In this gripping episode, Ronald L. Dart delves into the dark recesses of society that lead us to devalue human life. Through a narrative that examines a heinous crime in a small town, Dart explores broader societal issues including abortion, euthanasia, and our collective preoccupation with death. As the stories unfold, listeners are invited to question how our societal norms have shifted to a point where a dead body becomes a spectacle rather than a tragedy.
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
SPEAKER 03 :
I live in the country. I live near a small city and there are a few small towns sprinkled around. Some people out where I live sleep with the windows open at night and don’t bother locking their doors when they go for a walk. But not far from here, just a few days ago, an 18-year-old high school student and three accomplices robbed a man at gunpoint, took him to a nearby lake, and then shot him in the back of the head and left his body lying on the beach. Just another senseless act of violence. In fact, you probably got one very much like it in your own paper. It would have been just another mysterious homicide for the sheriff’s department, except for what followed. The killer took a friend or two of his from school out to the lake to show them the body. I’ve heard of people showing off their handiwork before, but this is a bit much. These friends told other friends who went out to see the body. Who told other friends who went out to see the body, just like it was a tourist attraction. In all, at least a dozen students from the local high school went out to view the body, and not one of them reported it to the police. And not only had at least a dozen students seen the body, the story had gone right through the school, and many more students knew about it, but not one reported it to the authorities. The body of that poor man lay on the beach for four days. I guess people said, well, you can go out to the beach and see what a dead body smells like. Finally, one anguished student who had not seen the body but had heard the story called the sheriff’s department and reported it. What’s wrong with this picture? The school district has a good reputation. It’s not a bad community at all. But the local prosecutor said this, quote, it is stunning that we have a society so deviant that people would treat a body like a tourist attraction. You know, back in the old days, when coal miners would go down the coal mine with the possibility of gas being there, they would take a cage with a canary in it down the mine, and they would watch this canary from time to time. If the canary passed out, well, they got out of the area very quickly. The canary was a kind of low-tech early warning system for gas in the mines, for deadly gas in the mines. They didn’t respond to it. Well, the miners were just as dead as the bird. For our society here now, 20th century, the canary has died. I told my audiences the same thing not long ago when a young couple gave birth to a baby in a hotel room. and then threw the poor thing into a dumpster outside to die. I guess they thought no one would ever know. And now another canary’s died. What’s gone wrong? Well, what’s gone wrong is that we’ve chosen death over life. We’re preoccupied with death. A very significant portion of our society sees nothing at all really wrong with euthanasia. They think when you’ve got an old person in the hospital who’s in a coma and the only thing keeping him suffering terrible excruciating pain is that coma and there’s no hope of him ever recovering, they think there’s nothing in the world wrong. And I’m not going to say to you that they think there’s nothing wrong with unhooking the person from heroic life support. They think there’s nothing wrong with giving the person a lethal injection and putting him away. A majority of our society sees nothing at all wrong with abortion, which destroys a potential life, a potential human being in the womb of its mother. Our Congress narrowly passed a ban on partial birth abortion not long ago, and the president, the leader of the free world, vetoed it. Too many of our elected representatives were opposed to the bill for Congress to override the veto, so a woman can almost give birth to a child. And while the head is still in the birth canal, the doctor can kill it and then pull it out. If the child were pulled into the world and then killed, the doctor would be a murderer. What’s the difference? Oh, about four inches. They lied about it, you know. When the battle was going on in Congress, they knew the procedure was performed most frequently on healthy mothers with healthy babies. And they lied to us about it. They lied to the press, and the press didn’t bother looking it up. And to enable our president to veto the bill, they deceived the public. Now, I know that some opinion leaders will argue that allowing abortion cheapens life. They will conclude that the allowing of some 30 million abortions in this country has so cheapened life that these kids didn’t think of this man as a human life snuffed out, or if they did, that the life was cheap. In other words, it’s tempting when you come to something like this to go back to the abortion controversy and say, see there, because you allow abortion, you have corrupted the minds of our youth, and as a consequence, they can let something like this happen. But while those who argue this way are right about the result, they’re wrong about the cause. The abortion laws didn’t cause this. They are another symptom of the same cause. So what caused us to have this attitude that life is cheap? What brought us to this coarsening of human life or our attitude toward human life to where we’re willing to, well, to sanction doctor-assisted suicide, where we’re willing to consider the possibility of euthanasia, where we’re willing to kill off babies in the womb? What got us there? Well, by some mysterious process, our society has devalued life. Now, it’s odd in a way, because we’ll spend billions of dollars searching for life elsewhere in the universe while we legally snuff out life in the millions right here, in human life, at that. Some kind of non-human life on Mars is precious in our sight. But not human life here. It was big news when we found a rock right here on Earth, by the way, is where they found it, which scientists think may have come from Mars that showed signs that might have indicated that there were life on Mars at one time. Now I think we’d be ready to spend billions more to send a probe to Mars in search of more evidence that there was life somewhere else sometime. And meanwhile, abortion clinics will kill potential life in the millions right here on Earth. As far as we know, in all the universe, which stretches 15 billion light years in every direction, we are the only life that exists. Oh, there may be life out there, and people are willing to say that there probably is, but as far as we know, we’re all there is. In the universe, life is special. Life is rare. Life is precious. So precious that we will spend huge sums of money and take great risks to find it. And yet we will kill the life that’s right under our nose. Actually, the process by which we have come to this state is not all that mysterious.
