Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

I was watching my favorite show again, Pride & Prejudice.  The scene where Lydia runs off with Mr. Wickham, they are all talking about how it will ruin the family forever, which made me start thinking.

You’ve heard the old adage about the frog.

If you put a frog in a boiling pot, he will jump out, but if you put him in a cold pot and slowly turn up the heat, he will die.

That is how Satan works.

He has slowly acclimated us to lower expectations that we should have of each other.  Just as Lydia had no clue or did not care that she was ruining her sister’s chances at a descent marriage proposal; our society has closed their eyes and is ruining our chances at being God pleasing people.

We all look around and say, “Oh, I can do that because everyone else is, so it must be acceptable”.

When we should be reading God’s word and asking ourselves, “Is this acceptable to God”.  This is what got the Israelites in trouble.  They wanted to return to the ways of the Egyptians.

If you think of the Israelites as the righteous (ha ha – but try) and look at the Egyptians as sin it makes it easier to see the picture.  God wanted to rescue the Israelites from slavery, but He also wanted to get them away from the evil examples that the Egyptians had set.  God actually ruined every chance the Israelites had in going back to Egypt, just so they couldn’t.

The Egyptians celebrated every form of paganism.  In commemoration, every spring as the Nile flooded, the Egyptians held fertility festivals involving public drunkenness, dancing, and group sex.  Ancient Egypt’s obsession with the afterlife to their art, and aesthetics to their sex habits, the Egyptians did everything in their own way.  The Egyptian city of Bubastis saw some wild times with its annual festival of Bastet.

Herodotus writes about the festival of Bastet, describing a scene of unbridled wine consumption and general debauchery.

One can only imagine the Egyptian landscape littered with hundreds of people drinking and stumbling, music and drums playing loudly, in the way of naked bodies, as the sexual frenzy continued.

In other words, this is how the Israelites saw the world.  The Israelites did not have the luxury of reading God’s word every day.  They would go to the temple or someone’s house, or a courtyard, and listen to someone read the scriptures.

They didn’t have Bible tools that would allow them to research what God said about sex.  They did eventually start memorizing the scripture.

The most famous person who is said to have memorized the entire bible is Jack Van Impe.   Van Impe said that he had memorized 14,000 verses, and it took him 35,000 hours to do so.  That’s dedication and perseverance.

My Father-in-Law dedicated his life to memorizing scripture.  He passed away when he was almost 99, and he could still quote the entire book of Revelations, and about 6 or 7 other books, along with many, many passages.  These people should be our examples, not the wiles of the Egyptians or our neighbors.

They say the whole point of the book of “Pride & Prejudice” is the pride and the prejudice between the two main characters, but I say it’s showing the struggles you put on other people when you do wrong and don’t try to set a good example.

This was displayed not only in Lydia’s selfishness, but the selfishness of Mr. Wickham and the effect it had on Georgian and Lydia’s sisters.

We should stop before we do something and think how this will affect the people around us.

After that thought process, then we should go forward or not, with our decisions.

 

Karen Y. Stevens is founder of Orange County Writers Guild