Where tyranny comes from

Some internet pundit suggests the “hidden” agenda behind the sudden exposure of Hollywood white men involved in sex scandals is to further clamp down on free speech, resulting in white men being afraid to even look at a female.

It’s common knowledge kids in public schools are already taught that the very institutions our country was founded on were devised by “a bunch of selfish, rich white men who wrote those institutions just to perpetuate their monopoly."

Jordan says, “When you have a culture where there’s no absolute truth, and it’s just ‘whatever feels right for you,’ you do what Israel did:  'Every man does that which is right in his own eyes.' (Judges 17:6)

“When you get to that kind of widespread skepticism about everything, where,  'We don’t know what to believe because there's no absolute truth,' you naturally get chaos.

“In a Christian culture, people are going to be self-governed and self-restrained, for the most part, because they know God’s looking. They know there’s a right and a wrong and that ‘it’s appointed unto a man once to die but after that the judgment.’ (Hebrews 9:27)

“You know there’s an accounting; there’s some absolute truth. There’s a God and there’s accountability. There’s justice.

“But when every man does that which is right in his own eyes, what kind of eyes do people have? Your heart is desperately wicked. You’re going to wind up in sin and you know what sin does? ‘Righteousness exalts a nation and sin is a reproach to any people.’ (Proverbs 14:34)

“Sin produces corruption. Things fall apart. That’s called chaos and when you get chaos in a culture, that can only go so far. When you don’t have character in people to restrain the chaos, somebody’s going to restrain it.

“The problems aren’t going to be resolved without truth being spoken to people, and with what little presence there is for the church the Body of Christ, it’s such a weak, ineffectual thing that isn’t based on Scripture and doesn’t have any answers and can’t contend with them intellectually.

That’s why the church today is totally irrelevant in solving things. So where do people go for answers? They go to themselves. Human viewpoint. Where does that get them? More chaos, and when you’ve got to get rid of chaos, there’s always somebody going to come in with a gun and a government, and people will say, ‘I’ll take it because I can’t live with the chaos.’

“And that’s where tyranny comes from.  Now that’s the way the cycle of history’s always been. But in the midst of that widespread skepticism, and that enormous spiritual confusion, there’s always a real deep spiritual hunger and that’s really what will drive the interest in our message. It’s because people are looking for answers.”

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Driving to a women’s bible study yesterday morning, a friend told me about the new “Christian” movie Let There Be Light and how it centers on a Richard Dawkins-type atheist who crashes into a tree after getting drunk and has a near-death experience in which he has a vision of his dead son.

I was immediately reminded of a dream I had in the night of a very vivid image of the face of my favorite baby doll, Dorothy Jr.! I even thought when I first woke up, “Why would I dream about her?!”

There was a time when I treated my baby dolls, Dorothy Sr., and later on, Dorothy Jr., as my children. I dressed them up in real baby clothes and slept with them in my arms. During the day I often kept them tucked under my covers with only their heads popping out. I didn’t actually give up “believing in” them until I was in the sixth grade!!!

Dorothy Sr. was a gift from my grandmother upon our return to U.S. from the jungles of Ecuador, where my father was a missionary doctor for the same compound of famed missionaries Nate Saint and Jim Elliott. I was then nine years old.

We spent a year living at my grandmother’s house and my place to sleep was on the floor in her bedroom next to the bathroom. I had a sleeping bag, a compact LP stereo and a little night light. Dorothy (she later became Sr.) was always with me at night and I often carried her around during the day, hugging her. A year later my grandmother gave me another baby doll, which I decided should have the same name as the first one for some reason, hence the Sr. and Jr. titles.

My dad was unemployed during this year at my grandmother’s and worked on painting and overall upgrading a couple of rental properties he owned in Akron. He was often in a bad mood and did some crazy things like taking the TV tubes out of my grandmother’s living-room color console so that none of us could watch it . . . to be continued.