COGWA Members App
Feast App
ROKU AppIs Evil Becoming Normal?
Written by Adam Sanders
If the world is becoming so evil that God will have to intervene, why can’t people see it?
Jesus Christ said in His Olivet Prophecy that the time before His second coming would be like the days of Noah. “For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and did not know until the flood came and took them all away, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be” (Matthew 24:38-39).
How could they be unaware?
How could people be unaware in the end time? The preceding verses of Matthew 24 do not paint a pretty picture. Things will be very bad on a grand scale. There will be wars, famines, disease epidemics and earthquakes in various places. Christians will be betrayed by friends and family. Humanity will be approaching the point of self-destruction.
How could people just go about their life as normal?
Noah’s time
What was going on in Noah’s time before the Flood? “Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5). When it gets to the point where everything around you is evil, down to the very thoughts that lead to actions, then everyone does evil. They no longer know the difference between what is right and what is wrong. Evil becomes the new normal. When things feel normal, you no longer can tell if they are dire or dismal.
In Noah’s day everyone was all about doing evil, but it was just normal. It was normal because evil was called good and good was called evil.
Calling evil good
Can this happen today? We live in a world with so much to offer, and we have so many technological advances at our fingertips, from modern medicine to the information superhighway. We can travel from point A on one continent to point B on another in a matter of hours. Yet we can’t solve our most pressing problems or find the way to peace.
What is going wrong, and how does God view it? Isaiah warned: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20). This happens when we start blurring the lines between what is right and what is wrong—when we replace God’s law and judgment with our own.
Satan still uses the same temptation he used to entice Eve to partake of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He said they would become like God and would know good and evil, with the implication they would have the power to decide for themselves what was good and evil.
The Bible should be our standard of right and wrong, but our world is quickly losing any respect for that standard that it may have once had. Instead of using God’s Word to measure everything against, we are choosing to use man’s word. Everything then becomes relative, depending on what is right and what is wrong in each person’s eyes.
Can normal be wrong?
Consider what has become “normal” today. Taking God’s name in vain is normal. Premarital sex is normal. Lying is normal; and we could go on and on. All are accepted as normal in today’s world, but in God’s eyes they are evil and they are sin.
However, political correctness dictates that we cannot call things sinful or wrong or evil for fear of offending and hurting people. Therefore we just come to accept sins over time as okay or different—until they just become common practice. People who want to hold to God’s standard are looked at as stupid or backwards or closed-minded.
But we’re not as bad as Sodom, are we?
Some people like to argue that we have never gotten to the level of evil of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19). But have we? Consider that even Lot’s sons-in-law laughed in his face because he told them the city was going to be destroyed because of the evil that abounded. They thought Lot was joking. They just could not see how bad things were. Evil had become the new normal in those cities.
Are we shrugging off how evil normal has become today?
We are getting closer and closer to the time when God will send Jesus Christ back to this earth to save it from itself.
We need to be able to discern the signs of the times by the words that God had written down in the Bible. We need to be able to tell what is truly good and what is evil. We need to repent of the evil and choose the good. Otherwise we will end up just like the people before the Flood, eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage until the Flood came and swept them all away.
Adam Sanders is a member of the Church of God, a Worldwide Association, and attends the Columbus/Cambridge, Ohio, congregation with his wife and four children.
See these related links:
