Dave’ Monday Blast – June 27, 2022
Have you noticed that bad behavior is routinely on public display, and there is little sense of it being wrong? I got to pondering this reality, and affirm what political scientist James Q. Wilson observes: “There are only two restraints on behavior…morality, enforced by individual conscience or social rebuke, and law, enforced by the police and the courts. If society is to maintain a behavioral equilibrium, any decline in the former must be matched by a rise in the latter (or vice versa). If familial and traditional restraints on wrongful behavior are eroded, it becomes necessary to increase the legal restraints.”
Pastor Jim Denison comments: “For decades, our postmodern culture has assured us that all truth claims are personal and speculative. As D.A. Carlson has noted, tolerance used to mean that people had the right to be wrong; today, tolerance means there is no such thing as wrong. As a result, morality, enforced by individual conscience or social rebuke is minimized or rejected altogether.”
Without a belief in the one true God, who alone can establish the standards for right and wrong/moral or immoral, people won’t take a stand for righteousness. They just don’t care enough; they simply don’t know enough. Belief in the one true God who affirms all absolute standards is the cement of society. It holds the home, the school, the community, and the nation, as well as the individual together. Without God being the object of our belief, convictions, and values, all falls apart.
The falling apart of society we are experiencing is in reality a crisis in belief. Easy divorce, crime, suicide, alcoholism, youth runaways, abortion, drugs, and the like are all expressions of the emptiness of our lives. We don’t believe anything and so nothing matters!
In such a society, Wilson alleged, “law, enforced by the police and the courts must be increased. However, these “legal restraints” are increasingly under attack for being discriminatory and threatening to “personal authority.”
Without either of the only two restraints on behavior, is it any surprise that our society cannot maintain a behavioral equilibrium?
Next week we will consider the pathway to reacquiring cultural balance. Of course INTENTIONAL men of God are way ahead of me…the answer to behavioral equilibrium can only be found in the WORD.
