A delusion exposed.

The news recently reported that one of the pioneering 'gay marriage' couples have just broken up. I don't want to be unkind about people going through a relationship breakdown, because it hurts, but I'm thinking: after all the fanfare, all the fuss made about how legalising or legitimising homosexual marriage, the celebrity couple who got the limelight have come apart. Of course that happens to straight couples, too. We couldn't help hearing all about Kim Kardashian's marriage because it was everywhere in the media. And it lasted under a year. The thing that strikes me is the futility of it all. Advocates of same-sex partnerships being called marriage act as if this was a breakthrough into a golden age. All it does is expose the pointless claims made by people that they've found a great new way of running society, and it turns out to be no big deal at all. Another news item that struck me came from a column in The Sydney Morning Herald, in which the writer said: (paraphrased): Western society has had little success in recreating, or replacing, the institutions which have declined in the past few decades, the family and the churches, and people are left without a sense of solidarity or belonging to something which connects them and gives them a sense of self. People feel adrift and lost without these things, and the supposedly clever social pioneers who ridiculed them have not come up with anything better, so they've left a hole where there used to be solidity and security. It's more of the same. People claim they know a better way to run the world, and find they've made things worse by junking some of the things that people needed - such as stable family relationships, and the acknowledgement of God in people's lives and conduct. It's a lie, a hatful of humbug. The supposedly progressive ideas are a delusion, and we need to get back what we failed to appreciate when we had it: a society in which, to many people at least, God and His teachings were properly honoured and followed.

We were warned.

The Australian Labor Party, which is in government in Australia at present, has just changed its policy on same-sex marriage. It now supports it. Soon there will be a vote in the Australian Federal Parliament on whether or not to legalizes it.
This has been a controversy for a while now, with some states in other Western countries legalizing it, some nations in Europe recognizing same-sex marriage. Much of the opposition to the idea has come from members of the monotheistic faiths, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Whatever their disagreements about other things, they concur on this: homosexuality is not just an individual variation like left or right handednes. It offends God.
Some practitioners of the faiths, calling themselves 'progressive', support homosexual marriage. All the arguments about minorities' rights, equality at law, love being the most important thing, have been voiced in support of homosexual rights. It raises the point here: God does not change to suit human fashion, God's Word does not alter to suit changing social views. God's Word in eternal and unchanging, and that is the reliability of it. We can know it now and always. If people believe that saying "This is the Twenty First Century" proves that everything has changed, they might learn the hard way that "there is nothing new under the sun." The Bible warns, and some secular history shows, that societies can become too self-satisfied with their own power and sophistication, become corrupt and implode from their own rottenness.
We might find that turning from God's Word does not usher in a new dawn of human well-being and joy. We have turned from God, scorned His guidance and sovereignty, and His blessing will pass from us. It would be shocking to see, but just as so many great empires and civilizations have fallen before, the modern world as we know it may collapse because human arrogance and blindness has become a trap for us and we led ourselves right into it. We thought we knew more than we did, and found out how little we knew. There may be a cataclysm into which we fall, or we may simply see a turning of the tide and a return to more Godly living, after some bitter lessons. That has happened before. Only God knows what He will do. One Christian friend remarked that she thinks this society is under judgement now.
Come again, Lord Jesus.

Vindication

Sometimes the world has to admit that God knows what He's talking about when He gives guidance about how to live. I'll bet they hate it, too: the Christians being proved right. But it's happened again. Yesterday in Australia a major researcher, Professor of Law at Sydney University, announced that a decline in marriage is to blame for increasing neglect of, and suffering among, young people. One of the subtitles read: "Growing rates of abuse are rooted in the rise of one-parent families." In essence, the assertion is made that 'the well-being of Australian children and young people has declined alarmingly in the past decade, and plunging marriage rates are partly to blame.' I kept the article as a collectible. It's overdue news. Child abuse, neglect, self-harm including hospital admissions are caused by the increase in numbers of one-parent families, de facto couples. violent and unstable relationships and divorce. A critical number of young people have lived without both parents and/or been through family divorce by the time they're fifteen years old and it's hurting them. The researcher has national standing, and can't be dismissed by people who don't want to accept the findings. Patrick Parkinson calls for a review of government policies, to ensure marriage is not undermined - which I reckon it has been by the increasing economic and social pressure for both parents to work, and the general attituded that marriage in only a middle class convention rather than a thing that exists out of human need. The quote is made, "Governments cannot ignore the reality that two parents tend to provide better outcomes for children than one,and the most stable, safe and nurturing environment for childre is when their parents are, and remain, married to one another."
So who thought they could reinvent it all? Who were the social pioneers who thought women could and should be single parents, or same-sex couples could do the same thing as naturan heterosexual couples? Who thought divorce was perfectly okay,and families could exist in all sorts of patterns? I've heard the remark made that in Australia families get less government support than they do in some European nations. Political correctness and left-wing social pioneering attacked conventional marriage and tried to reinvent it all, and the result was hurt and damaged children and youth.
Of course marriage has to work, and for that to happen, people need to get away from the idea that their personal fulfillment comes first, they are the centre of their own universe. Have we lost the sense of living for others, and made life all about our own preferences? It takes a certain amount of unselfishness to make a relationship work, and people are busy complaining that life is not what they want. They aren't getting things their own way enough.Then because people can't get a relationship work on their own terms they end it, and insist they're doing nothing wrong.Jesus said, Whoever loves their life will lose it, but whoever gives their life up for His sake will find it. Life is best lived for others, not purely for oneself, and if you're going to have children accept that you can't have your own way all the time. I have had to remember that myself, as a parent of five, who had to make a conscious effort not to be selfish sometimes.
Returning to the point, God set things up to work a certain way. Man and Woman together make children and raise them together.
One single female parent I heard said she didn't want to share the parenting of children with a partner so she set out to be a single parent. Dare anyone call that selfish? We're supposed to applaud her for bravery, or something. But it turns out she's not clever, and we're seeing the results of that departure from God's way.
Come again, Lord Jesus.

