The Wall of Oblivion: A Calling to the Children of God

A Treatise on the Confusion Satan Has Loosed Upon the Human Race, and the Silence That Has Made Us Complicit

Introduction: The Strange Double Standard of Obedience

There is a strange and revealing double standard buried deep in the conscience of the modern world, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Consider this: when a man obeys the laws of the road, when he stops at the red light, signals before he turns, and yields to the pedestrian in the crosswalk, we call him a good citizen. We praise him. We hold him up as the very model of decency and responsibility. No one accuses him of being hateful for refusing to run a stop sign. No one calls him a bigot for buckling his seatbelt. We understand instinctively that the laws of the road exist to protect us, to keep order, to prevent chaos and death on the highways, and so we obey them without complaint and even with a measure of pride.

But the moment a person announces that he intends to obey the laws of God, something snaps in the collective mind of society. Suddenly obedience is no longer a virtue. Suddenly the very same impulse that made the law-abiding driver admirable makes the law-abiding believer despicable. To say that you obey God, that you take His commandments seriously, that you actually intend to live every word written in the Bible, is to invite accusations of hatred, of misogyny, of racism, of sexism, of every ugly thing the human tongue can manufacture. The world will call the Book itself hateful before it will admit that the problem lies in its own unwillingness to read and obey that Book.

This is the contradiction I want to expose at the very outset of this essay, because it is the doorway through which all the other confusions enter. We honor obedience to man's law and we revile obedience to God's law. We will gladly bend our entire lives around the regulations of the state, the demands of our employers, the expectations of our peers, and the fashions of the hour, but we will not bend a single inch for the One who made us. And we have the audacity to call ourselves His children while we do it.

The Bewitching of the Whole Earth

What I have witnessed, traveling and speaking and trying to reach souls, is not ordinary disagreement. It is something that can only be described as a kind of mass enchantment, a paranormal phenomenon with the devil's fingerprints all over it. No matter where I go, no matter when I go, every time I try to speak to someone about the truth of God, I am met with the identical look, the identical recoil, the identical opinion. It is as though one spirit has descended upon the entire human race and given every person the very same instinct: to flinch away from God the moment His name is spoken in earnest.

I cannot remember a time, not in recent memory, when I could speak about God in public and have the conversation reciprocated like any other ordinary topic. Today, to speak openly about God in a public place is treated as something almost obscene, as though you had decided to undress in front of everyone and declare yourself a nudist. The discomfort, the embarrassment, the desire of everyone present to be anywhere else, is exactly the same. That should tell us something. When the mere mention of the Creator produces in people the same horror as public indecency, we are not dealing with reasoned skepticism. We are dealing with a spell.

And everyone seems to hate God in unison. That unison is the tell. Genuine human opinion is messy, varied, and unpredictable. People disagree about everything under the sun. But on this one subject, the truth of God, the human race has achieved a suspicious uniformity. The same scowl, the same dismissiveness, the same rehearsed line about how it is "their truth" and you have "yours." When you see that kind of unnatural agreement spread across every nation, every background, every personality type, you are looking at something that did not arise on its own. You are looking at the work of an enemy who has bewitched the whole earth.

Assessing the Situation Honestly

Let us begin to assess this entire situation with clear eyes, because clarity is the first casualty of the spell that has fallen over us. Here is the chain of reasoning, laid out plainly:

We are not hearing from God. That is the starting fact, and almost everyone, if they are honest, will admit it. The heavens feel silent. Prayers go up and nothing seems to come down. People cry out in their suffering and the answer does not arrive.

But why are we not hearing from God? We are not hearing from Him because we will not obey Him. And we will not obey Him because we have enthroned a single phrase above His entire law: "my body, my choice." That phrase, harmless as it sounds, is in truth a declaration of independence from the Creator. It says: I will do what I want with what He gave me, and He has no say in the matter. It is the very serpent's promise repeated in modern language.

So we commit, day after day, the kinds of crimes for which the Bible shows there is very limited mercy. And then, when the consequences of those crimes finally materialize, when the disease comes, when the marriage shatters, when the body that we insisted was ours alone is suddenly seized by forces we cannot command, we have the breathtaking audacity to look up and say, "There is no God."

But notice when that phrase actually escapes our lips. It only comes out when our most inner being is fully, painfully aware that the reason we are not hearing from God is our own inability to change out of our sins and into holiness. The denial of God is never the calm conclusion of a philosopher. It is the panicked cry of a guilty conscience that knows the truth and cannot bear it.

The War Between the Inner and the Outer Being

There is a part of us, the deepest part, that always knows there is a God. This knowledge is not earned and it cannot be erased. It was placed there. But there is another part of us, the outermost being, the part that loves the world and craves its pleasures, and this outer being is the one responsible for angering God after the inner being has already acknowledged Him.

Here is how the tragedy unfolds inside a single human soul. The inner being, in a quiet moment, admits: yes, He is real, and yes, I ought to obey. But the outer being, which is always going to want to sin, will not allow the change into holiness to take place. It vetoes the verdict of the conscience. It overrules what the heart already knows. And so the person walks through life with a divided self, an inner being that believes and an outer being that rebels, and the rebellion of the outer being is what keeps the whole person locked out of the presence of God.

This is why so many can say, almost in the same breath, "I believe in God" and "I will not do what He says." They are not lying about the first statement. The inner being truly does believe. But they are governed by the second, because the outer being has the controls, and the outer being will always vote for the flesh. Until that war is settled, until the inner being's knowledge is allowed to conquer the outer being's appetite, there can be no relationship with the Lord at all.

The Recoil That Exposes Everything

Now I want to speak directly to the great revealing test, the one that, more than any argument, exposes the true condition of a person's soul. It is the recoil.

No matter where I go or when I go, every time I try talking to someone about the truth of God, they all give me the same look, the same opinion, the same everything. And this universal reaction, this collective decision of the whole world to feel exactly this way about God and the truth of God, really does expose the entire religious aspect of our existence. Because here is the question that the recoil forces upon us: how can you walk around calling yourself a child of God, and yet when I try to talk to you about God and the biblical truth, you recoil? That recoil should tell you something. It should tell you everything about your relationship with God.

Ask yourself this honestly. If there are people who call themselves the children of God, exactly as you do, but you will not believe what they believe, then which one of you is right about the whole thing? You cannot both be correct. You cannot have all the supposed children of God believing contradictory things and still all arrive at the same heaven. One of you has the truth and one of you has a counterfeit, and the recoil is the symptom that helps us tell them apart. The one who has the truth does not flinch from the Book. The one who flinches from the Book is announcing, whether he means to or not, exactly where he stands with the Lord.

I am calling the whole world not to ignore this fact. If you are truly a child of God, then why are you not even able to listen, let alone believe, what I am telling you? The fact that you only recoil at what I am saying says a great deal about where you stand with the Lord. You cannot have all the children of God believing different things and still go to the same heaven. It is not possible. It is a logical impossibility before it is even a spiritual one.

Believing Lies About a Friend

Let me put this in terms that anyone can understand, because the spiritual principle is identical to a principle we all already know in our everyday lives. You cannot believe nonsense about one of your friends and still expect your relationship with that person to be as good as the relationships that person has with people who refuse to believe the nonsense.

Think about it carefully. If you choose to believe lies about a friend, then you will treat that friend in a manner that complements the lies you have chosen to believe. You will be cold where you should be warm. You will be suspicious where you should be trusting. You will withhold yourself, guard yourself, and quietly wound that friend over and over, all because you believed a story about them that was never true. You will hurt your friend very badly, and the worst part is that you will feel justified the entire time, because in your own mind you are only responding to what you believe to be real.

