What is Worldliness?

Last week we explored the story of Dinah in the Old Testament, and how that is a perfect example of the consequences or what happens when you have unintended consequences. Decisions that are made that have no evil thought, there's no desire to do something wrong, and yet they set in motion evil. They set in motion terrible things that had unintended consequences for her, for her family, and for the people of the city, the town that she'd gone into. Not that she had done those things, but why is there unintended consequences in life? That sermon sort of set up, as I talked about, how we have to understand unintended consequences by understanding the world we live in. You know, our choices sometimes, and our actions, can have no wrong intent. And yet because of the world we live in, can produce very bad consequences. You can do the right thing sometimes, and have bad consequences. Why? Why does that happen? You know, Jesus actually told his disciples on the night he was betrayed, he said, actually prayed to God for his disciples, and he said, They are not of this world, just as I am not of this world. Now statements like that are made throughout the entire New Testament, that Christians are not of this world, and it has led to a term called worldliness. But what is worldliness? You know, different churches define worldliness as different. I've seen it defined as different ways in my lifetime, in the radio church of God, the worldwide church of God. What is it? I can remember when Baptists, at fact the church of, I think some of the churches of Christ, some of the Baptists, the Nazarenes still teach that dancing and playing cards and drinking a beer is worldliness, and to do so, separates you from God.

Listening to secular music, some people say that is worldliness. Watching a movie, you know, in certain cultures, I think in the Amish country, a culture you can't even watch a movie. Watching cartoons, I remember a minister when I was a child saying that you should not let your children watch cartoons because it's too worldly. And so he said you shouldn't even watch cartoons. What is worldliness? I mean, we can make lists of things that we think is worldly, wearing makeup, wearing jewelry has been condemned at times as being worldly for women to do so. What is it? What is worldliness? Well, I'm not going to make a list today. I'm going to go through basic concepts in the Bible. We're going to start with some very basic concepts. As I've been saying lately, many of my servers are going to start with very simple, basic concepts because we need to relay those foundations. We need to make sure they're solid and then go into an example of understanding what worldliness is, which we actually set up what I'm going to talk about next week in the sermon. So what is it? How do we define it? In this room, we could probably come up with all kinds of different definitions. If I asked you to make a list of worldliness, it could be all kinds of things. There would be lots of things we'd agree on and there may be some things we disagree on. What is worldliness? So we're going to look at that today. So we've got to go back to do that. There's something so basic that we have to go clear back to Genesis. We start in Genesis because in the first chapters of Genesis, we see that God made human beings in His image and they had a perfect relationship with God. Adam and Eve had no problems. They had no marriage problems. They had no problems with anxiety. They hadn't disobeyed God yet. There was no guilt. They lived in this state of being that was unique. And in a personal relationship with God, they actually talked to God. God talked to them. He appeared to them. That's the way human beings were created. In the image of God, every human being that has come from Adam and Eve, all of us, are made in the image of God. But boy, this is messed up, right? For people who are made in the image of God, we sure are messed up when we know what happened. God allowed Satan to come into the garden. Adam and Eve were created with free will, the ability to choose. And they were created with the ability to have conscious thought, as mentioned in the sermonette. Conscious thought. And they also have the ability for emotions. They never had a choice with God. God told them, and they just did it. They never entered their mind to do anything else. He gave them a choice. They chose, in this conscious thought process, in their emotional process, and that's a complicated thing in itself. We could spend a whole sermon just explaining why Adam and Eve went down the path they did. So they chose a lie from Satan. There's a couple lies in there. But the first one is, you get to choose what is good and what is evil. You will be like God. God determines good and evil. He chooses good and evil. So you will be like him. You will know good and evil, and you'll get to choose good and evil. That's the first great lie he told them. The next one was, you won't die, the immortal soul. But that first lie is the basis of the world that you and I live in.

