The Devil at Work

The following is an excerpt from this wonderful sermon by Rob Rayburn on Revelation 12: 1-17. I loved the whole thing, but if you are short on time the portion below will be helpful. I appreciated this part because it made me think ahead as I parent these little boys. I need to see what dangers are ahead for them so that I can prepare them. It also made me appreciate the wonderful godly men that are being a light in our world. I am so thankful for my husband and other men that I know that help to show the world what "manliness" REALLY is.

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We have mainstreamed pornography and in so doing have cauterized and polluted the souls of our society’s young men and left our young women to make do with what is left. Apparently, according to almost all studies and surveys, American women are not much impressed with what has become of the American male. But even they are not crying out for a counter-revolution. There is nowadays a conversation underway in some segments of the media as to what has gone wrong with the American man, why he has become such an unreliable, unadmirable, selfish twit, alternately silly and disgusting, in bondage to his lusts, preoccupied with his diversions, and of little use to other human beings. He seems both more passionate and more skillful at video games and fantasy sports teams than taking responsibility for a wife or for children. It has been noticed that no one is speaking of manhood any longer; no one even knows what it would mean in our society. Step aside ladies; the men must get to the lifeboats! But aware of a great loss, no one has wisdom to offer; no one a remedy. The once grand conception of liberty, thus debased, has left our men no longer noble, but small. Petty, sitting alone in front of a computer screen with little to offer others. Those who mourn the loss of what used to be are voices crying in the wilderness.

Here we are: an enlightened culture that is systematically unraveling the character of our people. Pornography, gambling, violence are still seen to be positively liberating to some and, however depressing, irresistible to others. And it continues. With marriage teetering on the brink of collapse in a society that has been repeatedly warned that it needs nothing so desperately as to restore the health of the institution of marriage, it seems to many of our cultural elite that what is really needed is to continue the dismantling of the institution by opening it to homosexuals and by adjusting the social policy of the state still further to erase the distinction between the married and the unmarried.

And so it continues. In a society now shaped by the sexual revolution, with unprecedented numbers of people with sexually transmitted diseases and high abortion rates, it is still impossible to convince many of the architects of this revolution that anything is wrong. We now have a political class that in largest part cannot be made to see that there is any real problem with abortion or promiscuity. A single generation has erased the moral consensus of 2000 years. In a society beset with a generation of young people who suffer terribly from a lack of impulse-control, self-discipline, and the willing acceptance of responsibility, so-called experts are pressing us to outlaw spanking. The very things that our culture is in greatest need of, such as the disciplined parenting of children, are the very things intelligent people of our culture are determined to jettison. This is their moral passion: to destroy our character! The very things that we have done that have brought the greatest misery upon our society are the very changes they are most loathe to undo. Hardly a second thought ever passes through the minds of those shaping this culture into the engine of human sadness and disappointment and unfulfillment that it has become and is still becoming, as Europe before it.

Is this not “devilish” in the truest, deepest most literal sense of the term? Are we not correct to think that there is a power at work here greater than that of mere social currents or human ideology? The blindness to the facts, the indifference to human woe and especially the woe borne by our nation’s children, the inflexible loyalty to ludicrous ideas, the unwillingness even to contemplate the possibility that fundamental errors have been made, is all of this not evidence that our society is in the grip of something more powerful than itself and that it is in thrall to a will outside of itself?

When Paul says that, as Christians, we do not wrestle with flesh and blood but against principalities and powers, forces of evil in the heavenly realms, is he not explaining the world we see every day. And when he says that he is not ignorant of Satan’s designs and that it is imperative for Christians to stand against his wiles, what is he saying but that the world we live in each day is a world made more spiritually dangerous and difficult by the fact that it is inhabited by powers greater than those of mere human beings and that those powers are being employed to destroy, to corrupt, to unman, to blind, and to lead astray.