Today and tomorrow, I’m going to share a message from Pastor Paul Chappell of West Coast Baptist College and Lancaster Baptist Church. Though it was written in 2021, it has powerful application as if it was written yesterday.
We live in a day of amazing confusion.
But what makes the confusion especially disorienting is that those who are creating it don’t act bewildered or perplexed. Instead, when we point out what seems obvious, they tell us with a straight face that we are confused, that these issues are more complex than we could understand, that the problem is with us.
This was especially clear to me during the most recent election cycle in California when
- The black candidate was called the “face of white supremacy.”
- Governor Newsom stated the election was “a matter of life or death,” but he is unequivocally for abortion, taking the life of preborn children.
But this is bigger than just the past California election cycle. It’s all across our nation and in current news.
- It’s the school board that silenced a dad trying to alert others of a transgender student who raped his daughter in the women’s bathroom. Somehow the dad—not the sexual assaulter—was the villain.
- It’s insisting that women have the right to choose to take the life of their preborn child (“My body, my choice”), but parents do not have the right to choose if they will have their child vaccinated.
- It’s a culture that defunds the police while defending violent protests.
- It’s an ideology of inclusivism that excludes anyone who states obvious realties such as binary genders.
- It’s a morality that embraces what God clearly declares is wrong (same-sex marriage, transgenderism, state redistribution of wealth, taking the life of the unborn, rioting and lawlessness, etc.) while rejecting the Christian values that allow for law, order, and the traditional family—bedrocks of civilized societies.
If our takeaway is simply that the media has taken sides and frames the narrative for their agenda, that’s only part of the story. The larger issue is more concerning: our country is morally confused. 
This is not merely the secularization of a society in a purely de-religionizing sense. It is the re-programming of morality. None of the issues that I mentioned above are portrayed as simple differences of opinion. There is a morality attached to them: it’s deemed wrong in today’s society to question someone’s gender fluidity, to defend the police, to attach justice to equality of process rather than equality of outcome, to say marriage should be exclusively between a man and a woman.
We live in a world that calls wrong right, and right wrong. Isaiah 5:20 puts it bluntly:
“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”
I used to read Isaiah 5:20 and think that the outcome of this verse would be obvious—like the emperor’s missing clothes. After all, if people are calling good evil, how hard is that to see?
The reality, however, turns out to be less obvious. It turns out that changing terms and definitions (calling evil good, and good evil), reframing topics (substituting darkness for light), and recasting desires (replacing bitter for sweet) all has a disorienting effect on a society. In time, it’s hard for people who have been morally confused to know right from wrong—and that’s the goal.
Those who are perpetuating the confusion are not just confused; they are rebelling against God. Complexifying the issues and redefining the terms are smokescreens for an unwillingness to submit to God.
Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, (Romans 1:21–22)
So what are Christians to do in a society that confuses and mislabels right and wrong?
You’ll have to read tomorrow’s devotional to find out. But in closing, I remind all of us that this confusion existing in our world has a source and it’s NOT God. 1 Corinthians 14:33 reminds us, “For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints.”
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