Because Adam and Eve were kicked out of Eden, and because they were kicked out of Eden, Satan became the God of this age, as he's called. The God of this time period is Satan. Humanity came under the influence of Satan and were cut off from God in a very dramatic way. God still intervened with human beings. He even intervened in the life of a nation, of Israel. And now he's working through the church. So he's stepped into history to keep it moving towards the point he wants it to end up with. But the bottom line is, he's not involved in the day-to-day things going on in the world for the most part. It's just not. But Satan is. Dinah walked into a city, not understanding the world she had entered. You and I are born into a world that we have to grow constantly in understanding the world we live in. Not everything in the world is evil, is it? There's still beauty. We meet nice people. People do good things. Because human beings became a mixture of good and evil. So, they're still good in the world. But in the end, good and evil cannot exist together. And that's what we're going to talk about when we start to understand what worldliness really is. Because God wasn't in the development of the human condition after they were kicked out of Eden, except they intervened every once in a while, like the flood. His involvement in the human condition was, I've got to kill most of them. It's become that evil. That means everything in this world, our lives, the lives of everybody around us, whoever they are, our personal issues, our relationships with other people, whether it's our environment, the ecology, the governmental systems, the educational systems, economic systems. Just the human health, because we're not healthy like Adam and Eve were.

Everything in the human condition has a spiritual element in it. And that spiritual element changed in the story of Genesis 1 and 2. God was in the lives of the two first human beings He created in His image. Afterwards, He kicked them out of Eden, and the result is Satan has been involved in the development of human society ever since. Every human society, whether it's...where was it? I saw something the other day in 1999, they actually filmed it. I'd never seen the film or the video. Of the first contact between some Europeans, and I think it was in New Guinea, a tribe of people who had never seen anybody but their own tribe. They thought these men, because they were white-skinned, they thought they were ghosts, and they wouldn't even touch them, because they thought they weren't sure. What happens if you touch a ghost? I mean, you know, they didn't think they were human beings. And it took a while, but they finally accepted, they understood what was going on, and a couple of those Europeans went and lived in that society for a short period of time, and got to know them and their customs, and introduced them to certain things from the West. Kim said, you know, the shame is today, if you've met those people now, they're probably walking around with cell phones and, you know, playing on their iPads, but I'm not sure their lives have got much better. So, all that, whether it's that tribe, or the people who went with the modern world, introduced the modern world to them, both of those systems have one influencer. Once again, God does have influence. It's called the Bible. Any group of people that does anything out of the Bible that's right gets a benefit from it. Anytime you interact with the truth of God, there's a benefit. That's the way it's designed. So, there could be a group of people that have the Bible and have a number of truths, and they get a benefit from that. So, we see the good sometimes in people who are trying to obey God. But that doesn't erase the fact that overall, we live in a very flawed world because it is not God's world. God is not, except in a limited way, influencing the world today.

I don't want to limit God's influence because he's driving this towards a certain point, but the bottom line is, the average person is kicked out. He's been kicked out of Eden. And so, everything's dysfunctional, and understanding that is really important in understanding the word worldliness. I gave a sermon a while back where I just went through four words, right? Salvation and justification, sanctification, and transformation. Well, today we're just defining another word. What is it? What is worldliness?

God loves every human being. Every human being has value to him. But here's something we went through in that sermon, and defining those four words that we have to remember. Because humanity was kicked out of Eden. Human nature became corrupted. It's why, one reason why we have sickness, just physically we're corrupted. But up here in our hearts and minds, we're corrupted. Human nature is corrupted in every human being ever born except Jesus. And according to what we read in that sermon, that means that we are the enemies of God. Every human being in the world, every human being that's ever been born, becomes, in their relationship with God, an enemy. It's only because he is willing to forgive and love that we don't stay enemies. Now, that message right there is being removed from Christianity today entirely. God loves us just the way we are, and therefore the idea, even the idea that Jesus had to die for us, is being questioned. I read articles every week. I get a newsletter that just sends me every two days, 15, 20, 25 articles, from all over the Internet, magazines, on religion. And it's amazing, almost every time. There's an article in there by someone in a major school of theology, a major church, saying, we have to redefine Jesus' sacrifice. He didn't die for us. That would mean we were enemies of God. Yes! That's exactly what it means. He had to save us. When I went through salvation, you have to be saved because you're in danger and you can't save yourself. You can't. None of us can.

So, this important message of salvation is part of this too, in understanding what worldliness is. That the world was cut off from God, but not thrown away. This idea of salvation is all through the Scripture. There is not universal salvation. There is a lake of fire. But the promise that every human being has an opportunity to receive salvation is all through the Scripture. So, what does it mean to be cut off from God? Let's look at a place here in the life of Jesus, John 8. Now, I want you to think about who Jesus is talking to. He is talking to men, specifically men here, who had never worshiped an idol. He is talking to men who kept the Sabbath day their entire lives. He is talking to men who kept the Passover all the holy days. He is talking to men who believed in the God of the Bible, who understood creation, the lives of Abraham and Sarah and Moses. They understood. They knew the Bible in its original language and could read it in its original language. These are the people he is talking to.

