II TIMOTHY chapter he writes: "Despite almost universal belief to the contrary, gratification, ease comfort, and diversion, and a state of having achieved all one's goals, do not constitute happiness for man. It might be possible for an impover ished nation to harbor the delusion that happiness is simply comfort and pleasure and having enough of everything, but we have tried it and we know better. Comforts and pleasures of good living are not enough. If they were, the large number of Americans who have been able to indulge their whims on a scale unprecedented in his tory would be deliriously happy. They would be telling one anoth er of their unparalleled serenity and bliss, instead of trading tran quilizer prescriptions." Perceptive, would you not agree? This secular writer recognizes something that God's Word has to say: being a lover of money and things and self will lead to times of stress. We have over-empha sized the material world. We have become as the hedonist— lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. As a result, we are experiencing a problem with security. For some reason we have felt that if we could only get "things" around us we would then be secure and hap py. The Bible indicates otherwise, and most of us have found through hard knocks that the Bible is very accurate. Our society is suffering from lack of a clear concept of right and wrong. We are crippled with the disease of relativism. A bumper sticker I noticed recently had this message: "If it feels good — do it." It is a pathetic, criterion many
would have us believe is the best way to go today. Not too many years ago I inves tigated a case where a three year old boy had been stabbed with a butcher knife. The knife had gone right through his back and out his chest. It miraculously missed all the vital organs, and he lived. Three days later he was released from the hospital. As we investigated that case, we discovered a nine year old boy had committed the vicious crime. His reason? "It feels good to stick somebody with a knife!" Can you imagine where this phi losophy would lead if espoused on a nation-wide basis? I think we have created an age I refer to as "Spockism," where ev erything is okay. Express yourself in whatever way seems best to you. Our criminal justice statistics bear out the philosophy. In a recent re port released by the LAPD it was stated in 1971, only six percent of people convicted of felonies went to prison. Forty-four percent of those arrested for armed robbery were on probation or parole for armed robbery at the time they were arrested for their second, third, or fourth armed offense. If you took the time to analyze this report and digest it further, you would find it indicates we are plagued by a very small percentage of our populace in these areas of violent crime, but they are contin ually allowed to go back and do these crimes again and again, and again. It is interesting to look at what the Bible has to say about this in Ecclesiastes 8:11: "Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed quickly, therefore the hearts of the sons of men among them are given fully to do evil."
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