Righteousness of the unrighteous

            There are some really weird things going on these days. I find that people are becoming more righteous in their behavior. The weird part is that they also do the most unrighteous things. As a quick note “What is righteousness anyways”? In the good old dictionary it can mean upstanding, selfless, and a number of other self-gratifying words to boost your ego. The trouble as I see it is that we all are unrighteous towards others but not in our own eyes.

            I remember years ago that we looked upon the church as the righteous bunch. They proclaimed holiness and righteousness. Wow those are fancy big words. It means they looked good and the rest of us looked bad. Today we use social media to look good or get caught looking bad. The church has nothing to do with righteousness anymore. I guess people have cornered the market on goodness now.

            The other day I heard a guy call this generation the “Snowflake generation.” That was very interesting. Each one of us is considered unique. The bad side is that we think we know truth, goodness, and a host of other self-gratifying words to boost your ego. I have rights now. I have my own personal space. A mother just got kicked off a plane for a crying baby. The airlines personal space was violated. The mom goes on social media because her personal space was violated. My personal space on twitter was violated with all the self-righteous people giving their opinion.

            What does God have to say about righteousness? Mark 10:18 has Jesus saying nobody is good except God. I love Romans 3. Paul hits righteousness right on the head.

As it is written, “Not even one person is righteous. No one understands. No one searches for God. All have turned away. They have become completely worthless. No one shows kindness, not even one person! Their throats are open graves. With their tongues they deceive. The venom of poisonous snakes is under their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. They run swiftly to shed blood. Ruin and misery characterize their lives. They have not learned the path to peace. They don’t fear God.

How cute are the words in the Bible some times. These words go on to describe that our big mouths love telling the world our righteous ugly truth. The trouble is it’s our truth as we see it. I love social media but does it inspire righteousness? I read that one lady wants free drugs but not free prostitution. Another man loves freedom for sexuality but believes we should be giving our tax money for his sex change. How cute are we to decide what is right in our own eyes.

Interestingly enough God gave Judges in the Bible to rule the land thousands of years ago. For some it went well but for others it did not. One day the people decided they wanted a king like other countries. At the end of this book we are left hanging (literally?) with this verse “Back in those days, Israel didn’t yet have a king, so each person did whatever seemed right in his own opinion.”

Wow, these days we don’t believe in God. Good for you! Wow, we say we are smarter than ever before. Good for you! I wish we had aliens. They might come down and view people from a far. What would they observe? They might find it weird that we are repeating the past over and over throughout time. Boy is those creatures’ knuckleheads they might say. These words in the Bible were written thousands of years ago yet today they don’t fear God and do what is right in their own eyes.

A woman gives you the look when you let a door slam into her face, but she wants rules to give her a better chance of getting a job because she is female. You can’t have it both ways baby. Linda McCartney was a famous musician who hated drug testing on animals. She loved to protest the inhumane acts (noble and righteous). She had a dilemma. Linda got cancer and needed the drugs tested on by animals or she would die. She would only try the drug if the doctors would tell her they were not animal tested. She died by the way.

We want to be heard. We have opinions. We are hardly right about a great many things. In my day we had opinions too. It was polite to keep them to ourselves. It was just our opinion. These disputes were settled with an argument or a pop in the chops. Nobody was right in their own eyes. Today things are different and I think society is going (Gone?) nuts. Everyone is running around telling everyone else they are wrong. Imagine an alien listening to millions of people correcting millions of people. That’s why we have no alien encounters: they left before the righteousness of the unrighteous infected them too.

Faith comes alive