Note: My apologies to my regular readers for my recent silence on this site. I’ve had simple keyhole surgery on my knee, which I’m pleased to say has been a huge success. Thank you for your patience.

⁵The LORD came down to see the city and tower which they had built, ⁶and he said, ‘Here they are, one people with a single language, and now they have started to do this; from now on nothing they have a mind to do will be beyond their reach.’

Genesis 11: 5-6 – Revised English Bible

⁸Now listen to this, you lover of luxury, carefree on your throne, saying to yourself, ‘I am, and there is none other. I shall never sit in widow’s mourning, never know the loss of children.’

Isaiah 47: 8 – Revised English Bible

³’Cease your proud boasting, let no word of arrogance pass your lips, for the LORD is a God who knows; he governs what mortals do.’

1 Samuel 2: 3

Pexels – Andrea Piacqualio

I wonder whether, like me, your friends or family have referred to the last eighteen months as ‘strange’? When I first heard this, it struck me as a rather odd choice of word for the period of COVID restrictions. But the longer I continue to see apparently fit young people wearing masks in the street, or even sitting alone in their own cars, the more apt the adjective seems to become.

Clearly, it’s not just the virus and the issues that surround it that have seemed strange about the last eighteen months. I think from my perspective, the following things have added to my sense of living in very odd times:

• We’ve lived through a period when, it seems, it’s almost ‘mainstream’ to believe that a man can actually become a woman (not just be treated as one), simply by publicly declaring that he now is female.
• We’re now told that it simply doesn’t matter how much we spend as a nation, in a complete reversal of everything that economists have told us for the last 50 years.
• There’s a growing view that we so fully understand how our global climate works, despite its huge complexity, that we can calculate to very small margins exactly what mean global temperatures will be 80 years from now. At a time when we can’t forecast next week’s weather accurately?
• Also on climate, we consider that we are in full control of the global climate and our actions can directly bring our climate back to our own pre-ordained view of what a stable climate should be.
• We feel that there’s nothing odd about one set of people kneeling before another set of people, in a gesture that has from time immemorial been the definition of submission, despite the fact that we gave up a feudal system of government very many centuries ago.
• We feel that there’s nothing wrong with those who sound off loudest about global warming, being the very same people who own the largest gas-guzzling yachts, private jets and huge luxury cars and multiple homes.
• Many people feel that we should give up eating meat and fish, despite the fact that we are and always have been omnivores and in some parts of the world, living without meat would mean starving (the Innuit people are just one example).
• We find nothing odd or unacceptable in the fact that our media, including the publicly-funded BBC, have become little more than a shambles of propaganda, total lies, distortions and half-truths.
• We don’t find it odd that the global social media companies are happy to permit the Taliban to promulgate their own distorted view of how the world should be, but at the same time deprive use of their platforms to an ex-President of the United States.
• We’re convinced that, to all intents and purposes, whether we die or continue to live indefinitely, is a matter of our human choice, not the laws of nature.
• We consider it to be perfectly acceptable to erase parts of our human history, where it offends our modern ears, rather than using the excesses of past events and people as a catalyst for learning and becoming more enlightened.
• We see nothing odd in people loudly calling for tolerance and inclusion, but in the act of so doing, ‘cancelling’ those with whom they disagree, in an act of total intolerance.

And, of course, the COVID elements, too:

• We consider it perfectly possible through our actions to control precisely how a virus of 100 nanometres (one ten thousandth of a millimetre) behaves and who it infects.
• We saw nothing wrong with the Police using huge fines to penalise people for sitting on park benches in the sunshine. And are still doing so, in some parts of the world.
• We see nothing wrong with using coercion and the law, to force those who are not susceptible to a disease, to receive a ‘vaccine’, that carries with it a hugely greater risk than the disease itself.
• We consider there’s nothing wrong with the elderly forcing children to have a ‘vaccine’ in order to protect the elderly, in an exact reversal of the ages-old tradition that adults have a binding duty to protect children against harm.

Thinking about these and many other issues over the last few months, it seems to me that the root cause of them all, despite their dissimilarity in many other respects is ARROGANCE. So how did we become so arrogant?

My belief is that this is directly as a result of us abandoning our Christian beliefs, more or less totally, over my seventy-year lifespan. If we’ve walked away from God and now reject Him completely, we’ve compounded the error by putting ourselves in His place. We’re now divine beings; we don’t need to guide our lives according to God’s laws, we can just create our own. Who needs God, when we’re so clever that we can manage everything perfectly well without Him? Who needs God, when we know everything we need to, about everything? Who needs God when we can subject the ‘masses’ to our benign rule over everything, even including the banishment of death?  

Heavenly Father, we beg you to forgive us for our supreme arrogance, which is the worst human characteristic of all. Teach us, Lord, to return to a healthy acknowledgment that without you guiding our thoughts, our values and our lives, we are nothing, nothing at all. Amen.