What is WRONG with people?

 

What is WRONG with people? I find myself saying this more often than I would like.  

But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people. (2 Timothy 3:1-5 ESV)

I think the world has gone crazy.  But it has gone evil. Whatever happened to the golden rule?  Why do people think it is ok to stab someone over a seat at a track meet, to key a car because they don’t like the owner of the company, or shoot a businessman on the street because his company hurt you? 

This is what the world has become.  Paul writes it clearly to Timothy.  Many people in the world love themselves and put themselves and their wants and desires above everyone else, even their own family and friends. Money is the top goal to be reached, pride in having money, attention, power, good looks, and talent puff up humans so that they become arrogant, abusive and disobedient. 

Many have decided that their rights come before everyone else’s. They are ungrateful, believing they deserve every good thing, no matter what it takes to get
it. They worship possessions, don’t care about others’ problems, or if they say they do, is it shown and paraded for praise?

Even believers in God will put on an act of holiness and have no real relationship with Him.

These are the last days. I don’t know if the Lord will come in one day or in 100 years, but I know that we are one day closer to His coming and we are just spiraling into increasingly evil acts and beliefs. 

Why are we not amazed at the predictions in God’s word about this?  It is the same as it was in the days that Jesus walked the earth. The people knew the scriptures and the prophecies about the messiah, but when He came, they either didn’t recognize Him or didn’t want Him to disrupt the lives of evil and pride that they had built for themselves.

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. (Philippians 2:3 ESV)

Which of us can say that we don’t live our lives in selfish ambition and conceit?  Who of us is truly humble and think of others’ needs more than our own? I know I don’t, as much as I think that I try, I know that I am a failure, and it is only through the Holy Spirit of God that I can even attempt such a life.

Christ taught us to pray, “Deliver us from the evil one,” and this is so much more important than we realized when we memorized the Lord’s Prayer as children.

There is more bullying and oppression than kindness, more hate than love, more anger than joy, more stress and depression than peace, more violence and greed than patience, more spitefulness than kindness, more bad and evil acts than goodness, more abuse than gentleness, more ‘doing your own thing’ than faithfulness, and more ‘I want what I want when I want it’ , than self-control.

What is sin, and how can we fight against it? This is the topic of my next book. Please pray that I write what God wants me to and that it reaches those who need it.