Rejected men are violent and dangerous, their anger turned outward onto others. Rejected women, on the other hand, turn their anger inward, to work destruction on themselves. Rejected people seek one another's company, and it is in groups that the rejected see their destructive urges compounded.
The current unraveling of society can be seen as a symptom of this tendency for destructive behavior to appear right and normal to members of the participating group. A pattern that is world wide, a phenomenon mutated into civilized, developing, and re-primitivized cultures, the legitimization of rejection in society heralds the coming anarchy of the Great Tribulation. And the Church, with its current tending toward the identity of a political interest group, will ultimately choose to be caught up in the schema of rejection or to stand apart from it, to present as a testimony to the nations a last chance offering of personal salvation to individuals whose identities are circumscribed by their own self-destructing group. And then the end will come (Matthew 24:14).
It is my belief that the ability of the Church to hold fast to its calling will depend on its willingness today to minister to the spiritual needs of the victims of rejection, who are coalescing ominously just outside the doors. Because victimization groups are ugly, dangerous, and hard to get to, it is easy to be repelled by them, and more convenient to ignore them, even to maintain that where they are is where they want to be and deserve to be. Thus, there have not been too many in the Church, throughout its long history of intolerance, willing reach out to these lost.
But you can't ignore them. They are who you were. Your heart, even now, is wrenched by the image of their suffering. Yes, that's the harvest. And it's the very harvest that, through the awesome, astonishing outpouring of the Spirit, will light Revival fires within the Church. But before we can welcome in the harvest, we must recognize and believe that what we are seeing is what has been prophesied; for these signs point with certainty toward the Lord's return.
In this chapter we will look at the spiritual reality behind rejection-based interest group politics. We will examine two groups in particular, homosexuals and teen gangs, to see where they fit into these end times. And then, we will explore our part in this necessary harvest.
The earth shall stagger like a drunken man, and shall sway to and fro like a hammock; its transgression shall lie heavily upon it, and it shall fall and not rise again. (Isaiah 24:18 Amp)
Rejection is most pronounced and potentially most damaging to society when the rejected acquire governmental sanction, the consequences of immorality notwithstanding. The trend to normalize and even encourage what is Biblically forbidden is strong in today's multi-cultural, over-analyzed America, as we grow more and more reluctant to condemn or curtail those who are, after all, victims. It's true that you cannot legislate morality: people will do what they will do. They will do it because they believe they want to do it; or if they are sane enough or courageous enough to see that they don't actually want to do it, they will tell you they do it because they don't have any choice. And they will do it to the bitter end, just to prove the point.
At the same time, the country that sanctions immorality, typically, does not long endure. And God doesn't have to rain destruction upon it. That which is sown to the flesh reaps its own contaminated harvest, feeding upon itself until it is all used up, proving in its convulsive, ugly death no point at all.
In today's society, it is in groups that the legitimate gripes of the rejected become enmeshed with their spiritual oppression. Therefore, when outcasts bond together in groups with others who are similarly alienated and have the same standards of behavior, their view of themselves changes. They come to define their bondages as normal, if not positive, attributes. But rejection itself grows more powerful.
There has always been oppression. Those with power control, use and destroy those without it. Oppression feeds rejection, creating victimization. However, in today's society, where forces that naturally stabilize the political system cannot be taken for granted, victims strive with victimizers for equal rights.
Politics is not a phenomenon of nature. It is unique to fallen spiritual beings, who are directed by an unseen evil that they neither understand nor wholly object to. The goal is power. In the animal kingdom not everyone wants power; the top dog gets many privileges, but every time it's time for a fight, like it or not, out he trots to take on the enemy. Among humans, the lust for power is universal, and it grows in proportion to the influence of rejection.
Typical of this trend are two groups, one outside the social structure and one inside it, whose presence is felt at all levels of society. Gays, who wield influence money in the quest for social acceptance, share many characteristics with youthful gang members, who use guns to inspire fear. Both are trying to acquire respect--and with it self-respect--through force. Neither group is having much success.
The resurgent liberalism we are witnessing today, thankfully in its death throes, is destined to inspire a conservative backlash that we will have even more reason to fear. When the forces of the "righteous right" gain power, there are no victims any more. Instead, the high-sounding ideals of free will and free choice are viewed as the main determiners of right and wrong behavior.
Nevertheless, few homosexuals become that way through free choice, but because same sex love appears to be the next step in the development process; nor do teens choose to join gangs of their own free will, but because gangs in the inner cities have replaced the family as the main vehicle of socialization. Both groups are estranged from society because they are estranged from their own selves. God gave free will, but Satan took it away.
