Society has now reached a new standard of depravity, of course this has always been the trajectory and so I suspect, in fact I know that things will inevitably get worse. But when I read headlines like the ones I have read over the course of the last year or so I cannot help but wonder how much lower we can sink.

Virginity for sale to the highest bidder…That’s right; and this is the second time this year I have witnessed in the headlines what I am sure is to become the new fad. How have we sunk to this level of depravity? I ponder the question and ask myself; where have we gone wrong? I think back to a time in Israel’s own history, a time when the Israelites agreed that like the nations around them…they needed a king. God was no longer good enough to govern their affairs…they wanted a king.

Scripture declares that when we push that envelope too far God is willing to hand us over to our own desires, and I am afraid that we are standing on the precipice of disaster, looking down into the abyss of an unknown future and mesmerized by the possibilities of a life free from God. Our desire is a slightly different desire than that of the children of Israel though. Don’t get me wrong, we all still want a king; the difference is we all want to be that king. Others however are not content to have a king rule over them, so we compromise and say “then we all shall be our own kings, and we shall rule over our own lives.”

We shall have the power to determine in our own right what is true and what is false; what is holy and what is not. My body is mine, and I shall do with it what I want; never mind what the scriptures have to say. Holiness is a thing of the past, we serve a new king; a king who’s standards have changed.

Holiness under the new self-imposed kingship is no longer looked upon as a virtue but rather it is a vice. A vice that restrains and holds us back from attaining the transcendent lives we seek. Lives lived with a deeper understanding of the world and of nature. Lives where we no longer seek to explain the former by way of natural exploration, but instead we embark on a journey whereby we choose instead to explore the forbidden, hoping to somehow find meaning.

Philosophy and science have officially relieved the old guards of wisdom and truth; guards that had stood at the gates for generations defending the gardens of holiness. As we rush like mad men into the eternal flames of desire hoping to find our freedom; searching, grasping, and hoping that the search will not be in vain. Our thirst for another truth has now rendered us useless; we are weak, tired, and spiritually dehydrated. Our search intensifies and we become like desert travelers in search of life giving water. The illusions that have brought us to this place continue as mirage after mirage lead us on to hope; a hope that one day our truth will be found…it is unfortunately a hope that passes away.

I look with contempt upon those souls; that is until I realize that I too have followed that ghost into the land of nothing at times. In fact the struggle between my flesh and my spirit appears to have grown stronger as I walk the narrow road. My impulses convince me to chase the happy and forgo the holy.

I fight the impulse and I plead with God that he should cause my love for him to eclipse all that my eyes have convinced my heart to follow. I cry out to him for brokenness, realizing that my heart has been pierced more deeply for the sins of others than it has for my own.

I am not a keeper of the truth; instead God hath made me a steward. So I cry to the Lord, that he should first break me over the sins of mine own flesh, that the truth might be applied like a salve to the wounds of sins affliction, only then can I treat the wounds of others.

I pray for the exaltation of holiness in a world where the bedsheets of our hearts have been defiled and the stain of our innocence serves as evidence that we have indeed whored ourselves out to other gods; all the while exalting ourselves as kings.

even so come Lord, even so come…