What we have today in America is a whole lot of folks with a whole lot of power, who don’t seem to believe in any sort of life after this one.  Or if they do believe that there is a God, and that the spiritual component of each human being lives on past physical death, they seem to think that God is more akin to their therapists than to the perfectly principled, rather strict Father who commands a touch of reverential fear from His children.  You know, the real, ever-living God revealed in the Bible.  The actual Creator of every single little speck in the universe.  The eye-for-an-eye Guy.

Yes, yes, yes, I know.  God is love. The problem is that the word “love” has been put through so many ghastly contortions, reduced to such lowly human dimensions, has been so overused and misunderstood that we have “psychologized” it right out of the true lingual hemisphere.  Our common usage of the word “love” has nothing whatsoever to do with God or any of His character traits.

We tend to think that Hallmark defines “love” better than God does.  We have been deceived to believe that a hug says “love” to a little child who’s just run into a busy street, barely avoiding death - better than a spanking that might keep him out of the street from now on.  We’ve accepted nearly lock, stock and barrel the idiotic idea that, when it comes to marriage, love equals romance.  When and if you lose the romance, you’ve lost the love, and it’s time to chuck the marriage.  Pure human hogwash.  Genuine love is a choice of human free will that necessarily results in action, often self-sacrificial, for the benefit of another human being.  It ain’t a feeling.

We have taught ourselves to accept the idea that a government entitlement program equals genuine charity. An entitlement program enslaves its recipients to a dependent addiction upon unending support, while true charity inspires the beneficiary to become a giver himself.  There is nothing whatsoever truly charitable or loving about a government bureaucrat churlishly handing over a welfare check.  We might as well be handing out crack cocaine, because the helplessness and dependency we create with each “hit” to the system is every bit as disabling.  And anyone who earnestly believes that this charity is going to  earn him any merit badges from a truly loving God is in for a rather rude awakening.

Creating this deceptive form of slavery might even be worse than the chain-and-shackles kind, because welfare slavery is less obvious, more devious, and the “abolitionists” who decry its insidious evil are branded by its very perpetrators as uncharitable and unloving.  At least the slavers of old could not credibly claim to be high-minded humanitarians the way nanny-state politicians do today.  But God isn’t fooled; results do count.  Doesn’t anyone remember that provincial old saying about the road to hell being paved with good intentions?  Honestly.

Then, we have the whole abortion industry and its supporting politicians telling us day in and day out how much they love women, how they only want women to be free to choose.  Constantly cajoling women to believe that killing their helpless offspring is a worthy option in the pursuit of individual happiness, a “choice” that will incur no real consequence, is one of the most heinously evil deceptions ever perpetrated against women. That medical doctors ever allowed themselves to become willing accomplices to such an outright lie is one of the greatest coups ever pulled off by God’s own enemy.

But make no mistake, millions of women whose lives have been shattered by this devious deception will be waiting after this life with eternal castigation for those who professed to really “love” them.  A little more “afterlife” woman-fearing and God-fearing might deter an awful lot of abortionists from doing their evil deeds behind the cloak of anesthesia, rallied by a host of defenders crying “love” for women.  Please.

And what price will God exact from our politicians, who on the one hand proclaim their undying love for freedom and democracy, but find every excuse under the sun not to fight for it. To help a people achieve the formation of a government that enables human dignity, and at least the opportunity for a better earthly existence, has to be one of the noblest endeavors in this life.  To offer the promise of this help and knowingly stir up the “hornet’s nest” in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to then renege on that promise before the task is complete, must be one of the most ignoble and unloving deeds ever committed by those in powerful positions.

If we had not - as a Nation - lost sight of the genuine definition of our word, “love,” and if we had not tried to reduce God to the role of a permissive, everything’s-really-okay-if-you-feel-good-about-it therapist, then I doubt very seriously if we would be experiencing half the trouble we have in our laps right now.

It’s high time we bring back a healthy fear of God.  There is no way for anyone to prove on earth the existence of God or the reality of eternal life for the human soul.  However, those placing lifelong bets on there being no God - or that God is as permissible as a liberal parent - might be in for a terribly rude awakening.  Maybe some ought to be hedging those bets a bit.