Sunday 17 April 2016

My Eyes

I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully…. Job 31:1 NIV


My understanding is that the book of Job is one of the first full books ever written in the Bible, sandwiched in between chapters Genesis. This verse almost seems to be aimed at our age and generation in the 21st century, but obviously Job is dealing with an age old problem, and we are still trying to deal with it today. I think the advance of TV, magazines, and of course the internet has made it much more important that we need to keep a careful rein and guard on the things our eyes see.


There was a time when I would have said this kind of warning would be aimed on our young men, but that is wrong on at least two levels. The problems of access to indecent images, and the effects from it, are not confined to the young. Nor are they limited to the men in our society. The old saying goes, “monkey see, monkey do” and this applies to the lessons, good and bad our next generation learn from the previous one. So, the more lax and accepting we become to the images we take as normal on the TV, internet etc., the lower the bar gets for each succeeding generation.

For those over the age of 50, cast your mind back to your own youth, and note how things have changed. There are images and shows that would never have made it to our screens, but lo and behold they are there now, and we have become used to them. The taboos of yesterday are tolerated, and even encouraged today. Why should this be, and have you ever wondered what will be tolerated in another 30 years? Love has given way to sex, and we have accepted them as the same thing. We treat both as equal, and that is not the only immorality we have accepted as equal. In fact we have even gone as far as legalising, condoning and encouraging immorality. Is it any wonder we are experiencing an epidemic of child abuse and sexual crime? Or are we in our modern minds not able to equate the obvious connection between abuses and what our eyes have seen and accepted as ‘just the way it is’?

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