Just look at the image of the person I am describing. Picture the kind of human being who hears a rumor and immediately treats a faithful friend as an enemy. Sad, is it not? You have to be a truly sad and worthless human being to believe lies without checking the information out first. These are the kinds of people who enjoy gossip, who love to cause trouble, who would rather repeat a juicy lie than verify a sober truth. And that, I am sorry to say, pretty much describes the entire human race today when it comes to the way they handle the character of God.

This is exactly how we approach the word of God. This is exactly how we approach a relationship with God. We live by, and believe, things about our God that, had we believed them about a human friend, would have gotten us labeled narcissistic and abandoned forever. The treatment we casually hand out to the Almighty is the kind of treatment that, applied to an ordinary person, would land that person in therapy. We say and do things about God that we would never dream of saying or doing to one another, because at least with one another there are consequences, and with God we have convinced ourselves there are none.

Making Up the Rules As We Go

No one ever stops to think about what they actually believe when it comes to God. People simply choose to believe anything they wish, and then they expect God to honor their invention. They will disobey every law in the Bible and then expect God to accept all of their made-up, evil, narcissistic notions about who He is and what He wants. These days God is pretty much whatever people say He is, with no contradictions allowed, no correction permitted, no appeal to the actual text tolerated.

People spew lies about God with total impunity. They make statements completely divorced from the biblical text, comments that go directly against God's revealed nature and against the limits of His mercy, and they suffer no social penalty whatsoever. In fact they are applauded for it. The man who invents a soft, permissive, indulgent god who asks nothing and forgives everything regardless of repentance is celebrated as enlightened and loving. The woman who insists that God actually meant what He wrote is treated as a fanatic.

This is like sitting down to a board game and making up your own rules as you go along, changing them whenever you are about to lose, declaring new exceptions whenever the existing rules would cost you something. It might be amusing in a board game, but life is not a board game. Life is very serious. Life is the most serious thing there is, because the stakes are eternal. And yet this is exactly how people choose to treat it, as though it were a total joke, as though they could rewrite the rules of their own salvation and the Author of those rules would simply nod along.

The People Who Recoil and Still Call Themselves Saved

Now I come to the heart of this essay, to the people I most want to describe, because their condition is the great riddle of our age. These are the people who are living and believing lies about God, who recoil at the truth the instant it is spoken, and who nevertheless continue to call themselves the children of God with absolutely no evidence of the same.

Look at their lives and you will find no fruit of obedience anywhere. You will find them perpetually physically ill, sick with one thing after another, and yet never once connecting the sickness to the lifestyle, never once changing the beliefs or the behavior that produced it. You will find them carefully, almost instinctively, avoiding the only book in the world that condemns the way they live. They will read self-help books, horoscopes, novels, the endless scroll of opinion online, anything and everything, but the one Book that would actually diagnose their condition they leave shut on the shelf, because some part of them knows what it would say.

And here is the most upside-down part of the whole arrangement, the inversion that proves the spell is real. These people who recoil at the word of God genuinely believe that they are saved, and they believe that the people who actually obey the word of God are the ones going to hell. There is this sick, settled understanding among the children of the world that they do not have to believe in the word of God to go to heaven, but that the people who do believe in the word of God, and who order their entire lives around it, are the ones headed for destruction. The obedient are pitied. The disobedient feel secure.

I see it in my own family. My siblings believe that their Christmas trees, and everything else God never permitted, somehow make them saved. And I, who follow every law in the Bible to the best of my ability, am regarded by them as the one who is lost. They feel that they need to save me. Imagine that. The ones decorating the golden tree feel burdened to rescue the one who refuses to bow to it. This is the new mentality of the world today. This is precisely the confusion the Bible warned us about, and it is only one of many confusions that satan unleashes, and unleashes with terrible success.

The Pigsty of Confusion

Picture a pigsty. Picture the pigs lying in it, content, well-fed, utterly at ease, wallowing in filth that they have long since stopped noticing because it is the only environment they have ever known. The filth does not trouble them. They do not look up and wonder whether there is cleaner ground somewhere. They are at home in the muck.

That is the image I am forced to use to describe the confusion that satan has the entire human race wallowing in. It is not a confusion that torments people, at least not on the surface. It is a comfortable confusion, a confusion people have learned to enjoy, a confusion that feels like freedom. The whole world lies down in it together and calls it peace.

And the genius of this particular filth is that it disguises itself as cleanliness. The person who is the most thoroughly confused, the most completely deceived about God, is often the most certain that he sees clearly. He is sure he is enlightened. He is sure the believer is the deluded one. The pig in the sty looks at the creature standing on clean ground and feels sorry for it, because the clean ground looks so bare, so lonely, so lacking in the warm familiar muck that the pig has learned to love.

This is why the confusion is so durable. People will not climb out of it, because they do not believe they are in it. They have been persuaded that the sty is the world and the world is the sty, that there is nowhere else and nothing else, and that anyone who claims otherwise is either lying or mad. So they settle deeper into the filth, and they grow indignant at the one who points out the smell.

The Wall That Hides Them From the Truth

How is it that human beings can stand so near to such terrible danger and feel nothing? How can people who are surrounded by collapse, by disease, by the visible disintegration of every human institution, look upon the truth of God without the slightest tremor of fear? The answer is that they have built a wall.

It is an incredibly strong, incredibly thick brick wall, and it stands between every person and the truth of God, preventing them from truly feeling the terror and the danger of what is coming if we do not obey. We built this wall ourselves, but we built it out of an unlikely material. We built it out of the silence of God.

Here is how the wall was constructed, brick by brick. God, in His patience, does not punish us the instant we sin. The lightning does not fall. The ground does not open. We sin on Monday and we are still alive and comfortable on Tuesday, and we sin again, and still nothing happens. At the same time, our prayers go unanswered, because He does not hear the prayers of the unrighteous, and so we conclude from the silence that no one is listening at all. His refusal to punish us in the moment, combined with His refusal to answer the prayers of the disobedient, has been misread by the whole human race as evidence that He is either absent or indifferent. And out of that misreading we have built our wall.

It is a wall of absolute oblivion, and people hide behind it whenever the truth of God approaches and becomes a threat. The moment a conversation turns serious, the moment someone like me begins to press the claims of the Book, they retreat behind the wall, where they do not have to take responsibility for their unholy actions. From behind that wall they call out the magic words that excuse everything: "It is my life and so it is my choice." The wall lets them ignore the glaring contradiction between claiming to be saved, claiming to be heaven-bound, while despising the actual words written in the Bible.

It is precisely this contradiction that people love to ignore, and they expect everyone around them to respect their ignoring of it. They want to hold two opposite things at once, to keep their seat in heaven and their sin on earth, and they want no one to point out that the two cannot be held together. The wall makes this possible. The wall is the most popular structure on earth.

Why No One Wants the Mystery Solved

There is a question that ought to haunt every thinking person: why are there so many religions on earth? If there is one God, one truth, one heaven, why does humanity fracture into a thousand competing faiths, each certain of itself, each contradicting the others? You would think that a question of such enormous importance, a question on which our eternal destiny depends, would be the single most urgently pursued question in all of human life.

But it is not. And the reason it is not is the most damning thing of all. No one wants the mystery of why there are so many religions on earth to be solved, because people are subconsciously, fully aware that finding out the truth means conforming to that truth. To discover the one true faith is to incur the obligation to live it. And since living it would cost them the sins they love, they would rather the question remain forever open, forever debated, forever unresolved.

