“Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things.”
The originator of all distractions was Satan who distracted Adam and Eve, thus causing all humanity to be overwhelmed with distractions throughout history.
For SDA’s, the current most beguiling and most publicly argued distraction is women’s ordination, forthrightly labeled in a Fulcrum article as just that, a distraction. And aptly so, if “distraction” is defined as whatever diverts us from our mission, even one forced upon the Church by the contentious kibitzer class.
WO, it would seem, is as distracting to SDAs as Herod was by Salome’s dancing.
But WO is but a pink taffeta pantsuit tied as a bow around an ever-swelling bundle of distractions. First came awe and adulation of science, mod culture, higher criticism, and hermeneutics that our emergent thought leaders learned not from the Bible and God—both of which they increasingly ignore or frankly doubt—but from the likes of Fuller seminary and Azusa Pacific University and similar academic redoubts. And doubt of the Bible naturally involves disbelief in Genesis 1 and the full sanctity of the 7th day, and red-faced embarrassment over our inspired prophetess and our ordained peculiarity. And that in turn stokes the lust to run away and marry up with the world, while retaining, as long as it remains convenient, the name Adventist, cultural Adventist, that is.
This welter works like a tornado sucking in farm houses and farm tractors, bales of rotting hay, clucking chickens, and a few farmers until the crazy funnel dominates the landscape. Up there in it, the pink pantsuit is having a whirlwind affair with LGBTxxx, social justice is fandango-ing with socialism, climate change is fox trotting with global government, entertainment is intimately conjoined with Hollywood - all swirling in a fog of politics of all aromas feeding on politics. And more politics. Politics, which SDAs have been admonished to essentially ignore.
All this craziness and the official rebukes evoked in response are cherished as badges of honor, worn with condescending pity for the rest of us still stuck in the gas-lit 19th century.
The world loves distractions, notably entertainment, as escape therapy against depression, whether emotional or economic. For the world what else is there but escape? Bob Hope on USO tours really did distract our troops from WWII. Movies, Hollywood claims, pulled America through the Great Depressions.
Christians should, but usually don’t, see worldly distractions as overrated if not downright spurious, hardly ever as effective as Bob Hope, and then only for the nonce and it’s back to the war and shiploads of body bags.
Happy hours and fine wines are soothing until the hangover, DUI fines, delirium tremens, and not infrequently cirrhosis, and divorce, requiring even more of the same, and an obit. Not entertaining at all, certainly to women, are hairy trannies competing in track races.
The very process of living is distracting, literally. Brushing teeth thrice daily, flossing, shaving beard or leg or enduring epilation, hunting down a gluten-free fruit juice, and finding a parking space. In a former era it would have been pumping well water, reaping harvests, fast carriages. More recently our mowing our own lawns. Now illegal aliens do that, they becoming a political issue, itself a distraction.
Indeed, daily activities can distract us from our priorities. Esau was so distracted by hunger that he without ado handed over his birthright for a mess of hi-gluten porridge.
On the other hand, mundane chores, ordained of God to keep us out of mischief, are a duty to be faithfully performed. It is our being distracted FROM required daily chores that is a sin. But too much success at anything, even good things, puts us in danger of being cocky and prideful, which are king-sized distractions themselves.
Hi tech compounds distractions. For a 70-year old figuring out how to text on a smartphone, or for a 7th grader with flying fingers texting precociously sexy messages but oblivious of algebra, or for a 16 year old texting while driving. For a nonagenarian, befuddlement compounds the compounded distractions imposed by hi tech. With all these coming at you all day, suddenly your day is over and prayer forgotten.
The day over, we remember the admonishment to be alert to the signs of the End, and sit down with TV dinner for the 6 o’clock news. It turns out to be a spellbinding, distracting mix of expertly skewed fake or managed news, politics galore, emergent socialism, impeachment, universal eternal cost-free health, assassination by drone, the hailstorm of tweets.
For Israel the famously distracting thing was graven idols, idols of Baal, Moloch, Astarte, any fertility god plus an inviting priestess in a pleasant grove. Jehovah and His law were ignored. When Christ came to earth He found Jewish leaders hypocritically distracted by the law as amended by the elders, ritual purification, and possible more nit-picking regulations than the EPA now issues.
