Today we wrap up Chuck Colson’s look at the “Four Horseman” of this, our modern age, with this final quote from his speech, “The Enduring Revolution”:
The fourth modern myth is radical individualism. The fourth horseman brings excess and isolation.
This myth dismisses the importance of family, church, and community; denies the value of sacrifice; and elevates individual rights and pleasures as the ultimate social value.
But with no higher principles to live by, men and women suffocate under their own expanding pleasures. Consumerism becomes empty and leveling, leaving society full of possessions but drained of ideals. This is what Vaclav Havel calls “totalitarian consumerism.”
A psychologist tells the story of a despairing young woman, spent in an endless round of parties, exhausted by the pursuit of pleasure. When told she should simply stop, she responded, “You mean I don’t have to do what I want to do?”
As author George Macdonald once wrote, “The one principle of hell is ‘I am my own.’”
Revelation 6:7-8 tells us “And when He had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living being say, ‘Come and see!’ And I looked, and behold, a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”
The great sin which was the downfall of Lucifer, and led to his and a third of Heaven being cast out, was the sin of selfishness. I’ve read that to be a practicing Satanist, one doesn’t have to belong to the Church of Satan. All one has to do is to totally live for oneself, with no regard to anyone or anything else. How many of us are guilty of that at one time or another?
Ultimately, if this is the way you live your life, you will find yourself in Hell. Most people have this image of Hell as a place of fire and brimstone, with the Devil and his demons forever taunting them. Many people have said, oftentimes as a stab to harshly judgmental Christians, that they would rather be in Hell with their friends, than in Heaven with the likes of them. What these poor souls don’t realize is that Hell isn’t going to be a place where you will be with anyone. You will be utterly and absolutely alone. Worst of all, unlike here and now, where when even alone the Spirit of the Living God is present with you, in Hell you will be completely removed from the presence of God Himself. That is what Hell will truly be, and why one should fear, not embrace, it.