Because he was teaching some things they didn't like and they wanted to kill him. In verse 37, he says, They said, what do you mean? Abraham is our father. We are the physical descendants of Abraham. We teach what he taught. We know what he taught. We can quote the book of Genesis verbatim.

And Jesus says to them, God is not your father. I said, yes, God is our father. No, he's not. He says in verse 42, Jesus says to them, In other words, I came here because I willed to come here and then he sent me. Why do you not understand my speech? Because you're not able to listen to my word. You are of your father the devil. Remember who these people are. These are the people, the chosen people, the direct descendants of Abraham, the people who obeyed the word of God in the letter, the people who kept the Sabbath, the people who tried not to lie. It's quite possible none of these men had ever committed adultery, never stolen anything in the letter of the law. Quite possible. But they hadn't gone through justification, sanctification, and transformation only in a physical sense, only in a physical sense, not in the heart and mind. And so he tells them, you are the father of the devil and the desires of your father you want to do. You want to do what Satan wants you to do. Now if this is this way among these people, how much is this the truth in the pagan world, in the atheist world?

Understand the depth of what he's saying here. Even among you people, these descendants of Abraham, he says, you know what? You're just of your father the devil because you have not truly been transformed in the way that you need to be transformed.

He goes on and explains to them just how much they're like Satan because they want to commit murder and because he's a murderer. You have to understand when we talk about worldliness that God has a very powerful reaction to what he calls evil. God is very serious about good and very serious about evil. Remember the lie. You determine what's good and evil. That's what he told them. You get to determine it. You will be like God. You will understand and choose what's good and choose what's evil.

And here are the Pharisees trying to do the good with a real dedication. They were all circumcised on the eighth day. Real dedication. And then he said you're missing the point because you don't understand what it is to really live in this world. Just like Dinah didn't. Her's was just being naive. He tells them you should know better. You should know better. You have the scripture. So what is worldliness? You know when you look at the word I mentioned before, abomination, that's a powerful word. It means that you literally find something repulsive. It is repulsity. You want to push it away. That's how terrible it is. You know there's a lot of things in the Bible God calls abominations. He says I wish to push them away. He not only says that, He says He hates these things. He hates it. Now His hatred is not like ours, ours. Our hatred is not objective. His hatred is. I hate that, but I love you and will help you change. That's objectivity. I repulse by that, but I love you and will help you overcome. That's God. We hate something, we just what? Want to get rid of it. Push it away. So God's different in how He processes things. We have to understand that. But when He says He hates something, that's a powerful statement. Let's go to Proverbs 6. We're just laying the foundation here. Proverbs 6. Now what's interesting here is that a few of these things are mentioned in the law of the Torah as abominations and actually have the death penalty to it. But many of these things aren't in the law at all in terms of, you know, thou shalt not murder is in the law. But let's look at what He says here. These six things the Lord hates. Yes, seven are an abomination to Him, absolutely repulsive, a proud look. Well, pride is condemned in the law, but there's nothing that says, oh, go out and stone the person with a proud look. A lying tongue. Now that's a serious capital offense crime in certain circumstances. Hands that shed innocent blood. That is a capital offense. A heart that devises wicked plans. He hates that. You don't find one of the Ten Commandments, thou shalt not devise wicked plans in your heart, but it's obviously something that God would hate. Feet that are swift in running to evil, to do wrong things. A false witness who speaks lies. And one who sows discord among brethren. That's very interesting. A person who sows discord among brethren, who, you know, gossips, who works the, you know, plays the little political games, to get people who love each other to not love each other anymore. He puts that in the same list as murder. God hates certain things, and they're abominations. They're repulsive. There's even a few places where David says, God hates the people who do these things.

You know, we are to hate the sin and love the sinner. That's what we're supposed to do. When God throws someone in like a fire, it's actually out of love, but He's going to kill them. He will not abide forever in evil. Evil is repulsive to Him.

You and I were born into a world we have to understand. You and I were born into a world that is a mixture of good and evil. Every human being, including ourselves, have a corrupted human nature, and the God of this age, the greatest influence on the lives of everybody around this world, whether they're in Mongolia or South Africa or Egypt or Canada or wherever, Mexico, United States, everybody is under the influence of the originator of evil.