Violence is the mark of the end times. The savage acts of depravity humans commit on one another in these latter days only mirror the tidal waves, raging fires, cyclonic winds, and colliding plates that stagger the earth on a daily basis. Human violence happens mostly in cities; today it is happening in the countrysides of less developed countries also, where massive social dislocation has spawned a generation of nomads. Armed adolescents form a road-warrior culture that thrives on violence for the sake of violence, decked in ethnic or tribal regalia, the gang colors of the another world. As family structures are uprooted by war and disaster, the breakdown of old value systems makes chaos inevitable. Overpopulation tugs at its reins; the universal indebtedness of governments makes long-term solutions impossible.
Everywhere today poverty and intoxication are fermenting with persecution to explode in personal and social insanity. With borders eroded by waves of immigrants, our violent society joins the universal drift to violence. In the Third World, Robert Kaplan notes, the distinction between war and crime is becoming increasingly blurred. "Where there has always been mass poverty, people find liberation in violence," he writes. [1] That sounds like South Central L.A., where they refer to the riot as "the uprising." The fierceness of anger is the ultimate high. Violence is always the end result of exploitation, whether real or perceived, because the wounded nourish rejection, and rejection always says, "Strike!"
This post-modern world is Satan's finest hour. All the prince of evil is, all he hopes to achieve in these end times, can be found tied up in what's happening to the outcasts of the earth today - the tremendous pressure on the souls of men ground down by hopelessness and alienation. It has to do, all of it, with the mentality of self that knows no morality above itself. It is self seeking dominance in relationship with other selves in an effort to satisfy its own cravings. In politics, the powerful blindly seek more power, while pretending to find painless, though not cheap, solutions to the painful problems they have created. Our welfare system is a perfect example: a cop-out, a benevolent facilitator that steps in to bless the process of victimization by promoting social irresponsibility, while the criminal justice system feeds off its self-perpetuating spoils.
What are the country's most prominent social ills? "Name your pathology," says Newsweek editor Joe Klein; there's not one that can't be traced to the same corrosion of values that puts man at the center of his personal, relative universe. Indeed, it would be both unnatural and illogical to expect that confused people would make anything but short-sighted choices "in pursuit of happiness." If your life is unhappy, you deserve to get what you can. If you have no value system but the one that revolves around you, you live only for the moment and learn how to take what you want.
Nevertheless, the end result of doing your own thing at the expense of the right thing leaves a gaping emptiness that makes cohesion impossible in both individuals and society, however righteously it permits people collected within any inward-looking support group to perceive themselves. And self-will, acted out by homosexuals, teen gangs, radical feminists, legislators, prostitutes, etc., reaches its pinnacle in neither high nor sordid places, but in the proliferation of single parent families.
The family is the central unit of a society, within which children, its future adults, are socialized according to rules and traditions. Children are not merely a facet of our personal search for identity or a proof of masculine virility; they are life's great responsibility, upon which tomorrow hangs. We have destroyed the primary vehicle of human socialization: we allow families to start without being able to provide security; we make it acceptable for them to dissolve at whim; we permit them to limp along without any capacity to model the maturing process that is the backbone of social responsibility. Well, we are bound to see chaotic results.
The spiritual consequences of this moral blindness are even worse. How, within the span of a generation, could we have violated enough spiritual laws to reap the consequences of this tremendous moral decay? Preachers always point to the Sixties as the downfall of our society. It's true that Baby Boomers always feel that they are at the heart of destiny. I am no exception. Now the world belongs to us. Those born in the years surrounding the rebirth of Israel are now the presidents, generals, bankers, CEOs, teachers, and preachers, the movers and shakers of the world today. And you can bet that we are still as self-indulgent, self-centered, and self-righteous as ever - and as moved with compassion as ever at wrongs we cannot right. Are we not the generation that shall not pass away until the Lord's return (Matthew 24:34).
By all reckoning, it was the Baby Boomer generation that brought God's wrath upon this nation. We are not entirely to blame. First, we were done a great wrong, given up to the fire by parents who rubberstamped the Vietnam War, buying into official lies, turning their children into killers (Leviticus 18:21, Deuteronomy 5:20,17). Carried away by the righteousness of the anti-war movement, we rebelled against the parents God directed us to honor, compounding the wrong (Deuteronomy 5:16). And, of course, there was the free love, the dope, the blasphemy, sponging off parents and the government, and the Eastern, Native American, and occultish religions we tried out (Deuteronomy 5:18, Galatians 5:20, Deuteronomy 5:11,19,7,8).
True, we were misguided. In fact, we were often dead wrong; many of us now admit that, while countless others died to prove it. But were our hearts completely evil? We were just looking for love - in all the wrong places. The hippie era passed, as explosive and beautiful and ephemeral as fireworks that hang there, for an instant, in the summer sky - ungraspable, but forever etched upon the soul. Did we not turn the world upside down? What was right became wrong; what was wrong became right. And we laid the foundation for the current manifestation of perverted liberalism, that throughout history has seemed to herald the demise of great republics. The need to subvert the system to fix the system fractured the foundation, giving way to a proliferation of rights without responsibilities.
