Pratt: We are all children when it comes to battling the forces of evil

Did your parents ever tell you the punishment they were administering was for your own good? Did you feel comforted by that reassurance? Hmmm, that’s what I thought. You didn’t appreciate their sacrifice one bit, did you?

Were you convinced you were hearing the truth, the whole truth? I didn’t think so. But childhood is difficult for both parents and children. Great diversity exists in how people handle the issues of life such as discipline and ethics.

Children tend to copy what they see their parents doing relationally.  Adolescents often reject parental warnings as part of the growing-up process. Discipline becomes a delicate balance between helping them grow up, yet protecting them from making destructive choices.

In our stunning mobility and communication possibilities today, it becomes more and more difficult to assure the safety of not only our teenagers, but even our youngest children. Quite frankly, evil is having a heyday in America today.

Even more concerning is the tendency to close our eyes to the destructive foundations upon which we dance to the tunes of the songs of hatred emanating from radical groups bent on eliminating all people who do not live by their particular mindset.

It is a story as old as Noah’s Ark and as new as the ships being built and bound for space travel – it is the human story in all its diversity, disobedience, distraction and deadly consequences.

Are we merely pawns in a battle far beyond our comprehension of what constitutes Good vs. Evil, or may we ourselves become the gods of control that some seem to greatly desire?

These are not new questions. From the Judeo-Christian perspective, whatever “soon” means in a world beyond our comprehension of endless origins, faith stories give us a glimpse into the possible order of the universal questions we ask about survival.

As a young child, I recall my first wonderings about God, the great I AM, because my father quoted and explained Scripture as I toddled about the farm after him as he did chores. He told me the stories not only of the Bible but also of ancient history.

He loved God, history, science, geography and his telescope. He delighted in showing us our first “closer” view of the moon and other planets. He would have been considered “uneducated” as he had to drop out of school to help on the farm, but he had access to his grandfather’s classical library when he was younger and a phenomenal memory of what he read.

I don’t know novelist Michael Phillips personally although I recall that his name is on some of the Christian fiction that is on our church library shelves.

But I am entranced by this Texas writer’s latest book titled “Endangered Virtues and the Coming Ideological War” brought to my attention by a Lubbock friend of the author.

Phillips addresses issues that are troubling many thoughtful people of Christian faith as we observe what seems a rush by many to follow a hedonistic lifestyle even as they wear the “label” of religious faith, if not the characteristics it preaches.

This is the book for the times we are experiencing, including the war zone that surrounds the Jewish state because the prophecies about the war of all wars seems the destination of humanity as we move ever closer to biblical prophecy about a heavenly intervention to put an end to Evil for all eternity.

Phillips notes, referring to America, “The debate is not between different systems of faith … it is a divide between the virtue and what I call the ‘unvirtue’ of a nation and its people. …”

Although political issues are dealt with as endemic to the whole, he says, it is the religious issues that he addresses. “Silence, neutrality, and docile compliance will not be an option much longer,” he says.

Nor is this book an opinion about biblical prophecy timelines, but about how the church and individual Christians are to respond to the coming challenges that can no longer be ignored in the drift from a faith-based concept of the American documents of liberty.

We are all children when it comes to battling the forces of evil that beset a troubled world.

Beth Pratt retired as religion editor from the Avalanche-Journal after 25 years. You can email her at beth.pratt@cheerful.com.

This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Pratt: We are all children when it comes to battling the forces of evil