How Do You Boil A Frog? Series

We live in an amazing time, don’t we? We have laptop computers that are literally thousands of times more powerful than the room-sized computers we used to put a man on the moon – actually, 12 men have walked on the surface of the moon … so far. The computer which landed Apollo 11 on the Moon was about as powerful as a contemporary pocket calculator (www.thevintagenews.com). The typical cellphone contains 1,048,576 bits of RAM … or “Random Access Memory” … which mean that this [cellphone] can literally store over a million times more information than the same computers that put a man on the moon … and they can process information over 2,000 times faster (www.realclearscience.com). Wild, huh? This thing comes with a GPS … which communicates with tracking satellites hundreds of miles over our heads. It also has a computer built into it and it has access to the Bible in every known language on the face of the earth. I’m willing to bet that everyone here owns a laptop or a tablet or a cellphone … and if you don’t it’s not because you can’t afford it but that you choose not to … which is understandable.

Medical science is changing almost as fast as computers. I remember when someone getting open heart surgery was front page news … today it is almost a routine procedure which, thanks to the use of catheters and stints, is being performed less and less. We now have artificial knees and hips, as well as mechanical and pig aortas. Stem cell research is advancing by leaps and bounds and is being used to treat a growing range of diseases or re-generate damaged cells, tissue, and bone.

There is a new and rapidly developing branch of medicine known as “telemedicine.” It is what it sounds like. Health care can be provided at a distance via phones and portable transmitting devises. Patients can use these devices to measure blood pressure, monitor glucose levels, and test for conditions from blood samples at home and then send the results to your doctor in real time. They now have a pill that lets you know that you’ve taken it. The pill contains a tiny sensor that records when it is taken and then transmits that information to a patch worn by the patient … which then sends that information to … your smartphone. Computers are being used to diagnosis skin cancer and they are on the verge of having medicine that is genetically designed just for the patient. Like I said, wild stuff, amen?

We live a lifestyle in this country that most of the world envies and which we take for granted: hot and cold running water, refrigerators with food in them, grocery stores … with food in them, fruits and vegetables from around the world all year long. Most of us not only own one car but two … and have garages to park them in … unless they’re full of stuff. Many of us have so much stuff that we have to rent places to store our stuff, amen?

I could go on and on …

And then, I look around, and I ask myself and I ask God just about every day: What in the world happened?

You know … as crazy the world seems right now, we’ve been here before, actually. In the “days of Noah,” the LORD “saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5). In his book about Noah, author Jeff Kinley wrote: “If the Bible is correct in stating that earth’s entire population was thinking only about evil 24/7, certainly those evil thoughts would have included sexual promiscuity, adultery, and perversion, as well as rape, prostitution, homosexuality and lesbianism, and pedophilia. Does that sound extreme or far-fetched?” asks Kinley. “Considering that most of these aberrations and perversions have been prevalent among us since Noah’s day, it’s not a stretch to imagine how prominent they would have been in a world without any moral compass or restraint” (Kinley, J.; As It Was in the Days of Noah: Warnings from Bible Prophecy about the Coming Global Story. Eugene, OR: Harvest House; pp. 15-16).

A world without any moral compass or restraint. Spot on. How did we get this way? Paul would say “the same way that you boil a frog … one degree at a time.” Human depravity is a symptom of our isolation from God … which started when the serpent tempted Eve and Eve tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden. The temptation? To be independent. To decide for ourselves what is right, what is good, what is moral, and what is evil. Without God’s moral compass, we keep getting lost … over and over and over again, amen? As Pastor David Jeremiah puts it: “Without God at the wheel of the human heart, we are like a driverless car careening down the freeway. A crash is inevitable” (Jeremiah, D.; Is This the End?; New York: Thomas Nelson; 2016; p.8) … and the way things are going, I might add, we can expect to crash at any moment … at least it feels that way to me.