The Iconoclast

Ah, America, the land of freedom, materialism, and complete blindness to all things metaphysical.

Our freedom, albeit a welcome freedom, can propose a hefty problem for the Christian. Drinking freely of his liberty (and thereby a bit tipsy), he lives completely unaware of the influence of his surrounding culture—a culture which, coupled with his own nearsighted sin nature, is trying to mold him into a through-and-through materialist. Our society, with its liberties galore, will certainly remain affable with the Christian's religion. He can do his "church thing" without becoming any danger to the values most precious to a materialistic society. In fact, his society is quite happy to allow him to carry on his dichotomized existence as a theoretical spiritualist/practical materialist. It is this tendency to relegate the spiritual to the Sunday pedestal(?,) and to retain his materialistic viewpoint for everyday usage, that motivated the writer of Hebrews to challenge the believer to pursue an existence that is entirely devoid of covetousness (Heb. 13:5-6). Such a lifestyle is of utmost importance—important to our freedom and to our witness to a society that is stuck in the "here-and-now." Those who are "content with such things as they have" live like they believe that the material is not all there is. They live free from the enslaving captivity of transient things. And it is they, and only they, who pose a threat to the surrounding culture, because they alone are fundamentally different in their worldview, with a lifestyle that bears witness to that worlview. It is they who can say, "The Lord is my helper, I will not fear what man can do to me." They provide both a challenge to everything a materialistic culture holds dear and an answer to the hopelessness that inevitably plagues a society that really does believe that what they see is all there is.