SPEAKER 02 :
I want to tell you what that process is in just a moment. Can you imagine the combined population of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida wiped out since the Supreme Court decision allowing abortion? More than 35 million lives have been destroyed. Can we engage in such destruction and not pay for it? For a free copy of The Class That Never Was, write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791, or call toll-free 1-888-BIBLE44.
SPEAKER 03 :
So, how have we come to the place to where we are so willing to devalue life, human life in particular? We have, as a nation and a people, rejected the source of all life. We would rather believe, frankly, in the spontaneous generation of life. A part of the breathless search for life somewhere in the universe is to prove to ourselves that we are not special. You know, if you could get mankind on the couch with a psychiatrist, I think he would conclude that mankind is crazy. We’re trying so hard to prove to ourselves that we’re not special. That there’s no need for a God to create life. Life will just come into existence somewhere. But it’s plain that life is rare. And yet here we are, ready to devalue it. I recall a line in a poem by Robert Penn Warren. It’s a poem in which he has King Ahab saying, or actually he is in prayer and he prays, Oh, please, God, don’t exist. But if God does not exist… Sooner or later, we will succeed in our grand project of ending life. And when we get through and we snuff out all the life on this planet, as far as we know, there will be no life. Anywhere. Jesus himself warned that that could happen. In his great Olivet Prophecy, you’ll find it in Matthew 24, 21, he said there’s going to come a time when when there shall be great tribulations such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be again. And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved alive. But for the elect’s sake, those days shall be shortened. It’s not God who wants us dead. It’s us. God will shorten the days to keep us from killing ourselves off, for whatever life may mean to us, life is precious to God. And here we are, trying to reject, turn our back on, the source of all life. So how have we come to the pass where life is so cheap that a dead body becomes a gruesome tourist attraction to a group of high school students? Well, it’s tempting to blame the schools. And surely they must share some of the blame. But it’s not so much the teachers. It’s the system. The system will not allow prayer in school. The system will not allow God in the classroom. Oh, the system is happy to allow the remnants of pagan religions there. You can observe Halloween. You can have ghosts and hobgoblins and demons all around the walls. You can have Easter bunnies and lie to the kids and tell them that Easter bunnies lay eggs. You can have Santa Claus. But don’t try to introduce God, the real thing, the one who created heavens and the earth, the one who created life. Don’t introduce him into the classroom if you want to keep your job. If ever there were a time when schools needed prayer, it is now. Now, at the precise time when prayer is forbidden. I don’t want to pretend that that would solve all the problems. But maybe if there was a daily prayer in the classroom of this particular high school, maybe if that had been the case, maybe if there had been an awareness of God, some of those who learned of the death of this poor man would have reported it. But the truth is, the Bible says that whenever you consent to a murderer, You’re as guilty as he is. I don’t think many of those kids realized that when they were shown the body and they knew who did the murder and they didn’t go to the authorities, they were accessories after the fact. I don’t think the prosecutor is going to go after them in this case, but it’s sobering, should be sobering to parents. And by the way, don’t blame this lack of prayer in the classroom on the Constitution. The framers of the Constitution had nothing like this in mind. It’s the spirit of our age that wants it so. And the Supreme Court is simply the instrument of us. I’ll tell you what let’s do. Let’s go stand in the midst of the Bible and look at this thing from a biblical perspective. What does God see here? What has God said to people who have done these things before? Now, we can always look at the Bible and say, oh, well, that was then and this is now. And, oh, that prophecy was just for Israel. It doesn’t have a thing in the world to do with us today. Okay. Times change. Peoples change. I’m not going to argue that point with you. But I do want to remind you, God doesn’t change. And if there was a people in the past who did precisely the same thing that we’re doing today and God spoke to those people, don’t you think it would behoove us? to hear what he had to say? The man who saw it and heard it and wrote it all down is named Isaiah. In his very first chapter, in verse 2, he says this, Hear, O heavens, give ear, O earth, for the Lord has spoken. I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me. The ox knows his owner. A dumb, stupid ox that you hook to a plow and plow fields with and go on his way munching, chewing his