It is no wonder people are empty. Even Christians swimming in these waters are bound to take their eyes off Jesus and put them on the waves from time to time. When we do that, we know what happens; we start to sink. There is so much emptiness to go around that many marketers appeal to it to get you to buy their product or use their services.
Spiritual emptiness can manifest itself in countless ways, but in our culture, one of the ways it reveals itself is in shopping to find fulfillment. This is the kind of shopping that seeks to medicate a dry and thirsty soul. In a consumer culture like ours, this fulfillment shopping is exactly what we should expect.
I am never surprised by the fact that so many people feel hollow inside or that they think shopping can fill the void. I have been guilty of doing it myself. Our culture, as Francis Schaeffer has so aptly put it, has fallen below the line of despair. Society today is operating from a worldview of hopelessness because we have denied God, and, in the process, lost any foundation for meaning, truth, and morality. Since there is no true human nature and no real purpose, all we are told we can do is to try to make ourselves happy; whatever form that takes
The more people hold to this worldview and push it to its logical conclusions, the more absurd it will become. This absurdity is why our culture is now adamant that we call men, women and women, men, and when these two choices are not enough, we add 56 new genders. That is right; when you sign up for Facebook, you can now choose from 58 genders. When we denied humanity’s nature made in the image of God, we did not set ourselves free; we enslaved ourselves to futility.
The secular world hated the idea that we are made in the image of God but that we had fallen into sin. They hated the idea that we are glorious creatures in an abnormal state because they said it was demeaning to think of humanity that way. Then they declared that “God is dead,” so man no longer has a created nature, but if God is dead, so is humanity.
A secular world without design from a personal creator can have no ultimate meaning. Sure, we can make things up to give us hope or purpose, but never forget our hopes are only fanciful imaginations. This worldview of despair saturates almost everything we touch. It is littered throughout our endless social media feeds. It is in the TV shows we binge-watch. It has even made it into employment policies and laws. Yes, a culture that says morality is relative enforces its morality with the threat of punishment. You may have no inherent nature so you can be whatever you want, but you will live how we say or face the consequences.