And now that conceptually pure, but bankrupt, humanist urging toward utopia once again is feeding off its good intentions. As columnist George Will writes:
Liberalism has become a pretzel-like persuasion, so twisted that it rationalizes racial, ethnic, and sexual spoils systems as part of the "identity politics" now Balkanizing America into grievance groups. Each group nourishes its unassuageable sense of victimization and demands that group rights supersede individual rights.[2]
A desperate need for self esteem has given birth to identity group politics. But let's face it. Unlimited acceptance by society will not make gays gay. Jobs, though necessary, are no more a solution to the blight of urban neighborhoods than prison is. And a constitutional amendment sanctioning abortion on demand still won't free women from the consequences of male exploitation. Rejection, which is not created by circumstances, is not cured by them either.
The rejected have no capacity to perceive that their potential is blocked, not by external repression, but by separation from the Source of Life. The true problem is internal --and is inherently difficult to perceive for those who have spent a lifetime compensating for their rejection by unhealthy, compulsive, external behaviors. Grievance groups are made up of individuals attempting to deal in sociological ways with a deep, abiding, personal despair.
The scenery changes when your heart leaps in faith; you see two worlds instead of one. The world of light begins to draw you, even as the world of darkness begins to repel you. Then, in an instant, the realization of the enormity of your sin - your sodomy, your rebellion, your murder -becomes overwhelming. Suddenly, God's love for you, magnificent beyond belief, brings the realization that the anger you carried for so many years had no power to fill your voids. Now at last the Word of God can seek out and permeate every cavity in your soul. Through Him only can oppression cease. We are victors, not victims (1 Corinthians 15:57).
Few of us stumble on salvation by accident. Most cannot hear without a preacher. And part of the problem is that those who struggle with rejection don't want to hear preachers, who in their rigid self-righteousness condemn the hard-won group identity. To those under rejection, Christians are first of all the enemy, because we feel obliged to expend our energies doing battle in the political/social arena on behalf of God. Fighting against the legitimization of self-gratification and general social irresponsibility, we reap abuse by committing the same sins as those we condemn (Romans 2:1). Worse yet, we polarize and complicate society still more, contributing to the process of inward decay by which all mighty nations have tumbled. The good news of the Gospel loses its power when we throw it in people's faces instead of living it.
Do we really think our mission is to save the world? Does God want us to do that? Didn't we read the end of the Book? The world we know is destined for oblivion. Our job is to save the people in it, not by joining the chorus of rejection or by dictating behavior, but by love and by example.
We have to take the Ten Commandments in perspective. God's commandments are not restrictive, abstract, impossible standards of behavior. Instead, they can be demonstrated to be the best and safest way to do things. They avert chaos, prevent diseases, keep families together, and, by reflecting God's Eternal Perfection, promote the beauty and creativity that is true art. The Ten Commandments are the accountability God demands of man. But He also knew when He gave them that we would not be able to keep them.
We are all imperfect and no one knows it better than God. That's why the love that Jesus called us to and demonstrated for us is God's answer for all humanity. Furthermore, it is only through the act of Grace, by which the Spirit of the Lord comes to dwell within us, that we are even capable of the love that He requires.
Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors and showed us how to reach out to the hurting. Blaming the world for our own problems, we are so often content to only reach in. While insisting upon a higher accountability in our own lives, we need to model God's perfect acceptance based on His ability to see us all - the wretched, stumbling humankind that we are - in terms of our highest good, which is His image. Most of all, as Christians we need to understand that because the various elements of society we object to are under rejection, we cannot reach them by rejecting them. We can only reach them by meeting this rejection with love.
As we have seen, rejection is a personal problem requiring a personal solution, which can only begin with a restoration through Christ of the right relationship between God and man. Victimization allows us to blame others instead of facing our sin. When the spiritual forces that feed off rejection gather strength in social groups, they drive personal solutions farther away. Through rejection, Satan plays ping pong with the lives of men and women here on earth, by holding them in the grip of irrational lusts and hatreds. Nor are these forces a product of random accident. They flow forth as man nourishes and cherishes these ancient idols.
We are always putting idols between ourselves and God, cutting ourselves off from His Presence by deifying things, emotions, traditions, or people. Yet, throughout the Ten Commandments, God denounces idol worship; in the Second Commandment, He defines and condemns idolatry specifically, spelling out its consequences:
You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in
heaven above or on the
earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for
the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who
hate me, but showing
love to thousands who love me and keep my commandments.
