Common Sense Rules

I get to spend time on occasion with our granddaughter. (My wife babysits her during the week.) The other day, my wife was not well, so I got the duty. At one point we were watching one of those educational kids shows. "Today," they told us, "we're going to learn about safety." Oh, yeah, this ought to be good.

The teacher in the show explained to the kids in the show, "The first rule of safety when you're out walking is 'Stop, look, and listen.'" Well, I thought that made sense. You know, helpful for young children to know. "The second rule," she went on to say, "is to never run on the sidewalk; you might get hurt."

What? When did this become helpful safety instructions? And if it is the standard of safety -- "you might get hurt" -- how would we apply that? Let's see. Well, clearly you should never ride in a car because you might get hurt. In fact, walking on the sidewalk could potentially be dangerous as well by that same measure. On the other hand, they tell me that most accidents occur in the home, so being in the home is probably not safe either. You might get hurt. Now, hold on a minute. Is there anywhere that you cannot get hurt? Okay, this is going to get complicated.

This kind of nonsense is the product of a foolish world. There is some sort of idea that nothing unpleasant should ever happen. You can see this in the constant lawyer commercials suing medical companies because something went wrong. No, not malpractice. No, not malfeasance. Something unpleasant happened and someone is going to pay. You can see it in the "ban guns" response to incidents where bad people do bad things with the tool they're carrying called a "gun". You know, if there were no guns, no one would kill anyone ... right? Silly, of course, because on the very same day as the Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut a Chinese man stabbed 22 school children in a village in China. For some reason they're not banning knives. What's up with that?

Where do we end up? We end up suspending two 7th graders for playing with toy guns at home. We ban the game of tag from schools. We suspend one boy for drawing a picture of a gun and another for waving a pop tart like a gun. Hugging gets banned. All sorts of insanity ensues. Luckily when a high school teacher tried to introduce a play to a drama class involving bestiality, pedophilia, and incest, the teacher was suspended. Oh, wait, that was only temporary. Students and parents rallied to his cause.

The Bible says that the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked (Jer 17:9). The Bible says that sin leads to a "depraved mind" (Rom 1:28). Sin isn't merely immorality; it is insanity. So when a feminized society tells us that we shouldn't run on the sidewalk with the rationale "you might get hurt" or a school suspends a kid for playing legally at home or parents defend a teacher exposing his students to rank immorality, you should be able to see where sin is leading us. Insanity. Maybe now you can see why we are to "be transformed by the renewing of your mind" (Rom 12:2). It is probably something of real importance if sin is rampant and sin breeds insanity. Lots of evidence around us says it does.