So everyone secretly loves all this religious nonsense. The endless variety of contradictory beliefs is not a frustration to the worldly soul; it is a comfort. It keeps them oblivious. It keeps them confused. It gives them permanent cover, because as long as no one can say for certain which path is right, no one can be blamed for choosing the wrong one. The very confusion that the Bible commands us to flee, the confusion God explicitly tells us to make sure we are not trapped in, is the confusion that the world clutches to its chest like a security blanket, precisely because confusion is the perfect excuse for disobedience.

It always strikes me with a strange intensity, an almost electric awareness of how real all of this is, whenever I consider that everyone who refuses to accept the truth is living in this blindfolded oblivion for one reason and one reason only: so that they do not have to obey the Bible. Every elaborate argument, every appeal to tolerance, every shrug about different paths up the same mountain, traces back to that single root. They do not refuse the truth because they have examined it and found it wanting. They refuse it because they have sensed what it would demand, and they have decided the demand is too high.

The Sin of Silence

Now I must turn the mirror upon those of us who claim to be the true children of God, because we are not innocent in this catastrophe. There is a sin we have been committing, quietly, continually, and it is the sin of silence.

We who have had the scales removed from our eyes face a terrible difficulty, and I will not pretend otherwise. We do not want to be social pariahs. We do not want to be the strange ones, the unwelcome ones, the people whose presence makes every room go cold. We are human, and the desire to belong is woven deeply into us. But at the very same time, we are not permitted to keep our silence about sin whenever we see it. We are caught between two pressures, the pressure of the world that wants us to shut up, and the pressure of the Lord who commands us to speak.

The world has a saying that it applies to terrorism and crime: "When you see something, say something." Everyone understands and approves of this principle in that context. If you see a suspicious package, you report it. If you see a child in danger, you intervene. To stay silent in those situations would be a kind of complicity, and everyone knows it. But because the world does not recognize the law of the Bible as the law of man, no one understands the importance of saying something when you see someone living in sin. The same principle that everyone applauds in every other arena, they reject the instant it is applied to the spiritual life. They cannot grasp that a soul living in sin is in greater danger than a person standing next to an unattended bag, because the danger to the soul is eternal.

This silence that the children of God have been exercising is itself unholy. We are not allowed to keep our silence like this. We comfort ourselves that we are only being polite, only being respectful, only keeping the peace, but in truth we are afraid, afraid of becoming outcasts in our own societies, and we have dressed up our cowardice as courtesy. And so both groups have been sinning at the same time, in different ways. The children of the world have been sinning through their disobedience, and the children of God have been sinning through their silence. The disobedient and the silent are both guilty, just of different offenses.

And here is the hard truth that I cannot soften: keeping your silence is the same as committing the sin yourself. When you watch a brother or sister walking off a cliff and you say nothing, because you are afraid of how it will look, you have not kept your hands clean. You have joined them in their fall. Your silence is your participation. The blood is on you as surely as it is on them.

Why It Is Now Urgent to Speak Up About Sin

I want to explain why this is no longer a matter we can put off, why the obligation to speak has become urgent in a way it perhaps was not in calmer times. We are living in a time when everything around us is falling apart, and it is falling apart for one reason: our God is no longer on our side. We have removed Him. We have built the wall, embraced the confusion, and driven Him out, and the consequences are now arriving on schedule.

The diseases are only going to get worse and worse as sin gets more and more prevalent. This is not pessimism; it is observation joined to principle. Sickness in the body follows sin in the soul the way effect follows cause, and as the sin multiplies, so will the affliction. And it is not going to end where we imagine it will end. Sin is not going to find its own brakes, its own natural stopping point, simply because we have decided that everyone is finally free to live however they please. That is the great delusion, that we can open every gate and the flood will somehow politely stop at a level we find acceptable.

It will not. The very same force of destruction that told us it was acceptable to remarry after divorce is the same force of destruction that is now coming to dismantle every remaining aspect of human decency and human organization. People imagine that the corruption has a ceiling, that there is some line so obvious that even the devil would not cross it. They are wrong, and the error is dangerous.

The Trickle-Down of One Sin to the Next

Do you think homosexuality is where the devil draws his line in the sand for himself? How naive that hope is. No. Satan is not going to stop there, and he is not going to stop anywhere, until everything we call human organization lies in ruins. Each sin that is permitted does not satisfy the appetite; it enlarges it. Each barrier that falls does not protect the next barrier; it exposes it. This is the trickle-down logic of evil: allow one sin, and the next sin follows, and the one after that, with no true adult supervision left anywhere to halt the slide.

Watch how it has already happened in the matter of our children, which to me is the darkest evidence of all. I have never seen so many female teachers getting down with their young students, having sex with them, grooming them, abusing the very trust that is supposed to be most sacred. Twenty years ago there was perhaps one such case, maybe two, and when they happened they were enormous scandals, famous precisely because they were so rare and so shocking. Today it is so normal that judges do not even bother handing down long sentences anymore. Some of these offenders walk away with probation. Probation, for a crime against a child.

This did not used to happen when I was young in the 1990s. This is something that has been unleashed upon our children in just the last twenty years, and it has been unleashed because the adults cannot get it together, or, more honestly, will not get it together. We removed the restraints, one by one, congratulating ourselves on our broad-mindedness, and now the predators move freely through the gap we opened, and we are surprised. We should not be surprised. We were warned that one allowance leads to the next, and we did not listen.

It is only going to get worse for humanity now that we have allowed this much sin, and especially given the kind of sin we have allowed and legalized. These are sins for which the Bible shows us God has very little mercy. We did not merely loosen the rules around minor matters; we trampled directly on the offenses He treats most severely, and we did it openly, proudly, with parades and applause. And still it does not seem to bother anyone, because everyone on earth has that incredibly strong brick wall standing between them and the truth of God, the wall that prevents them from truly feeling the terror and danger of what is to come if we do not obey.

The Price of Sin Written on the Body

For years I used to watch the videos online, the ones where people document their journeys through incurable disease, and I would weep for them. I would feel such sorrow, such helplessness, even though I already understood the root of why they were suffering, which is sin. But something shifted in me after I tried, again and again, to speak to people about their sins, to explain to them gently why they were actually sick, and was met every single time with angry disbelief and immovable stubbornness, with no chance whatsoever of any change. After enough of that, I came to a realization that has stayed with me ever since.

The real trouble is not that we cannot find the cure for cancer. The real trouble is that no one wants to hear our Creator telling us why we are all sick. We have framed the entire problem backwards. We treat sickness as a puzzle of chemistry and biology that simply has not yet been solved, when in truth it is a message of judgment that we refuse to read. I now watch those same videos understanding that what I am actually seeing is the price of sin made visible in the flesh.

These suffering people cannot explain to you why they are sick. Even though they believe, somewhere inside, that there is a powerful God who has control over every disease on earth, control enough that they grow angry at Him for allowing it, not one of them has ever actually asked Him the real question. Not one has knelt down and said, "What is it that we are doing that is causing You to allow all these fatal, incurable diseases?" If they did ask, and if they were willing to hear, they would discover an angry God whose only remaining means of communication with the human race has become these very diseases, because we have refused Him every other means. The one form of communication He actually wants is absolute obedience to His Word, and that is the one form we will not give Him. So He speaks in the only language we have left Him.

Cells That Obey Their Instruction

Let me show you something that I find almost unbearably clear, something that turned my understanding of the human body into an act of worship. Your bodily cells contain an instruction, a set of commands written into what we call DNA, and your cells obey that instruction faithfully, ceaselessly, without complaint. That obedience is the only reason you are alive at this moment. Every breath, every heartbeat, every healing wound is the fruit of trillions of tiny obediences happening inside you right now.