So we have to look at this for a minute from God's viewpoint. He looks on a world that says, I love these people, made in my image, but I will not live with evil. So He puts up with evil only for a time period. You and I are living in a time when He puts up with evil. Even then, He steps in every once in a while, doesn't He? And He's going to step in with Jesus Christ, because when Jesus Christ comes back, if He doesn't, Satan will have driven humanity into such a state of evil that we will destroy ourselves. It says no one will survive. And we have the capability of doing that. That can be done today.

Just with nuclear weapons alone. So He will not live forever with evil. In fact, in His kingdom, when He changes everybody into His family members and creates a new heaven and a new earth, Satan is removed. We don't know what happens to Him. He's set off in outer darkness, right? And there is no evil in the influence of God. There's nothing evil. It's gone. He will not abide with it. That's why we can't take it lightly in ourselves. And we have to realize that we are to try to... everybody has a... we have a light that's supposed to shine. So if our light shines, we're going to come in contact with people who aren't moving away from evil. We're supposed to shine that light. And He may call people. Because that's what He does. That's what He's doing right now. The purpose of the Church is to call people out of the world. It says that over and over again in the New Testament. So I guess if we start with a grand concept of worldliness, what is it? Basically everything. In this grand concept. Because everything's been tainted. Everything. In one way or another. Now, if you try to see the whole way... you have to look for the good, by the way. You can't live, you know, all look at... you know, you can see a baby and say, oh, look at that cute little baby. Shame that Satan is deceiving them. You know, I mean, you can literally get to the place where you just condemn everything. And you never enjoy a minute of life. That's not what we're supposed to do. In fact, there's some Scriptures that talk about that. But what we're supposed to do is recognize the world we were born into. That's why it says in Ephesians 2, another... Okay, we're going back to something fundamental here before we start breaking this down. And I can't break this down too much because it would take hours and hours. I'm going to break it down in one concept. Let's go to Ephesians 2.

And Paul's writing to the predominantly Gentile church here in Ephesus. And having been there, no, six weeks ago, I... Every time I read the book of Ephesus now, it just means so much. He says to them, this is the church, and you he made alive. God has a remedy for the results of sin, including death. And all human beings are condemned to death, right? We understand that when we went through justification. That God justifies human beings. He brings them back into relationship with Him. So God has a remedy for this, of bringing people back into relationship. You have been brought into relationship with God.

And you he made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world. You just lived like everybody else. According to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the less of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others. By nature, we were a mixture of good and evil, under the influence of Satan. So we think it's right. We understand if it's your nature, you think it's right. It's one of the difficulties of actually coming out of the world. Part of us wants to believe certain things are right because it feels natural. It feels natural to the people involved. But by nature, we were part of the world. And by nature, we were influenced by the God of this age.

So when we're talking about worldliness, we're talking about things that are part of this age. Drinking alcohol is not worldly unless you drink too much, then it's worldly. Dancing isn't worldly unless it becomes some kind of lewd dancing, then it's worldly. You cross a line. So we live in this understanding that everything can be tainted in this world because of Satan and because it then feels natural to human beings. It seems absolutely right to human beings. James 4. Because this is going to create a tension in your life. Because there's still things, as you come out of this world and I come out of this world, that feel natural to us. There's certain thought processes that seem right to us. There's certain things we do that seem right to us.

He's talking here about adultery, but I want to break into the next sentence he makes. Verse 4 says of James 4, adulterers and adulteresses, he says, here's the point. He's just not talking about sexual sin here. He's talking about this greater concept. Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Now I've seen people take this to say, well, my neighbor's over here. I know they drink too much and I know one of them's fooling around. So every time I see them, I'm just going to yell at them, repent you sinner. You know, God's going to get you. And that's not what he's talking about here. He's not talking about that kind of interaction. He's talking about when we try to adapt back into what we're coming out of. Well, this is our place where we feel comfortable. So to leave the world while still living in the world is an uncomfortable place to be at times. And real Christianity is uncomfortable at times. And if it's too comfortable for you, either you are super righteous, or maybe a little bit you're too much part of the world. I guess you have to decide. Because the bottom line is, we are part of a different world. We've been called to become part of a different world. You know the story of Lot? We tell that all the time. A righteous man who moved into a city that was, you know, a city just filled with sin. And we look at the sexual sins there, but there was a lot of sins there. Greed. I mean, there's a couple places in the Bible that list the sins of Sodom. And there's a whole lot of sins inside. The whole society was eaten out. Because certain societies become more evil than others. Certain people become more evil than others. That's the thing about being a mixture of good and evil. I was reading something the other day by Jerry Kwon...

