More Americans now commit suicide than die in car accidents. “People are despairing in America,” writes Joseph Farah, “more than ever before.”
It would be easy, notes Farah, to blame the suicide epidemic on the economy. But, that’s not how he sees it. People may be struggling financially, but they’re not ending their lives because they lack food and shelter or toys and gadgets.
“I believe the trend reflects a deep and growing spiritual emptiness in a culture that is more depraved than ever before,” writes Farah. “Too many people just don’t find any meaning in life.”
We should all, as Farah advices, “think about it.” He continues:
We are told from the youngest age in state-run schools that human beings are merely the result of billions of years of evolution from lower life forms and random mutations. There is no God who loves us and to whom we are accountable. There are no laws higher than those that government imposes on us – no sin. No ultimate, objective moral code. In fact, human beings are a blight on the planet. It would be better off without us – or at least with a lot fewer of us polluting the air with carbon dioxide and overheating the earth.
. . . Prayer and Bible reading are prohibited, but explicit instruction on how to have promiscuous sex without consequences is mandated.
Abortion is subsidized, while adoption is prohibitively expensive in the unlikely event you can find a child to adopt.
Increasingly, the state is sticking its nose into what we eat, what we say, how we raise our children – even what we believe.
Government is fine with pornography. But purity and abstinence are discouraged.
In other words, right is wrong, up is down, black is white, left is right. And we sit here and wonder why people are killing themselves.
When government replaces God in the lives of people, their lives become empty. They become subjects of the state, rather than citizens endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights – among those being life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
When government becomes the ultimate authority in our lives and practices lawlessness, disregarding routinely the Constitution from which it derives its limited authority, I would suggest to you this is a much bigger cause for despair and powerlessness.
There is a solution to this problem. But it’s not a top-down answer. It’s a bottom-up solution. Americans need to get right with God.
They need to find out what He requires of them, why He created them, and how much He loves them.
They need to have a genuine repentance for having turned away from Him and whored after false gods and pursuits.
If Americans did this, they wouldn’t be taking their own lives in record numbers.
Thank you, Joseph Farah. It is a privilege to reprint a portion of your column. May it be used to spark dialogue in families, neighborhoods, schools, places of business, law offices, and congregations.
Joseph Farah is a nationally syndicated columnist.
I excerpted from his commentary,
“What happens when government replaces God”
which appeared in October 1 edition of The Washington Times
Reblogged this on FIRE AND HAMMER and commented:
The following is a post by a pastor’s wife.
Tim, thank you for the compliment, but I’m not a pastor’s wife. I am a farmer’s wife. He plants seeds of hope, too. Then waits on the Lord for the harvest 🙂
I am sorry about that “Pastor’s wife” thing. Farmer’s wife is a great thing too.