The 25 Most Visited Posts on Cerulean Sanctum 2018–Today

Want to know what people are searching for in life? The posts listed below were the most often returned on Cerulean Sanctum, reflecting what web searchers have been looking for here since 2018.

The 25 Most Visited Posts on Cerulean Sanctum (from most visited to least)

Hell’s Road and Good Intentions

“When an unclean spirit comes out of a person, it roams through waterless places looking for rest, and not finding rest, it then says, ‘I’ll go back to my house that I came from.’ Returning, it finds the house swept and put in order. Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and settle down there. As a result, that person’s last condition is worse than the first.”
—Luke 11:24-26

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions” is likely not a favorite aphorism of many—mostly because it may be more true than any of us would care to admit.

Exorcising a demon out of a man may, on the surface, seem about the most positive thing that could happen to that man, but Jesus said that unless other events transpire, that demon may return and bring more noxious demons with it. And so, an act of good becomes something much worse.

Because we lack a crystal ball to scry the future, and because we often don’t know or can’t manufacture the necessary next ingredient to keep a good situation from souring, we need to be more sober about what happens to us and whether that positive happening is only good in the moment, with its gotcha component still to come.

I don’t know what it is about American Christians today that we can’t get over exclaiming, “It’s a God thing!” whenever some positive event or windfall occurs. Fact is, we don’t know that—at least in the most basic way. Maybe it’s just a thing and we need to reserve judgment, allowing time to reveal its future aspects.

Winning the lottery would sound like a “God thing,” but when you read the horror stories of lottery winners whose lives crash and burn post-windfall, you start to wonder. Did God bless them with money only to destroy them later because of it? That’s a theodicy I don’t want to wander into, and yet many people do carelessly. How they manage to reconcile such dichotomies leads me to believe they never attempt to, and they just move on as if nothing happened, living in perpetual denial.

In contrast to the “from blessing to doom” pathway, we have this in the life of the patriarch Joseph:

Then Joseph said to his brothers, “Please, come near me,” and they came near. “I am Joseph, your brother,” he said, “the one you sold into Egypt. And now don’t be grieved or angry with yourselves for selling me here, because God sent me ahead of you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years, and there will be five more years without plowing or harvesting. God sent me ahead of you to establish you as a remnant within the land and to keep you alive by a great deliverance. Therefore it was not you who sent me here, but God. He has made me a father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household, and ruler over all the land of Egypt.”
—Genesis 45:4-8

Joseph was beaten by his brothers and left in a hole to die. He was sold into slavery, had a brief respite, and was later thrown into prison to rot. Everyone forgot about him, even the ones he asked not to.

But eventually, God not only restored Joseph, He elevated him to the second-in-command of the Egyptian empire, where his insight and blessings of God upon him resulted in saving a majority of the world from years-long famine.

The hubris of many of us American Christians is acting as if we know everything God is doing. But we don’t. In fact, we have almost no idea what God intends out of this happening or that circumstance. One day you get a promotion to an executive leadership position at work, and a month later you are indicted along with the rest of the leadership team for securities fraud. Welcome to the federal pen. Must be a God thing.

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will travel to such and such a city and spend a year there and do business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring — what your life will be! For you are like vapor that appears for a little while, then vanishes.
Instead, you should say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”
—James 4:13-15

I write all of the above to leave with this: Consider being more circumspect of pronouncing such and such as a positive or negative. Consider being more wary of the surface appearance of good that comes your way, for underneath the tip of that cool, refreshing iceberg may lurk something catastrophic. Likewise, today’s doom may set you up to save your life and the lives of many. Not everything bad today is bad forever.

Most of all, pause to allow for time to reveal all things. There is no evil in saying you will reserve judgment until you know more. “We shall see” is not a pronouncement of faithlessness but one of a right mind governed by godly sober thinking.

Image: “The Struggle of Good and Evil Spirits” (1875) by Ivan Tvorozhnikov

How Social Media Disabuses Us of the Goodness of People

All have turned away;
all alike have become corrupt.
There is no one who does good,
not even one.
—Psalm 14:3

I subscribe to behaviorist Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel Substack. It’s one of the more informative and lucid analyses of contemporary culture and society.

In today’s post, “On The Degrading Effects of Life Online,” Haidt talks about the brutal and sadistic postings we all have witnessed on social media. Every aspect of man’s inhumanity to man is viewable, and Haidt wonders about the corrosive effect of encountering this toxic stew hours at a time, every day, on the Internet.

It’s not just gross, sadistic acts either. Haidt cites another commenter, Freya India, who writes in her Substack GIRLS:

Most of the time when we talk about social media being bad for us we mean for our mental health. These platforms make us anxious, depressed, and insecure, and for many reasons: the constant social comparison; the superficiality and inauthenticity of it all; being ranked and rated by strangers. All this seems to make us miserable.
But I don’t just think it makes us miserable. I’ve written before about how it makes us bitchy. And self-absorbed. And over time I’m becoming convinced that our most pressing concern isn’t that social media makes us feel worse about ourselves. It’s that social media makes us worse people.
—Freya India, “What’s Become of Us?“

Many people will nod in agreement, but I want to propose a redemptive way that Christians can use this reality as an evangelistic talking point.

This is my take, and you may have your own, but I think the single biggest lie that has permeated modern society is the belief that people are inherently good. You’d be hard pressed to enter any conversation with nearly anyone, save for a conservative theologian, and convince them that at our core we human beings are sinful, with evil rooted in our very being.

Here’s the thing, though. EVERYBODY is aware of this online. Everyone has had a bad experience with a total stranger online. Everyone has seen garbage and filth posted by other people online. Everyone has a Facebook friend who has inexplicably turned on them like a mad dog for some seemingly innocent post or comment.

In short, original sin is on ample display online, and this verse is as true as it ever was:

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God…
—Romans 3:23

As an opportunity to talk about this truth and share Jesus with others, when someone brings up how people are inherently good, ask them whether social media confirms this or denies it. Ask what it means that “anonymous” people who could very well be a neighbor or coworker tear into complete strangers online, or post gruesome and degrading images, or brag about themselves, or do all manner of hateful, spiteful things under the lite cover of a username. Ask them if they’ve ever said anything they regret on social media.

In closing, I would offer this: We have a choice to be salt and light online or not.

I added this in the comments of the Haidt article:

“You can resist the urge to follow the crowd. Instead, you can choose to be a helper, to assist people, to offer hope and encouragement online. You can even reveal yourself not as a tower of strength but as someone who makes mistakes and whose life isn’t perfect. Every one of us can choose to be a genuine, positive, encouraging force online.”

Of course, the caveat on my statement is that sin-sick people can’t do this. You can’t be salt and light if you don’t know the One who is the source of that salt and light.

But then, that’s the challenge, isn’t it?

Image: Thomas Cole, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (1828)