Category Archives: Humanity

Personal Responsibility

I notice today, more than ever we are buying into the idea that all of my troubles in this world are the fault of someone beside me. If I get pulled over for speeding, I was late for work, or my alarm didn’t work. The fact of the matter is I was speeding, it was my foot on the peddle. Or, I got into trouble for talking in class today because Sean would not shut up, he just kept talking to me. What we are saying in these two examples is that, yes I did this thing, and got caught, but it wasn’t my fault. The blame for that thing falls on someone else… I am innocent!

Getting caught

I knew this guy at one time. He had spent a good portion of his life in prison for running drugs into the United States. He told me the story one day of how he got caught with his load. He was smuggling the stuff in a very cleverly built boat. The boat had a removable deck, that was not noticeable. The deck was lifted away, the cargo was placed inside hidden compartments below the deck, then the deck was lifted back into place.

On this particular day my friend left Nassau with his boat loaded with “cargo”. He would make his way to the island of Bimini, refuel and the next day cross to Florida where his cargo would be delivered.

My friend arrived as planned to the fuel dock in Bimini. The fuel attendant came out to meet him, and assist him with refueling his boat. My friend was not interested in waiting around for the boat to be refueled, so he gave the fuel attendant more than sufficient money to fuel the boat, and told the guy to keep whatever was left for himself. The fuel attendant did not fill my friends boat, instead he kept all of the money and put no fuel in my friends boat.

My friend was interested only in going to the local bar and partying all night, and that is what he did. In a drunken drug fueled stupor he stumbled aboard his boat in the wee hours of the morning and set off for Florida.

He didn’t get too far out to sea when his engines died, and his boat was dead in the water. He had no water, no food, and no way to make land one way or the other. He was stuck.

After a couple of days my friend passed out on the deck of his boat from severe dehydration. As he lay on his deck a fishing boat came lumbering along, not paying attention to what was in front of them. They did not see my friends boat and their port stabilizer dragged across my friends boat tearing the center console out of its place, revealing his cargo below the deck.

The Captain of the fishing boat quickly realized that this was a drug boat and called the Coast Guard. My friend was caught, and the rest did not go well for him.

In his mind the reason he was caught is because the fuel attendant ripped him off. It was not his fault that he didn’t check his fuel levels.

God’s thoughts on our blaming others

Gen 3:12-13

The man replied, “It was the woman you gave me who gave me the fruit, and I ate it.”
Then the LORD God asked the woman, “What have you done?”
“The serpent deceived me,” she replied. “That’s why I ate it.”

When Adam sinned and did that which God had said not to do. He blamed both the woman and God, then the woman blamed the serpent. I think it is important to note that God had nothing to ask the serpent. But what we have here is Adam especially not taking responsibility for his sin.

How did God react?

The serpent was punished. Vs 14 and 15 Then the LORD God said to the serpent,

“Because you have done this, you are cursed
more than all animals, domestic and wild.
You will crawl on your belly,
groveling in the dust as long as you live.
And I will cause hostility between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring.
He will strike your head,
and you will strike his heel.”

Then the woman was punished. Vs. 16 Then he said to the woman,

“I will sharpen the pain of your pregnancy,
and in pain you will give birth.
And you will desire to control your husband,
but he will rule over you.”

The man was held responsible Vs 17-19 And to the man he said,

“Since you listened to your wife and ate from the tree
whose fruit I commanded you not to eat,
the ground is cursed because of you.
All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it.
It will grow thorns and thistles for you,
though you will eat of its grains.
By the sweat of your brow
will you have food to eat
until you return to the ground
from which you were made.
For you were made from dust,
and to dust you will return.”

Since you “listened to your wife”. Adam had chosen to listen to his wife rather than God. God held Adam responsible for the sin, not his wife, even though Adam had tried to pass the buck on to her and ultimately to God.

We are guilty of the same behavior: The devil made me do it, my wife made me do it, my friend got me in trouble, the fuel guy didn’t fill my boat.

God does not accept the blame shifting, he will hold us all personally responsible. There are no excuses that will be considered valid.

The only way to please God is to do life God’s way, and only His way.

Delusion and Confusion

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Why is there so much confusion?

Why are people confused about who they are?

Why are people confused about what they are?

Why are there so many who have come the point of thinking it is best to end their own lives? Why do so many think they are not loved? “No one understands me…” is something I hear so often. Our emergency rooms are filled with children who have tried to commit suicide, or have plans to do so. I can’t comprehend how as a culture we have come so far, that our children want to die! They should be concerned about what they will do after school. Who they will be playing with. Will they be riding their bicycles, or playing on the swing, or playing hop scotch with the neighborhood kids. Instead they are heavy with the worries of this life. They are pondering things like, am I a boy or a girl? Am I a cat or a person? Am I popular on tictok?

Our kids are being taught to define themselves by their imaginations. They are being taught all kinds of evils on tv and the internet. These evils are deluding their young minds, they are confused because there are no hard fast definitions being given to them. They are left to themselves to define life. This is foolishness! Since they are the ones who have to define life, it is distorted, and grotesque.