(Exodus 20:4-6
NIV)
No idols have as much power over men as sexual idols. Sexual idolatry is the hallmark of our age, as it was in ancient Greece. Therefore, what the Apostle Paul had to say about how to avoid its snare is as relevant in today's neo-pagan world as it was in the unconverted world that Paul preached to. Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth, Paul instructs those at Colassae, condemning a catalog of familiar idols: Fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence and covetousness, which is idolatry. He further warns that for the sake of these things: the wrath of God cometh on the children of disobedience (Colossians 3:5 KJ). Does the wrath of God include AIDS, with its cost in human suffering, lost potential, and ruined lives among the innocent as well as the guilty? You'll have to answer that one yourself.
If we understand Paul's original language, we can appreciate how these false gods have come to dominate our society, with such brutal consequences. First, fornication, from the same root as "pornography," can mean any kind of all the assorted types of sexual relations that are not the one type God lawfully sanctions. Fornication is the worship of sex. Secondly, uncleanness, which is the lure of immoral behavior, is the worship of an erotic lifestyle. Inordinate affection is derived from the Greek word paths, meaning the suffering of passion, that is, the pain of love; it is the love of being in love - my own great idolatry in times past. Evil concupiscence refers to a longing for what is forbidden or what is harmful, the lusting after perversion. Covetousness, in this context, refers to sexual addiction, the continual desire for more and greater arousal.
Homosexuality seems to embrace all these sins; indeed, this idolatry is ravaging our time. However, in many ways, homosexuality is no more or less worthy of condemnation than other sexual sins. Fornication and perversion are hardly exclusive to homosexuality; rare are the adults these days who have not dabbled. In fact, the only sexual experiences God blesses are those within an enduring heterosexual marriage.
On the other hand, without a doubt, homosexuality in all its exotic variations is forbidden in Leviticus 18 and 21. Centuries later, in his first letter to the Corinthian church, Paul moved further toward specific condemnation of homosexuality by denouncing the effeminate and abusers of themselves with mankind (6:9).
Nevertheless, if we look to the original Greek of the Corinthian passage, we perceive that homosexuality is condemned chiefly because it is idolatry. The idolatry of homosexuality is that it is worship of the self. In fact, paiderastia, the word used for homosexuality, is man-boy sex, which gives an exact picture of the condition. More than anything else, homosexuality is the sexualized attempt made by the incomplete man (or woman), unaffirmed at one or more crucial stages in identity development, to repossess a lost part of the self.
A compulsive, addictive behavior controlled by strong demonic forces, the homosexual drive reenacts a deep, internal, desperate desire to go back, to repossess the beauty of innocence - at the point where growth stopped and ugliness began - and also to break free of the immature self, to get on with the identity formation process. It is no coincidence that so many of those who become homosexuals are traumatized or molested at a critical time in development. At this point the wounded spirit is driven back and enslaved by a varied multitude of harassing and oppressing demons. Meanwhile, the haunted soul stumbles on through physical maturation - without the sustaining growth of the spirit.
When a person yearns to homosexually possess another, it is the soul attempting to put on a part of itself, to fill a void that has existed in the identity since its spiritual growth was halted. The self yearns for who it wants to be. The lack of a healthy same sex role model, especially during adolescence, results in both a longing for same sex intimacy and an undeveloped gender identity. The compulsion to possess another of the same sex is compounded by acted-out lust and the twin bondages of pathos and perversion. Nevertheless, the fantasies of the homosexual are always for his or her own idealized self. This is the idol that the gay or lesbian worships.
People who become homosexual are from an early age a battleground for physical, psychological, and spiritual forces. The missing relationship with a same-sex parent always stands as a lynch-pin. The self is never adequately defined, creating a tremendous anxiety that is projected in various directions, blamed on society or the latest lover, and frequently muted by eroticism , alcohol, or drugs. Personality may have been further mis-defined and shamed by the molestation a floundering identity seems to almost invite upon itself. Then, too, sometimes non-identity is given physical impetus by a hormone imbalance; creating a delicacy and grace in man or a coarseness in woman, these traits, reinforced at the expense of true masculinity or femininity, form a false self-image. Add AIDS and the fear of AIDS to the picture, and you have Satan's perfect entrapment through rejection: a totally alienated self, compelled to seek itself to the point of death.
Leanne Payne quotes this illuminating passage:
Whoever does not love himself is an egoist. He must become an egoist necessarily because he is not sure of his identity and is therefore always trying to find himself. Like Narcissus, being engrossed with himself, he becomes self-centered.[3]
She continues:
Another Greek term of "self" and "love" denoting the same idea is auto-eroticism . . . . The failure to pass from the narcissistic stage [of early adolescence] on into that of self-acceptance is . . . the failure to accept and love oneself aright. . . . A study of homosexuality turns out to be a study of arrested growth in at least a part of the personality; it is a study in immaturity . . . with its mood swings between a selfish egoism on the one hand and an annihilating self-hatred on the other. [4]
Homosexuality is the least understood of all bondages. Christians at least come closer in their understanding than secularists, who snort at the notion of sin. Yet most Christians have the impression that homosexuality is a very vile, yet very different type of sin, the product of conscious wrong choices. To God, however, all sin is vile, while sinners of all sorts do not realize they have the capacity to make right choices. The curse of the homosexual is, in its extreme form, the curse of fallen man: idolatry and eternal separation from God.
