The ancient Greeks believed that if certain evil acts were done, and not atoned for, the whole community would incur a spiritual pollution; and for as long as that remained, their city could not prosper.
We find this in the Bible, too: it wasn’t just a Greek thing. In Dueteronomy 21, God gave Israel a procedure for correcting spiritual pollution, involving the sacrifice of a red heifer “If one be found slain… and it be not known who hath slain him” (v.1). The community nearest the location of the unsolved murder would perform this sacrifice, and “So shalt thou put away the guilt of innocent blood from among you,” (v. 9). The intent of several such rituals, throughout the Mosaic Law, was to rid the community of a spiritual taint.
They were wiser than we are today.
Fast-forward to our own benighted age, with godlessness run wild, no repentance, and outright denial that certain acts, for long ages considered to be grave sins, aren’t sins at all. How many nanoseconds do you need, perusing the news headlines on any given day, to see that this is so?
A few miles down the road from my front door, a local public library, using public funds, hosted a “Drag Queen Story Hour” for the kiddies, to get them trained for “inclusion” and “tolerance,” blah-blah. If activities like this do not bring on a spiritual pollution, what will?
But we live in an age of folly and moral anarchy, whose main preoccupation seems to be to compel acceptance of every species of fornication devised by fallen man. And it looks like the wicked are succeeding in their enterprise.
God ordained for us to be born in this evil age for a reason. I don’t know, for sure, what that reason is; but I think it’s because He put us here to speak the truth, in defiance of the evil follies of this time. To speak the truth even if the world will hate us for it. To keep the lamp of truth burning. I think this is what our Lord Jesus Christ meant when he told us, “Occupy until I come” (Luke 19:13).
We don’t sacrifice red heifers anymore. Christ is our sacrifice, once and for all.
But we don’t seem to be doing that much occupying anymore, do we?
