RESISTANCE

What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive,

because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.  You adulterous people! 

Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?

Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.  Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”?  But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” Submit yourselves therefore to God.

James 4: 1-7

Resistance is one of those terms that has been used in many different ways in various situations. What remains the same, however, is that as humans our inclination is to resist what is perceived as evil. What if, however, our perception of evil is off?

The prophet Isaiah warned that there are those who see evil as good and good as evil, and that their demise would swiftly come (Is 5:20-25). Isaiah was warning the people of Israel, not the pagan nations around them that disaster was about to come their way. In fact, the LORD was going to use those surrounding pagan nations to destroy Israel because the nation of Israel had become so corrupt, that they had lost their identity as the sons and daughters of God (Is. 5:26-30).

Deep down they knew right from wrong, but they were used to the protection and prosperity that Yahweh had provided them, and this gave them a false sense of security. They felt that they could get away with just about anything and they began to make excuses for living for fleshly pleasures and dishonest gain.

I know far too many professing Christians that are living the same way as the people of Israel in antiquity. Deep down, they know right from wrong, but continue to buy into the ideologies of the culture that go against God’s written word. This is when evil begins to flourish and the Truth can become distorted and seen as something bad.

Over the years, I have been surprised at some of the most pious professing Christians who are ready to compromise the word of God when a family member or friend comes “out of the closet” or claims that they have gender dysphoria. Many of them also quickly overlook and make excuses for the adulterous lifestyles of lay-leaders in the Church.

The point here is not about sexual proclivities, but about compromise. Once we begin to compromise one part of the Bible, we change the meaning and purpose of why God included the boundaries for his people that he included. Changing the meaning of even one part of Scripture, will eventually cascade into altering and misunderstanding the character and nature of God.

Changing the character and nature of God is not only a form of resisting the purity of who the Creator is, but it is an acceptance of what he calls evil. The logical conclusion of elevating evil to good will eventually cause one to be separated from God. The individual may not even realize that they are drifting away from the LORD because they have changed his nature and their understanding of who he is.

One compromise will always lead to another and before you know it you are accepting what the world considers as good yet is seen as evil and unacceptable to the God of the universe. This inverted mindset will inevitably consider the goodness of the God of the Bible as something to be scorned as evil and offensive to the secular idea of good.

This is what happened to the nation of Israel as we read about in Scripture. They had compromised so much, they no longer realized how far that they had drifted away from their God. Professing Christians are supposed to be an example to the world about God, however, just as the nation of Israel was intended to point the pagan nations to the one true God, they assimilated into the culture instead and became like everyone else.

There is no question that there will be judgment on the secular realm, but those who profess Christ yet live like and accept the ideologies of these materialists will not escape God’s perfect judgement. Jesus warned that there would be a great deception in the last days therefor it is to our benefit to be skeptical of the popular ideologies from the world around us and to test everything against the word of God. More importantly, we need to understand that we are called to speak up when we see people going down the wrong path.

Silence signals acceptance.

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