But consider what happens when a cell stops obeying its instruction. When a single cell breaks from its commanded pattern and begins to do what it wants, multiplying without restraint, refusing the limits written into it, we have a name for the result. We call it cancer. Cancer is, at its very root, a cell in a state of disobedience. A cell that has decided, in the only way a cell can decide, that it is its own body and its own choice.

Now draw the line all the way out. If a single cell disobeying its instruction produces something as devastating as cancer in the body, what do you imagine happens when an entire human being disobeys his instruction? We marvel at the catastrophe when our cells rebel, and we pour billions into reversing it, but we cannot see that we ourselves are doing to God exactly what the cancer cell does to us. We want our cells to obey their instruction so that we may continue to enjoy the bodies God designed, and at the very same moment we have absolutely no intention of obeying our own instruction, the law God wrote for us. The hypocrisy is total. We demand from our cells the precise obedience that we refuse to give our Creator.

If our cells obeyed their instruction as badly as we obey ours, there would be no human race left on this earth. That is not an exaggeration. Our continued existence depends entirely on a faithfulness at the cellular level that we will not imitate at the level of the soul. Every plague, every virus, every cancer is, in a sense, a small preview of what total disobedience produces, a glimpse of the end that waits when rebellion is allowed to run without limit.

The Folly of Playing God

There is a whole industry built upon refusing to hear the Creator's voice, and we call it science. I want to be careful and precise here, because the issue is not knowledge itself; the issue is the posture of the heart behind the knowledge. What I have come to see is that so much of what passes for science today is simply a vast effort by God-denying minds to take His place, to figure out on their own what He would gladly have told them, if only they would obey Him and listen.

Picture it. The silence from above, the silence that we ourselves created by our disobedience, is the very reason the world is filled with science labs. Because people do not know how to hear the voice of their Creator, they decided He must not exist, and having decided He does not exist, they concluded that they would have to work everything out alone. Completely void of biblical knowledge, they never realized that all they had to do was open the Book, conform their lives to its commands, and let God speak. Instead they study things on a scale so minute that the effort is almost useless, trying to force the cells of the body to obey their instruction while the people themselves have no intention of obeying their own.

There is a bitter irony in it. We agree that what God made is wonderful, so wonderful that we want our cells to keep obeying their instruction forever so that we may go on enjoying His creation. We will fight tooth and nail to make a rebellious cell fall back into line. But it never occurs to us that we too were given a book of rules, that perhaps all these diseases are in some measure our own fault, that we are reaping the effect of a cause we set in motion. We accept cause and effect in every other domain of life, yet we cannot accept that our suffering might be the effect of our own sin, and you would be shouted down for even suggesting it. To unleash every cure now, while the human race goes on sinning, would be irresponsible, because a cure without repentance is not the end of suffering. It is merely a second chance. And how can a second chance mean anything to a man who has no intention of giving up the thing that is killing him?

The Stolen Blueprint

I want to offer a picture that finally made sense to me of why even the holy suffer, why people who genuinely try to obey still fall ill, because this is one of the hardest objections anyone can raise, and it deserves an honest answer. Imagine that I created something powerful and wonderful, something you wanted so badly that you finally succeeded in stealing it from me. And imagine that, even after the theft, I remained your friend and kept on being a blessing to you. But here is the catch: when the thing you stole begins to break down, it is no longer in my possession for me to repair. You have taken it into your own hands. For me to fix it now, you would have to invite me back in, and you would have to do exactly what I tell you.

That is precisely the situation of the human race. In the Garden, we stole the blueprint of the human design. We grasped at the knowledge that was meant to stay in God's keeping, and the serpent's promise was, in a horrible sense, fulfilled. We took the design into our own possession. And so now, when the human body breaks down, we cannot simply hand it back to the Maker for repair as we once could, because we are no longer in the Garden, no longer under that direct and constant care. What God did instead was leave us a book of instructions, a manual explaining how to maintain the design we seized, and when we refuse to follow those instructions, the design we stole breaks down, because the One who built it is no longer the one in charge of it. We are.

This is why a person can obey God in the matters of conduct and still fall ill, if at the same time they bow to idols, if they keep the man-made holidays, if they decorate the tree and feast at the appointed festivals that God never sanctioned. Obedience cannot be partial. You may refuse to justify sin in your behavior and still be undone by the idolatry of the calendar, because the body and the relationship with God, though they are now two separate things since the Garden, still affect one another profoundly. The blueprint is in our hands, and the instructions are in the Book, and we cannot pick and choose which pages of the manual we will honor and expect the machine to keep running.

James 2:10 and the Impossibility of Being Half-Saved

This brings me to one of the most important truths in all of Scripture, and one of the most ignored. In James 2:10 it is written: "For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all." Sit with the weight of that. It does not say that the one who offends in one point has done well in the others and will be graded on a curve. It says he is guilty of all. One breach makes him a lawbreaker entirely.

To me, a human being who justifies disobeying any part of the Bible while carefully obeying other parts is either a chameleon or a creature of diminished sense. You cannot be only half saved. You are either completely saved or completely condemned. When a fireman runs into a burning building to rescue you, he does not save half of you and leave the other half to burn. He saves all of you, or he does not save you at all. When God made you, He did not make you half alive. And He has not promised you half of heaven.

Yet half-salvation is the most fashionable doctrine of our day. People assemble a private religion out of the parts of the Bible that cost them nothing and quietly discard the parts that would require sacrifice. They will be kind, perhaps, because kindness is pleasant and costs little, and they will tell themselves that kindness alone will carry them through the gates. This is the new religion of inappropriate kindness, the belief that as long as you are nice to everyone you will go to heaven, no matter what condition your soul or your obedience is in. But God did not give us a single law and call it kindness. He gave us a whole law, and James tells us that to break it in one point is to break it in all.

The Lie That God Does Not Care About the Outer Appearance

One of the most stubborn lies of all is the claim that God does not care about your outer appearance, that He looks only on the heart and is utterly indifferent to what you do with the body He gave you. People love this lie because it frees them from the most visible and the most easily corrected forms of obedience. But it is a lie, and a tragic one, and I want to dismantle it.

If God created your outer appearance, why on earth would you assume He does not care about what He created? Consider the most ordinary human example. If you came upon a filthy, neglected child, ragged and unwashed, looking as though no one had ever cared what became of him, while his parents stood nearby clean and well put together, what would you conclude? You would conclude that the parents had failed in their most basic duty, and you would be right to. We all understand, instinctively, that it is the parent's responsibility to look after the child's every need, including how the child appears to the world.

So when God tells you what to wear and what not to wear, He is doing exactly what a good parent does. He is your Maker, your Father, the One responsible for your every need, and He is exercising that responsibility down to the details of your appearance. To suggest that the God who designed your outer self would then turn away in indifference from that same outer self is not only sad, it does not even make sense. I would be heartbroken if my God were not looking out for my outer state. The lie that He does not is meant to sound liberating, but it is actually the disinheritance of a child who has been told his Father does not care how he looks. No loving parent is indifferent to that, and neither is He.

Modesty That Never Changes, Fashion That Always Does

God told us to dress modestly, not fashionably, and the distinction is everything. According to common definition, apparel means the whole category of fashion, the dresses and pants and tops and accessories, all of it organized around the changing tides of style. And fashion, by its very nature, never stops shifting. What is appropriate this season would have scandalized people a few years ago, and what would land you in jail one year is paraded down the street the next. Fashion has no fixed point. It is a current that carries you wherever the culture happens to be flowing.

Modesty is the opposite. Modesty does not change. It is anchored, steady, the same in every generation, just like our Creator who is forever faithful to His promises. This is why God commanded modesty and not fashion. He did not tie our obedience to a moving target, because a moving target cannot be obeyed; it can only be chased. He gave us something permanent to stand on. And the permanence of modesty is itself a reflection of His own unchanging character. When we abandon modesty for fashion, we are not merely changing our clothes; we are trading the eternal for the temporary, the faithful for the fickle.