Christians often judge homosexuals to be weak for giving into perverse temptations. If we could witness the spiritual storms, in which these fragile brothers and sisters are forced to exist, and the emotional pain that always rests just below the surface, would we see things differently? While never condoning the sin, would we waste less time condemning it? Or would we, like Jesus, be moved with compassion, and, recognizing the desperation of the man or woman behind the offending exterior, offer love instead? For only love will save them.
You can never rise higher than what you worship. This is the condemnation of our age. We live in a time of rampant idolatry, not knowing God, saturated but never satiated by our lusts. Man pays a horrendous price for never rising above all the created things that he has placed between himself and the Creator. In a broader sense, all sin is a form of idol worship.
At the same time, idolatry can give birth to astonishing depravity in the name of personal fulfillment - like the taking of life for the sake of convenience, like anal intercourse, like the senseless acts of violence we saw during the L.A. riots. But these perverse desires are never simply programmed into the brain. Conceived in the heart through temptation, idol worship is nevertheless fed and nourished and given life by the worshippers themselves.
Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin; and sin when it is full-grown brings forth death.(James 1:14-15 RSV)
Paul told Timothy: Men shall be lovers of their own selves (2 Timothy 3:2 KJ). Translated literally, this reads: "Men shall be lovers of their own private bondages." Selves here is a form of the Greek word nagash, meaning to snare, to entrap with a noose. We know that rejection brings the snare; then bondage finds the door rejection holds open. And the rejected love their own private bondages when for the first time, in the company of others like themselves, they attain an "identity." Before that time, they had only known an uncomfortable, depressing pull into non-being.
Even so, the Bible tells us that we cannot attain our true identity until we die to the pleasures of this world. Take up your cross and follow me, Jesus challenges us (Matthew 16:24). To follow Christ, to know God, we must surrender all. When we are willing to crucify all we are in the flesh, to become who we are in Him, only then are we complete.
GANGS: THE REBELLION OF VAIN LIVES
Another powerful ruler of spiritual darkness is racism. None suffer from rejection more than men from ethnic minorities, especially those who grow up in inner city neighborhoods. Throughout time, Satan has used his demons to promote the creation of, successively, slums, ghettos, inner cities, and now urban areas - the dumping ground of the social order. Racial prejudice is a powerful force. The forces of greed which make up colonialism - the economic exploitation or neglect of one group for the advantage of another - are compounded by racial factors.
In a multicultural nation like ours, it is the men from ethnic minorities who bear the full weight of rejection. It is a model more permanent than economics: even successful men of color, who have staked a claim in the American dream, from stable families, with good careers and money in the bank, have to fight to stay above the psychological damage that can be done by ignorance and prejudice. Poverty merely intensifies the problem.
Rejection, with its conditioned response of striking out as a form of self-preservation, is what draws the young men of inner city neighborhoods into gangs. In that clash of beauty and brashness, purpose and indecision, that characterizes youth, they inherit ugliness, coming to manhood filled with anger and resentment toward the society that created their mean streets. At the same time, acting rejectable, they also earn rejection.
Of course, it is necessary to realize that gangs are not unique to our time or cities, but they have existed in many cultures throughout countless generations. Gangs are one of Satan's gifts to the adolescent identity crisis. At that time of life when identity establishment forms the primary developmental task, assertion of self in opposition to the existing order of things, represented by authority figures in the older generation, dominates a young man's thoughts. Youthful rebellion is, to a degree, absolutely necessary. To individuate, young people must cut the cord, must learn to think for and depend upon themselves. This separation is the final pang of the birth process.
Gangs have always existed to give these universal feelings movement. Under whatever name, gangs have been the momentum behind every revolution. Sometimes they have captured the essence of human nobility, forged new nations, done great and mighty things; at other times they have been misdirected or led by evil men who manipulated the fervor of the times to accomplish their own ulterior designs. Always they represent the legitimate needs of one generation - or one segment of society - to replace the outworn value structure of the generation -or the power structure - that has gone before. But too many times they fight on to their own destruction after the revolution is won.
A young man's identity crisis is ultimately resolved when the authority figures in his life, usually his mother and father, accept and affirm his independence, acknowledging him as an equal and a man. Peace is made. The best of the old is retained to be meshed with the best of the new. Tradition and stability integrate with idealism and zeal to forge ahead with the generation that is to come.
