The Omega Letter Intelligence Digest
Vol: 48 Issue: 1 - Thursday, September 01, 2005
Depravity and Chaos in the Big Easy
"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" (Jeremiah 17:9)
The mayor of New Orleans ordered his police forces to put search and rescue operations on the back burner and turn their attention to the widespread lawlessness sweeping the city.
In what remains of New Orleans, anarchy reigns supreme. Like some Third World country, bands of thugs cruise the city in stolen trucks bristling with AK-47's looted from local gun shops.
A police officer was shot in the head by a looter; across the city, a man shot his sister in the head and killed her over a bag of ice. Survivors tell stories of total chaos; TV cameras catch literally hundreds of people looting at their leisure, oblivious to the millions of witnesses to their crime.
While it is possible to find some justification in the mother looting a convenience store for milk, food or fresh water for her children, TV cameras captured looters carrying off television sets and stereo equipment, not necessities of survival.
A kid slinks by with three boxes of shoes. One guy shoulders a batch of fishing rods. A pair of cops joins the thievery, pushing a basket of stolen goods through a Wal-Mart in New Orleans, which according to a TV reporter's assessment, is on the verge of becoming "a city of outlaws."
In one scene, a looter was pulling a large clear plastic container filled with stolen electronics through the water behind him.
Think about this for a second. New Orleans is under several feet of water. There will be no electricity for as long as four months. There is no place dry this guy can put this stuff, and the city is about to be totally evacuated. What's he gonna do with it all? This isn't mere depravity, it is mindless depravity.
We expected images of nobility and sacrifice similar to that exhibited on 9/11 -- and to be sure, there were certainly many noble acts of sacrifice that did occur -- but by and large, the image of New Orleans is reflected by the gangs of looters pillaging what little remains of a destroyed city.
For most Americans, the chaos and crime in New Orleans is bitterly disappointing.
Assessment:
Liberal humanists, recognizing their theory of mankind's inherent nobility is collapsing before their eyes, have already begun to argue such conduct is justifiable, given the circumstances.
An article in today's Washington Post, under the headline, "Carried Away", argued that "we are also learning from the post-Katrina chaos, what we think of as looting may be more complicated than it seems."
Aha! The guy who stole stereo equipment about as useful to him as surgical equipment to a roofer wasn't stealing for stealing's sake! It's 'more complicated' than that. How so?
It seems that the guy stealing stereo equipment he can't use is a member of the "disenfranchised who jump at the chance to get even with those who have more stuff than they do."
The Post quoted Benigno E. Aguirre of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware. Professor Aguirre criticized those "people [who] use the concept of looting without making distinctions."
"Who is to say," asks the professor, "whether these were criminals or people desperate to survive?" Professor Aguirre compared the looters to city officials who commandeered equipment from a looted Office Depot.
There is a difference. Equipment commandeered by officials during a state of emergency is legal and the equipment is eventually paid for. There is no comparison between the city commandeering equipment vital to maintaining order and a looter carrying off three pairs of stolen Reeboks.
The Bible teaches the universal depravity of man. Removed from social restrictions, a crowd quickly becomes a mob. Studies have proved things like racial prejudice are NOT learned behavior, but are ingrained in our nature.
A study put a preschool black kid in a room full of white preschoolers. The black kid was shunned by the rest of the kids. Then they put a white kid in a room full of black kids. The result was the same. It is unlikely the preschoolers were taught racism while some of them were still having trouble learning not to bite.
The spectacle of armed Americans, raised in America with American values, banding together into armed gangs to rob their fellow citizens of whatever they might have left reveals much about the condition of the human heart.
One forum member commented that the chaos in New Orleans is a foretaste of the coming Tribulation. I couldn't agree more. The Tribulation is all about the result of evil, unrestrained.
Jeremiah says the human heart is 'desperately wicked' and asks, 'who can know it?' The Bible says that God does, and what He knows about it would curl your hair.
The heart, according to God's Word, is an 'abomination to the Lord' (Proverbs 11:20) "full of evil" and "madness" (Ecclesiastes 9:3) filled with "evil imaginations continually" (Genesis 6:5) full of vain thoughts
(Jeremiah 4:14), a "treasury of evil" (Matthew 12:35; Mark 7:21) "rebellious" (Jeremiah 5:23) and 'judicially stupefied' (Acts 28:26-27) -- (as in the case of Professor Aguirre).
That is the condition in which we enter this world. Babies have to be taught not to steal, fight, hurt other people, lie, deny prejudices, and get along with others. Those improperly taught are improperly labeled as 'spoiled'.
In point of fact, they are not 'spoiled' -- they are merely exemplars of the raw material we spend our whole lives trying to improve. Humanists insist that man is inherently good and noble, since humanism sees man as the supreme being (and it wouldn't do for a supreme being to be so fatally flawed).
That this is a lie is observable by anyone who cares to take an honest look around, yet it is a lie that is embraced by millions of people, despite the insurmountable mountain of evidence to the contrary.
That is more evidence of just how depraved the human heart truly is. Man is the only being that has the capacity to tell himself a believable lie. THAT is how 'desperately wicked' the human heart that only God knows really is.
THAT is why we need a Savior. THAT is why Scripture says that "we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags." (Isaiah 64:6)
More than just 'filthy rags' in fact. Let me articulate it the way the Lord intended it to be understood. The Hebrew word translated 'filthy' is 'ed ayd' meaning 'menstrual flux'.
Good works are a necessary part of the Christian life, but 'good works' are those arising from a 'good' motive. And there is no motive which can be said to be good but that of bringing a lost sinner to Christ.
Good works play no role in salvation. He who performs good works with a view to save himself, does not do them from a good motive, because his motive is selfish.
It is easy to get caught up in the lie that before we can do a good work for God, we have to be so heavenly minded that we become no earthly good.
God KNOWS the human heart, and He knows that is what beats in the chest of each of us. Even after the heart is regenerated at salvation, it remains a heart of flesh, filled with every evil imaginable, a judicially stupefied 'treasury of evil' incapable of anything more than the desire to please God but bound by our heart of flesh to 'the body of this death'. (Romans 7:24)
With all of this, "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." (John 3:16)
"God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8)
"For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life." (Romans 5:10)
The hour is late; the watchmen on the wall are few. The enemy objective is to silence as many of them as possible, by convincing them they are not worthy to stand their watch.
As the anarchy in New Orleans demonstrates, NONE of us are worthy. God knows that, but He chooses to use us anyway, but only to the degree we are willing to trust Him.
If we trust that, as evil and depraved as we KNOW we are, we are righteous in God's sight because of Jesus -- and not because of our assessment our own righteousness -- we can boldly step forward and do our duty when duty calls.
Don't allow the enemy to silence you by deploying your own sin nature against you. God KNOWS your heart (and mine), and He says, 'trust Me.'
"But if the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned; if the sword come, and take any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at the watchman's hand." (Ezekiel 33:6)
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