This is why the adorning of the body with gold and apparel, the painting of the face, the perpetual rearranging of oneself to match the season's demands, is not a small matter. It is a declaration of allegiance. It announces that we have chosen the world's ever-shifting standard over God's settled one. And every excuse we make to keep it, the forgotten head covering, the bracelet slipped on as a joke, the arms left bare because we were preoccupied, exposes how lightly we hold the One we claim to serve. We women know perfectly well how to be diligent about our appearance when we are dressing for a man's approval. The makeup that smudges is fixed in an instant; we fly to the mirror. But for God, somehow, we cannot summon the same energy. We do not find Him important enough to look for Him the way He has asked to be looked for, though we will spend hours assembling ourselves for someone whose opinion will not follow us past the grave.

The Lesson God Meant Us to Take From Jezebel

When God describes a person the way He describes Jezebel, He is not telling a bedtime story for our entertainment. He means for us to take the example to heart. Notice the detail He chose to record, the detail He preserved across the centuries: she was painted. Notice, too, the exact word. God did not say she was wearing makeup. He said she painted herself. He chose the word painting, and the choice was deliberate.

What He meant to communicate, by selecting that word and attaching it to a figure of such judgment, is that any and all painting of the face is displeasing to Him. He was not naming a particular cosmetic or a particular fashion of a particular era. He was naming the act itself, the painting, and He preserved it as a permanent warning. This is the kind of careful reading the Book requires and almost never receives. People skim past Jezebel as a villain in a tale, never asking why God bothered to mention the paint, never realizing that the mention was the lesson.

And here is something that struck me as I considered it not only as a believer but almost as a scientist would. If we are made in His image, and if He is displeased with the painting of our faces, then it stands to reason that our very cells would not benefit from it either. By forbidding us to paint ourselves with any paint, He was, among other things, protecting the body He designed. We all know how toxic paint is, no matter how gentle the label claims it to be. God knew it long before any laboratory measured it. So the command that the world dismisses as petty vanity-policing is in fact an act of protection from a Father who understood the chemistry of His own creation better than we ever will. I once caught a fragment of a documentary in which researchers were discussing new findings that the application of cosmetics could activate cancerous cells in the body. I never had the chance to follow the research further, but hearing it gave me that cold feeling in the knees, the feeling you get when you see the lights flashing behind you, because it was simply the confirmation of what the Book had said all along.

Taking the Word Out of Context

People are masters at taking little pieces of the Bible and bending them to fit their narrative, lifting the Word completely out of its setting to license the very thing it forbids. The favorite verse for this maneuver is the one about God looking on the heart. People wield it like a permission slip: God only looks inside the heart, they say, so the outside does not matter.

But that is not what the verse means, and to use it that way is to make the whole Bible contradict itself. When the Lord told the prophet not to judge by the outward appearance in the selection of king David, He was correcting the prophet's instinct to choose by height and impressive stature. He was pointing to David's pure heart, the place where God Himself dwelt, as the source of David's true strength. He was not issuing a universal decree that appearance is irrelevant and that you may therefore adorn and paint and dress however the flesh desires. To read it that way is to take a statement made for one purpose, in one moment, about one decision, and drag it into a completely different context to win an argument it was never part of.

It reminds me of a scheme I once heard about, where a marketing company would call businesses, ask strange questions, and record the calls, then splice the recordings, inserting different questions, until it sounded as though the person had agreed to a binding year-long contract they never consented to. Infuriating, is it not? But that is exactly what people do with the Bible. They record a fragment, cut it loose from its true context, and replay it to make God appear to have said something He never said. And then they hold their forged contract up as proof, expecting everyone to honor a consent that was never given.

The fuller truth is that God called the human heart wicked. The very reason He told us to concern ourselves with the heart is that He wanted to expose how corrupt the heart of the whole human race truly is. And right beneath the verse people love to quote, there is more, instruction about what we are to do with our bodies in order to begin the work on those wicked hearts. If we drape ourselves in gold and apparel, our hearts only grow more wicked. The command about the heart was never a license to neglect the body; it was the doorway into a discipline that includes the body, because what we do with the outer self shapes the condition of the inner self.

The Idols of the Calendar

I must now speak plainly about the idols, because this is where even the people who try hardest to obey still stumble, and it is the very thing that keeps the holy among us suffering alongside the rest. The most blasphemous habit of our age is the habit of adding to the Bible the very thing God told us never to add. We invent observances He never authorized, attach His name to them, and then act on them as though He had commanded them Himself.

Consider the invention of a human birthday for God. The Bible never makes a fuss about the birth of Jesus as an annual festival, never instructs us to mark it, never hints that we should decorate and feast and exchange gifts in its name. And yet the whole world burns incense, so to speak, to this human creation. People decorate, they feast, they spend the last of their money on electricity to light up the decorations, and each of these observances comes complete with its own feast menu and its own mascots, often many mascots. A friend of mine who lived in open sin once said to me, "I'd think God would be happy we're celebrating His birthday." But consider what actually happens. People get drunk for this day. And the gifts? They do not give those gifts to God; they give them to one another, and even then most people both give and get, keeping a careful ledger of exchange. To give gifts to each other on what you claim to be the Savior's birthday, while He receives nothing but the disobedience of the whole performance, is despicable in His eyes. And the economy swells on the strength of it, taking a great boost from the season, which tells you whose interests are really being served.

Do you genuinely believe that celebrating a birthday you yourself invented will make up for all the crimes you commit against the Lord throughout the year? You did not merely invent this observance; you take an entire day out of your year to keep it. You write songs for it. You set out food for it, an ungodly multitude of turkeys and feasts for one occasion or another, and then you sit down and eat the very food you pretended to offer. This is the pattern of the calendar, one invented festival after another, each draining the heart's devotion away from the actual commands of God and pouring it into a celebration He never asked for. The Book warns us against adding to the Word, and warns that to those who add, God will add misery. There is an awful lot of adding going on across the whole earth, and the misery is arriving on schedule.

What grieves me most about these idols is how they reach for our children. We are no longer bringing our children to our Creator. We are dressing them up in the colors of the idol, standing them in front of the golden tree, and teaching them to sing songs they do not understand. The thing that should be teaching them the fear of the Lord is teaching them instead to delight in what He forbids, and we call it innocence. There is nothing innocent about training a child to love an idol.

The Cross Around the Neck

There is a companion to the idolatry of the calendar, and it is the idolatry of the ornament that pretends to be devotion. People find obedience to the Word too difficult, and you can read that difficulty in their faces and their clothing, so they reach for a substitute. They hang a great cross around the neck, imagining that the symbol will make up for the substance, that the jewelry of faith will excuse the absence of faith's obedience.

But the Bible has already named this exact maneuver. "They love me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me." The cross worn as decoration, while every law is broken beneath it, is the lips loving God while the heart has wandered off entirely. It is the appearance of nearness covering the reality of distance. And the more elaborate the ornament, the larger the cross, the more designer the clothing draped around it, the more it tends to signal not devotion but its opposite: a person dressed in every disobedience, hoping that one conspicuous symbol will distract God and man from all the rest.

I confess I am fascinated, in a sorrowful way, by the truly confident ones, the ones who believe themselves so highly educated and refined, the high heels, the designer bag, the designer clothes, every detail of the outfit a quiet rebellion against the Word, and I think to myself: ruthless, disobedient, entirely unwilling to listen. It is not that such people lack intelligence. It is that intelligence, untethered from obedience, becomes only a more sophisticated instrument of self-justification. They can construct a defense of anything. What they cannot do is bow.

