Never has there been a generation like ours. A generation that feels entitled “to have” and “have it right now”. The aftermath is a generation of kings and queens fallen subject to their wants and desires – only to cascade so low that we are but a generation of servants who are constitutionally masters. The Wise Book of Proverbs poetically describes our generation with the apothegm of the earth’s lamentation to the inanity of the servant and the master saga:
…there are three things that are too much for even the earth to bear, and under four it shakes its foundations —
when a servant becomes king,
when a fool gets rich,
when a whore is voted “woman of the year”,
when a “girlfriend” replaces a faithful wife (Proverbs 30:21–23).
The Proverb condemns not servants from becoming kings but rather, the emphasis pivots on the quantum entanglement that when the servant becomes king, then the king has become servant. Nor does the Proverb condemn the fool from getting rich, but rather, the fool that gets rich, is the fool that is getting poorer, for the fool has not mastered the ingenuity of maintaining wealth. The fool that becomes wealthy is homologous to the prodigal son that felt entitled (Luke 15: 11–32) and demanded and demanded “to have right now”. When the fool yielded to his desires, he gave to the world his crown and triggered the role reversal in which he became the servant that was constitutionally king. And the world, that should have been serving him, (Genesis 1:28) unconstitutionally became his master.
Like the prodigal son and the fool, our entitled generation is only concerned with the physical and what the eye can see right now. Everything unseen and unknown is assigned, a lie. The downfall continues until we are a people voting the whore, the woman of the year; the wife, the unconstitutional courtesan mistress; and the concubine, the unconstitutional wife. In the absurdity, we jauntily jump ship to mix the same ingredients and hope for different results.
Our generation remains entitled and blinded by the ‘wants’ that, like the prodigal son and the Mighty Sampson, we do not realise that what we want and what we demand is cancerous to our souls. Samson said to his parents “…now get her for me as my wife“(Judges 14:2–3). And the prodigal son said to his father, “…I want right now what’s coming to me” (Luke 15:11–12). We all know the outcomes of their desires…
Sampson was chained and imprisoned by his desires and addictions. His wants ultimately brought him to his death. The prodigal son found himself undisciplined and dissipated, having surrendered to his desires, and when he had given all of himself to the world, “he began to hurt.” He found that he could no longer fill the void in his heart with the pleasures of life and ultimately, found that those pleasures only brought more pain than he could have imagined. In fact, the prodigal son’s wants brought him so low that he sold his identity from king to servant and was assigned to work in the fields and slop with the pigs (Luke 15:12–16).
And yet, this is our generation; selling our crowns and identity to slop with the pigs and live lives less than what God intends for us. We live lives slopping in desires for meaningless things instead of seeking the eternal things. A generation that is ever seeing but never perceiving, ever hearing but never understanding (Mark 4:12), blinded by our wants and driven only by our desires. Even though there have been many who have gone before us who have binged on their wants. Like King Solomon, who once lived subject to his desires and said to himself “Let’s go for it—experiment with pleasure, have a good time!” He ultimately found that it was nothing but smoke and that everything, in the end, was meaningless without God (Ecclesiastes 2).
In his book of memoirs, Ecclesiastes, King Solomon stated, “Everything I wanted I took—I never said no to myself. I gave in to every impulse…. I sucked the marrow of pleasure out of every task—my reward to myself for a hard day’s work!” (Ecclesiastes 2:10). But in the end he concluded that it was all meaningless without God and but a chasing after the wind, saying, “remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, I find no pleasure in them” (Ecclesiastes 12:1).
The moral of story? As so eloquently stated by an unknown author, “Life is full of lessons. We are free to make the choices, but we are not free from the consequences of those choices.” So as we catch ourselves feeling entitled to our desires, wants and things, let us also remind ourselves of their inevitable consequences.
©Katie Mliswa and MomentsbyKatie.M, 2018.
