Don't drink coffee after 7:30
It is easy to see how this judgment works out in history. For complex historical reasons, France turned on the Huguenots and persecuted them almost out of existence, so the Bible and the Reformation never took hold in France as it did in England. Sometimes the antipathy toward the Bible has arisen from drift, rather than from persecution. In many Wester countries, the public sense of morality was until a few decades ago largely tied to the Ten Commandments. Nowadays very few even know what the Ten Commandments are. The result is not freedom and integrity, but a lilting scorn that flaunts its superiority over something no longer even understood, much less respected--and what shall the end of these things be? So many Bibles, so many Bibles--and so little thoughtful reading of them. The next stage is the Bible as source of prooftexts; the stage after that is the Bible as quaint relic; the next, the Bible as antiquarian magic; the next, implacable ignorance--and all the while, a growing hunger for something wise, something stable, something intelligent, something prophetic, something true. And the hunger is not satisfied.The only answer is the fulfillment of Jesus' prayer in John 17:17.
I don't want to beat the dead horse of the state of American morality (indeed, there are enough dead-horse-beaters of that variety around today), but I found especially insightful the idea of "a growing hunger for something wise, something stable, something intelligent, something prophetic, something true" that comes with a loss of the truth, beauty, mystery, challenge, and wonder of the Scriptures.
When I take my Bible for granted, I am showing contempt to the revealed truth of the God of the universe--it's no wonder life makes less sense. When I go a few days without taking time to (at the very least) read the Bible, my mind does not get a similar reprieve from all the messages this world tries to tell me--it's no wonder the world seems small, pessimistic, and ugly. It is not that I cannot imagine life without God; it is that I all too often live so that I do not have to imagine. More than the number of teenage pregnancies, more than the sort of commercials aired during Monday night football, and more than whether some chiseled rock sits in a courthouse, the thought that those who do not know Christ live every day in that sort of confusion is what should truly concern me.