What have you forgotten?

The shocking events in England show what happens when a people forget their God. The riots, with burning and looting and now some deaths happen when people forget or do not know who they are and what they will answer for. True it may be that the rioters may be poor and desperate. But there are ways of dealing with that apart from engaging in spite and cruelty.
It's not only the rioters and trouble makers themselves. Britain's people have been set a shocking example by some of their leaders. The gap between wealthiest and poorest is partly a measure of who will work and who will not, but partly a result of greed. Failed bankers still got their huge bonuses. Those who can gain do so by any means they can, including dishonest use of parliamentary entitlements. Greed and self aggrandisment drive the accumulation of massive riches, and some of the rich would deny those below them all they can. So those in power, some not all, are seeing what happens when they don't care about others, and they insult God by thinking themselves allowed to show such contempt for other of His human creatures. But to blame them only is too easy. The communist explanation that poverty is the sole cause shows disrespect for the people rioting and looting. It implies that they can't take any responsibility for their actions. Some of the victims of those riots are claiming of the young hoods, "They've got no respect". And that's been said for years. People who do not know God are not reminded of their duty to treat other people properly. They lack respect for themselves, but they lack respect for others also. If they turned to Him, He would do what His perfect wisdom knows could be done to alleviate the wretchedness of life. But they would scorn such things. So who are these people who sought to drive Christianity out of schools and public life? Who are they who cut off the thing the human spirit most needs? Who said humans do not need God, their own wisdom and goodness are enough? How do they explain how a society without Christian influence falls apart like that?
Jesus said of them, If they stand between anyone and knowledge of God, it would be better if they had a huge stone tied around their neck and were thrown into the sea.
I'm praying for Britain, the lands of most of my forebears, that she will undergo a revival, a huge coming back to Jesus Christ. I can't listen to social commentators and politicians claiming they have the answer in their own paltry human wisdom. God be with you, Britain and all your peoples.

What have you forgotten?

You can't reinvent it.

Some time ago we heard about a couple in Canada who have a new baby and they are NOT announcing which sex the baby was born. The theory is, the child will choose their own identity, and decide for themselves which gender they are. Supposedly, we aren't born a particular sex, we're socialized into it, and to be free to decide who we are we should not be treated according to a gender type.
It sounds 'try-hard' to me.
Just for one thing, people have the physical characterisics of one gender or the other. We don't have either ovaries or testes because of the way we're raised, we're born with them.
Still, some people insist, we only learn to act "male" or "female" because we're treasted like one or the other.
That theory was discredited by the case in which Dr John Money surgically reconstructed a boy as a girl, thinking he would just grow up feeling like one. But he did not, and eventually had to be surgically reconstructed over again, as a boy.
If someone knows I'm wrong, please tell me. But I thought behaviour was in part influenced by hormones, and hormones depend on which gender we are cast from conception, whether we're XX or XY. In other words, we are set to be one or the other right from birth. So it is not an environmental thing, it is inborn.
This is the same mistake the marxists made, thinking they could reinvent human nature.
Tell me if I'm wrong. But I recall the Word of God saying, "male and female He made them" and we are meant to be one or the other from birth, society doesn't make us into it. God intends us to be.
We need to stop trying to reinvent what God has made, because we only make a bigger and bigger mess. God's design is sacred, human intelligence can't even properly understand it. Humans can't make other humans, they can only carry out the process of fertilization and gestation that God set up. We are getting above ourselves thinking we know better and we can improve on it. Where will it end?

Think what you're saying.

Watching a T.V. comedy the other night, I heard one of the characters say, "It's just sex!" I'm thinking, did you know what you just said? How about saying "It's just a tsunami!"
They don't seem to get it. Sex is how new people get brought into the world. People forget that and treat it like recreation, of no big consequence at all. But that is what cause new life and every time a new baby is born, history changes. They might never be famous, or recorded in history,or have a wide impact on others, but the human race has changed, because one more being created in the image of God has come into it; and sometimes things will be shaken up in a big way.
That could be good or bad. Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Jack the Ripper, whoever he was, each made a big impact - not a good one. Mother Theresa, Florence Nightingale, Abraham Lincoln and WIlliam Wilberforce each made a big impact - a very good one. And it started when two humans engaged in intimate contact and a new life was conceived. Hardly a small thing.
Jesus once said that you don't take the childrens' bread and throw it to the dogs. There is a certain respect due to certain things. The importance of them needs to be properly remembered and appreciated. You are changing history when you cause the birth of a child, whether the fact is widely remembered or not. The momentous life ever lived on Earth, interestingly, is an exception: Jesus Christ was born of a virgin woman and no human sexual contact was involved. People try and call that an unimportant detail, but it's actually a very important one. It shows the unique and miraculous nature of Jesus. Any other human being was born because of that contact between a a man and a woman, and we'd do well to think what we're doing.
Of course some people find ways of separating sex from birth. A married loving relationship may well involve physical intimacy without wanting to have a child every year, too, but who dares stop a life once started from running its intended course?
Think what you're saying, characters and scriptwriters. "Just sex" is like saying "Just an earthquake". Sex causes birth, and once a person is born the world has changed. It may be a huge blessing, too. That depends on whether or not it is given to God properly. Some people just don't know what they're messing with! We all need to think what we're saying.