Saturday, July 29, 2017

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE KINGDOMS OF THIS WORLD





When a society abandons moral clarity and conviction,  the pursuit of pleasure and decay are the inevitable results, according to historians Will and Ariel Durant:

  • Caught in the relaxing interval between one moral code and the next, an unmoored generation surrenders itself to luxury, corruption, and restless disorder of family and morals...A failure in leadership may allow a state to weaken itself with internal strife. At the end of the process a decisive defeat in war may bring a final blow, or barbarian invasion from without may combine with barbarism welling up from within to bring the civilization to a close. (The Lessons of History, 1968)

We have become morally unmoored. We can no longer agree on the basics - the nature of justice, truth, and love, and the values which make life worth living. Without these values, we have reduced our lives to a pursuit of the fleeting pleasures of the now. We are chasing after religions that have never benefitted the nations that have embraced them. We have rejected the lessons of history and the principles that had once made this civilization great. Meanwhile, our intellectual elites have systematically rewritten and deconstructed our history to highlight only its moral failures.

The powers of destruction have already seized the controls and await the spoils, but we await an undefiled eternal kingdom:

  • “And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all the peoples, nations, and languages should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed...But the saints of the Most High shall receive the kingdom, and possess the kingdom for ever, even for ever and ever.” (Daniel 7:14, 18)

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