The ship of destruction

I have read that on the night the Titanic sank the musicians played instruments on the deck until the very last moment. They did so supposedly to keep the people on the ship calm, to keep them from panicking. I guess it could be said that they played to deceive those onboard.

Here was a great ship, the likes of which the world had never seen before. It was grand, filled with such finery that it’s still talked about today, more than a hundred years later. And on that ship were some of the wealthiest people in the world.

These were people that were used to the finer things in life. They didn’t know hunger or depravation. They lived on expensive meals and wore expensive clothes. They owned the finest things and spent their days doing…whatever the wealthy did in the early twentieth century. They were, quite simply, not accustomed to hardship.

And in the most dire of moments they were serenaded with songs meant to give them luxury and coddling as they sank to their deaths in frigid water.

The day of the Titanic is long gone. Today we speak of what a tragedy it was. How horrible it was that so many people lost their lives that night, how senseless those deaths were because they could have easily been prevented if there had only been more lifeboats on board.

More than a hundred years after the Titanic sailed and sank, a ship that was ‘unsinkable’, people are fascinated with it, they speak of it, they study it.

But as I write this I think of the many people on the first class deck, or whatever upper levels they were on, doing whatever they may have been doing that night, being serenaded with music right up to the final moment when the ship disappeared into the icy depths.

They were given a show, designed to delude them, to keep them from realizing just what was happening, and to keep them calm until it no longer mattered if they were calm.

And I think of the many ‘church’ buildings today. The Sunday services, the music that is presented as more of a concert than a true worshipping of the Lord, the sermon that is designed to offend few if any, even in the ‘churches’ where the preacher is willing to tackle a deeper truth, he will generally skate over the surface of the topic, using lots of stories to catch the attention and grab the emotions. At best these sermons are only a tiny bit of what they could be. Sadly in most of them they are but a show put on to entertain the mass of people that file into the congregation on Sunday morning, people that are used to getting what they want, when they want it, and what they want today is a sermon that caters to their emotions and lets them leave an hour later feeling good about themselves.

These Sunday services are much like the music played on the Titanic the night it sank. Here is a group of people that are doomed. They are headed for an end they will not like. Their destruction is coming. And their preachers stand before them week after week playing ‘music’ in the form of sermons designed not to tell them, ‘LOOK! You’re about to sink. Wake up! Grab the only Life Preserver there is.’ No, these preachers don’t do that. Instead they stand before them week after week, as their ship slowly sinks, and they play ‘music’ before them to keep them calm, to keep them entertained, to give them the life they have become accustomed to. There is no need to shake things up, no need to wake them up. Just play the ‘music’ and keep them deluded until the boat sinks.

Here are the majority of the preachers today, men that lead through shows and their inability to offend anyone. They play their ‘music’ before their audience to keep the audience happy.

The people that pack those ‘churches’ are like sheep following a leader straight to the slaughter house. They are so busy listening to the ‘music’ and enjoying the way it makes them feel good when they walk out the doors that they do not understand that they are being kept entertained until the very last moment when their ship sinks and it’s too late.

The musicians are playing on the first class deck, the people are congregating around them, some of them half asleep, some of them wide awake and dressed in their very best, some of them have put on life jackets, they hold tight to their Bibles and their crosses, some of them sit and smile at the musician, some of them dance, keeping time to the melody being played, but all of them are sitting before a program that is nothing but the illusion of what they think they have.

I’ve read that those on board the Titanic did not know it was sinking until very nearly the last moment. They believed the loading of the life boats was a drill (or something to that effect) and therefore they did not take seriously, or did not understand, the danger they were in. They were tricked into thinking the situation was less dire than it was by the crew of the ship, by the music being played before them, by the assurance that the ship they were on was unsinkable.

Today hundreds of thousands of people fill ‘church’ buildings every Sunday. Some of them have seats that are ‘there’s’. We might say they have reserved seating on the ship of destruction. They file in every morning, some of them dressed in their very best, dressed because they are going to the ‘house of God’, dressed ‘nice for Jesus’, some of them take the ‘come as you are’ mentality to heart and show up in their pajamas. No matter what they wear, they show up, they file onto the ‘ship’, they sit in their chairs and they buy into the assurance that their ‘ship’ is unsinkable through the prayer they prayed that gave them salvation, through the belief that if they do nice things they will get to heaven, by the belief that ‘God’ loves them all so very much and that He wants them in heaven with Him just as they are, by the belief that ‘God’ only wants to ‘bless them’.

And they smile and enjoy the ‘music’, some of them singing along, some of them sleeping, some of them dancing in their fancy clothes or their pajamas.

But they all fall for the show before them, being deluded until the very last moment when the ship goes down and they sink into the deep, dark, depths and they realize in one horrifying moment that the ‘musician’ duped them. As they sink into the depths of hell they will realize that the preacher and his elders led them straight to an eternity of torment as they sat before him and enjoyed the ‘music’ he played for them.

And as they experience the agony of hell, in a place where there will be great torment, they will finally understand that the band played for the sole purpose of keeping them calm until the ship sank. And they fell for it. Only, in that moment when they discover hell is real and it is to be their eternity, it will be too late to stand up on the deck and walk out of the show being played to keep them deluded until it’s too late.

Too late.

Their cries in that moment will fall on death ears. The Lord will not hear them. They had their reward on earth as they lived for the things of this world and followed men that claimed to offer them salvation. And now they will pay the eternal price for the delusion they lived with. Because in that moment they will understand that the ‘musicians’ played for them to keep them calm while their ‘ship’ sank straight into the fiery depths of hell.