Frivolity
WITH love of money it began. From possession of money Wealth was born. With his third Woe! the prophet assails the child of luxury, named Frivolity.
How from exaggerated and wanton luxury of itself frivolity is born, you can readily trace from your own experience.
Now and then you took part in some festivity or marriage-feast. And that was right, for at Cana your Savior set you the example. But however stately and conventionally the marriage, which you attended, was conducted, you knew, that things were different from ordinary life. Cares had been put aside, there prevailed a more relaxed humor. Even though excitement was avoided, there was a lighter, more cheerful tone in the general conversation. Tongues became more loose. Voices became more musical. Witticisms were in demand. In brief, on such an occasion you were in a freer and happier frame of mind than in your everyday life, and with your fellow-guests you forgot the somber, dark side of life, to satisfy yourself with the lighter side of it.
But even though you were kept thereby from sinful dissipation, yet you felt, on coming home, that you had more or less become a stranger to yourself; that ordinary restfulness and calm were gone; that excitement of senses and nerves did not go well together with the ordinary seriousness of your life.
And it took you a little while, before you were yourself again, and the occasion left you conscious, that you would not like to get away too often from the restfulness and seriousness of your ordinary mood.
Such wedding-festivity is good, but it must remain an exception.
Every day, or even every week, to help celebrate such an occasion, would be impossible.
And yet just this, is what amidst exaggerated luxury life soon runs into.
That superabundance of food and drink and sensual pleasure that makes a wedding-banquet, and which an ordinary person allows himself at most once in a great while, takes place in those circles of wealth every evening anew.
Also the over-strained tone and the light-hearted joke is in those circles no exception but rule.
And so it comes to pass, that light-heartedness banishes seriousness; that the sense for the holy becomes dull and blunt; that constant excitement estranges people to themselves, and that Frivolity presently turning into mockery becomes a predominant power, and which they can not resist.
THIS condition of a person living in luxury, who at last is overpowered by Frivolity, Isaiah portrays in bold outline.
You can readily picture to yourself a valiant, strong horse, which, holding its head high, and not without quick gracefulness, heroically draws the heavily laden wagon. A horse that is fiery and wants to go ahead, but … harnessed with cords and traces to the loaded cart, cannot go forward, without it pulling the cart along.
Well, says the prophet, a luxurious and over-excited sinner is like such a horse.
“Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of vanity, and the sin-wagon as it were with cart ropes” (5, 18).
Such is the slavery of this sin.
Over-excitement knows no rest. When by exhaustion unharnessing would follow, at once swish goes the whip of the driver of the wagon of sin.
On, on it must go, and on it goes.
In the midst of wealth the rich man has lost dominion over his own spirit. Unobservedly wealth has bound him with cords, and wantonness has put him in harness.
He is still conscious that sin is a burden, but a burden as of a wagon which he must draw.
And as a courageous horse he pulls at the cart, and with this burden of sin he makes ever greater advances in the way of sin.
There is no opportunity granted to come to one’s senses. There is no such thing as a standing still.
And when at times in a moment of sobriety and of return of seriousness he would liberate himself, he realizes all but too speedily that those cords are too strong and those traces too thick to be broken.
And so he runs along, always in over-excitement, always with the driver behind him.
And as once he ceased to have money, because money had him, so now it is no longer he who has wealth, but wealth has become his evil master.
The punishment of sin has run after the sin, and has made this rich man and this luxurious child of the world a slave of sin.
And so the seriousness of life has fled him forever, and Frivolity is the cancer that consumes him.
AND then of course mockery of the holy could not remain wanting.
He who still has seriousness in his soul, still trembles before the Almighty, and still fears the Judge of quick and dead.
But the slave of Frivolity laughs with loud sallies of hilarity sacred seriousness in the face, and defiantly taunts God: “that He make speed, that He hasten his work, that we may see it, and that He let the counsel of the Holy One draw nigh and come, that we may know it” (v. 19).
To such taunting of God and bold and reckless calling in of judgment, it does not come at once.
Only drop by drop the poison of evil is let into the veins of our soul.
The first time hearing some one else say it, and self half shrinking back from it, but keeping silent.
A next time that dread already gone, and joining others in laughing at the language of the scoffer, as though it were witty.
Then invite it, so as to make some one else hear it again.
Gradually himself taking a single phrase of it on his lips, to be hailed for it by others.
Ever bolder, ever yielding more recklessly to this unholy urge.
At length leading others in it.
And finally taking pleasure in it, bringing younger people, who have not advanced so far in sin, out from their innocence, purposely poisoning their soul, and enjoying it, when one who first trembled at the sound of such mockery, is at last overcome, and now himself first laughs with others, and then himself takes part in it.
How many young men there are, who once learned to pray at mother’s knee, who were filled with awe for the holy, and with righteous indignation called for revenge when they heard derisive speech, and who now sit down in the bar-room and in clubs amidst sponging scoffers, reveling in it, when that God of their father and of their mother, before Whom once they themselves knelt, is derided, with blasphemy and vilification is defamed.
AGAINST nothing therefore do the people of the Lord have to watch so zealously, as against the ever-menacing danger, that the demon of Frivolity enter stealthily into their own circle and in the circle of their households.
That demon tries to do this by means of a seductive book, which is most interestingly written, or by an acquaintance or friend, who charms by his appearance or clever way in presenting himself.
And when such a book is then read on the sly, or such a young man scoffer is listened to with certain delight, the poison is already operative, and the evil plague enters into the blood.
And therefore it cannot be urged sufficiently that Christian parents keep all such books away from the home, and forbid the visits of all such seductive friends, even though they are members of their respective families, and for the rest most agreeable and polite.
All such books and persons are tainted, and they communicate the taint to you and to your children, when, otherwise than in passing, your family comes in touch with it.
Forget not, that a scoffer hides also in your own heart and in the heart of your child, and the desire, to pull the sin-wagon along by cord or rope, lodges in our sinful blood till death.
Therefore frivolous books and frivolous talkers have no place in your home, and you have no place in their houses, and by intercourse or attendance upon parties you must not accustom your children to the association of the frivolous.
If you have the courage, if you have command of speech, when they come to you, or when you are with them, to resist them at once and stop their mouth, then freely erect the barrier, but then count with it that the intercourse is soon ended.
Such sternness must be practiced; not because we deem ourselves holier than others, but because God has said: Come ye out from among them, and because sin in your own heart renders the danger of taking part with them so great and serious.
Go out from Babylon, saith the Lord, and that world of frivolity is Babylon.
What prevails in those circles, is the spirit of Belshazzar at his brilliant banquet, where all present caroused and made the rafters ring with their sallies of laughter and they scoffed, till the “Mene, Tekel, Upharsin” in flaming characters appeared on the wall.
For though in our times God does not strike with terror in so wondrous a manner the frivolous in their frivolities, once they too in bewilderment of dismay will see that “Mene, Tekel, Upharsin” gleam before them.
Not just before their dying.
Even not always on their death-bed.
But certainly as soon as they have died, when they open their dull and glazed eyes in eternity.
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