51
CIVILIZATION & CO.
Homewreckers
by M. M. Johnson
This material was penned many years ago by a devoted Christian
minister. Though old in origin, it is up to date in practical
fact and application. It is well worth reading, considering and
applying again today in our modern society.
"Mine eyes fail with tears ... for the destruction of ... my
people; because the children and the sucklings swoon in the
streets of the city. They say to their mothers, 'Where is the
corn and wine?' when they swoon as the wounded in the streets of
the city, when their soul was poured out into their mother's
bosom...Let tears run down like a river day and night; in the
beginning of the watches pour out thine heart like water before
the face of the Lord: lift up thy hands toward Him for the life
of thy young children, that faint for hunger in the top of every
street." (Lam. 2:11,12,18-19.)
DESTRUCTIVE BUILDING
Far more is being done today about housing problems than about
home problems. If you could not have both a real home and a
lovely modern house, which would you prefer? Which DO you
prefer? Our thoughts and actions in the past have already proven
which we prefer, have they not? Our homes have been ravished and
robbed by proud passion to build, to invent, to erect modern
walled cities. And our so called Western Christian civilization
now has its own type of walled cities that are no better
fortified to withstand the terrible onslaught of our real
enemies than were the walled cities of China prepared to stop
the airplanes of Japan.
Our colossal school system was supposed to be an impregnable
bulwark against the return of the jungle methods of settling
disputes by "tooth and claw." Instead of being protecting walls
for us, these proud schools have proven to be no more than
Trojan horses brought into our midst to flood our homes and
churches with smart snobs and infidel parrots, poisoning our
social life with pleasure-mad, covetous youth who have been
taught to think that the simple old Godly firesides were, and
should be, the last relics of primitive peoples.
Then, having come to believe the modern lie that toil and grime
and tears are man's enemies which must be walled away from
mankind, restless man has built great mass-producing machines
and factories which were supposed to be friendly walls, keeping
drudgery and enslaving poverty out while afford ing delightful
and wholesome leisure on the inside. However, instead of these
mechanical and technical walls proving to be helpful protection,
they are being found to be brutal "Frankenstein monsters" that
are destroying the jobs of millions and making bored robots out
of the few specialists who may be required to feed the heartless
monsters which now lash out, first in this and then in that part
of the world with man-made ability to bomb and gas and terrify
as no sweat and toil in the older times ever could.
Over two thousand years ago God said through Isaiah to a people
who were guilty in a measure of this same sort of destructive
building; "The houses have ye broken down to fortify the wall"
(Isaiah 22:10).
LIFELESS MONUMENTS
And let us note well that as these imposing walls of our foolish
and feverish civilization have gone up, the houses have gone
down. Sitting in our little half-log house over in the woods in
N.W. Arkansas a few months ago, I was reading Jeremiah when I
came upon a verse that is an amazing command from God to those
who are dissatisfied with the quiet simplicities of Godliness.
Listen to this, (Jer. 46:19) "O thou daughter dwelling in Egypt,
furnish thyself to go into captivity. For Noph shall be waste
and desolate without habitant." The city of Noph is the same
city that is better known as Memphis. It was here, in this
particular section of Egypt, that the twenty great pyramids were
built. Nor is there in all the world today such imposing
evidence of a proud and capable generation of mechanics as were
those ancient Egyptian pyramid builders. Awe-inspiring evidences
of their artificial life are still there but where are they and
their children? They are gone and are only to be traced by
gigantic masonry and bejeweled mummies. With all of their
Godless furnishings they did as God said: "furnish thyself to go
into captivity."
BORED DISCONTENT
And what furniture factories, furniture stores and furniture
salesmen" we have today! The machines have freed us from long
hours of toil so that we now have time to crowd the rapidly
multiplying theaters (video stores, televisions, multi-media
computers, etc. today) where we are furnished with the
captivating suggestions and scenes of illicit "love," smart
crookedness and enslaving liberalism. We are, as a people, about
thoroughly furnished to go into captivity. We are captivated by
"love," - "lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God" (2 Tim
3:4).
Nor is this to be said merely of the confessed unbeliever. It
can be truly said of the vast majority of professed Christians.
All the while the Lord Jesus Christ says: "Ye adulterers and
adulteresses, know ye not that friendship with the world is
enmity with God? Therefore whosoever will be a friend of the
world is the enemy of God...If any man love the world, the love
of the Father is not in him" (James 4:4; 1John 2:15).
In the 81st Psalm we hear God crying out in grieved love to the
ungrateful and uselessly enslaved Israelites: "I am the Lord,
thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt...but My
people would not hearken to My voice, so I gave them up to their
own hearts' lust; and they walked in their own counsels."
