God has often been likened to a gentleman (which He is) in that God respects the individual choice of another person. If He is asked or told to leave somewhere, He leaves. However, since there can be no good without God, the immediate departure of Him creates a vacuum of power into which other forces attempt to fill. Any exorcist will tell a man that since the demons are more powerful than humans, they immediately come in a fill it, and they are not dispelled except by the force of the power of God when He is invited back in.
There has been a lot of talk this past Easter about “where is God” in the midst of a seeming worldwide shutdown of religion, society, the economy, and life in general amid growing political chaos, social disorder, natural disasters, and confusion in general. People are asking, quite literally, where God is in all of this. Some are asking out of anger or spite, but a lot may be asking out of genuine surprise and confusion, feeling lost in the turning of events around him.
Having noted this, has one considered to ask the question of not where is God, but where were you?
Sin is sin and it all leads to death. However, there are different grades of sin. The Protestant criticism of the Catholic Church on this matter made by many are not just wrong, but outright heretical because as St. Paul himself says, “not all sins are mortal”, and hence the common distinction, rooted directly in Sacred Scripture itself, between mortal (outright destructive) sin and venial (damaging but not outright destructive) sin. The Old Testament imparts a deeper understanding by identifying four since that, in the words of Sacred Scripture, “cry out to Heaven for vengeance.” These sins as noted by the Catholic Church are:
-Willfully murdering the innocent
-Sodomy
-Oppressing the foreigner, widow, and orphan
-Depriving the working man of his justly earned wages
Let’s review each one of these.
Willfully murdering the innocent takes many forms, but in modern times that form is abortion. Tens of millions of children have been murdered in the US alone since 1973 and over a billion worldwide in the same period by way of this sin, and largely because people do not want to take responsibility for their decisions. Likewise, the abortion industry is deeply linked to medical and technological research as the highest levels of all major world powers and their militaries. They want abortion because they used the dead bodies for conducting frankensteinesque eugenic experiments. Some people oppose abortion, but a lot do not, and many will often either condone or ignore intermediate steps to the advancement of this evil in society, let alone other forms of eugenics.
God does not want this sin, and He is a gentleman asking men to stop. Where were you?
Sodomy speaks for itself. This is the sin over which God destroyed multiple cities on the plains of Middle Ghor by way of fire from Heaven as a sign for all time as to the evils of homosexuality. This is not a unique belief, but it is something that has been a part of Christian teaching since time immemorial. For most of Christians history, opposition to such was naturally presumed because such is obvious.
Do you believe that homosexuality is evil? If you do and you are under the age of 38 and you live in the United States in the current time, you are in a <10% minority. If you express your views, you may lose your job, friends, be physically attacked, and have short-term and long-term social problems for decades with potentially severe repercussions. God says that if you love Him, you will keep His commandments. Where are you on homosexuality? Oppressing the foreigner, widow, and orphan takes the modern form of the strange and politically-motivated support of xenophobia and eugenic social policies masquerading as various forms of 'welfare' or 'benefits'. This is not to say that one cannot have national borders or laws, or that people should not help themselves, but rather the manipulation of these groups by exploiting them for gain without caring about their common welfare at all. Prime examples of this in the US are the exploitation of the US situation with migrant labor as a political football by both political parties as well as the use of "welfare" for the poor as a way either to divide families or to use it to promote eugenic ideas against the most vulnerable members of society. Likewise, the deprivation of the working man of his justly earned wages is related to the above, for while the above take from without, refusing to pay people their wages for work robs from within. It robs the trust within society, and often times it is used to "legally" exploit people, such as with currency manipulation, "speculation", and perversion of the means of exchange in what St. Amos called "Making the ephah small and the shekel large" (Amos 8:5), and having robbed the trust from society, it opens the way to revolution as economics precedes politics. Where are you on these matters? This is just in America too. It does not include the rest of the world, where these things are commonly practiced also. The US has been a very blessed country, but the fact is that she has engaged in the sins that "cry out to Heaven for vengeance" for a long time, she has done them repeatedly, she shows no desire to amend her ways, and instead has come to a point where she is attacking those who try to tell her to stop. Where is God? He left a long time ago because we told Him to leave. But the devil was sure to come by to fill the vacuum, and he is not going to leave except by force.