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.

When Black Panthers marched into the California assembly in 1967, the spectacle accomplished little for them—but it handed legislators the excuse they needed to pass the Mulford Act, a gun-control law supposedly aimed only at preventing such incidents. Yet the first man arrested under it was no radical but a decent citizen, a former legislative candidate who carried an unloaded gun for protection while driving through dangerous neighborhoods at 4 a.m. Like all gun-control measures, the law punished the righteous while doing nothing to restrain the lawless. And even as innocent men were charged, politicians pushed for still stricter laws—proving that America’s problem is not a lack of legislation but a lack of Christian character. Laws cannot grow food, end poverty, or make a man righteous, but unjust laws can destroy peace, punish the godly, and burden the nation like the plagues of Egypt. What we need is not more laws, but more righteousness, more freedom, and more godly men.

Modern society talks endlessly about “law and order,” yet we increasingly separate the two—and the result is tyranny. Order without true, God-given law is the order of the graveyard or the gangster: silent streets, rigid control, and no justice. From communist dictatorships to local governments empowering criminals to “keep peace,” we see examples of lawless order everywhere—order that suppresses righteousness rather than upholding it. America now faces the danger of restoring order without restoring law, a tactic long used by revolutionaries who create chaos so people will accept any authority that promises peace, even if it is ungodly. Scripture warns us that real justice is impartial and rooted in God alone (Deut. 1:17). When law and order are torn apart, what remains is tyranny. The urgent question facing our nation is simple: Will we demand godly law and order—or settle for the deadly counterfeit?

The Puritans accomplished astonishing things not because of numbers, but because of conviction—men like Richard Rogers, who when accused of being “too precise,” simply answered, “I serve a precise God.” They believed every word God spoke demanded obedience, and as Christopher Love warned, “If you break God’s law, God will break your peace.” Today millions fill churches, yet the old power is gone; pious sentiment has replaced active, disciplined faith. Modern believers want God to be precise with His blessings while refusing a precise God who commands their lives. Joshua’s fiery warning still stands: the holy and jealous God will not indulge casual faith; if we forsake Him, He will “turn and do… hurt” even after doing us good. In a generation content with comfort, the piercing question remains: Have you given God reason to break your peace?

Psalm 33:12 declares that the nation whose God is the Lord is blessed—but the implication is equally clear: the nation that rejects Him is disinherited, judged, and left to be trampled underfoot. Our modern world, having severed itself from God, now walks squarely in that judgment, and nothing will change until men return to Him in obedience. Scripture teaches that the meek—those tamed and yoked to God’s will—will inherit the earth, while Revelation warns that the ungodly will be broken and dispossessed. Yet even in the midst of judgment, signs of blessing are rising: Christian schools, faithful ministries, and renewed dedication to God’s Word. The real question each of us must answer is this: Are we aligning ourselves with the world of blessing—or with the world of curses?

An old fable tells of a poor, frozen peddler in Warsaw whom the angels begged God to bless—so God brought the man to Heaven and offered him anything. But the peddler, small in heart and vision, could imagine nothing greater than a hot coffee and a doughnut. His request embarrassed the angels because it revealed the deeper problem: he trivialized God because he himself thought trivially. We often fall into the same trap, forgetting that we come not to a village merchant but to a King. As John Newton wrote, “Large petitions with thee bring… none can ever ask too much.” Christ Himself commands us to ask boldly so that our joy may be full. This episode challenges us to enlarge our expectations of God—and to pray like people who truly know the greatness of the One they approach.