The Last Days: Society in Ruins

Why are we here?  What is our purpose for our life?

Life is not supposed to be easy, free from pain, from want or free from frustration.  It is simply a test.  How we handle the test will determine our reward.  We arrive on this earth at different times and in different stations in life.  However, we all have the same goal and opportunities: to reach the Kingdom of Heaven.

You can not buy your way into heaven, you must earn it.  We can not do it without the help of Jesus Christ. 

Bishop Fulton Sheen said,  “We just cannot walk through life into the Kingdom of Heaven.  We have to work out our Salvation; and there will be crosses in our lives that we make through self-denial and mortification, and then there will be other crosses that are imposed on us… Sickness, particularly of children…Now what do we do with crosses?  We have to unite it with Our Lord on the Cross in order to use it to ‘purchase’ our eternal salvation.”

Early on, Bishop Fulton Sheen tried to sound the alarm, as he explained how such evil is allowed to advance …

“Why is it that so few realize the seriousness of our present crisis? Partly because men do not want to believe their own times are wicked, partly because it involves too much self-accusation, and principally because they have no standards outside of themselves by which to measure their times … Only those who live by faith really know what is happening in the world. The great masses without faith are unconscious of the destructive processes going on.”

And, that’s the key, isn’t it? “The great masses without faith are unconscious of the destructive processes going on.” We turned our religion into a non-government organization (NGO) and a social club, as we lost our supernatural power to discern all that is holy and good and right. St. Paul wrote: “The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor 2:14).

You see? This is why “people of faith” (supernatural faith) are seen as so dangerous to the worldly. They are the only ones with the “spiritual eyes” to see the evil in the world so desperately wants to advance. People who belong to a religion, yet are void of supernatural faith, pose no problem for the worldly who are doing the bidding of Satan. In fact, these people of “fake faith” do the world a favor by seeming to have their religion endorse evil.

The only way out of this pit of destruction is a restoration of supernatural faith … TOTAL reliance on supernatural grace! This is why I am so passionate about “spiritual warfare.” The time has come, and is way overdue, that we fall to our knees and cry out to God, that we may receive His supernatural power to save souls and reclaim surrendered ground.

At times, things seem completely catastrophic, but Bishop Fulton Sheen reminds us what God is up to …

“God will not allow unrighteousness to become eternal. Revolution, disintegration, chaos, must be reminders that our thinking has been wrong, our dreams have been unholy. Moral truth is vindicated by the ruin that follows when it has been repudiated. The chaos of our times is the strongest negative argument that could ever be advanced for Christianity … The disintegration following an abandonment of God thus becomes a triumph of meaning, a reaffirmation of purpose … Adversity is the expression of God’s condemnation of evil, the registering of Divine Judgement … Catastrophe reveals that evil is self-defeating; we cannot turn from God without hurting ourselves.”

I would like to look at the phrase evil is self-defeating. Evil unless you give in to it, evil is nothing by itself. The power evil has over people is the power that they themselves give to it. The only power evil has over you is the power you let evil have.  Temptation is just that temptation and it will stay that way until you act upon it. 

All is not lost.  We do not, should not, and will not give into temptation if we follow the teachings of Jesus and the Church.  God is,  has, and will in the future protect all of his believers both in this world and next.   Amen