Intro: I perused the morning headlines from my computer: Epstein this and Epstein that; a massive drug overdose in Baltimore, MD; Netanyahu resolved to keep attacks going; more and more money for Ukraine’s protracted defeat, etc.

It is clear that many leaders like nothing quite so much as the swamp, their own power, and the sowing of chaos. The orchestrated chaos ensues, tribalism is the predictable reaction, and the bureaucracy grows bigger and more sinister. If you just step back and take it all in, it is sickening.

Question: Always like this? That is, has it always been like this? Short answer: Since Genesis 3, it has been like this. Genesis 3 records the Fall of man. Rather than obeying God’s wisdom, Adam and Eve chose the serpent’s way. Instead of God defining good and evil, our federal head opted he knew better. The first Adam fell.

Results? God “drove out the man [Adam], . . . east of the garden of Eden . . . (Genesis 3:24, ESV). Banishment, that was the result. Adam (and all he represented) was banished east of Eden. If Genesis 3 were not clear enough, Moses is yet more explicit later: “The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5, ESV). This is just one example of hundreds in Scriputure of what’s known in theology as man’s depravity, man’s fallenness.

Segue: This is why, dear reader, it is so disheartening when people who claim to be Christians act in ways contrary to the ways of God. They profess to be regenerate people, redeemed people, but their actions belie that profession. Christ told us that we would know trees by their fruit (Matthew 7:16-20; Luke 6:53-55). He wasn’t teaching a lesson related to dendrology; He was teaching what my precious-but-now-deceased grandmother would have expressed this way: “What’s down in the well comes up in the bucket.”

As a friend of mine reminded me recently, each day has its own trouble. As Christ Himself taught us in His Sermon on the Mount, “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble” (Matthew 6:34, ESV).

My enduring favorite book of Scripture remains Ecclesiastes. Admittedly, it is a highly literary and poetic book, and I tend to favor literary genres, not just chronologies or records of the numbers of tribes, etc. But Solomon, in the masterful book of Ecclesiastes, wrote the following:

What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
among those who come after. (Ecclesiastes 1:9-11, ESV).

Prayer: Lord, I pray for Your true people. Open their eyes. Remove the scales. Likewise, purge the evil. Reveal it for what it is in all its lies and hypocrisy. Encourage Your saints, mighty resurrected King. Amen.