Romans 1:21 Teaches that if we don’t worship God as God, or be thankful to Him, we have the tendency to think up foolish ideas of what God is like. The result of this is the mind becomes dark and confused.

Romans 1:22-32 Lists what comes out of this dark confused mind. It is a list that we see lived out in our world today. This is why our children are so confused, why they would prefer to end their own lives. My friend this is not all that difficult. The human mind separated from God is a dark confusing thing. If life seems to out of control, it seems like there is no hope. I want you to know that there is hope.

God created us to worship Him. He gives us reason to live, gives us love for one another, defines who we are, and gives us clear purpose. This is all the opposite of confusion. It is hope!

There’s Good and Evil, So What?

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What difference does it make to me if there is good and evil?

Well, we all stand on one side or the other. There are some who have earned the reputation of being evil, Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson… Society as a general rule regard these men as evil, because of what they have done. (their works)

Humanism has made the argument that “all people are basically good.” This argument has prevailed for the most part and is accepted as true. But is it true?

Jesus and the Law

A question was put to Jesus one day. “What is the greatest, or more important law?” It’s funny, this is the question that we all want answered. What is the least that I need to do to be considered good before God?

Jesus’ answer as usual was not as easy as we would like, in fact His answer was quite impossible because it encompassed the entirety of the law. The greatest law he said is to love the Lord your God with all your heart mind and soul, and the second is just like it, equal to it, to love your neighbor as yourself.

Well that put the kibosh on being good easy!

The first part of His answer is impossible. We can’t love God with all our hearts minds and souls because that is the way we love ourselves. We take the position of love and adoration in our own minds, the position of love and adoration that God wants, that He deserves. We are our own number one, and God wants to be, needs to be, our number one.

The second part of His answer, simply makes evident our position on the first part of the answer. It is impossible to love God with your everything if you don’t love all that He created as well. We can’t love God and hate our cousin Joe because he is an idiot. That would be a contradiction, a violation of the Law according to the teachings of Jesus. We can’t love God and ignore the suffering of children in need of food and clothing. We can’t love God and ignore the murder of babies. We can’t love God and ignore injustice in whatever form it takes.

The Human Evil

Despite the teachings of humanism, we as people are by default evil. We are born sinners, evil, and we look for excuses, and ways to dismiss what we know, that we are bad, rotten to the core. Late at night when all is quiet we know deep inside our failures, our wrongs, our evil actions. You need no convincing of that. The next morning, though we build a facade of righteousness, of all is well. We convince ourselves that we are good, and we go about our lives, putting on the lies.

All the noise and distractions of our modern society aid us in forgetting that we are inside, evil, bad, lost. So at times when we are forced to slow down all these realities can be harsh, we can be laid bare to ourselves, and we don’t like what we see. That is why there is so much despair in these days, we have been made to be more still than we are used to. We have been made to slow down. We have time to think.

There is hope! But hope is not in ourselves, it is in God. Seek Him. We are not whole without Him. We are in fact evil without Him. We all know this to be true!

The Battle of Good and Evil, for the Souls of Men

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Is there good and evil? Is there right and wrong? For years academia and the world of science has been telling us that there is no such thing as good and evil, no such thing as wright or wrong. They have been telling us that right and wrong is simply religious dogma designed to control us.

Now all of a sudden academia, and science are all a buzz talking of social justice, and the evils perpetrated on certain groups in our society. I find this really interesting since they have been trying for so long to convince us that there is no good or evil, no right or wrong. You see without right or wrong, there is no justice! Without good or evil, there is no Justice!

We all know deep within our being that there is right and wrong. We feel it whenever we do something good, that welling up of good unexplainable feeling in our chest. When we do wrong, just the opposite feeling occurs. Why is that? Gods word says that He has written His Law on our hearts. In other words, He has given us a conscience. An inner guide.

When we try to ignore this inner guide bad things begin to happen. For one thing there is a nagging thought always that we are not doing good, but in fact we are doing evil. You see, there is no middle ground. The bible teaches that if we do not do good, we in fact do evil.

This is why so many of our young people today are depressed and suicidal. They have been lied to, bamboozled! They have been taught to violate their own conscience. That conscience is always there to remind us of right and wrong. To remind us that we didn’t do good. This reminder comes especially strongly when we are quiet, when all the noise of the day has dissipated, and we lay down to sleep. There is no peace, the battle rages.

So what is this battle of good and evil?

God is battling for our souls, wanting us to do life His way. Satan is battling to keep us away from God and His way. Good vs. Evil.

Doing life God’s way leads to peace, joy, unity. These things come because when we follow God’s way because there are basically two laws that govern our being. 1. Love God above all. and 2. Love everyone else like you love yourself.

Evil says, you are different to me, so I will hate you. Evil starts by hating God, then hating others. We blame God for our troubles, then we blame others and lash out looking for revenge, but calling it justice.

God created all men equally. We are not different in His mind, no matter color, race, status, or location.

Do you want peace?

Peace begins by listening to the conscience, that law that God has put in our hearts. Most of us know what is right and wrong.

Real peace comes when we realize that God has already served justice on His own son, on our behalf. You see Jesus died a terrible death, in our place, so that our wrongs can be righted in God’s eyes.