John MacArthur has a talk titled "What's Wrong With Everybody?" about the current miserable state of affairs we're all living through so very unhappily.. He makes the distinc ction between saved and unsaved, the redeemed and the fallen nature into which we are all born and remain until we are saved if that is to be our destiny. It's a dramatic difference he describes, not the usual rather vague distinction that leaves us scrambling to figure out of if we're saved or not.
AIt's hard to recognize the difference because even when we are saved we still have the "old man" or fallen nature in us and are still capable of falling into our old sins. Neverteless we do have the new life in us, which is what salvation is, which is what redemption is, a real transformation, a new birth out of a state of what is called death into the life of god. Because of our believing the gospel we have this new life planted in us, god Himself has come to live in us. I think of a couple of book titles: Man the Dwelling Place of God, and The Life of God in the Soul of Man. That's what salvartion is.
I'd been thinking about the Burning Man event and how it is such a concentrated distilled essence of fallennness, the fallennness into which we are all born but without most of the usual restrains socieity puts on us. At least in some departments of sin, mostly the sexual. One way I am persuaded of my own salvation is through the recognition that I used to share in those \\\\the mentality that seeks those experiences. Even if I can still fall into them from time to time, and I don't know if that's even true any more, but even so it's clear to me that that is no longer my mindset.
When I became a believer, God became the most intensely attractive center of all delights and desires. For long periods He eclipsed every other interest. But the world and the flesh can still take over and when my focus changed to wore wordldly concerns such as politics and even the debates about creation versus evolution, my mind got drawn back into those old sources of pleasure. Still, when I picked up the Bible, or heard it preached or heard a powerful devotional message, something in me would just melt, I'd "pant after God" and experience that other level of my being at least for that moment.
It is a dramatic transformation, a massive transformation as MacArthur puts it. It's not always at the forefront of our experinece but it is of such a diffdrent nature it has to be described as radically other than the experiences of this world and the flesh we start out so accustomed to. A radical difference, a radical transfomrmation. And the things of this world can be distressing in ways beyond even the distress everybody else is feeling these days.
the world is not always a perfect reflection of fallenness. There are restraints in place through laws, police agencies and the like, and people do seem to have a moral code, at least in some places at some times. Certainly in America in the early years, as the Founders often affirmed was the reason we could be trusted with the fragile rule of the sort of republic they crafted for us. eric Metaxas describes this early mentality, how for instance Alexis deToqueville saw us as a very religious nation, which was our strength.
Well, fallenness has since then certainly reasserted its own nature over us and we are now headed into a police state, which is the only possible outcome when the people have lost the moral foundation that controls us individually. that kind of moral self control is possible with an education toward that end, which was powerful in the days following the Great Awakening under Georlge Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards and lasted maybe a century and a half until the Sixcties, oh yes the Sixties, brought it all crashing down. We are no longer America. Without that moral foundation we can't be. Metaxas makes that point clearly. Deuoquevill e saw it. Can we get it back?
Itg's probably tgoo late, but on the other hand, there is nothing else worth doing,.
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