From early on in life we are told that “Nature hates a vacuum and demands that it be filled.”  Which is true.  When a vacuum is created in the natural world it is immediately filled when that which maintains the vacuum is removed.  For example, in a science laboratory, when a test tube has all of the air inside it sucked out and a cap is placed on its mouth, a vacuum is created.  The inside of the test tube is unaffected by the atmosphere outside of it as long as the tube remains in a vacuum state.  However, when its cap is removed the outside air rushes in to fill the empty space.  It does not matter how putrid or even deadly the incoming air might be, the test tube “commands” the air around it to rush in and fill the vacuum.

The same is true in the spiritual world.  WHEN GOD DOES NOT FILL AN INDIVIDUAL’S LIFE A SPIRITUAL VACUUM OCCURS.  LIKE NATURE, THE HUMAN BEING “COMMANDS” THE NEAREST SPIRITUAL ENTITY TO FILL HIS/HER SPIRITUAL VACUUM.  Man was created with a need for a spiritual presence to occupy his mind/heart.  Either God or Satan (not both) will fill that need.  When man either rejects God or, having known Him, then pushes Him out, Satan is always nearby and available to “come to the rescue.”  Regardless of the cause for it, the absence of God creates a spiritual vacuum which Satan automatically fills.  By their very nature, human beings, even atheists, crave a god.  The problem is that WHEN GOD IS PUSHED OUT, EVERYTHING AND ANYTHING BECOMES A POTENTIAL GOD.

The “Chrisitan world” long ago began pushing God out of her midst, thereby creating a spiritual vacuum that “demanded to be filled.”  God will not go or stay where He is not wanted.  Western civilization began pushing the Biblical God out of its midst with the advent of the Industrial Revolution.  When machines began to replace muscle once religious man began to lose his religion–his dependence on His Maker.  For example, with the advent of machines human beings no longer depended on God for rain; they simply pumped it out of the ground.  Man no longer needed strength from God to do the physical labor necessary for everyday life; man’s machines now did the work.  MACHINERY REPLACED GOD AS THE SOURCE OF MAN’S POWER IN ALL AREAS OF LIFE.  With the advent of man-made armaments, man no longer needed God’s help to win battles and wars because he had guns, airplanes and bombs which he made with his own hands.  Instead of having to fight hand-to-hand to defeat a heathen nation, America needed only to drop one bomb from an airplane to bring a world-encompassing war to an end.  Man had machines; he no longer needed God.  What man needed man could manufacture.

The elimination of God from national importance did not begin with the dropping of a bomb out of an airplane.  It began some 60 years earlier with the invention of the internal combustion engine.  This was a wonderful creation that quickly began to replace man’s muscle with man’s intellect.  If properly utilized, the gasoline engine would make man’s life much better and easier, which it did.  However, man decided to put his creations to other uses, in fact, almost all areas of life came to be handled by machines.  Neither God nor His rules and regulations were needed in the totally mechanized world of man’s creation.  The greater the effect of machines had on man’s life, the less effect God had on man’s life.  His forced exit from both individual and national life left a spiritual vacuum that Satan was quick to fill using the very items man had invented.

Man, proud of his accomplishments, no longer looked to his Maker for life’s necessities.  Man, even religious man, no longer depended on God for his “daily bread.”  He mass produced it himself.  Man’s new self-importance soon plunged the world into war as machines made it possible for one nation to totally and quickly subdue, or even destroy, another nation.  World War I taught reasoning people a valuable lesson: in spite of what man could invent, MAN STILL NEEDED GOD.  During those terrible war-filled days churches began to fill up as the peace-loving world realized that it was no match for the godless world outside of it.  People realized their need for God’s help as death counts mounted.  That was when the Western World got religion.  As a result, God brought the war to an end.  Praise for God’s intervention was heard world-wide.  But only temporarily.

The passage of time saw praise of God being replaced by praise of man.  Soon after the war ended, man began to take stock of what had happened.  He concluded that he, not God, had produced world peace along with an increase in prosperity.  God was slowly pushed out of the hearts of men and out of the national narrative.  Man no longer needed God; man had created another god to worship and serve–himself.  He also created other gods which he would worship, gods which the true God called “the works of man’s own hands.”  His warnings about those works and the worship of them fell on deaf ears.

The forced exit of the Lord created a spiritual vacuum.  Man needed something to “flip his switch.”  Satan fulfilled that need by what became known as the “Roaring Twenties,” a decade-long era when music, dancing, sex , liquor and mind-altering drugs became the new deities of those who had once been God-fearing people and nations–the United States of America in particular.

Once again God had to yank the spiritual slack out of the world’s people.  He accomplished this by sending the Great Depression which once again caused church pews to be filled and prayers to be sent heavenward.  But Satan-aided man had not learned his lesson.  So God sent World War II–the second supposed “war to end all wars.”  Once again man remembered the God of the Holy Bible and turned to Him for help.  As a result He mercifully brought the carnage to an end in 1945.  Once again those who claimed Him as their God praised Him openly and often.  Once again the exaltation of God was only temporary.

The prosperity that followed World War II caused man to, once again, look to himself as his source of all things.  Unfortunately, another change was taking place.  With the prosperity that followed the war, man found that the “necessities of life” had evolved.  Man felt the need for more than just his “daily bread.”  The necessities of life had taken on a “fun” aspect.  Man absolutely had to have “things” and “stuff” to go along with his daily bread, which he could now provide for himself.  With a five-day, eight-hour-per-day work schedule now the national norm, and with machines now doing the heavy lifting, man felt the need for more fun.  Fun with things and stuff had replaced the joy that comes from walking with the Lord.

Minimum wage laws and the automobile age having now placed a “a car in every garage and a chicken in every pot,” man felt the need to be ENTERTAINED.  Satan had just the thing man needed to occupy his leisure time–TELEVISION.  When we bought our first t.v. I was 16 years old (1957).  Like the rest of the nation, I was soon  “hooked” on the entertainment fare offered by the “boob tube.”  I, like my fellow boob-tubers, quickly came to know more about the t.v. offerings than about God’s offerings.  God was a Sunday thing; t.v. was an everyday thing.  In short order the T.V. GUIDE became the best selling book on the market and remained so until the advent of the internet.  The advent of internet enabled man to carry the world around in his hand.  Ever resourceful man had created yet another god–a plastic box that gave him the world he wanted to be in.  But it also was addictive.  I recently read that the average teen internet addict into a screen 10 hours each day.  The truth has become evident: WHEN GOD IS PUSHED OUT, EVERYTHING BECOMES GOD.  America, along with the rest of the civilized world, has many gods which that world worships and serves with ever-increasing zeal.  Reality has become whatever the screen viewer wants it to be.  And if he can’t find it, he simply obtains the proper app.    L.J.