The Bible Is Not Up for Debate

I have stood like a deer caught in headlights while a friend debated and debated the Bible, a Book she had never read, every one of my beliefs met with reflexive argument. Had I been telling her about any other book, she would have accepted everything as simply a different point of view, an interesting perspective, nothing to fight about. But something about the Book of Life ruffles everyone's feathers. It is the strangest paranormal phenomenon I know, this thing that happens when you try to feed the Word of God to an ungodly soul. It is as though there is a dark force standing between the lost soul and the Word of truth, guarding its property ruthlessly, allowing no entry.

And I have come to a firm conclusion about the impulse to debate. To me, a person who wishes to debate the Bible before living the truth in it is not operating in his full mental capacity. To be so clueless as to live in any form of biblical disobedience is, by itself, enough for me to consider someone mentally deficient. But to then proceed to debate what one knows almost nothing of, having never lived a page of it, is to be a human being shamelessly void of all common sense.

Here is what no one seems to grasp: the Bible is not up for debate. It is the Book of truth, which is exactly why people living a lie have no standing to debate it. The truth is a straight line. If you want to truly understand it, you must live it in order to believe it. You cannot get to know a person merely by hearing about them endlessly from a distance; you have to live with them to know them as you wish to be known. It is the same with the Word. The one who has lived it knows it from the inside, and the one who only argues about it from the outside knows nothing, however loudly he argues. And it is always the loud ones, I have noticed, who are wrong, because it most often takes the greatest volume to carry the weakest truth.

Only the Prayers of the Righteous

There is a hard saying in Scripture that the modern believer would very much like to forget, and it is this: God hears the prayers of the righteous. People recite it as a comfort without ever stopping to consider its terrible implication for the one who is not righteous. If God hears the prayers of the righteous, then it follows, plainly and inescapably, that He does not hear the prayers of the unrighteous. He does not hear them, and what is more, He does not know them.

Follow the logic where it leads, even though it wounds. Suppose you fall ill with an incurable disease, and you pray and pray for God to heal you, and He never does, and you die. What would make you think He will simply usher you into heaven, when the very silence you experienced in your sickness was the evidence of your standing before Him? Here are the painful facts laid side by side: God hears the prayers of the righteous, and your prayers were not answered. The conclusion writes itself. If your prayer went unheard, then by the Bible's own measure you were not counted among the righteous.

And who are the righteous? The righteous are those who obey every law in the Bible, to the best of their ability, without debate. That phrase, to the best of your ability, is where so many hide, so let me press on it. You are not obeying to the best of your ability if you are wearing makeup and jewelry, because those things are not difficult to remove. They come off in seconds. If a woman insists that she is the godliest person she knows, that she is obeying to the very limit of her ability, while her face is painted and her ears hang with ornaments, then I am forced to assume her arms are not working, because she seems to find it impossibly hard to lift them to her face and wipe the paint away, or to reach up and take off the dangling earrings, or to loosen the choker at her throat. The excuse collapses the moment you examine it. The things we claim we cannot manage to obey are precisely the things that would take us thirty seconds to obey, if we wanted to.

The False Prophets Who Comfort the Guilty

It is hard for me to keep watching the parade of television false prophets who lie and deceive innocent souls for the sake of money. They promise salvation, and the people hand over their money in exchange for that promise, and the transaction runs smoothly because, deep down, every human being who knows what the Bible says but does otherwise would love nothing more than to have someone perpetually soothe the guilty conscience into a false assurance. The market for comfort is bottomless, because the supply of guilt is endless.

But understand this clearly: no human being can relieve you of your own responsibility to obey every law in the Bible. Not a preacher, not a priest, not a televised personality with a soft voice and an outstretched hand. What would make you believe that God would assign certain commands to some women and excuse other women from those same commands, and then welcome both groups into the identical heaven? The notion is absurd on its face. There is one law, given to all, and the only thing the false prophet sells you is permission to ignore it, which is not his to sell and not yours to buy. The prosperity preacher grows rich on the very confusion he is paid to maintain, and the people who fund him are funding their own deception.

The Peace That Rests on the Obedient

I want to testify to something I have seen with my own eyes, because it is not all darkness, and the contrast itself is part of the argument. There were seasons in my life when I was fortunate enough to be among people who followed every law in the Bible, who never made excuses about what the Book said, who simply obeyed. And when you come near such people, you can feel the peace of God resting upon them. It is unmistakable, and it is wonderful, and once you have felt it you can never quite forget it.

That peace became a kind of landmark for me, a reference point, because I spend so much of my time among people who do not know God and do not wish to, and their lives are unmistakable too, full of turmoil, churning with anxiety, never still. The peace of God is simply not present around them; only the restlessness is. So the memory of those obedient ones, the calm that hung about them like an atmosphere, remains my happy place, the proof in human form that the path of obedience leads somewhere the world cannot follow.

And yet, I must be honest, because honesty is the whole purpose of this essay. Those same holy people, the ones who refused to justify any sin in their conduct, still suffered incurable diseases like everyone else. Why? Because while they would not justify sin, they all bowed to the idols of the calendar. They celebrated the invented birthday, the harvest feast, the spring festival, and every other observance the church has justified over the centuries. Their obedience in conduct was real, but it was not complete, because the idolatry of the holidays remained, and the law cannot be kept in part. This is the stolen blueprint again, breaking down in the very people who tried hardest, because the manual was honored on most pages and violated on a few. It is the most sobering proof I know that there is no such thing as being almost obedient.

The New Religion of Inappropriate Kindness

I keep returning to the new religion of our day, because it is the soft trap that catches even sincere people, and it deserves to be named again and exposed fully. Today, inappropriate kindness has become the standard of salvation in the popular mind. People believe that as long as they are kind to everyone, they will go to heaven, and they hold this belief while entirely disregarding the horrible physical and spiritual condition they are in. They are wallowing in unholy filth, but as long as they are pleasant to one another, they are confident heaven awaits, because they have decided that God must not care what you look like or how you live, only whether you were nice.

This misguided understanding is tragic. It takes one genuine virtue, kindness, and inflates it into a complete substitute for the whole law, which is exactly the kind of distortion the enemy specializes in. He does not always tempt us with obvious evil; sometimes he tempts us with a single good thing magnified out of all proportion, until it crowds out everything else God asked of us. A person can be kind and still be in open rebellion, kind and still painted, adorned, remarried in adultery, kind and still bowing to every idol on the calendar. Kindness does not cancel disobedience. It cannot. And the saddest part is how reasonable the lie sounds, how generous, how warm, which is precisely why it has become the religion of the age.

My Body, My Choice, Until the Body Is Taken

The motto of the age is "my body, my choice," and it is recited as though it were self-evidently true, a final and unanswerable statement. I can do anything I want with my body, people say. If I want to give myself to someone, I can. If I want to mark my body permanently, I can. It is mine, the reasoning goes, and so the choice is mine alone, and no God and no Book has any say in the matter.

But watch what happens to that motto when the disease arrives. Watch the videos of people fighting cancer, and observe carefully, because the lesson is written on their bodies in a language no one can deny. That same control over the body, the control they insisted was total and inviolable, is simply gone. It has been handed over to the cancer that is ending their lives. The hair they painted and permed and obsessed over falls out. The nails they were forever decorating turn brittle under chemotherapy. The organs that were the instruments of sin before marriage are fried by radiation into infertility and impotence. The very parts of the body that were displayed for the world are replaced by surgical scars.