Nevertheless, because they institutionalize as well as personify rebellion, gangs do not permit the formation of identity. Rather, they inhibit it. Built upon fulfilling needs created by rejection, they embody an identity crisis that cannot be resolved. Gangs inhibit development in that they, in themselves, give identity. In contrast to revolutions that have come before, the gangs found worldwide today lack many of life's redeeming virtues. Created around the value systems of unsocialized adolescent males, they are characterized by instant gratification, wanton aggressiveness, and predatory sex. [5]
Furthermore, so much of what is youthful rebellion is the striking out/striking back response of rejection that overshadows and drives purpose. It is the rebellion of men emptied of purpose. The life of Jephthah illustrates how the brightest and best are wasted:
Now Jephthah the Gileadite was a mighty warrior, but he was the son of an harlot. Gilead was Jephthah's father. And Gilead's wife also bore him sons; and when his wife's sons grew up, they thrust Jephthah out, and said to him, "You shall not inherit in our father's house; for you are the son of another woman." Jephthah fled from his brothers, and dwelt in the land of Tob: and there were gathered vain and worthless and empty men to Jephthah, who went on raids with him.(Judges 11:4 Amp/KJ)
To the rebel without a cause, any cause - or no cause - brings the same satisfaction in its power to break and destroy. The rebel destroys that which he cannot be a part of; the ripped off child will always fight back. Jephthah's curse is also the curse of the gangs today, the curse of a disrupted family. As New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan stated:
A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder - most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure - that is not only to be expected, it is very near to inevitable. [6]
In this country recent studies, like the 1991 Justice Department study that looked at 1,400 inmates, ominously confirm that many children from broken families end up, like Jephthah, a burden on society. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead writes:
One such study summarizes the relationship between crime and one-parent families in this way: "The relationship is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime.[7]
Dispossessed youth are stuck in a time warp. There is no future. The past - blurred images of the pain that attends rejection - festers unacknowledged. The totality of existence is now, an unfinished deal about to come down.
The urban teen lives through his senses, experiencing life in all its blaring reality, barraged by perceptions of things that he cannot legally afford. Within a framework of a peer pressure more intense than any other on earth, his self satisfaction hinges, not on skills he has mastered or what he might become, but on the power of his weapon or those high price tag decorations that bring status. These things constitute "manhood" in the inner cities. Nor is it in the least surprising, since identity forms the barrier between being and non-being, that he would kill for a pair of sneakers.
Gordon McClean, in Cities of Lonesome Fear, examines why kids join gangs. "I found kids joining gangs as young as seven or eight years of age," he writes. "If they're still alive at seventeen, they're survivors. Some kids get pressured into joining, but most volunteer for two reasons: protection or action."[8]
"What makes it easy to be involved with this kind of lifestyle," wrote one of my students in a paper,
is to have a bad home life and to know nobody really cares for you. I was, in one way, forced into this lifestyle due to peer pressure, bad home life, and the fact that the only people who associated with me were Mexican/Italian youth from the projects on the Southside where I had lived.
During my junior high and high school years, I was not accepted by normal (straight) kids in school. So I had become involved with the drug culture, which in turn meant I stayed pretty much to myself.
Because I stayed away from others, I was considered to be strange by others, which in turn led to me being accused of being a narc, which almost cost me my life. At this point I knew that I would need protection, so I swore allegiance to a neighborhood gang, which undoubtedly began my career with gangs.[9]
McClean writes:
The African-American youths I know are raised in a ghetto or housing project, usually by a mother alone who cannot cope with a growing teenager. He joins a gang to find a family and sense of belonging.
The Hispanic youths I have met are very proud of being Latino but grow up with parents who have come to the U.S. from either Puerto Rico or Mexico and remain more comfortable with the language and values of the homeland. The family is normally intact, but the children grow up in new surroundings, boasting of their Latino heritage and yet eager to be Americanized - Big Macs, cars, Levis, ghetto blasters - the result is both a language and culture gap between parents and children. . . .
Of course, becoming a gangbanger does not appear to accomplish Americanization in a very effective way. But to the kid on the street, it has more appeal than one might think. Many of these kids are provincial. Television is their only window on the rest of America. Certainly the America they see there is depicted by violence and crime as much as it is by suburbia and order. For them, suburbia is far away and unreal, whereas street action is real and close at hand. . . . The gang becomes an illegitimate means of meeting legitimate needs. Too many inner-city youths - often the sharpest and brightest of the lot - gain their recognition on the streets. [10]
To this sentiment my student adds:
From my own experience with gangs, anything is possible as well as illegal. This lifestyle is a very brutal and cruel one, which I had embraced in order to achieve acceptance - and this at a price. [11]
Finally, looking to the spiritual side, it is clear that gangs are also the nesting place of the idolatries Paul speaks about in his letter to the Galatians:
Witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revelling, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.