Hoff... Bonn Hoff... What's his name? Hoff... I know it. Anyways, he's a German Lutheran who stood up against Hitler. And was killed in the concentration camp because of it. And he wrote some books because he went to England partway through the war. Then he went back because he said, I have to go tell people how evil Nazism is. And so they put him back in a concentration camp. And a few days before the war was over, the order came killing. We're going to lose the war anyways because they didn't want to make a martyr out of him. So they killed him. But he wrote in there, how could... He says, how could my people, the German people, who are some of the smartest people in the world, they have remarkable talents, some of the greatest craftsmen... I mean, there's all these things that they're known for. And how could they become so evil? And he says, very simple. He realized good people and evil people, good people have to stand up to evil people. He said, and when the average person loses the ability to logically think through everything, they're educated, they have lots of knowledge, but basically they don't understand wisdom, and they become selfish. Once you no longer have the ability to think logically, and once the... he even mentions about once the concept of God is watered down so much that that's changes, and you become selfish, he says you become stupid, and the evil people make you evil. Isn't that interesting? Inability to think logically, rejection of the power of God, and selfishness. I don't know, that's the world I live in. He said, and the result was, they just followed along.

Lot got in there long enough that even though he didn't participate in it, he sort of became tainted by it. I mean, we know the story where the angels show up, and he has the two daughters, and we know that, right? And he says, here take my daughters, which is bizarre, as he's struggling with what am I supposed to do here, they're going to kill everybody, including these two messengers who came from God, and God saved him. I'm going to go to 2 Peter 2, though. So we look at Peter, and we condemn him so much at the time, and what's interesting is, God looked at him and said, you're too much, you're in the world, you reject the world, but you're becoming too much like the world. So what was God's response? Verse 7 of 2 Peter 2. And he delivered righteous lot that was oppressed by the filthy conduct of the wicked. He was oppressed by it. There almost isn't a day when my wife and I will talk that one of us is feeling incredibly oppressed by the world we live in. It's a sick place. And you know what? The reason nobody can find any answers, because there's lots of people honestly trying to find answers, is because at the core is a rejection of Satan's world at a return to God, and nobody really wants to do that, or they think they've already returned to God.

So the solutions can never be found. That's why nothing changes in the greater context until Christ comes back. Because at the core of all of it is a spiritual issue. Because who runs the world? I don't mean runs it, he's not pulling every string, but he influences everything that goes on. It's Satan. And we're corrupted human nature. We feel that's natural. We actually... that seems to make sense to us, his values, his standards. He says, verse 8, This is important because this is the point Peter's making. The Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust under the punishment for the day of judgment. He says, but Lot was saved from that because God said, I got to get him out of there. And he got him out of there.

That's why... let's go to Proverbs. I wasn't going to read this, but let's read this. Proverbs 29. Because I get one more story I want to tell you. Proverbs 29 from the Bible here. Proverbs 29 verse... I think it's 27. Let me see. Okay. An unjust man is an abomination to the righteous. We feel repulsed by certain things.

I was in Germany a number of years ago, and they had a big, big gay pride parade. And I missed all of it, which I was happy, until I came to the hotel, and there was the last of the parade. Which was a bunch of men in speedos. And a few of them start naked. I have to admit, I found that repulsive.

Now, if I had a chance, I'd go to them and say, God has something better for this, guys. You know, I'd go preach the gospel to them, and if they were repented, it'd be great. Probably they'd beat the tar out of me. Okay, well that's probably what would happen. But I was repulsed by it. God was repulsed by it.

He didn't say, go kill them, by the way. That's not what we're told to do. The Church is not told to go commit capital punishment. Human nations are given that prerogative back in Genesis, but the Church doesn't have any prerogative to do those kinds of things.

We are to tell people to repent, come out of this world. That's what we're to tell them. But notice the rest of this. And He who is upright in the way is an abomination to the wicked.

I say to her all the time, she'll get frustrated, she won't care if I tell you this. I'll say, Kim, you have to realize, the same sort of righteous indignation you have is exactly how they feel about you. They have a righteous indignation against you, because it goes against what they believe is good. That's what Satan's done. That's why there's this righteous indignation. You are evil.

