Atrocities of My Culture

I've been studying this week the truth that the church is God's display of His powerful authority over all that exists. How the assembly of the redeemed, simply by the fact that we are the recipients of God's gracious plan of salvation through Jesus Christ, display His power to overcome sin and its disasterous effects and to produce for Himself the glorious reconcilation.

Then it struck me how we don't always look different than the world. Some cases in point:

My home group has been reading God's Word in the book of Judges. Just last week we came to the story of Jephthah in Judges 12 and his horrific sacrifice of his own daughter. Human sacrifice!! He offered her up as a burnt offering! How ugly is this?!! It completely offended my nature that a man would do such a heinous thing and call it good. In our home group we wrestled with how much Jephthah's culture had impacted how he functionally believed and behaved. To him, because his culture understood it as OK to sacrifice humans to the gods, what he was doing was OK. He was not living according to the revealed Word of God (God hates human sacrifice; Deut. 12:31) but rather according to the accepted principles of his culture.

I was shocked this week to hear again of Al Qaeda's use of mentally handicapped women, having Down's Syndrome, as "suicide" bombers in Iraq. I was angered and disgusted that these evil men would go so far as to use these weakened humans, made in God's image, to carry out their plans. John Piper said it well when he states, "This was not this was not suicide bombing, but the detonation of retarded girls at a distance." Did this news anger you?! Did it send you into a fury over the depths of this evil? It did to me. "How could they do that?! They are so evil!!"

Then Dr. Piper made an interesting parallel to our culture that blew me away. Not that it was true, but rather that my heart was not angered by its truth. Piper drew the parallel between what Al Qaeda did to those two women and what we in the U.S. and in England do when tests show that our unborn children have Down Syndrome: 90% of the time these children are aborted. They are torn limb from limb, "blown up from a distance." For the studies and to read Dr. Piper's blog, click here.

Why am I not as angered to this truth of such terrible atrocities toward the weak and helpless? Shouldn't my heart cry, "How can we do this?! We have been so evil!!" My culture has affected my heart more than I realize and I need to be transformed by the renewing of my mind to come into line with God's revealed Word. Am I speaking out on the horrors of evil here? Now? Am I challenging my culture's accepted norms in order to defend the weak, the helpless, the destitute?

So, what are you going to do about it?