Time and Change

2 Timothy 3:1 This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. 2 For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, 3 Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, :4 Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; :5 Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.

I read this passage today, and without trying to get heavy and dark about it, I see aspects of it nearly every day. Just Friday at work I had a couple of experiences that were kind of cases in point. In the early afternoon I was policing our lot, a nice way of saying that I was raking leaves and picking up trash. While I was raking near the fence that separates our equipment yard from the public park next across the street, I heard a car door slam. A man in his twenties was storming around the pavement in front of a car, waving his arms and yelling at a young woman in the car. This man was extremely angry, and I think the best thing for her to do would have been to leave. She did try to drive away, but he placed himself in front of the car and forced her to come to an abrupt stop.

He was behaving in a very verbally abusive manor towards her and he began calling her a dirty name. About one hundred feet away, I used a voice that he would definitely hear, and when he looked my direction I said, "Say it one more time, and I'm calling the police." He instantly dropped his volume level to a whisper and began to plead with this woman because he did not want to go to jail. He got back into the car and they left. This "gentleman" did not care what he said to this woman in his life, or who heard it, unless his antics might get him into trouble.

Just a couple of hours after that, I noticed a large crowd of teenagers just out of school for the day, heading for the same park at a fast pace. Normally, I might see a couple of kids at a time walking past the store, but this time they were arriving in groups of ten or more. Many were acting a bit strange. One kid on a bike was racing back and forth from one group to another. He passed our building about a dozen times. I watched, and as they hit the park, the kids separated into three different areas, but it was evident they were there for same purpose, whatever that might have been. I've seen stuff like that before, and it is never good. I got on the phone and called 911. I suggested to the data dispatcher that the police might want to make themselves visible, and she said that she would send them out. Two radio cars arrived in about as many minutes, and the kids, if they noticed, didn't seem to show it.

The thing is, the police would not leave. They just placed themselves at strategic locations, and waited it out. After about forty-five minutes, the kids gave up whatever it was they had planned, or had come to watch and headed back in the direction they came from. Once again, someone had something in mind to do, but decided not to do it when they were threatened with legal consequences.

Times change, and in our society, like it or not, they are getting worse. I remember the Smothers Brothers Show. Shows you how old I am. (Laughing here.) It got canceled because they (I think) flushed a toilet on their show. Yes, things have certainly changed. All manor of lewd, sexually explicit and salacious acts are portrayed on network television for all to see. ABC is still engaged in an FCC suit because it broke guidelines and aired a nude scene in 2003. A single nude scene? Television is plastered with them if you have cable. But because cable is invited into people's homes, the guidelines are much looser. Nonsense, people invite all TV into their homes, and it is up to them to be discriminating. If you don't like what is on, don't watch it. If you find it heinous, write the sponsors and tell them you don't need their products if they lend their support to such programs. Simple.

As tough as things might have been for Timothy in his day, Paul was saying that things would inevitably become worse. Paul even goes so far as to refer to those future days as "perilous." The word in Greek for perilous is "chalepos." It's found only one other time in the New Testament in Matthew 8:28, describing the two demon possessed men in a graveyard in the country of the Gadarenes. These men were so "exceedingly violent" that nobody could get past them. Paul was trying to make Timothy acutely aware of what lay ahead.

"Ginoske," in the Greek means, "know." It is a present imperative, and Paul used it to preface what he told Timothy to stress its importance. There are many Christians these days who tend not to give any importance to prophecy. It's treated as some sort of embarrassing cousin or something, and regarded as something that can't be understood, and which is of little import. That to me is strange, because Paul and other New Testament writers felt very different about it. The New Testament has prophetic passages throughout. In fact, about a third of the entire Bible is prophetic in nature.

Why would the Holy Spirit desire us to ignore prophecy is hard to understand, since He emphasized it so strongly in the one and only book He provided for us to live by. The very first sermon to pour out of the early church had prophetic references, and that message reaped a harvest that began with about three thousand souls, and it is still harvesting souls today.

Those in the early church were concentrating more on Jesus coming back for them than they were about death or about heaven. They were hoping to be taken up with Jesus in His glory, and they didn't want to be left behind on earth. They believed that the most imperative thing for any person on the planet was to get right with his Maker. They lived as if they might see Jesus coming in the clouds two-thousand years ago. Some people point to the fact Paul apparently believed it too, and because of that say his writings were neither inspired or inerrant.

But what is two-thousand years to the One who dwells in eternity? What is ten-thousand? Time is a construct that we have to deal with. It isn't any problem for God. Our life on earth is not only finite, it's the flicker of a flame. A breath. God doesn't wear a watch that's wound the way ours is, and every second that ticks by is prolonging His coming. Every second is a moment of prodigious grace, because He is "not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance."

I don't want to rip off someone else's work, but if you would like to read a good description of what we should be doing with the gracious time provided by a merciful Maker, take a look at yesterday's post at: http://www.glenwoods.blogspot.com/ The title is: "discipleship is mission" I think you will find it encouraging.