Yelling

Jesus went up to Jerusalem. And He found in the temple those who were selling…And He made a scourge of cords and drove them all out of the temple…saying, “Take these things away; stop making My Father’s house a place of business.” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” John 2:13-17

There’s an old Jewish folk tale about a godly man, a prophet, who arrived in the wicked city of Sodom. He began wandering the streets, telling people that they needed to repent and get right with God. He was completely ignored, but the more the people turned their backs on his message, the more loudly he cried out for their repentance.

Finally, someone asked him, “Why do you keep yelling? Can’t you see it’s not making any difference?”

The tzaddik responded, “At first, I hoped that my yelling would change the people of Sodom. Now I yell so that the people don’t change me!”

This is an important principle. Look at Lot who was in Sodom. In Genesis 13, he was with his godly uncle Abraham. In verse 10, he lifted his eyes toward the valley where Sodom was. Then in verse 11, he chose the valley. In verse 12, he moved his tents as far as Sodom. Later, in chapter 14 verse 12, he was actually living in Sodom and sharing its fate. He had to be rescued by his uncle Abraham. In spite of this second chance, he remained in Sodom and we find him in chapter 19, not speaking out against the sins of the city. In fact, he actually offered two of his virgin daughters to be gang-raped. Finally, he became so drunk that he had incestuous sex and impregnated his two daughters. How did he go so far so fast?

I’m worried about those who claim to be Christians but don’t yell about society’s sins against humanity and God; those who feel that matters like abortion, euthanasia, sexuality, rampant drug addiction, and church leaders falling like flies are subjects that are too ugly or harsh to be dealt with. We look at men like the abortionist in Texas who publicly flaunted the laws of the nation by aborting babies in the third trimester and shrug our shoulders. We look at the systematic rape of the Amazon and we shake our heads in dismay. We discover that there are 25,000,000 orphans on the continent of Africa due to AIDS alone and we sigh. But we do not yell, cry or throw righteous temper-fits because that would not be “dignified”. Our churches would rather be worthy of tax breaks from our government than stand up and yell when the government enters an unjust war. And so, because we won’t yell to change the world, the world is changing us. We are drowning in a cacophony of worldliness. At least we’re a dignified corpse!