August 2, 2010 – Wisdom 12-13

An interesting perspective on the question of why those that do evil are allowed to continue on.  Why God doesn’t hit His big “SMITE” button.  God is not only merciful and allows them a chance to change, but also wants to teach us to be merciful.  It is a lesson for us to not judge too harshly.  God sent wasp as a warning before He sends an army to destroy.  We should not be quick to lay on heaps of punishment.  That is not how God teaches.  And by giving them time to repent, God also gives them enough time to rack up their evils if they also choose that path, so there can never be anyone accusing God of judging wrongly.  Being an attorney for the Public Defender’s office, I was in the habit of asking for people to get second chances.  Sometimes it works out and you don’t see them again.  Sometimes it leads to me asking for them to have third, forth, or fifth chances. 

To see the beauty of the world around us and not stop and think of the creator or the complex things we can’t describe and not the master that wrote them is a sickness of our secular culture.  But it is obvious that this is not something new.  Here we see the writer is dealing with the same issue.  Some may say there is a difference because the secular world does not worship nature or complicated works as gods but as they are and so they are not similar to the person described in chapter 13.   But they are not gods in name only.  People are obsessed and infatuated and lay waste the rest of their lives to these “non-god” gods of the modern world.  What else would you call something that could possibly take up 10-15 hours of a person’s day other than something that is worshipped.  Yet young men would spend that exact amount of time playing video games if they were allowed to.  It is a sad irony (and I don’t know if it is irony, that word gets used when it is not suppose I am told) that this “worship” of “non-gods” has seem to lead to a rise in Atheism.  But that is also in word alone, because these people say they do not believe in a god, but will devote their lives to one thing or another.  They just won’t call it a god.