Who Is This Modern Man?
by Donavon L Riley
Who is this modern man? He is the one who has abandoned the river of his ancestors, forsaking the waters that nourished his fathers’ souls, the stream that carried their prayers to the heavens. He stands on the banks of history, scorning the liturgy of ages, refusing the life God offered through tradition, and casts himself adrift into the empty wilderness of his own design. The past lies in ruins, not destroyed by invading hands but by his own—fires lit by pride and the desire to forget. He is unshaped clay, but he resists the Potter’s hands, preferring to be molded by every passing tyrant with a chisel of ideology.
He fancies himself wise, a skeptic of all things eternal, but his doubt is the hollow kind that denies truth while fawning over every new idol set before him. He calls himself a seeker, but he seeks no road that leads to the narrow gate. Instead, he stumbles from distraction to distraction, terrified to confront the silence where Christ waits. In his heart, the altar once meant for the Lord lies empty, and yet he bows there, daily, to the fleeting gods of his own making.
This modern man speaks often of freedom, yet he is enslaved—bound to his whims, his desires, his unexamined cravings. He demands his “rights” but flees the duties that make a man whole. He has torn off the yoke of Christ, not knowing it was a yoke of mercy, and now he shoulders the crushing weight of his own rebellion. To him, the world is not a garden infused with the breath of God, not a vineyard entrusted to his care—it is a laboratory, a place to tinker and tear apart, to force creation into new shapes without ever asking what God has already called good.
He calls himself a rebel, but he does not rebel against the chains of sin; he rebels against the commandments that would lead him to life. He sneers at beauty, spurns reverence, and laughs at the idea of holy mystery. Proud of his shallow understanding, he jeers at those who still kneel before the eternal, those who sing of the heavens and the earth as God’s cathedral. This is the man of glass and wires, the man who prefers screens to scriptures, the man who clutches data but cannot hold wisdom. He is a hollow man, a barbarian at the center of what once was holy, not building but dismantling, not renewing but decaying, while the voice of Christ still calls to him, “Come to me, all who are weary, and I will give you rest.” Yet he does not listen.