Materialistic Society

It’s never enough. Not enough money, not enough time off, not fast enough transport, not a fast enough PC, not enough books, not enough games, not enough music, not enough friends, not enough time to yourself, not good enough health and so on. Our thirst is never quenched. Even “Christian” themed items become another idol. Not enough commentaries, devotionals, biographies and Bibles. Our desire for possessions is insatiable. I’ve been going through the minor prophets the last couple days and Haggai 1:6 comes to my mind:

You have sown much, and harvested little. You eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your fill. You clothe yourselves, but no one is warm. And he who earns wages does so to put them into a bag with holes.

The Jewish people were putting themselves first and God last. How little has changed with the human nature. Their pursuits (and so often ours today) were in vanity as God was not in it. How vain is it to seek fulfillment in anything outside of God? Just as they were seeking to possess fine housing as a priority over God so do we seek possessions before the Lord our God. He is the giver of the gifts we have in our possession and He is also the one whom empowers us to enjoy these gifts or not (Ecclesiastes 5:18; 6:2). In the society we live in the lines get blurred (or rather we blur them intentionally) as to whether our priority of possessions has usurped the priority of a right relationship with our God. Sometimes God has to take away what we are holding onto for us to realize what’s going on with us. The modern day “prophet” A.W. Tozer recognized this cancer on society:

There is within the human heart a tough fibrous root of fallen life whose nature is to possess, always to possess. It covets `things’ with a deep and fierce passion. The pronouns `my’ and `mine’ look innocent enough in print, but their constant and universal use is significant. They express the real nature of the old Adamic man better than a thousand volumes of theology could do. They are verbal symptoms of our deep disease. The roots of our hearts have grown down into things, and we dare not pull up one rootlet lest we die. Things have become necessary to us, a development never originally intended. God’s gifts now take the place of God, and the whole course of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution. – Chapter 2, The Pursuit of God, A.W. Tozer

Let’s examine ourselves and give ourselves a reality check. Are we holding onto anything? Is there anything that means more to us than Jesus Christ? What broken cisterns are we trying to quench our thirst with? Let us kick these aside as we press towards the mark. Let us run into the arms of Jesus; the one who is the living water; the one who truly quenches our thirst and the one who’s arms are outstretched waiting for us. Let’s not wait for discipline to set us right (Revelation 3:19). Instead let’s run to Him now and leave aside our worldly possessions that offer temporal comfort to the one who gives eternal joy. Until next week, (By then I’ll hopefully continue my Hermeneutics series! :))

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