Communities United vs Individuals Divided
Isaiah 53:3-6 in The Message:
“We’ve all gone our own way, done our own thing…”
That phrasing…
Stark individualism is not good for a person. It is devastating for a community, for a society. The man, or nation, embracing it, forgets how connected all men are designed to be. Alone, divided off from each other (in- divid- uals), we wither and break. United into community (comm- unit- y), we flourish and grow.
God plunged Himself into human community, dove into the gene pool, and took on all human guilt, pain, and punishment. Take on Jesus, by letting Him have your guilt. He frees you from punishment, and immediately you begin to heal from all kinds of pains: emotional, intellectual, philosophical, relational, physical, and spiritual wounds. I know this. This is my story!
In that healing process, God uses community. Every religion exists as a conduit through which their community can receive blessings from faith in their higher power. When a person moves from “non-believer” to “believer” attitude, they soon become conscious that they have “joined” something. Community has been the basis for human society since day one, and that truth is held in common between believers and evolutionists and agnostics alike. Whether you study ape communities for insights into your origins, or the book of Genesis, both sources of information present you as a member of a human community.
God uses churches and synagogues and mosques and temples to pull people together. Religion is the great commons of human history. Almost without exception, every human being is either currently a member of, or recently estranged from, a religious community. This reference point of membership has existed as long as humans have walked this earth. I don’t know if evolutionists will ever try to purge the historical record of the universality of religious community, but they really must if they are ever to obtain any sort of a majority standing in the world. Right now, they are seriously outnumbered, and that’s even if you count those cognitively dissonant few who are members of religious communities and believers in the tenets of evolutionism.
E Pluribus Unum, the motto of the United States, may teach that out of many diverse communities Americans have made a country of united citizens, but We The People have at times allowed a dangerous tendency toward individualism to overtake our priorities. The “Me Society” looks out for Number One and says, “Do your own thing,” even as it erodes away the ties that bind us to the source of our sovereignty– community action! When your wealth allows you to gate yourself away from the unpleasant reality of diversity and community, you place yourself in a position of self-delusion. It’s the individualist’s air-conditioned micro climate of the SUV rampaging through the dangerous streets of poverty, war, and sickness that allows so many of the owners of our community’s wealth to avoid dealing with the question of whether or not they should, in fact, accumulate so much of our community’s wealth.
Whether solutions to this divisive power-plays are forthcoming or not, one thing I believe: God Himself will someday intervene in such a way as to reclaim His sovereignty over the human community, and physically redistribute the wealth and land in a fair and equitable fashion.
I doubt that without Divine intervention, but I’m convinced that soon, with it, human society will one day return to its roots: a community of individuals united by the idea that together we are more than the sum of our parts. And all will worship the only King worthy of that title, God Himself.