For us over-civilized Americans, it is science or culture, American Idols, the American Dream. Tax upon soak-the-rich taxes, warehouses of laws and regulations, property, position, power, wealth, fame, galas, awards, celebrities upon celebrities. Advertisements, underarm deodorants, PR men and feedback questionnaires, uTubes, computer climate models, surveillance cameras, and fast cars. Vain, pointless university and seminary curricula and safe spaces for protesting trannies. Terrorists and feminists; racists and sexists; porn, pope or emoji; bribery, flattery, and schmooze. Or talent or good looks, or lack of it amenable to plastic surgery, extreme makeovers, Botox. Facebook friends, online shopping. Trying on stiletto shoes all day or learning how to walk on them, or, for a sailor on leave, just the sight of them. Partying it up. Looming civil war. Troubles such as never were.
Hollywood, O dear Hollywood that awards Oscars for the best suspension of disbelief and morals, depravation, perversion, corruption, sins of every sort but don’t call it sin, as the natural, the ideal condition of man, certainly what man naturally craves. Ah, Hollywood, drawing as the sun draws the flowers, the flower of our own SDA youth who profusely praise God for such a blessing more than the Bible. Film-making and acting, anything Hollywood, are vocations more to strive for than preaching, heading everybody straight to Hollywood like lemmings to the sea. If they make it (a miracle), eliciting louder public praise to God than at an altar call. And a curse upon any who object.
Art, whether cartoons, graffiti, or sequestered in museums; literature, whether novels, plays, or poetry, essays. Both are increasingly ugly and dumbed down, and but unthinkably high-priced vehicles for a Marxist political message, not art for art’s sake, itself distracting. Downright distracting are satire, parody, irony, burlesque. Voltaire, famously a great philosopher, is more famous for satire and getting people to laugh off serious matters. But simply quoting the crazy rationalizations for WO or LGBT sounds rather like pure satire and parody and entertainment, deserving of awards or guffaws. Laugh it off we must not.
And are you, dear reader, distracted by wittily labyrinthine, rococo, undiagrammable sentences reeking with bon mots, and vaguely cynical paragraphs, like mine? I do understand that you could well be. Do they empower repentance? To write more of this would be a distraction for me as well as you.
Our Peculiar Distractions
It is high time, in this time of the Investigative Judgment, that you and I, all of us Adventists, turned away from all distractions and looked seriously at ourselves.
We were told to be a peculiar people, and we are, in many ways that were never meant to be. Holiness, holier-than-thou-ness is our peculiar distraction. May the Lord open our eyes to see the beams in our own eyes, that we may see our need for eye salve, for we are Laodiceans. We are but hypocrites, whited sepulchers, resplendent in our fashionable apparel but filthy rags, and wide open to distractions even from what should delight us, the Sabbath.
We do see clearly the End-Times, and how with the increase of knowledge there will be increasing Satanic deceptions that if possible will deceive, and distract, the very elect.
Our Message
And what is that message that we are commanded to thoroughly absorb into our hearts and then single-mindedly preach with Spirit-driven zeal to the whole world?
First, Christ and Him crucified. Let Christ’s glorious sacrifice for us who are otherwise doomed, be always in our thinking, be our abiding joy, solace, comfort, our message, even our conversation.
Next, our message is that Christ is soon to return to receive us unto Himself that we may be where He is, heaven. The glories of which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor entered into the heart of man. Let us not be distracted by Satan’s cartoons of robed saints knee-deep in clouds.
The gospel and the Three Angel’s messages we must heed and preach and teach. Come out of her my people, and be not only diverse but peculiar.
To end this article let us pray, yea plead, for all of us who face the peculiar deceptions, distractions, of these End-times. And we presume to pray especially for those of us who discern the heap of strange new doctrines as fragrant enlightenments to be grasped to their bosom rather than fetid and repulsive, to be cast off.
O Lord, touch our eyes and give us clarity of vision to see only your true message for the world, thus to unite all of us into one marching church, undistracted, unshaken, unwavering.
Dr. Kime was born in 1929, in Los Angeles, California.
Kime pursued dual careers in art (since childhood) and medicine (physician; specialties in internal medicine and pathology; clinical and academic). He studied the principles of art, chemistry of paint, and the works of master artists as assiduously as medicine. After retiring from pathology at Kettering Medical Center in 1994, Dr. Kime has concentrated on his art, producing portraits, seascapes and figural work mainly in oils, and urbanscapes predominantly in watercolor. Dr. Kime currently lives in Redlands, CA.