The essence of all sin is dissatisfaction with God and that
which He says is enough. Have you noticed that the ten
commandments begin and end with this truth? The first
commandment is: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." and
the tenth, or last, is "Thou shalt not covet." In other words,
God and His provisions are enough. "Godliness with contentment
is great gain...Having food and raiment be therewith content"
(1 Timothy 6:6,8). How we Christians need to face such passages
as these and 1 Timothy 6:9-14.
The bloodless religionist, Cain, who killed his brother, was the
first city builder and his grandson, Tubal-Cain, was the first
artificer in brass and musical instruments. The Creator never
intended for man to proudly and feverishly wall himself in from
earth, from flowers and trees and from animals and birds and
skies while he becomes bored with professional barnyard
imitators and disgusted trying to smell artificial flowers or
get lead poisoning while painting pictures of beautiful nature.
God never intended that man should become artificially
cultivated to such a high pitch of musical temperament that he
himself becomes unstrung while seeking to string a fiddle or
banjo or harp. God never intended that we should forsake the
forests, the fields and gardens and hover around radios
(televisions, PC's and VCR's today) listening and watching one
set of sales-ladies reciting recipes from competing
food-faddists until we get sick at our stomachs and then dial
away from dietitians to the doctors or the drug store
"alkalizers" and then to the beautiful solicitations of the
morticians. How sordid and sickening it all is! What ceaseless
unattainment! What insatiable desires characterize our so-called
civilization.
A RICH MAN'S INVENTORY
There is but one man in all of history who is duly qualified to
speak concerning the real value of things, the vast accumulation
of temporal and material possessions. The man is Solomon. You
remember that God promised him any single gift that he should
desire. Solomon asked and received the gift of wisdom so that it
was truthfully said of him: "And God gave Solomon wisdom and
understanding exceeding much, and Solomon's wisdom excelled the
wisdom of all the children of the east country, and all the
wisdom of Egypt. For he was wiser than any man...and his fame
was in all nations round about" (1 Kings 4:29-31). Then God gave
Solomon the opportunity to take a careful inventory of this
whole feverish world with all of its material wealth, sensuous
pleasures, illicit wives, great power and prestige. This "number
one" man of affairs, this leading soldier of good fortune, this
man who had reached the very top rung of earth's ladder of
success, was inspired to accu rately record his ripened
convictions and seasoned philosophy of life, (that is life
"under the sun," temporal, earthly life of man). The book of
Ecclesiastes is this record.
In this book of twelve chapters we have the words of "the
gatherer" or worldly accumulator, the words of earth's very
first capitalist. In the King James version of the Bible we have
an unfortunate rendering of a Hebrew word which literally means
"gatherer." In this version we have the statement in the first
verse of Ecclesiastes that these words are the writings of the
"preacher." A careful reading of the book will reveal that the
witings are actually the words of the "go-getter" or successful
"gatherer." The King James translators seemed tohave thought
that because the Hebrew word meant "gatherer" and Solomon was
the gatherer in this case where he was serving as a preacher or
teacher, therefore, the Hebrew word for gatherer meant the
gatherer of people, or a preacher. (Note please, that I mean to
prove the correctness of my criticism by pointing you to the
context of the book and not by a mere reference to a Hebrew
dictionary.) Be that as it may, the fact is very clearly and
repeatedly brought out in this little book of twelve chapters
that worldly gain, though it be great wisdom and prestige, is
nothing but "vanity of vanities" and "vexation of Spirit." "The
eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear with hearing." "He
that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver, nor he
that loveth abundance, with increase; this is also vanity"
(5:10). Note the disgust and despair expressed in the second
chapter (read Eccl.2 )
"PROGRESS" A DELUSION
God help us to see that this gluttonous god called "Progress"
is the most fiendish of all cannibals. The finest things in our
lives are being thrown into the greedy mouth of this idolatrous
god of the evolutionists. In the bewitching name of "Progress"
parents are persuaded to hand their children over to bobbed hair
sissies, childless professors and intellectual fiction peddlers
with the assurance that such teachers are better qualified to
train children than their own parents. Thus relieved for most of
the day from their little "brats," the parents, especially
"Paw," are free to battle down in the money marts and vicious
industrial jungles in order to make enough money to build
extravagant school buildings, and costly playgrounds, and pay
the increasing number of teachers that are being demanded by
dictator-god, "Progress." My friends, it's all a delusion. It is
all the proud, swaggering, boastful and foolish efforts of men
and women drunken with self-righteousness, and unbelief.
For over three hundred years now this public school system (and
the whole thing is only about three hundred years old), of
artificial training of children has been at work, weakening the
position and the preeminence of parents and strengthening the
state with its artificial functions and enslaving
institutionalism, and now, all over the world we are witness ing
what is being termed the threat of the "Totalitarian state."
Shall Christians allow the newness and size of a word to obscure
the fact that this condition is coming on us so rapidly and is
being so feared by those who still have some conception of the
sacredness of individual and home life? I say, shall we allow
this popular word, totalitarian, to separate the sad condition
from the things that have necessarily caused it? In other words,
the very things that all our biggest teachers and preachers have
boasted most about are those things which have gradually and
surely robbed the individual and the home in order to create and
maintain the mass movements, the public schools, both day and
Sunday schools!
