Yesterday I watched a movie called Red Dawn. It's a remake of an 80's movie with the same title, and it was a really good movie. It had a little too much language for me, so I wouldn't watch it again, but a very good movie nonetheless. In the movie, international tensions are rising as North Korea continually attacks various nations. The story follows two brothers, one a former marine and the other a high school student, who are caught in the middle of it all when a North Korean attack on America invades their town. The brothers escape to the woods with a few friends, but the North Koreans take control of the town and set up a dictatorship-type government. Throughout the movie, the brothers and their friends continually set up small attacks on the North Koreans, then escape back to the woods, creating an irritating disturbance for the Koreans and rousing the Americans caught in the town to action, while the Koreans try to convince everyone that they're here for the Americans' good. It's a movie that definitely makes one feel patriotic! At the end of the movie, I thought, "That was a great movie, but it doesn't really happen that way." I wasn't referring to the unlikelihood of them surviving in the woods with thousands of North Koreans nearby, or the unexplained fact that they had to have food for all that time (where did that come from?). I was referring to communism.
Yes, sometimes communists invade a country with guns blaring, bombs exploding, and men controlling. But if you've ever studied communism, like I did last year in government class, you know that most of the time communists don't operate that way. They come in as one of our own. An American citizen rises to government, promising wonderful change, new jobs, a fixed economy, etc. From there, they gradually wean the people off their dependency on themselves to dependency on the government through law changes. When the people are willingly depending on the government, to shift is made from a free country to a country under what is called socialism, which is the step under communism. Once the country has accepted socialism and is completely dependent on the government, the government seizes all control, and becomes a Communist state. The people are then so dependent on the government, they cannot rise up to fight the government. They have trapped themselves.
Why do communists do it this way? For the very reason as displayed in the movie Red Dawn. When governments try to seize control of country that has all of its freedoms, we recognize that they're taking our freedoms and fight back. However, when it comes slowly, when they convince us that what they're doing is a good thing, when they wean us off dependency on ourselves, we rarely see the shift until it's too late.
Why did I just talk about all that? Because Satan is the exact same way. He doesn't come to a strong follower of Christ and say "Hey! Why don't you do drugs/get drunk/have sex outside of marriage/commit adultery/etc,' because the immediate answer would be a resounding "NO!" He comes slowly, distracting us until our quiet time gets ignored all day, or convincing us a tiny little cuss word in a song is okay, or telling us its okay to be disrespectful to our parents behind their back just this once because it's justified this time. He weans us off our righteousness, one compromise at a time.
An example of this would be a time I was reading a book I had gotten from the library, and I was about a hundred pages into it (about a forth of the way in) when BAM! F-bomb. I set the book down in shock. I was not expecting that! But now, I was faced with a choice. Put the book down and move on to the next, or continue reading. It was only one word. There was a high probability that there was no more in the rest of the book, and I was already past that one. I sat there, undecided, until I had a thought straight from God. "I can either lower my standards and keep reading or uphold them and stop." I had not seen it that way until then. We rarely do when faced with such choices. See, if it was okay with that book, what keeps it from being okay in the next? Or if it's okay once when it wasn't before, what keeps it from being okay two times, or three, or four?
Satan doesn't come in asking us to make huge, life-altering choices right off the bat. He slowly weans us off righteousness until everything is questionable, every moral thrown up for grabs. Because if one thing that was wrong before is now right, what keeps the next thing from becoming okay too?
No comments:
Post a Comment