coot and just doing whatever ox do, they at least know who their owner is. An ass knows his master’s crib. But Israel does not know. My people don’t even think about it. Does your dog know you? Can he tell the difference between you and a stranger off the street? Is your dog glad to see you when you come home? Sure he is. And sure he knows you. But God says, my people, whom I have blessed and I have nourished and brought up, don’t know me. Don’t even recognize. Just like Israel of old, our nation seems determined not to know God. And the description of Israel in this time fits our country today like a glove. Ah, he said, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corruptors. They have forsaken the Lord. They have provoked the Holy One of Israel into anger. They’ve gone away backward. Why would you be stricken anymore? Why are you going to do this to yourself any longer? Because you are doing it to yourself. You will revolt more and more. The whole head is sick. From the top, from the government, the people who are in the positions of power, it’s sick. The whole heart is faint. From the sole of the foot to the head, there is no soundness in it but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores. They haven’t been closed. Nobody’s bothered putting a bandage on them. They haven’t been mollified with ointment. In other words, of all the people out there who could do something about this, nobody is doing anything. For Israel, well, for Israel it led to a bitter end. The prophet went on in verse 7 to say, Your country is desolate. Your cities are burned with fire. Your land, strangers devoured in your presence, and it is desolate as overthrown by strangers. Couldn’t happen here, right? Not possible that that could ever happen. No, no, no, no. That would never happen here. But the truth is, as a nation continues to corrupt itself and becomes weaker morally, sooner or later it becomes weaker physically. And the wild animals around the nation will finally bring it down. Couldn’t happen here. Oh, no, of course not. God says, when you spread forth your hands, this is verse 15, I will hide my eyes from you. By spreading forth your hands, he means a supplication or a prayer. You’re going to make your prayer, and I’m going to hide my face from you. I’m not going to see you. Yea, when you make many prayers, I will not hear. Why? Well, the hands that you lift up to me, he says, are full of blood. Because you see, if you see a murderer, And you consent with the murderer. You don’t take steps to turn him in. You don’t take steps to turn him over to the authorities. You don’t testify against him. You keep your mouth shut and you ignore it. I’m sorry. Not only in the eyes of the law, in the eyes of God, you are an accessory. And your hands are full of blood. Wash. Make yourself clean. Put away the evil of your doings from before my eyes. Cease to do evil, says God. Learn to do well. Seek judgment. Relieve the oppressed people. Look after the fatherless children. Plead on behalf of the widow. Come now, says God. Let’s reason about this. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, they will be as wool. If you’ll be willing and obedient, you will eat the good of the land. So there’s hope for any individual at any time if he’ll just turn himself around. In verse 20 he says, But if you refuse and rebel, you’ll be devoured with a sword, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken it. How, he asks in verse 21, has the faithful city become a harlot? It was at one time full of judgment. The law courts were honest. Righteousness lodged in it. Who lives there now, he says. murderers not only the person who held the weapon not only the initial perpetrator the killer the shooter but those who consent with the murderer the princes your princes are rebellious and they are companions of thieves everyone loves gifts and follows after rewards they don’t judge the fatherless they don’t care about the cause of the widow that was Israel are we any different Our princes, are they rebellious and companions of thieves? Do our princes love gifts and follow after rewards? Our political system is so corrupt that foreign governments actually believe they can buy influence with our politicians. Think of that. Do you believe, really honestly, that the foreign interests that were funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars into our political campaigns thought there was nothing coming back to them in return? They just did it out of the goodness of their heart, right? They just believe in the political ideals of this party or that party, right? Tell me, is there anyone out there who really believes that if $100,000 campaign contributions brought no results, that people would keep on giving it And if a foreign contribution influences foreign policy, actually causes a president or a secretary of one of the other departments that deal with overseas matters, actually causes them to blink on a foreign policy issue, causes them to fudge a decision in the direction of the person who’s the big campaign contributor, what’s the difference between that and treason? But Isaiah is not the toughest prophet. There was another who was tougher yet.