(Galatians 5:20-21 KJ)
The original Greek that Paul used makes it clear that he is speaking to the lifestyles of today's urban gangs.
Hatred (echthra), variance (eris), emulation (zelos), wrath (thumos), and strife (eritheia) are bondages directly related to rejection. The words which have been translated emulation and wrath predominate in youthful gangs: a burning anger and fierce indignation. Envyings (phthonos) was especially hard to translate into King James' English. It means being the ruin of self and/or others from spite. Spite is a tool of rejection. Sedition (diachotomeo), to cut up, and heresy (hairesis), to choose a faction, both are part of gang warfare.
Several other Greek words refer to lifestyle. Witchcraft (pharmakeia) refers to drug addiction. This word was originally translated as "sorcery," since in the world of the King James version, there was no way to anticipate what its true meaning would be. What God knew then is now quite clear. Gangs use drugs and move drugs, though the inner cities, out into all of our lives.
Revellings (komos), carousal, is partying, profligacy - drugs, alcohol, sex, and the loud, annihilative music of the streets - and the weight of the pain of debauchery. This word is used in one other place, by Peter, who speaks of wild profligacy (1 Peter 4:3-6 RSV). Of drunkenness itself (methe), meaning the authority of drunkenness, Jesus warns:
Take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness and cares of this life, and so that day come upon you unawares. For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth. (Luke 21:34-35 KJ)
And here we are, waiting for that day. Its heart overcharged with surfeiting, our angry, dysfunctional, careworn world is poised to come crashing down. The prophet to the inner cities, David Wilkerson, maintains that the snare (pagis), or deception, of violence and intoxication is what we reap for our toleration of idolatry:
Do you remember when God judged Israel by sending the Assyrian Army to be His rod, to do His correcting of Israel? The Assyrians were the rod of His anger, the staff in the hand of His indignation.
God said, "I'm angry at you and I'm going to let these Assyrians come in and I'm going to let them invade your land. I'm going to let them move in among you and I'm going to use them as a rod."
And that's exactly what is happening to us with the drug lords, drug pushers, and the pimps and the prostitutes here. They have become the rod of God to chastise our wicked society.[12]
What we are, what we have become, cannot long endure.
Inevitably, we are drawn to the heart of the problem of the inner cities, the one question that pulls all others: can this man of desperation, the fruit of violence, hopelessness, and exploitation, be saved? For, of course, he can be saved, just like any other man can be saved, if he wants to be, and then, one soul at a time.
Nor is the desolation of his soul greater than that of the man born to every advantage, who may channel his aggressions into more acceptable forms. After all, "manhood" is simply the inner city, stripped-down definition of self, the idol of choice for the end-times. Their destiny, Paul says of all who are "self" centered, is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame (Philippians 3:19). By splitting itself open to exposure, the inner city reveals, in concentrated form, the cracks in our larger society, a microcosm of a diseased, self-indulgent, cosmos in which there is no right or wrong.
THEIR GOD IS THEIR STOMACH
I write this during the election year of 1992. Never before in the history of our country has the god of the stomach had such a field day, whose doctrines are the special rights of self-focused interest groups, the accolades and dispersements of which grease the political system. Not even the preponderance of evangelicals can give the hope of righteousness to the party of big money interests - while the party of the little guy receives its coloration from a genuine politician, who has a heart, who knows what is right, but who long ago sold his soul to the agendas and industries of the forces of darkness in order to be elected.
Yet through all of this, we are exhorted not to fight evil with evil, nor to be entangled in the affairs of the world. The true battle, the spiritual one, which is not won in the political arena, is not lost there either. A spiritual battle is won in the spiritual realm. The weapons of our warfare? Not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds (2 Corinthians 10:4). This battle is won as men's hearts are changed.
There's only one way to change men's hearts, and it's the responsibility of those who know the way to do it. They cannot do this by calling names or shrieking at their lost brothers and sisters, for these are the tactics of the evil one. They change lives only by loving those rejected individuals who will reject them for their efforts.
You will notice that Paul never once complains about the political system. He complains about wrong doctrine and wrong behavior. Strikingly, he complains about the failure of Christians to be content in every circumstance. No, this exhortation to Christian contentment is not a cop-out instruction. We should not condone, by ignoring, those evils which the machinators of the political system - in itself a neutral entity that can be turned to either good or evil - seek to impose upon us. Paul means that we should take charge of our own behavior, keep ourselves free from sin, and trust God a little more. Most of all, we need to do our warfare in the realm where we have already won the victory. He gives us this advice:
Rejoice always, pray constantly, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophesying, but test everything; hold fast what is good, abstain from every form of evil. (I Thessalonians 5:16-22)
Things grow darker - this is the prophecy of the Most High God for the times in which we live. Our job is not to grow bitter or become ensnared by despair at the darkness, but to celebrate and carry the Light.