Little wonder that we have a generation of disrespectful and
lawless youth that forces our nation's chiefest police official
to warn and seek to arouse us by writing such articles as J.
Edgar Hoover (long time head of the F.B.I.) has been writing
lately on the staggering juvenile crime situation. Little wonder
that our best trained youth have the least respect for their
parents and for constituted civil authority.
AS PARENTS SIT IN THE GALLERIES
And why should youth respect their parents any more than brute
beasts remember and respect the animals that gave them physical
birth when our modern youth see so clearly that the things most
highly esteemed among modern men are the things that their
parents did not give them, but rather are the things the day
school and Sunday school teachers and experts give? It's all
wrong. It's terribly wrong. We are a generation of
"bleacherites" who have so little genuine life of our own we are
bored to tears or the point of suicide unless we can crowd and
cram into a theater to see pictures of somebody living.
How ironical it is for so much to be made today of "honest Abe,"
his homespun mother and his rugged determination to help his
fellow man in the midst of no labor-saving gadgets or social
security. What chance has the modern boy, sired by a race track
gambler, born by a cigarette queen, educated by a pol-parrot of
the evolutionary fool-osophy and given thirty minutes a week in
association with other pampered youth in an enticingly equipped
Sunday School room and then sent out to make the world safe for
democracy---I say what chance has that poor novice of ever
becoming an Abraham Lincoln, to say nothing of his ever becoming
"a good soldier of Jesus Christ," able and willing to endure
hardness?
We have walls today. Oh yes, great imposing walls! But how and
to what purpose were they built? Let me repeat the vivid
statement in Isaiah 22: "Ye have broken down the houses to
fortify the walls." Our boasted "freedom and progress" has about
wrecked us.
What a pitiful spectacle this is; here we can't possibly cut out
our extravagances in order to get out of depressions and
recessions. If we cut out our staggering expenditures for these
death dealing cigarettes, liquors and movies we will throw
millions out of employment and that would further retard this
gay progress and so, in order to lengthen our shortened sheet,
we cut the bottom off and proudly sew it onto the top. "Hath not
God made foolish the wisdom of the world?" Isaiah 47-15 needs no
modernizing to bring it up to date. It is God's sufficient
indictment of the condition all clear-eyed people see about us
now.
RAHAB'S RAY OF HOPE
Truly and soberly do I "view with alarm" when I look with any
honesty of heart about me. Nor will I listen to any of the new
dreams being offered by the very same schools of false prophets
whose past schemes did not have God's authority or His
blessings. However, with the Bible enlightened eye of faith I
look above with great joy and glorious assurance.
Do you remember the story of the harlot, Rahab? She had a house
on the wall of the wicked place with its more wicked
inhabitants. That great city was soon to fall along with its
proud walls. Then what hope was there for the poor harlot whose
house was on these walls? There was the hope of the otherwise
hopeless, the crimson thread that leads from the place of sin
and death to the home of the redeemed. In fact, that harlot's
house became the only real home there was in all that proud city
of houses. Listen to this (Joshua 2:18). "Behold, when we come
into the land, thou shalt bind this line of scarlet thread in
the window which you didst let us down by: and thou shalt bring
thy father, and thy mother, and thy brethren, and all thy
father's household, home unto thee."
This heathen harlot hid the two Israelitish spies who had come
into Jericho to spy out the land before their army entered for
the conquest. She had heard of the way the true God had owned
and blessed these people and she tremblingly received and hid
these two from the hateful hands of her fellow sinners in
Jericho, with the pleading that they would remember her and her
family when the time of God's judgment should fall on the wicked
city. They told her to hang a scarlet thread in her window as a
token of her desire and her faith in the God of Israel. She did
so and was saved.
BUILDERS
A builder builded a temple He wrought with care and skill.
Pillars and groins and arches Were fashioned to meet his will;
And men said when they saw its beauty: "It shall never know
decay. Great is thy skill, O builder, Thy fame shall endure for
aye."
A father builded a temple; He wrought with skill and care,
Forming each pillar with patience Laying each stone with
prayer. None saw the unceasing effort; None knew the marvelous
plan; For the temple the father builded Was unseen by the eyes
of man.
Gone is the builder's temple; Crumbled into the dust Pillar and
groin and arches Food for consuming rust; But the temple the
father builded Shall endure while the ages roll; For that
beautiful, unseen temple Was a child's eternal soul.
http://www.webcom.com/christ1s/civiliza.html
updated Sept. 29, 1996 by 70253.3542@ compuserve.com
Whilst the New Covenant Church of God does
not necessarily support every conclusion in this article it is sympathetic with its
broad sweep.
This page was created on 7 April 1998
Last updated on 7 April 1998