Wednesday, March 11, 2009

When God is shown the door ...

I love it when Canadians take it upon themselves to lecture the US about public policy issues. There's something so self-righteous and smug about Canadians -- like we're SO superior in our thinking and progressive in our attitudes ... ach ... don't get me started.

The latest on this is Leonard Stern's column in today's Vancouver Sun, which suggests (and the sub-headline tells it all) that "the sky has not fallen" four years after the legalization of same-sex marriage.

Is that a fact?

Let's see what's happened in Canada in the past four years:
  • increase in gang violence
  • increase in the incidence of HIV/AIDS
  • increase in homelessness
  • increase in drug use
  • worldwide economic downturn, affecting Canada
  • increase in environmental degradation

Wait a sec', you say: what has this to do with same-sex marriage? Plenty, because the passage of that Civil Marriage Act in 2005 was yet another instance of Canada officially barring God from the country. Our parliament rejected the Word of God as its guide, just as it has done with abortion, drugs, prayer in schools, a judicial system that has lost its sense of purpose and the misguided policy of "tolerance", which is a twisted form of chesed -- unconditional -- love.

(Politicians have tended to claim that we have to separate church from state, but that leaves them with no impartial moral guide to follow. It also leaves them open to any attack from the enemy. The Lord showed me back in 2005, in the waning days of Paul Martin's brief tenure as prime minister, that Martin left himself unprotected from the effects of Liberal sponsorship scandal by his open defiance of his own parish priest, who had pleaded with him to vote against the Civil Marriage bill. Had he done so, the Lord said, Martin could have escaped being tarnished by the misdeeds of the others in his party and could have plausibly stated (as he did) that he was "out of the loop" on such things. But that plea was greeted not with understanding and credence, but with hoots of derision, that the minister of finance was unaware of what was happening in financial matters.)

When God is barred from the land, He stays out. He only comes in when invited, anyway (which is why Jesus tells us to include "Thy Kingdome come, Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven": God gave us dominion over the earth, and that means He can't get involved until we call Him in), so when our governments pass laws that directly contravene His Word, He takes the hint and stays away.

And when He does that, He takes His blessing and protection with Him. So while one may not see it, there is a connection between the larger problems and legalizing same-sex marriage.

Others are suffering in different ways, too. CTVGlobemedia is on serious financial hard times. I remember the cheer that went around the CTV Vancouver newsroom when the Civil Marriage Act was passed, and I remember that same summer, the Globe and Mail offered a $10,000 gay wedding package as a prize in one of its contests. Canwest Global is on the verge of bankruptcy: has God withheld blessing and/or protection because of the Sun's and the Province's "progressive" editorial stances?

In a way, many Christians are responsible for this "barring" of God. We are called not to judge one another but to love one another and to reach out to those who have lost their way -- those who have caved in to their fleshly desires. If we spend our time and energy railing against sin rather than walking as lights that overpower darkness, we, too, are caving in to our own visceral responses. We are, indeed, rejecting the Word of God just as decisively as those we judge. In fact, such rejection is even worse, because it gets dressed up in Religious trappings, having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof (II Tim. 3:5).

So in the face of fatuous "the sky hasn't fallen" assertions from the "progressive" elements in our society, we need to ask ourselves why our country has rejected God, and what we can do to reverse that.

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