Your Bible & You - Little Book Open.org

YOUR BIBLE AND YOU
208
S i g n s o f O u r T i m e s
dient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman, implacable, slanderers,
profligates, fierce, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit,
lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding the form of religion but
denying the power of it” (2 Timothy 3:1-5, RSV).
Does this description also fit our times Indeed it does, with astonishing
accuracy. True, there have always been selfish, money-loving, proud, and
arrogant people. Every generation has been stained with similar sins. What
makes the present situation different is the universality of all these vices.
The whole world is involved in the moral collapse as “evil men and seducers…
wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived” (2 Timothy 3:13).
The deplorable growth of teenage violence, of drug abuse and suicide, of homosexualism
and AIDS, of political corruption in the highest offices, of lawlessness of
every kind and description, is evidence enough that “the last days” have arrived.
James contributes another sign of special interest. It touches upon the capital
and labor problem, so much to the fore at this time. “Come now, you rich,” he
writes, “weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches
have rotted and your garments are motheaten… . You have laid up treasure for
the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which
you kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of the harvesters have reached
the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure;
you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter” (James 5:1-5, RSV).
The woes of the rich are all too apparent today, what with confiscatory taxes
and bank failures. Direction and management have also become one long succession
of headaches, beset as they are with hostile takeovers, the need to
restructure, and innumerable restrictions and limitations. Labor too has entered
a new phase, with its representatives often sitting on boards of directors.
Caught in the midst of this titanic social struggle, now moving to its climax, is the
humble, inoffensive Christian worker, whose one desire is to live at peace with
all men. For such James has this comforting word: “Be patient, therefore, brethren,
until the coming of the Lord. Behold, the farmer waits for the precious fruit of
the earth, being patient over it until it receives the early and the late rain. You also
be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand” (verses 7, 8).
From the apostle Peter we have yet another sign, relating to intellectual matters
in the time of the end.
“First of all you must understand this,” he says, “that scoffers will come in the
last days with scoffing, following their own passions and saying, ‘Where is the