When the World Went Mad

I said in a sermon a few weeks ago that sometimes I sit and try to figure out exactly when the world went mad.  When did the world lose its mind?  If you don’t agree with me that the world has gone mad, do you never watch/check the news?  Do you not watch “COPS”?  The decisions made by individuals, organizations, factions, and governments are so often simply whack in my humble and unbiased opinion.  It’s a crazy world.  I’ve wondered when it became that way.  You’ll be glad to know I’ve figured it out.

For a while I thought we’re approaching the 50^th anniversary of the big turning point for the sanity of the world.  February 9, 1964, the Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, brought a cultural change.  The new emphasis on youth, freedom of expression, and throwing off former norms began a major shift.  Disillusionment and the emergence of a new proliferation of drug abuse came along with that, and eventually brought many people and neighborhoods into ruin.  The drug-related early deaths of several rock music stars of the era seemed to personify much of what was happening to the world people once new.  With the war in Viet Nam coming along toward the end of that decade, I began to think that it was the 1960s that ushered in the madness we have now inherited, with the turning point being February 9, 1964.

But I had to back up from there and think about where and when the seeds were sown that bore fruit in the 1960s.  Sure enough, the influences that would shape the 1960s were coming out of the new affluence of the 1950s, and backing up from there, of course, much of what shaped the 1950s came from the second world war of the 1940s.  Much of that event that rocked the world came out of greed, madness, and a will-to-power not just found in Adolf Hitler, but in many humans in many nations.

You may be seeing the picture coming into focus.  When you start trying to figure out when the world went mad you just keep backing up in time, and that’s where the pursuit took me.  But I finally did come to a moment that signaled the corruption of all that was good and right with the world.  It was when the first people God created used the gift of free will to oppose the God who gave it to them.  It was when they didn’t trust God and bit off more than they could chew.  When they were expelled from the garden they ended up east of Eden, in the land of Nod, which means “wandering.”  That’s when it all started.  That’s what it says in the Bible.