So tell me, when you reach that point, how much control do you still feel you have over your body? Does the cancer also believe that it is your body and your choice? It does not. It takes what it wants. And this is the unbearable irony of the slogan: the body we claimed as our absolute possession turns out to be a possession we cannot hold onto for a single day past the moment God allows it to be taken. When you disobey God, He permits the cells of your body to disobey their instruction, and you lose complete control over the very body that was the instrument of your rebellion. The choice you boasted of evaporates precisely in the organ you most abused. There is a terrible justice in it, a justice that no court of man could ever have designed.

Was the sin worth it? That is the question every one of those videos silently asks. Was the temporary pleasure, the assertion of autonomy, the defiant declaration of ownership, worth the loss of everything, including the body itself? No one ever thinks to ask the question until the answer has already been forced upon them.

Confronting the One Who Refuses the Small Things

I have heard it said to me so many times, in so many tones of dismissal: "You really think that just changing your clothes and taking off your makeup is going to do anything for your relationship with God? He doesn't care about small stuff like that." And I have a simple answer, an answer that exposes the whole bluff.

If it is not a big deal, then change your clothes. If you truly believe that what you wear and how you look does not matter to God in the slightest, then it should cost you nothing to take it all off. Wipe the paint from your face. Take the earrings out of your ears. Put on a godly attire. If these things are as trivial as you claim, you will do it without hesitation, because trivial things are easy to surrender.

But you will not do it. And do you know why you will not? Because it is a big deal. That is the whole reason it appears in the Bible at all. Your refusal to make the change you call insignificant proves that you know, somewhere beneath the wall, that it is not insignificant at all. If it really did not matter, you would let it go in an instant to win the argument. The fact that you cling to it so fiercely, while insisting it means nothing, is the loudest confession of all. Your outer appearance is a big deal to God, and your unwillingness to alter it is a big deal to you, and the two facts confirm each other.

To reject the sin of vanity, when you call yourself His child, means simply this: not putting on apparel as fashion, not decorating yourself with gold, and not painting yourself like Jezebel. These are not heavy burdens. They are the lightest of all commands, requiring nothing but a willingness to let go of what was never yours to glorify in the first place. And it is exactly because they are so light that refusing them is so damning.

The Difficulty of Living as a True Child of God

I do not want to pretend that the path I am calling people toward is easy in the social sense, because it is not, and to deny the difficulty would be to insult everyone who has actually tried to walk it. The true children of God face a real and constant pressure, a pressure that pulls in two directions at once and gives no rest.

On one side, we do not want to be social pariahs. We are not seeking persecution for its own sake; no sane person enjoys being the strange one, the unwelcome one, the figure whose arrival makes a room tense. We feel the cost of standing apart as keenly as anyone, perhaps more keenly, because we feel it every single day in every ordinary interaction. On the other side, we are not allowed to keep our silence about sin whenever we see it. The command to speak does not pause out of consideration for our comfort. So we live perpetually stretched between the longing to belong and the obligation to testify, and there is no easy resolution, no clever way to satisfy both at once.

There is something in the true children of God that simply burns the eyes of the world. I do not fully understand the mechanism of it, only that it is real. When the world looks at people who dress only in clothing pertaining to their own gender, who refuse to paint their faces or hang jewels upon their bodies, who quietly decline the festivals and the fashions, it reacts as though it has been physically provoked. The world feels it must strike back, as if the mere existence of the obedient were an act of aggression against it. It is not that we have attacked anyone; it is that our obedience is itself an unbearable accusation, a silent sermon that the disobedient cannot tolerate. And so they lash out, sometimes literally. I have, in attempting to tell a woman why she should not wear the clothing of a man, been attacked by a swinging purse. The light does not need to say a word to offend the darkness. It only needs to shine.

The Woman Who Asked for Respect Instead of Truth

Let me tell you about a particular encounter, because it captures the whole tragedy in a single exchange. I had been following a number of cancer patients online, partly for research and partly because I cannot look away from the price of sin written so plainly on human lives. One of them, after months of suffering, received good news on one of her three-month scans; she had been cleared. And so I reached out to her, gently, because she and her family attended church and prayed to the Almighty, which is exactly why I thought she ought to know what she was doing wrong. I told her that if she did not marry the man she was living with, her cancer would return, because living together unmarried is a sin, like all the other sins committed so casually and so constantly without any regard.

And in one of her next videos, she responded, though not to me directly. She said, in effect: please be more respectful in the comments, everyone has their own faith and their own beliefs, so let us all just be respectful of one another. I wanted to write back and say, sweetheart, there is only one God, one truth, one heaven, and one Bible. We cannot all have different beliefs and all arrive at the same heaven. Which religion do you imagine heaven belongs to? But I recognized how futile it would be, how it would only push her to shut off her comments entirely, and so I held my tongue, which is its own kind of grief.

Think about what she actually asked for. She did not ask whether what I said was true. She did not weigh it, test it, search the Book to see if it was so. She asked only that everyone be respectful, that all beliefs be treated as equally valid, which is to say she asked that the question of truth be set aside permanently in favor of the comfort of mutual non-interference. This is the religion of tolerance in its purest form: the agreement that no one will ever tell anyone that they are wrong, even when they are walking toward death, because telling the truth has been reclassified as disrespect. And so a woman who had just been spared, who had been given the second chance I spoke of earlier, used that chance to defend the very arrangement that had endangered her, and to silence the one voice trying to warn her.

Why They Ask God Why But Refuse the Answer

Here is one of the strangest behaviors of the modern soul, and once you notice it you will see it everywhere. People will ask God why. Why are You allowing all these diseases? Why the hurricanes? Why the earthquakes? They will raise the question loudly, even angrily, demanding an account from the heavens for the suffering of the world. But they do not actually want to hear the answer. They want the question to function as an accusation, not as an inquiry.

Because the answer is available. The answer has been available the entire time, sitting on the shelf in the one Book they will not open. The answer is that we have turned against the only book of instruction that was meant to keep everyone healthy, and that disobedience in the Holy Bible is the cause of these diseases, and that throughout Scripture, disease was used as a punishment for one thing or another. The answer is right there, plain and repeated. But to receive it would require accepting responsibility, and so people ask the question as a weapon and then flee from the reply. They want a God they can blame, not a God they must obey. They will interrogate Him about the consequences while refusing to discuss the cause, which is like a man demanding to know why his house is flooding while refusing to acknowledge that he left every faucet running.

Trying to Tell ET About Jesus

I have had experiences in this country that I can only describe as surreal, and I share them not for amusement but because they reveal how far the human race has drifted. I once tried to tell a man about Jesus, a man who had never even heard the name. I am not exaggerating when I say that it felt like trying to explain Jesus to ET, to a creature from another world entirely, so total was the absence of any frame of reference. The unsettling strangeness of that moment, the sense of speaking across an unbridgeable gulf, gained me a whole new respect for the men who do this difficult work of saving souls, because I have never felt more out of place in my life.

I had always assumed, naively, that people consulted the Bible for every confusion they encountered, that it was the natural reference point for any question of right and wrong. Only by living among people did I discover that most of them have never opened it at all. And this explains so much. It explains why people are so fearless of the Lord, doing the most reckless things even in the face of death. I used to think they were fearless, but I came to understand that they were not fearless at all; they were simply uninformed. The man told he is dying who spends his last wish on three hundred women, the woman who abandons her husband and children upon her diagnosis to chase one final fling, the couple who rush to formalize a forbidden union before death parts them, none of these people are defying a God they know. They are stumbling in the dark, unaware that there is an angry God waiting to judge them, because they never read the warning. Their boldness is not courage. It is ignorance wearing the mask of courage.

