Godlessness and Evil

Concerning those who reject God and thumb their noses at His transcendent moral laws, the apostle Paul wrote this: "Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them." (Romans 1:28-32)

Paul wrote that epistle in the 1st Century C.E. Paul's description of human behavior sans the fear and knowledge of God sounds more like our modern world of today than the world that existed 2,000 years ago.

And if that sort of evil existed 2,000 years ago, then what will an end time world look like that has completely rejected God?

Paul provided the answer in his second of two letters he wrote to fellow apostle Timothy: "But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people." (2 Timothy 3:1-5)

Tragically, a growing segment of the world believes that it can achieve peace and harmony by eliminating God and wiping out every vestige of His laws and commandments. That's the world vision of President Barack Obama and his blind followers--the creation of a secular utopia that replaces God with man and crowns him as the highest authority in the universe.

It was Obama's Department of Defense that recently classified evangelical Christians as extremists who are as dangerous as Al Qaeda. That designation wasn't created by some rogue bureaucrat at the DOD. It was created at the behest of the Obama administration that loathes fundamental Christians and wants to drive them out of America.

State atheism isn't something new. The old Soviet Union was an atheist empire that littered its landscape with the corpses of millions of people that it loathed. China and North Korea are atheist nations that deny human rights and persecute those who dare profess a belief in God.

And so, wherever you find godless secularism, you find two maladies: (1) Moral depravity in the form of violence, hopelessness, high crime rates, drug and alcohol addictions, rampant sexual perversion and (2) the encroaching police state that must maintain order by force.

Human nature never changes. Apart from God, human beings become utterly despicable and corrupt. The antidote for that isn't religion--it's the acknowledgment and respect for God and His laws.

As King Solomon wrote 3,000 years ago: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline." (Proverbs 1:7)