Different, But Still the Same!

Irene Poter captured my attention with these words,  "Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed." We often hear about how much things have changed. The cars people drive, the clothes people wear, the ways people communicate, etc.. AS one noted, "Change is inevitable - except from a vending machine." To hear some people tell it, the world never experienced any change until our own generation,. But a little reflection changes that perception or misperception). Edmund Morris wrote a book about Theodore Roosevelt who became the 26th president of the United States after President William McKinley was killed by an assassin's bullet on September 14, 1901, six months into his second term.

Describing conditions and ambitions in the United States and abroad, Morris quoted Francis Bacon - "The imagination must not be given wings but weights." Morris then continued, "Francis Bacon's dogged dictum . . . seemed negated by this new century [the 20th] with its young men impatient of gravity and its young powers - America, Japan, Germany - pushing back the borders of old empires. The only constant now was change . . ." (Theodore Rex, p 370). Those words were written to describe the decade between 1900 and 1910. And if you have seen picture of or photographs of cars, clothing, houses, and telephones from that era, you have to agree with a by-gone Virginia Slims cigarette advertisement that sought to enticed women to smoke their brand with this jingle - "You've come a long way, baby!"

So we have. But before we agree everything has changed, please consider the quote from Irene Poter above - "Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed." Let me tell you something that hasn't changed. Sin hasn't changed. Read Romans 1:18-32 for a catalog of sins that present and popular in the first century Roman / Greek world. God on, read the verses. It turns out some things 21st century Americans frequently hear touted as the "new normal" are not new or normal, at least not in the Biblical sense of the word. The verses contain a  list of things the apostle Paul described as "ungodliness and unrighteousness" (verse 18). There was rampant idolatry (wrong thinking about God) and immorality (dishonorable use of the body wrong attitudes).

Paul singled out a moral wrong our nation's highest court now defines as a legal right, and that millions in our culture now rate as morally admirable - lesbianism among women and homosexual behavior between  males (Romans 1:26-27). But even in Paul's day (2,000 years ago) those behaviors were not a new normal. Check out Genesis 19 and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, two ancient cities whose approval of and open practice of homosexuality led the New Testament writer Jude to say that "having given themselves over to sexual immorality and gone after strange flesh, are set forth as an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire" (Jude 7). In Romans 1:26-27 Paul calls this sexual behavior "unnatural" (New International Version).

Now friends, I'm not trying to be unkind, and I don't hate homosexuals or heterosexuals or any other kind of sinner! We are all sin-infected and stand in need of God's grace and mercy (Romans 3:23-24). I'm just saying that just because things are different doesn't mean anything has changed.

Making a sin legal does not make it moral, and calling sin by some other name does not sanctify it (see Isaiah 5:20). Sin is always the same, and the gospel that saves us from it is, too (see Hebrews 13:8). Will you think about it?

--Dan Gulley