Ezekiel 16

(February 21, 2015)

                It is easy to point the finger of shame at Israel and to think of ourselves as wiser and more righteous than they were.  In part, I would expect, that is true – after all, we have the benefit of history to see the result of many of their mistakes.  But we make our own set of mistakes today that must be comparable to the ones that ancient Israel made.

                The Jews used to seek out strength by adopting the practices of other nations.  But now we find that the modern children of Israel (us) seek out strength through the philosophies of men.  We seek to accept our politics as our guide and use our religion to bolster those political ideas.  Or we seek to take our professional or philosophical ideas as our gods and use religion to bolster them.

                It takes a great deal of effort to accept that regardless of what we might think intellectually, professionally, politically, or philosophically all of these things must ultimately be secondary to the truth that has been revealed to us spiritually.  If the Bible and Book of Mormon are true (and they are), then that leads to certain uncomfortable, unpopular, and almost unpalatable consequences that we will need to accept in our lives.  Because the truth is the truth, and we have a culture that had gone astray from that truth.  No matter how much we might think we are isolated from that culture, we have accepted much of it unquestioningly and our best hope for freeing ourselves from this self-imposed blindness is to recognize that when those cultural assumptions crash headlong into the doctrine it is culture that must bend.