I can't imagine much more evil than taking little children, mutilating them, in the name of changing their sex. I mean, that's just appalling. Right? But to say that you're against that, for those who believe that's good, they have the same repulsion against us. Now you understand worldliness. It's a spirit. It's a spirit driven by a literal spirit, Satan. The Germans have a word, zeitgeist. I've used that word a couple of times before. Zeitgeist means the spirit of an age. In other words, if you take the standards, the culture, the morality, the education of a certain group of people at a certain time, there will be a zeitgeist.

There will be a certain commonality to it. You know, people will say, I've had people older than I am, say, yeah, the 1950s had a totally different feel to it than the United States does now. Well, there was a zeitgeist that was different then. There was a different spirit to the country. And that wasn't all good either. There was a lot of bad in the country then, too. So, we talk about the zeitgeist of an age. You and I are living in a time when the spirit of this age is changing, it's going through a transformation.

It happens all the time through history. It's becoming something else where all the norms are going to be turned upside down with whole new definitions to right and wrong. You say, how could that happen? It happens because Adam and Eve were kicked out of Eden and told, you get to choose.

You will have the ability, once you choose to do evil, one choice to disobey God, and you'll now have the ability to choose what's good and evil and everything. That lie permeates the world, and that is the basis of worldliness. I've gone through a lot of time to give you the definition. It's the basis of it. The basis of it is, God doesn't determine good and evil.

The creator of good, who is all good, of course now people are accusing God of being evil, a lot of people are choosing Jesus of actually doing evil, and we're talking about Christians. So, people are being judged by what? I choose. And Satan is telling the exact same lie. You choose. And a new zeitgeist, a new spirit of the age is being created.

And when the people buy into that, what happens to them? They believe they're enlightened. We have a better way, a more intelligent way, a more spiritual way, a better way that's more good. You see that there's a movement now to turn AI, to ask AI to write a new Bible, to take all the religions of the world and write a new Bible so that everybody can follow the same Bible. You know, all that'll do is divide more.

That'll bring some people together and divide other people. The Hindus aren't going to follow that Bible, and the Muslims aren't going to follow that Bible, and some of the Christians aren't. Others will all join in, and then it'll all fall apart.

Because you know why? Eventually, everybody's deciding for themselves good and evil. Every problem in human history ends up with the same problem. It never ends up with a solution. Never has, never will, until Christ comes back. That's worldliness. And it changes. The spirit of this age, the spirit of that age, you know, ancient Greece had the spirit of its age. Every group of people anywhere, those that tribe in New Guinea, very innocent people, they had a spirit of their age, what they thought was true, which was some kind of paganism, and that was what they believed was true.

The spirit of the age. Worldliness changes in its expressions. It doesn't change in its core. The core of worldliness is the same all the time. You get to choose. And you come up with a better way, a whole lot better way than God, because God, all He wants to do is take away your choices, which is not true. God just says, if you choose this way, this is how life works. If you choose this way, you'll destroy yourself. Now you get to choose. The one way leads to life, the other way leads to death.

I want to give you just an example. You know, one of the elements of the zeitgeist of the modern U.S. society, and it's actually in Europe too, is that everybody makes up their own religion. And this will be what we'll end with here, this little story. They make up their own religion. And so that's why people say, well, I'm not religious, I'm spiritual. And it's personal. I personally decide how God or the gods or whatever want me to live.

There's books out right now. I found a website, because my wife got upset with me because I was searching for a website on this subject. I found one, and then they started sending ads to her. And the whole website was on how to discover the goddess inside of you. Not that I'm searching for a goddess inside of me.

But I knew that that's a concept that certain people are dealing with, and I thought, well, I've been talking to somebody about that. I'm going to look it up. Now they're trying to sell her little trinkets to help her find out what goddess is inside of her.

So, they're all the same problem. Let's go to Judges, Chapter 17. The book of Judges, to me, is just so fascinating.

I spent so much time in the New Testament. Every once in a while, I just love to go back into the Old Testament.

