The Yazoo Clay of Our Day
Rob ChambersWhenever someone plans on building a house, the design and type of materials are always considered, but the foundation is always where the building begins.
The Bible talks about the foundation of a house and its correlation to one’s spiritual house. The quality of a spiritual house depends on the spiritual foundation. If one has a bad foundation they will have a house with structural problems.
In Mississippi many house foundations have been built on a type of soil called Yazoo clay. Yazoo clay has a distinctive, yet destructive, property of expanding and contracting by as much as 200%. The higher the moisture content the more it expands and vice versa. One can imagine, and many can testify, the destructive nature of Yazoo clay has on homes in Mississippi.
This clay can cause unforeseen problems in the structure of a house, and the clay can seemingly lay dormant for a season without causing obvious problems to the structure of a house. When the conditions are right the clay will expand and contract causing floors to buckle, walls to crack and the roof to leak.
Scripture uses a building and foundation analogy throughout. In passages like Psalm 118:22, Isaiah 28:16, Matthew 21:42 and I Peter 2:4-8, the inspired writers have communicated that Jesus is the cornerstone or the essential building block upon which all righteousness and godliness is built. There is no hope of righteousness if one builds their spiritual house on anyone other than Christ.
The substitute foundation the world offers are ideas, like Yazoo clay, that are destructive to one’s spiritual house because it is untrustworthy and unpredictable. These ideas have their footing or root in unbelief in God.
From the world’s foundation stem many ungodly ideas like same-sex marriage, sexual promiscuity, abortion, etc. Biblical families are confronted with such issues and are pressured to accept what is ungodly as normal or permissible. What is causing much of this pressure is the not so subtle indoctrination of evolution in our public, teaching institutions.
Evolution is the Yazoo clay of our day.
Charles Darwin made the idea of evolution popular through the publication of his book “The Origin of Species” in 1859. Darwin sought to explain where life came from without pointing God. His theory has become the government’s official “creation story.”
One may think it is extreme to draw such a drastic conclusion from teaching evolution in our public schools, but as generation after generation after generation is taught that God does not exist and God did not create as Genesis 1:1 states, then the idea of Biblical morality will cease to exist in the minds and hearts of many. These children will become educated influencers in our society and have the tendency to shape immoral social and public policy.
This is exactly what we have today. This ungodly idea has infected our educational system and propagated within the adult society just like a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough.
Evolution teaches that same-sex marriage is a social norm and should not only be socially accepted but also legally protected. Evolutionists also say that abortion is a means whereby females participate in the evolutionary process by aborting babies considered less fit for survival or a healthy life. Also, sexual immorality is perfectly normal to evolutionary theory because there is no source of moral authority, like God or the Bible, to say sex outside of marriage is wrong.
Mississippi public schools, colleges and universities have biology departments committed to teaching the government’s account of creation and how morality is subject to the will of society, not God.
Thankfully, within our state we have Baptist schools and colleges that are committed to teaching the Christian doctrine of creation. The church, however, must not rely simply on teaching what is right and wrong but also focus on engaging the world with prayer for the lost, practicing the life of Christ and proclaiming the Gospel message of faith and repentance. If individual Christians do this, the saved will be revived, the lost will be awakened unto salvation, and society will be reformed with values that honor God.