CORN DOGS, SAUERKRAUT, AND COTTAGE CHEESE

Neal Pollard

The food items above have one sure thing in common–they are all items I cannot even choke down.  Each of them are undesirable to me for different reasons, but they are all checked off in my gross column.  You may love them all, and if so, in the words of the great philosopher Briscoe Darling, “more power to you.”  I just do not.

Culinary tastes differ.  I enjoy mixing peanut butter and table syrup, using homemade biscuits to sop up this fine, tasty blend, but I realize I may not have a lot of company in that proclivity of mine.  Some things are healthier and more suitable to eat than others, but much of that is simply a matter of taste.

Sadly, there are people who have tried to lean on their human reasoning and experience, determining what they will and will not do and believe based on personal preference and taste.  They do not see Scripture as authoritative.  In our postmodern age, people have tried to make our culture–with its peculiar tastes, desires, and leanings–preeminent over God’s revealed truth.  When this is the case, a society can put sins like abortion, homosexuality, adultery, living together, modern dancing, immodesty, and greed into the palatable and even desirable category.  The same group may put godly traits of character like honesty, courtesy, commitment, conviction, faithfulness, and the like into the distasteful category.

I remember my dad preaching a sermon about “Cafeteria-Style Religion.”  Back in those days, cafeteria-style restaurants were more common and popular.  You walk in the restaurant, walk past meats, vegetables, breads, and desserts, putting only what you wanted on your tray while rejecting the rest.  The spiritual application of that, that people pick and choose what commands of God to obey and what to ignore, is even truer today than it was then.  Today, it is not just doctrinal matters but also moral matters.

We need to remember this.  Scripture itself speaks of a way that seems right to a man that leads to death (Prov. 16:25).  It is not in man to direct his own steops (Jer. 10:23). Paul had been responsible for Christians’ deaths, yet could say in Acts 23:1 that he had lived with a clean conscience before God to that very day.  God has left a complete revelation that has been preserved, despite what agenda-driven skeptics say.  Our task is to swallow that, but to spit out any alternative authority.

“TOLERANCE, ACCEPTANCE, EMBRACE”

 

Neal Pollard

One of the feature stories in today’s USA Today is a glowing feature about a homosexual couple getting married in Maryland, one of the states to legalize homosexual marriage in the last election.  The article is also about changing attitudes in our nation.  Chuck Raash, the author, states in the course of writing that 53% of Americans surveyed say they think that same-sex married couples should enjoy the same rights as heterosexual couples.  Perhaps the statistic I found more interesting was that 36% of people surveyed have changed their mind about this issue during their lifetime.  While those numbers are not further analyzed, the tone of the article would suggest that most, if not all, have changed from opposing to accepting it.  One of the grooms summed up the “three stages” homosexuals often face when they reveal their preference to the people in their lives–”tolerance, acceptance, embrace” (USA Today, 1/9/13, A-1).  I do not doubt any of the statistics in the article, nor do I disagree with the fact of such gradual change in thinking in people’s minds toward matters like homosexuality.

Yet, I would disagree with this man and those who support his lifestyle that such change is positive.  Sin is very often met with such a gradual, changing attitude.  The 18th Century English poet, Alexander Pope, is actually the originator of the thought from the afore-quoted groom.  In “Essay on Man,” Pope said, “Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, as to be hated needs but to be seen. Yet too oft, familiar with her face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace.”  The idea, especially in context of the whole, is that people’s attitude toward sin soften through the attrition of exposure.  That is, the more we are exposed to sin, the more comfortable and desensitized to it we become.  When a sin is increasingly portrayed as positive and right and people stop speaking against it, that society inevitably moves from disapproval to embrace.

Isaiah speaks of people getting things spiritually backward, calling evil “good” and good “evil” (5:20).  Consciences get seared (1 Tim. 4:2). They become callous, having “given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness” (Eph. 4:19).  Someone may deny God’s existence or that the Bible is His inspired Word, but those who claim faith in both cannot consistently do so but tolerate, accept, or embrace what He says therein is sin!