Calamities have been happening regularly for thousands of years …
I’m an avid news junkie and Wall Street Journal addict. Like everyone, I’ve become gradually conditioned to headlines blaring the latest calamities, like mental health crises due to extended shutdowns, apocalyptic natural disasters, global warming, international animosities, gaping political fault lines, riots, class warfare, social injustice, etc.
No wonder most of us have retreated into creature comforts and fallen into the waiting arms of a voracious entertainment industry streaming endless fantasies to feed every imaginable taste.
So, is this upheaval anything new? How do you think people felt during the Civil War, World War I, World War II or the Cold War? How did it feel to stand by helplessly while the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 took 50 million lives, infecting a third of the world’s population?
Welcome to the real world.
Rather than delivering the utopian paradise that the secular humanists promised (gleefully riding on the shoulders of modern scientific triumphs), we have been dragged into a dizzying megalopolis “ablaze with neon” that is not fit for man or beast.
This is what results from decades of cradle-to-grave postmodern programming served up by academia, elites, intellectuals, the news media and Western culture.
C.S. Lewis once observed, “Human history is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”
These institutional conspirators are unknowingly repeating the age-old desire for a universe without its Creator, enjoying the Design while excluding the Designer. Some 4,000 years ago, mankind proposed building the Tower of Babel, arrogantly plotting, “Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”
The results were predictable: “The Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built … the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city.”
So much for a universe without God.
We are told that this material world and its fading glories are “all there is folks, so get used to it.”
In Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, author Carl Sagan wrote:
“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
God has a far more positive “alternative narrative.”
“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Do not be carried away by varied and strange teachings.”
— Hebrews 13:7-9
Of all 100 billion people who have ever lived throughout human history, only one life glows dazzlingly over against Sagan’s “great enveloping cosmic dark.” Jesus Christ came from Heaven to save us from ourselves, declaring in John 8:12, “I am the Light of the world; he who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life.”
But deliverance only comes to those who are willing to bow their over-rated intellects at the feet of that solitary, despised “Lamb of God” who selflessly bled out for us on a cruel Roman cross.
As it is written in 1 Corinthians 1:17-19, “… the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
And the cleverness of the clever I will set aside.’”
When I finally draw my last breath on this “Pale Blue Dot,” I will immediately be gazing into the face of my Savior in the heavens. He assures me in His Word, in John 14:1-3, “Do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also.”
Now that’s MY “new normal.”
How About You?
Does your happiness depend on your physical circumstances, or upon your relationship with Jesus Christ? Do you seek Him and the interest of His kingdom first? Or are you still leaning on a broken crutch called “this world?”
“For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”
Philippians 1:20-22
— D.C. Collier is a Bible teacher, discipleship mentor and writer focused on Christian apologetics. A mechanical engineer and Internet entrepreneur, he is the author of My Origin, My Destiny, a book focused on Christianity’s basic “value proposition.” Click here for more information, or contact him at don@peervalue.com. Click here for previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.