CELEBRITY CHEFS

A professor at Dallas Theological Seminary is speaking in a chapel service. His topic is an exposition of Psalm 19. During his teacing of the psalm, he begins to talk about the various ways God reveals Himself. One of those ways, he says, is that God reveals himself through history, that is, God reveals Himself as a moral God. Then, he states the principle: "No nation endures that flaunts disobedience to God's principles."

THE STAGES OF DECLINE: DECADANCE

In one historian's opinion, the last stage of an empire, nation, or culture is that of decadance (a flaunting of God's principles). He defines the stage: "In the age of decadence many people choose to behave in ways that are unsustainable, apparently unaware of the consequences. They indulge in excessive, often conspicuous, consumption. An absurdly wealthy elite emerges, but instead of repelling the masses, it is admired and celebrated [by the masses].

"Those outside the elite aspire to similar levels of consumption . . . People become convinced that increased consumption is the key to happiness, but in its pursuit, they become measurably less happy. As David Morgan says, “You can never get enough of what you don’t need.”

CIRCUSES AND CHEFS

Rome had its calculated distractions to keep the attention of the masses off what was actually going on--they developed a celebrity-worshipping culture (the gladiators and the charioteers). Instead of gladiators slaughtering one another, a culture can become distracted by sports as well as by reality shows on TV. One historian noticed something else in his study of the characteristics of a culture in decline: the rise and celebration of chefs as celebrities who became members of the elite, wealthy class. They too served (no pun intended) to distract the population from the important issues of the day. 

In the Decadance Stage of decline, an a-moralism pervated all the empires, nations, and cultures ripe for the plucking. They all lasted roughly 250 before the consequences caught up with them. Flaunting God's principles cannot be sustained.

SPRING BREAK

We need look no farther than the annual Spring Break baccanalian festivals tolerated on the beaches of South Padre in Texas and the Floridian beaches. Those beaches are an example of the "educated" and the wealthy who are hell-bent to satisfy their lust in the shortest possible time with the greatest amount of excess possible at the time. 

On Spring Break, "people drink themselves to the point of unconsciousness and shamelessly collapse in the streets and the beaches. In Roman times, binge drinkers were left to their fate. Today’s debauchery is supervised by the police; its ‘victims’ are taken care of by hard-pressed health care professionals, placing further pressure on the public purse. And, all the while, supermarkets and corporations make a killing selling discounted booze to people barely old enough to buy it. This is our modern-day bread and circuses, with drunken, obese citizens literally becoming a burden on the state."

THEIR EDUCATION

It is this educated elite that have grown up, not only indoctrinated and in relativism, but also in the flaunting of it, trying to live without guilt, without shame, and without parents to say, "No. Not on my dime and on my watch!" To see the photographs of South Padre with its worship of Bacchus, and to hear the interviews of the hedonists staggering around in the sand, we're seeing those who believe it and live by the credo: "There are no consequences," with obscenties directed toward their parents thrown in for good measure.

There is no election cycle that will stop the decline into decadance; it's naive to believe that. The problem is the sin nature of man. Therefore it's a spiritual problem that can only be cured by deliberately going into all the world and making disciples, teaching them to observe all things [Christ] has commanded.