SPEAKER 02 :
I’ll talk about him when I come back. For a free copy of this radio program for yourself or to share with friends and others, write or call this week only and tell us the call letters of this radio station and today’s date. Write to Born to Win, P.O. Box 560, White House, Texas 75791 or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE44.
SPEAKER 03 :
The prophet Hosea was sent to the ten northern tribes of the house of Israel. But frankly, his prophecy could just about as easily have been written yesterday and aimed at us. In fact, there’s a very good case it could be made is that while it wasn’t written yesterday, it was aimed at us. But for now, let’s just see if the shoe fits. In Hosea 4, verse 1, Hosea says, Hear the word of the Lord, you children of Israel, for the Lord has a controversy with the inhabitants of the land. Aha! God’s upset with us. Why? Well, here’s the answer. Because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land. If the shoe fits, wear it. Our politicians would just as soon lie as tell the truth. The prime consideration is not what is true, but what works to our ends. Whatever it is we’re trying to get done, well, we’ll lie if we have to because, after all, we know what’s best. We know what’s best for the people. If the people knew the truth, they’d probably make the wrong decision. Are you looking for mercy? Well, there wasn’t much mercy to be found at Waco, was there? You’re looking for knowledge of God? Well, our system has done everything they can to keep it out of the schools. Thank God for the Constitution that prohibits any laws that interfere with the free exercise of religion. But don’t expect that to continue indefinitely. The spirit of the age found a way to get religion out of the schools which no one who framed the Constitution had in mind. And the spirit of the age is working on getting it out of public discourse and to get it discredited in the public eye. So don’t think freedom of religion is inviolate even in our society. Now, if you expect to find a person to blame all this on, you’ll look in vain. It’s the system we have created and the system that most of us think we want. You can try to change the system if you like, but I’ll tell you what, those people are who are trying to change the system with rifles and guns, are fools. The only hope you would have is trying to change it with prayer and with the Bible. But the only realistic hope you’ve got is to save your own family. Listen to what Hosea says. and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery. They break out, and blood touches blood. The blood from one crime runs into the blood of the next. Powerful language that he uses. In verse 6, he says, My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge, because you have rejected knowledge. I will reject you, that you should be no priest to me, seeing you have forgotten the law of your God.” I will forget your children. And our system has forgotten the law of their God. One poor judge is trying to keep the Ten Commandments on the wall of his courtroom and is having to fight tooth and toenail to keep one of the oldest law codes in the world on the wall. Why? Because God gave it to man. That’s why. If he put Hammurabi’s code up there, no one would care, I suppose. But we have forgotten the law of God. And we ban the law of God from our classrooms. And God says, okay, I’ll forget your children. And I think in our little community, we just saw evidence of that when so many high school kids could know about a dead body and even see the body by the lake and not report it. As they were increased, so they sinned against me. Therefore, I will change their glory into shame. You know, if God still cares about us, You really had better brace yourself. Because as we have become wealthier and wealthier, we have progressively forgotten God and shut him out of public discourse. The solution is obvious, isn’t it? Instead of wealth, poverty. Instead of glory, shame. God says in verse 12, My people ask counsel at their stocks, and their staff declares to them. He’s talking about idols. They’re asking of their staff they carry around, what’s God going to do? For the spirit of whoredoms has caused them to err, and they have gone a-whoring from under their God. They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains and burn incense upon the hills, under oaks and poplars and elms. Why do they do it there? Well, because the shadow thereof is good. The implication is your religious acts are directed by comfort, not conviction. And because your religion has no form, no conviction, therefore your daughters shall commit whoredom and your spouses shall commit adultery. I will not punish your daughters when they commit whoredom nor your spouses when they commit adultery, for themselves are separated with whores, they sacrifice with harlots, And therefore the people that do not understand shall fall. You know, this is odd. He says, I will not punish your daughters when they commit whoredom. But he will not punish because the objective of God’s punishment is to correct. He’s saying he will not even attempt to turn them back for you. He will leave them to their fate. If you’re not willing to do something about your own sons and daughters, why should you expect God to do anything? You know, being a Christian today is a lot like being a Christian in the old Roman Empire in one of its most benevolent stages. But it’s not going to hold. I think Christians had better prepare themselves for the catacombs. God doesn’t want your children to be losers. Until next time, this is Ronald Art reminding you, your children were born to win.
SPEAKER 02 :
And tell us the call letters of this radio station.
SPEAKER 01 :
Stay in touch with the new Born to Win with Ronald L. Dart app. This app has all of your favorite Ronald L. Dart radio messages, sermons, articles, and it even has a digital Bible. Simply search on the iOS or Android app store to download it for free today.
