In Haggai 2, God teaches a striking truth: holiness is not contagious, but sin is. A clean towel cannot purify dirty hands—rather, the dirt spreads. Judah needed to learn, as we do today, that no one becomes godly by belonging to a good church, a good family, or a wholesome community; righteousness does not transfer by proximity. But sin, injustice, and foolishness rub off easily unless we stand firm by faith, governed by God rather than by group pressures. Modern society has replaced morality with “group dynamics,” treating the opinions and feelings of the crowd as law. Even churches sometimes borrow the world’s music, fads, and spirit in the hope of attracting people, forgetting that true faith requires a break with the world, not a merger with it. Holiness comes only from God’s power, never from blending in with the age.

When a repeatedly arrested, probation-bound assemblyman is easily renominated, it reveals not merely the corruption of leaders but the deeper corruption of the people who elect them. As voters tolerate sins in their children and demand tolerance for their own, it is no wonder they tolerate the same in their legislators. Isaiah warned that in times of judgment, guilt runs through every class and station—“as with the people, so with the priest… as with the lender, so with the borrower”—because God locates sin wherever it lives, not merely at the top. The real crisis, as Proverbs 29:18 teaches, is the absence of biblical vision: without the teaching of God’s Word, people “run wild” and society decays, but where God’s law is kept, there is blessing. Our greatest need, then, is not better politicians but faithful proclamation of the Word—yet today, men prefer blindness to vision.

The Roman satirist Juvenal mocked religion as naïve “guff,” yet he spent his career lamenting Rome’s moral collapse—never realizing that the decay he despised came from the very unbelief he celebrated. St. Paul saw the same rot even within the early church: people who still wore the appearance of godliness while denying its power. When Christian faith stops governing a person’s life, he effectively joins Juvenal’s camp—brilliant perhaps, intense perhaps, but ultimately impotent to change anything. Juvenal’s world looks strikingly like our own, where cynicism replaces conviction and moral critique replaces moral transformation. In the end, Juvenal altered nothing; Christ, through faithful men like Paul, changed the world.