Perversion: It has an unpleasant, unwholesome ring -- and well it might: turning away from a straightforward, healthy course to deformity and ugliness. It is the natural, inevitable tendency of our sin-cursed flesh. It is not new, though its modern victims proclaim it as the wave of the future. It is as old as the vile Canaanites that Israel was to ruthlessly wipe out to cleanse the land from filth: as old as the bestial Sodomites whom a holy God burned up in a dreadful outpouring of righteous wrath: as old as the gross antediluvians who were swept relentlessly away by the purifying judicial waters to rid God's fair earth of their moral putridity. And now we have the whole earth sinking rapidly down to the same state: every moral vice glorified as virtue. But perversion takes many forms. Man was designed to serve God in total love, total holiness, total devotion. Anything short of that is the perversion of the flesh. Such selfish perversion in those who know -- or should know -- better may be more offensive to God than the ignorant bodily perversion of the dead animal world around us. We can so sink down from the true original ideal that we can't even see our own pitiful perversion for what it is. Let us strive every moment to painfully (but joyfully) work our way back up to where God from the beginning intended the blessed and noble race of mankind to be. [Next]