Out of nowhere comes a brand new definition of a very old word: woke. When applied to faith by someone who has left there’s, cannot one wonder why? There already is a fine phrase that means exactly the same thing: shipwreck of faith. “Woke” is not found in the Bible. “Shipwreck of faith” is. The two terms are synonymous. Plus, there are dozens of closely related terms—all permutations of the same thing. Some of them, from the Letter to the Hebrews alone, I dealt with in a post reminiscent of the song: “It’s Almost Like 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” You just walk out the back, Jack.
Is “woke” really not a term found in the Bible? Actually, it is. But it means the exact opposite of today’s meaning! The biblical meaning is found at Romans 13:11
“You know the season, that it is already the hour for you to awake from sleep, for now our salvation is nearer than at the time when we became believers.”
It’s the overall world that needs waking from. Its goals and dominant thinking are writing its epitaph. How would you not need to wake from that? Instead, someone would choose to go back to that? Describe what the current crowd calls “woke” in the more graphic terms of 2 Peter 2:22: “The dog has returned to its own vomit, and the sow that was bathed to rolling in the mire.”
Too harsh an assessment? “Wokism” today almost exclusively resides in the West. It’s a culture committing mass suicide! How can you spin it any different when collectively it kills off the most basic instinct known to humankind: that of producing enough children to replace itself?
Is it selfishness—people gots to pursue career and fun, don’t want to crimp their style? Is it inhospitality—people can’t afford to raise children? Is it fear—“I would never bring children into a world like this!” is a line heard all the time. Take your choice. Whatever the dominant reason be, put them all together and it amounts to mass suicide.
Isn’t it like sawing off the limb upon which you once sat and whooping for joy as you come crashing down to earth? At last one is “liberated!” Though, to be sure, sometimes it’s not sawing off the limb. Sometimes it’s dropping down to a more conventional form of Christianity, the kind that allows that the kingdom of God is “within our hearts” and thus allows the overall world to call the shots. This arouses the ire of the anti-cultists far less than do the Witnesses, since the goals of such ones are pretty much the same as the world, absent only awaiting a final verdict from “the man upstairs.”
****** The bookstore
Leave a Reply