So Be Careful How You Live. Don't Live Like ...

“So be careful how you live. Don’t live like fools, but like those who are wise. Make the most of every opportunity in these evil days. Don’t act thoughtlessly, but understand what the Lord wants you to do” (Eph. 5:15-17). To ignore that is to court disaster.

The Winter 1991 issue of the “University of Pacific Review” offered a chilling description of the 1986 Chernobyl (Soviet Union) nuclear disaster: There were two electrical engineers in the control room that night. The best things that could be said for what they were doing is they were “playing around” with the machine. They were performing what the Soviets later described as an “unauthorized experiment.” They were trying to see how long a turbine would “free wheel” when they took the power off it.

Taking the power off that kind of nuclear reactor is a difficult, dangerous thing to do, because these reactors are very unstable in their lower ranges. To get the reactor down to that kind of power, where they could perform the test they were interested in, they had to override manually six separate computer-driven alarm systems.

One by one the computers would come up and say, “Stop! Dangerous! Go no further!” And one by one, rather than shutting off the experiment, they shut off the alarms and kept going. You know the results: nuclear fallout that was recorded around the world, from the largest industrial accident ever to occur in the world.

It was not an accident; it was a deliberate violation of instructions and warnings. The instruction and warnings in Scripture are just as clear. We ignore them at our own peril, and tragically, at the peril of innocent others.