Tuesday, February
21, 2017
Work at living in peace with everyone, and work at living a holy life,
for those who are not holy will not see the Lord. Hebrews 12:14(NLT)
Just about everyone knows
what a melt-down looks
like. There are varieties, such as the
third grader who lost a race on the playground, or a high school athlete who
just lost the year’s most important game.
There is the business agent who lost the big contract to competition. There’s the bully who just got exposed as a
fraud.
A melt-down
is when everything comes unglued, and common sense becomes scarce. It’s when irritability steps up its game to
become white-hot, seething, foaming-at-the-mouth revenge-seeking anger!
The
writer of Hebrews understood full-well that those who live a life filled with melt-down
kind of anger are those who eventually find themselves alone. Nobody likes to be around anyone who is perpetually
melting-down. In fact, Scripture
condemns runaway anger as one of the seven deadly sins. The writer goes so far as to say that kind of
person will not see the Lord.
It’s
that
serious.
Unrestrained temper tantrums
are becoming something of this new millennium’s hallmark. Terrorist events, where dozens of people die,
screaming matches in political events, road rage, and the dividing lines drawn
in the sand by groups of all kinds, against other groups of all kinds…well, it
seems to define what we’ve become; welcome to the 21st century!
And,
as disturbing and depressing as the sound of all that may be, the beat of the
drum may have only begun. Somewhere,
perhaps far in the future, perhaps sooner than later, there is coming an
ultimate melt-down. That one is known as
End
Times, Armageddon, and Last Days.
Jesus
taught his disciples that they should recognize the signs of the last
days. One of those signs is unchecked
anger, where evil increases and the disdain of people for godliness becomes overwhelmingly
gross. I would call it a perpetual state
of melt-down, gone way past the point of caring about God, to the point where
nothing about God can be seen. It’s
where anger has blinded so many there is hardly a thought thrown towards
goodness any more.
But Jesus
also taught his disciples that they are salt and light to just such a
generation.
For You Today
Have
you thought about the way you’ll be a light-bearer in this melt-down world?
NOTES
[i] Title image: See page for author, via Wikimedia
Commons
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