GO INTO ALL THE WORLD
What we should do is so obvious that it is easy to miss it. We have a Great Commission. Therefore, the Greatest Commandment cannot be our stumbling block. God has told us to love our neighbors as ourselves (Mark 12:31). For some of us this is a heavy charge. It involves loving people for who they are - not in spite of who they are - just as God loves them, just as God loves us. Love, Paul tells us, never fails (1Corinthians 13:8). But Jesus' directive infers an even deeper commitment.
Like it or not, every promise in God's kingdom hinges on our capacity to love ourselves as He loves us. We must love ourselves not only for who we believe we are on the inside, not only for who we will one day become through the renewal of our minds, but also for who we are right now, inside and out. We must love ourselves for who we were in the past also, the sinners for whom Christ died. Without in any way denying, excusing, or affirming our sinful behavior, past or present, we still must realize that today, when God looks at us, He does not see frail humanity. He sees His Son.
Even more important for the work we have to do, we cannot be alienated from any part of ourselves, or we will be limited in the love that we can give to our neighbor. We will reject that thing in him that we reject within ourselves. Today, He has no other way but us to reach that leper, to show that His compassion is for real; in this present darkness, He uses us to show His love on the earth. And nobody can spot a phony like a leper.
The most pressing need of the Church is to recognize and break down all the walls rejection has built in human souls that inhibit the forthcoming move of God. Revival comes only with the help of men and women who are on fire. The newly reclaimed need people who have themselves come out from under rejection, who can show them and demonstrate with their lives what God can do to heal them. Only through people like you can the Church direct itself to the renovation of the inner ghettos built by rejection - and the wedge that rejection drives between man and himself, his brother and sisters, and his God.
To walk in freedom out of the inner cities, we must walk by deliberate choice back into them, going to the source of the actual rejection to see the foothold gained by the spirit of rejection. If the Church could deal a little more convincingly with personal and corporate alienation of men and women from themselves, then those who walk away from the wretchedness of their beginnings might grow strong instead of being chased down by their pain. The Church cannot pray fervently for Revival and at the same time ignore the needs of the living dead whose rebirth is necessary to bring it about.
But isn't this what happens. The healthier you are yourself, the more readily you reject the rejected. Why? Because the Greatest Commandment is so hard to obey. Even the well-meaning unconsciously reject in others what they see as rejectable in themselves. To love the unlovely cannot be a conscious choice unless a person is free to choose.
This is an age like no other. The cataclysmic events that shake our natural world are manifested in the souls of men, who strive and contend for power on a crumbling earth. Churches that concern themselves only with spiritual rebirth are no more effective in post-Christian America than churches that believe attending to the physical needs of the lost fulfills the Great Commission. Faith and works always meet in the soul.
The soul is really where things happen, where the shaking goes on that reorders lives, plowing down the mountains that once loomed dark over every horizon, dumping spiritual filldirt into hollow cavities, and straightening those perverse and crooked trailways till they all lead into the highway to Zion. All bondages begin in the soul, with the subversion of primary psychological needs that God alone can wholly meet - and would meet, if man would just surrender. And it is in the soul that the will exists: the will of man that decides at last to not only surrender to God, but to learn of Him, submit to Him and take Him to the lost and dying world.
As you find your true identity, you, too, are able to surrender yourself. His righteousness burns through, like the morning sun comes out of the fog of a long, dark night. Darkness, confusion - you have been there. Now, having come through the wilderness, the power of God rests upon your life. You are the servant who declares: Prepare the way of the Lord, make His paths straight. You are a living witness to His promises:
Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low.
The crooked roads shall be made straight,
the rough ways shall be made smooth.
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.
(Luke 3:4-6 NIV)
NOTES
1. Robert Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy," Atlantic Monthly (Feb. 1994) 72.
2. George Will, "At Least One of These, Please," Newsweek (6 Oct. 1992) 82.
3. Walter Trobisch, Love Yourself (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1978) qtd in Leanne Payne The Healing of the Homosexual (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1984) 31.
5. Charles Murray, Losing Ground, qtd in Lee Smith, "The New Wave of Illegitimacy," Fortune (18 Apr. 1994) 82.
6. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, qtd in "The Ominous Rise in Illegitimacy," Readers' Digest (Mar. 1994) 139.
7. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, "Dan Quayle Was Right," Atlantic Monthly (Apr. 1993) 77.
8. Gordon McClean, Cities of Lonesome Fear (Chicago: Moody Press, 1991.
9. A. Donitelli (with permission) 1992.
12. Nicky Cruz, David Wilkerson: A Final Warning (Green Forest, AR: New Leaf Press, 1990) 171.