The Fear That Is Worse Than Any Horror Film

I used to enjoy horror films. There was something fascinating about each different kind of fear, the way it would hit you differently every time. The Exorcist was a favorite of mine; I could not sleep for two weeks after seeing it. But I outgrew the films, not because the fascination died, but because I found something better to do than wait out the heebie-jeebies.

And then I discovered a fear far worse than anything a film ever gave me. Every time I see someone die who I know did not truly know God, or who rejected Him while alive, the fear I feel is so much more horrifying than any movie, because it is real. The terror that person must feel at the very moment of understanding the circumstances he has fallen into, the dawning comprehension of where he now stands, is a darkness I cannot escape when I think of it. We have all imagined the dread of a prisoner standing before a judge who can sentence him to death. But imagine standing before a Judge who will send you to your death, and there is no better place waiting on the other side, only the lake of fire, where you remain for all eternity. Imagine those who were burned at the stake, the fire burning and never finishing its work, never consuming, only burning on and on like a candlewick that will not go out. That is the fear I feel for the soul that died outside the Lord, and it makes every horror film I ever watched look like a child's amusement.

This is why I say that to know about heaven, to possess the instructions written for us, is a privilege beyond reckoning, and that to sneer at those instructions is demonic. How can a person say he believes in good and evil, yet deny that God and the devil exist, and therefore want nothing to do with the Bible? If he truly believed in the Bible, he would be reading that Book day and night to make certain he was on the right path. The casual indifference of the unbeliever toward his own eternity is, to me, the most frightening thing of all, more frightening than any monster ever put on a screen.

Time Is Passing While You Sleep in Oblivion

I want to speak now to the person still hiding behind the wall, still wrapped in the comfortable blindfold, still lying down in the warm familiar filth. While you live in this unholy oblivion, time is not standing still to accommodate you. Time is passing, and passing, and passing, and with every hour we are drawing closer and closer to our day of judgment. The oblivion feels permanent from the inside, as though you could remain in it forever, but you cannot. The clock does not pause because you have chosen not to look at it.

We are each given only a certain amount of time on this earth, and that time has a purpose. We are here to build our souls through our actions, to prove to our Creator, by our obedience to the Bible, that we are worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven. That is the one assignment, the single reason we draw breath. We are not here for plastic surgery. We are not here for human happiness as the world defines it. We are not here for some selfish purpose of our own invention. We are here to build a soul, and we had better have that soul completed by the time we take our last breath, because there is no continuing the work afterward. The deadline is the final exhalation, and not one of us knows when it will arrive.

This is what makes the oblivion so deadly. It does not merely waste time; it consumes the only window we will ever have to do the one thing that matters eternally. Every day spent behind the wall is a day subtracted from the soul-building we were sent here to do, and that day will not be returned. The man who sleeps through his only chance does not get a second night. And so the very comfort of the blindfold is the trap, because it persuades you that there is no urgency, while urgency is the truest fact about your situation.

What Is Coming If We Do Not Turn

I will not soften the warning, because softening it would be a kind of lie, and lies are the very thing this essay was written to oppose. We are living in a time when everything around us is falling apart, and it is falling apart because our God is no longer on our side. We removed Him, and now the protection that came with His presence is being withdrawn, institution by institution, body by body, soul by soul.

The diseases are going to get worse. As sin becomes more prevalent, the affliction that follows sin will become more prevalent too, because the one tracks the other as surely as a shadow tracks the thing that casts it. And the dissolution will not stop at the body. The same force of destruction that persuaded us it was acceptable to remarry after divorce is the same force now dismantling every remaining boundary of human decency and organization. People imagine there is a floor beneath which the corruption cannot sink, a final line the enemy will respect. There is no such floor. Satan will not stop until everything we call human organization lies in ruins, until the protections around children, around marriage, around the body, around the family, around the very categories of male and female, have all been torn down and trampled.

We have already seen the preview. We have watched the abuse of children move from rare and scandalous to common and barely punished, in the space of a single generation. We have watched the offenders walk free where once they would have been buried under the weight of justice. And anyone who imagines this is the end of the descent has not understood the nature of what we are dealing with. One sin allowed clears the path for the next. One barrier removed exposes the barrier behind it. The legalization of one offense becomes the precedent for the legalization of the next, and on it goes, with no true adult supervision left to call a halt, because the adults themselves cannot, or will not, get it together.

These are not the small sins, either. The sins we have allowed and celebrated and written into law are, many of them, the very sins for which the Bible shows God has the least mercy. We did not stumble into minor errors; we marched proudly into the offenses He treats most gravely, and we did it with parades and applause and demands that everyone affirm us in it. And still the wall keeps everyone from feeling the danger, the thick brick wall of oblivion built from God's patient silence, the wall behind which the whole human race hides from the truth that will one day judge it.

The Calling

So let this essay be exactly what its subject demands: a calling. A calling for people to come out of their unholy oblivion and stop living in lies and confusion. I am calling the whole world not to ignore the facts assembled here, not to retreat behind the wall the moment the truth approaches, but to do the one thing the spell of the age makes hardest: to listen, and then to obey.

To the one who recoils, I say: examine the recoil itself. Ask yourself why the mere mention of the Word produces in you a reaction you would never have toward any other book. That recoil is not a sign of your strength or your enlightenment. It is a symptom, and it is telling you something true about where you stand with the Lord, if only you will hear it.

To the one who calls himself a child of God while breaking every law in the Bible, I say: there is no such thing as half-salvation. James 2:10 stands, and it will not bend to your convenience. You are guilty of all if you offend in one, and the only remedy is not a larger cross around your neck or a more generous festival on your calendar, but the complete and unconditional surrender of your whole life to the whole Word.

To the one who is sick and asking God why, I say: ask Him the real question, and then be willing to bear the real answer. The diseases are a message, the last language He has left because we silenced every other one. Stop demanding to know why the consequences came, and start examining the cause that summoned them.

To my fellow children of God who have kept silent out of fear, I say: our silence is not innocence. It is its own sin, the sin of watching a brother walk toward the cliff and saying nothing because we feared how it would look. When you see something, say something. The principle the world applauds in every other arena is binding upon us in the one arena that matters most. To keep silent is to share in the offense, and we are not permitted to keep silent any longer.

The Two Faithful Things

In the end, two things in all of creation are perfectly faithful, and they stand as twin witnesses against the unfaithfulness of the human race. The first is the body, where trillions of cells obey their instruction without ceasing, holding us in life by a faithfulness we will not imitate. The second is the Word, modesty that never changes, truth that runs in a straight line, a Maker forever faithful to His promises. Between these two faithful things stands man, who demands faithfulness from his cells and offers none to his God, who wants the rewards of obedience while practicing the science of sin, who insists upon his body and his choice right up until the cancer proves that neither was ever truly his.

The remedy is not complicated, only costly. Stop making excuses and obey the Book, and you will discover the most amazing relationship on earth, the peace of God resting upon you the way it rested on those obedient ones whose memory I cannot shake. Or go on pretending to know the Lord while living in complete disobedience, and remain miserable and confused, because the misery and the confusion are not random; they are the direct fruit of the disobedience itself. Those are the two paths, and there is no third. You are either completely saved or completely condemned, exactly as the fireman saves all of you or none of you, exactly as God made you wholly alive and never half.

The board game is not a game. The rules are not ours to rewrite. Life is the most serious thing there is, because the stakes are eternal, and the time to build the soul is running out with every breath. Come out from behind the wall. Take off the blindfold. Climb out of the sty. The truth is a straight line, and it is still standing exactly where it has always stood, waiting not to be debated but to be lived. Hear it while there is still time to obey it, for the only privilege greater than knowing the truth is the privilege of conforming your whole life to it before you take your last breath.