Have you heard the story about if you put a frog in a pot of tepid water and slowly heat up the water that the frog will not be aware that the water is getting to dangerous levels, thus it will not jump out and boil to death. This story has been used by many people – including many religious leaders to be an example of how you can slowly be affected by your environment and become someone you don’t want to be and not even realize it. The point that people make may be true, but the story about the frog boiling to death is not. The story is an urban myth that people have communicated as truth. Our culture is becoming increasingly difficult to know what is true and what isn’t, what is right and what is wrong, what is moral and what isn’t. One way to get perspective is to imagine if you took someone from 20 years ago and put them in our current culture – what would they notice, what would stick out to them as unusual, inappropriate? I understand that changes in culture have produced needed mindset and cultural changes of injustices, biases and personal treatment, but the question we must also wrestle with is where has culture brought us to places that are toxic and harmful. What have we been told is true about the benefits of advancement of culture and have we evaluated whether that is accurate or are we believing the boiling frog story.
God gave Paul a view of what was going to happen as culture developed and Paul wanted to give Timothy a heads up so that he could be prepared. Paul says in the last days things will be hard – if you look at the meaning of the words and context it is believed that Paul was referring that it will not just be a hard situation, but that the people will be difficult to live with, in fact they will most likely be dangerous to be around. As we look at the description of the people that Paul was describing it might be easy to identify where that exists in our current culture.
2 Tim 3 You should know this, Timothy, that in the last days there will be very difficult times. 2 For people will love only themselves and their money. They will be boastful and proud, scoffing at God, disobedient to their parents, and ungrateful. They will consider nothing sacred. 3 They will be unloving and unforgiving; they will slander others and have no self-control. They will be cruel and hate what is good. 4 They will betray their friends, be reckless, be puffed up with pride, and love pleasure rather than God. 5 They will act religious, but they will reject the power that could make them godly. Stay away from people like that!
No matter where your political, religious, social activist perspective is, I invite you to to look over this list and evaluate how many of these adjectives describe our current culture. Now look over the list and make a note of the things on the list that our culture and maybe even yourself list as positive attributes. I am guessing that if we compared lists many of us would have different answers. I am also assuming that many of us would not want our closest friends to be known by this list and we would definitely steer our kids away from being around people that exemplify these traits.
My personal reflection on this list is that we as a culture are becoming more and more known for these characteristics. I also have opinions on why we are becoming like this, I think many of us do. Many of those opinions point fingers at the other political party, government, leadership, authority structures, injustice, unfairness, institutional biases, and basically the actions of other people. And then if we can humbly go back through the list, we might find that our evaluations might just illustrate something on the list (pride, ungrateful, slander, unloving, etc..).
So how did many of us get here? We never intended to be like this. This was not a top 10 list that we were trying to achieve. What happened. I believe it started with subtle temptations that we all face. The subtle temptations of you deserve, you need to be understood, you are being pushed down, who gave them permission to say what is right or wrong, life is hard, I feel out of control so I need to control something. As a culture, especially over the last 2-3 years we have quickly become a culture that is defined by what we are against and what we feel entitled to. Many of us have engaged the subtle temptations that has shifted our focus from living for God to living for self. Some of us are a long ways down that road and have already become more like the list that Paul gave that we ever wanted to be.
If we are going to live a thriving life in 2022, we must resist attacking culture without first analyzing where we are personally at and what subtle temptations we may have already given into. To thrive we must be watchful of the subtle temptations that lead to hard heartedness, selfishness, entitlement and pride. We can resist the temptation and shift our culture to being one that cares about others, supports each other and most importantly loves God and pursues Him.