State of the World

The following is an excerpt from an article entitled "More than Meets the Mouth Or, the Meaning of Meals" by Kenneth A. Myers in the July/August 2009 edition of Modern Reformation magazine. I think it speaks well to the world today.

C. S. Lewis observed in an incredibly prescient book written in 1948 called THE ABOLITION OF MAN, "For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline and virtue." In other words, to be wise and to live a good life means to discern the ways of the world as Solomon did, to understand that there's an order in creation, and that I should fit my life into that order in some way; and we do that through knowledge, though an understanding of the world; we do it through self-discipline, where we constrain ourselves and contain our appetites and virtue, which is a development of entrenched habits of choosing to do the right thing. On the other hand, there is the modern view; he describes this as the view of applied science or technology and of magic. He relates our technical approach to the approach of magicians, where the problem for them is: "How do I subdue reality to the wishes of men?" The magician or the genie in the bottle comes in and remakes reality to fit our wishes. And modern technology is increasingly doing the same. We have our wishes; we want to reconstruct reality. We have certain desires; we want to reorder nature so that our desires can be fulfilled.

It seems we live in a world today where everything is relative. There appear to be no absolutes in this "alternate universe" we find ourselves in today. The world has gone insane and is turned upside down. But thank God the reality is that there are absolutes such as Biblical truth, no matter how much the world tries to ignore it or drown it out with their noise.