns us of the danger; he does his best to underscore the severity of it and, as though pleading with the church across time and space, admonishes us to contend earnestly for the faith. Paul calls it fighting the good fight of faith, but it all boils down to two options. It is as binary a choice as male or female. You can quit, or you can fight. There is no in-between.

I can’t make you fight. You must choose to fight. You must choose to strap on your armor and show up on the battlefield because anything short of that would be coercion, and if someone is coerced into going to war, they’ll rabbit the first chance they get.

I’d rather stand shoulder to shoulder with three men who are there to fight and know how to do it than a hundred cowards who only showed up because they couldn’t bear the embarrassment of not doing so. They left home with white kerchiefs in tow and have no reservations about waving them high in the air for all to see, signifying surrender.

If you’re not willing to earnestly contend for the faith to your last breath, stay home. You’re just getting in the way. Too many cowards are pretending to be great generals looking for any excuse not to bloody their swords. The one I hear most often is that whatever the issue is, it’s not a hill to die on. You’re supposed to pick your battles, wait for your opening, and be level-headed about these things. And, while we’re backslapping and glad-handing, telling each other how wise we were in choosing discretion over action, we’re running out of hills, and soon there will be none left.

The fight will have been fought, and we’ll still be waiting to find our hill. We’ve picked up some nasty habits from the godless, some of them being situational ethics, situational morality, and situational principles.

We’re either for or against something based on the current environment, not because it’s right or wrong. Suppose someone says we should defend life, the innocent, and the unborn. In that case, it’s inevitable that some sanctimonious halfwit who spooks at his own shadow will make a show of how spiritual he is and insist that our focus should be the heavenly things. If, on the other hand, someone insists we ought to contend for the faith, that selfsame gasbag will insist that we must do our best to influence the culture and not be so heavenly-minded all the time because it’s not relatable.

We can lie to ourselves all we want, and we may even get away with lying to each other, but one day, and one day soon, the General will return to assess His troops and see how much ground they’ve taken. What will be the modern-day church’s excuse for not even putting up a fight? What will He say to those who not only surrendered but mocked and ridiculed those who would stand?

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.