Open your eyes and look at the world around you today.

What do you see?

What don’t you see?

Do you like what you see?

I would argue, if you’re like me, you don’t like what is happening in the world today.

I see a world drowning in hate, evil, anger, and death. Polls also show that most people believe America is not on the right track. However, if you ask those being polled why the world is moving in the wrong direction they won’t likely give you the reason I’m going to suggest.

The answer can be found by looking back thousands of years to a group of people who took 40 years to walk a journey that should have taken 11 days. Those people were the Israelites – God’s chosen people.

Despite their rebellion in the desert, God rewarded the Israelites by safely getting them to the “chosen land”. Before Joshua lead them into the land they crossed the Jordan river, which God had miraculously stopped so they could cross safely. As a reminder, Joshua had a man from each tribe place a stone next to where they crossed to serve as a memorial of God’s role in arriving in the promised land.

Then Joshua called the twelve men from the people of Israel, whom he had appointed, a man from each tribe. And Joshua said to them, “Pass on before the ark of the LORD your God into the midst of the Jordan, and take up each of you a stone upon his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the people of Israel, that this may be a sign among you. When your children ask in time to come, ‘What do those stones mean to you?’ then you shall tell them that the waters of the Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD. When it passed over the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. So these stones shall be to the people of Israel a memorial forever.”

Joshua 4:4-7

Sadly, within a generation of Joshua the Israelites had forgotten God. The book of Judges records this Great Forgetting that took place.

And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers. And there arose another generation after them who did not know the LORD or the work that he had done for Israel. And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the LORD and served the Baals. And they abandoned the LORD, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. They went after other gods, from among the gods of the peoples who were around them, and bowed down to them. And they provoked the LORD to anger. They abandoned the LORD and served the Baals and the Ashtaroth.

Judges 2:10-13

Like the Israelites of the past, we too have forgotten God. We have replaced God with a society focused on self-gratification and hyper-individualism. Some might argue we have become far less religious, but I would argue we as a society are more religious than ever. The problem lies in what we now worship. We have replaced worshipping God with worshipping self. We have replaced the Baals with fame, fortune, sexual identity, gender orientation, social media likes, political affiliation, etc.

However, the situation is not all bad. God is still sovereign. He is in control. He holds all things together (Colossians 1:17), even if it looks like the world is falling apart. This blog is my small contribution to help you see there’s still hope in what looks like a hopeless situation – that while many have forgotten God, he has not forgotten us (Joshua 1:5, Hebrews 13:5).