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| “For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.” |
| —John 3:20-21 |
Cockroaches hate the light. They much prefer darkness. In darkness, they have a much better opportunity to survive. In the light, they can be seen and destroyed. Sin is exactly like that. Sin hates the light and much prefers the darkness. That’s why negativity is an enemy of the truth.
Someone recently asked me why our nation has become so negative:
“Why do things seem so much worse today than they did when I was a child in the 1950s and 1960s? Why do so many people seem so far from God than they did when I was younger?”
I believe that the so-called sexual revolution of the late 1960s ushered in a time where normal social mores were put aside in favor of licentious behavior. Openly living in the depths of sin was formerly frowned upon by the majority of individuals in our nation.
But, after the sexual revolution took hold, increasingly people began to accept more and more types of sin as normal and deemed that sin acceptable. Why? Because sin begets sin—the more we tolerate sin, the more sin will prevail.
Out of this ever-increasing prevalence of allowing sinful behavior to put on a mantle of acceptability, it became ever-necessary to pull away from God. While once the majority of people living in the United States attended church or synagogue services, now fewer and fewer people do so.
As a general rule, citizens of the United States have pulled away from God because He is the one who judges sin. The more prevalent sin has become, the more necessary it has become to set aside the One who judges sin, declaring that He is irrelevant or nonexistent.
The Apostle Paul wrote these words to believers, found in Ephesians 2:1-3:
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
These verses, in addition to the verses from the Apostle John found at the beginning of this blog post, clearly show the pathway taken by the power of sin to destroy a people and a nation. Everyone who does wicked things hates the Light. Sin has a deadening effect of people’s minds and hearts. The only antidote is found in the truth of God’s written Word, the Bible.
We who follow Jesus are children of the Light. We are the ones who shine the Light of God’s truth into the darkness caused by rampant sin in our world. It is a solemn duty, an awesome responsibility, and one that we dare not take lightly.
Let’s not allow fear to hold us back from our calling. We stand against the darkness of sin by proclaiming liberty to the spiritually captive, light to the spiritually blind, the sound of praise to the spiritually deaf, and hope to those spirutally lost in the swamp of sin.