Here's the zeitgeist of Israel during the time of Judges, Verse 6, of Chapter 17. In their day, there was no king in Israel, and everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

There's the core of it right there. They created...it's a little different culture that we...the culture of ancient Israel, of course, was quite different than the culture we live in today. But their worldliness was the same. You choose, and you'll be like God, knowing what's good and what's evil. You read the story here. It's about a man from Ephraim, named Micah, who stole a large amount of money from his mother. And then he takes it back to his mother. He's a young man. He's not a kid. And he gives her the money back and asks for forgiveness. She's so impressed that she takes some of the money, Verse 4, and he returned the silver to his mother. And the mother took 200 shekels of silver and gave them to the silversmith. She made it into a carved image and a molded image, and they were in the house of Micah. So the man Micah had a shrine. He built like a small temple with this images in it, and made an ephod, which is a type of dress for a priest, and household idols, and he consecrated one of his sons, who became the priest. So here's a man who lived in Israel, who believed, by the way, in the God of Israel.

You know, at this point the temple wasn't built. The tabernacle still existed, but it wasn't in Jerusalem. They didn't have much opportunity to interact with Levites and priests and be taught God's way. So this made sense. I will worship God here, my way. And it will be much more spiritual. It will be a better way, more enlightened. We'll have some images that represent the God of Israel. Well, a traveling Levite comes through, because the Levites at this point were actually, some of them were traveling through Israel selling their services. You need a priest, you can hire me. So he hires this Levite, because he knows that only Levites can be priests of God. And he hires the Levite to work in his little temple. And it becomes very, you know, people come to it, it becomes profitable. It's great! You have now a priest of God serving God. Verse 12.

So Micah consecrated the Levite, and the young man became his priest and lived in the house of Micah. Now notice what Micah says. Micah said, Now I know that the Lord, the God of Israel. He doesn't use other names that could apply to other gods, like El. He uses what commonly pronounces Yahweh, although that's not the exact pronunciation. So he uses this word, this name, that's specific for the God of Israel. He says, The God of Israel will be good to me since I have a Levite as a priest. That's what happens in the zeitgeist of this age that said every man could do what was right in his own eyes, but still worship God. They could still worship God just however they felt like it. Whatever gave them the best, the warmest spiritual feelings, that's how you worship God. And this guy had his own church, his own statues. I mean, he's disobeyed God on so many levels here. You just go through all kinds of the Ten Commandments. He's broken all kinds of the Ten Commandments. But he's fixed it because he brought in a real priest.

There's a good example of religion is whatever you do in your own eyes. Because remember, he's worshiping God. People would have thought, this is how you should worship God. This is actually a better way to worship God. What's interesting is what happened here. Unintended consequences. Unintended consequences was a small army from the tribe of Dan came through the area looking to... They wanted to... Actually, they eventually took a little Canaanite city there, killed everybody in it, made it their city. Just basically a raiding party from Dan. And they're coming through and they find this shrine. And they all go up and they worship the God of Israel at the shrine. They like it so much that they tell the priest, we want you to come with us. This is just a... Mike is just a little operation here. We've got 600 men. We're going to find a place to live, bring all our wives and children. You're going to be a priest over a major city. So, the priest goes with them and so the Danites steal everything that Micah has. His shrine, his statues, his ephod, everything that he's made and his priest. And when he goes to protest, they tell him, back down and we're going to kill you right here. So the story ends with Micah standing outside his house watching his whole religion be carted off by another group of Israelites who are now going to worship God in a more enlightened way.

There you go. The zeitgeist of the age. We all worship God the way we want to. If you read the next two chapters, it even gets worse. The Danites degenerate into Sodom. And there's the civil war in which the Israelites kill everybody in the tribe of Dan except 600 young men. They kill all the elderly, all the women, all the children, and most of the men. And an entire tribe was wiped out to 600 men. Well, everybody did what was right in their own eyes.

That's the zeitgeist of our age today, in terms of religion. So, we have a very general working definition of worldliness. Not in detail yet. In fact, I'm working out a chart I'll give you on breaking worldliness down into smaller bites. But in its bigger concept, it is the spirit of the age, which is driven by a great spirit, an evil spirit, and his demons. And you're going to find demonic activity exploding in the United States and all through the world. Because this new spirit of the age invites it. It invites it. It wants it. As everybody searches for Hinduism or New Age Christianity, it invites it in. So, worldliness is simply following your corrupted human nature, your natural human nature, under the direction of Satan. Righteousness is giving your life to God and letting Him work in you to prepare you for the coming age. That's what it is. When things can be fixed. When humanity can be brought together in the way it's supposed to be. Now, to really understand this, we have to break down how does Satan influence humanity and how does Satan influence us? That's what we'll talk about next time when we talk about the God of this age.