I’m puzzled. I heard a preacher talking about how bad things are in the world. After church he went out to his fairly new luxury car and drove to his 5000 square foot home and ate a full Sabbath dinner that put him to sleep for the rest of the afternoon. I wonder about his definition of bad. His text for the morning was II Timothy 3 that says, “There will be terrible times in the last days. 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.” He was right when he said it described our current world.
What puzzles me is when hasn’t it been like this? History books describe every era like this. Perhaps he would tell me that things are different now than they were just fifty years ago. He’s right. We now have 24 hour daily news that searches the world for bad news. Fifty years ago all we had was our local newspaper and the bad news was limited. I doubt if there was less bad news then. We just didn’t hear about it in other places.
He might say, “Wars and rumors of wars.” We could point out that in all the thousands of years of recorded history we have less than 20 years when we cannot find record of an ongoing war. In Matthew 24 Jesus says these things are not the sign of the end. There is much suffering in the world. It isn’t new. Let us stop terrifying ourselves. Let’s rejoice in our bounty and use it to help those who don’t have.
Written by Roger Bothwell on December 13, 2013
Spring of Life, PO Box 124, St. Helena, CA 94574
Rogerbothwell.org