Wake Up, Look Up

Hello everyone, and thanks for listening to Wake Up, Look Up, a podcast where we connect events happening in real time to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Zach Weihrauch, and in today's episode, we're asking the question, is legal always loving? This is prompted by an article I read in the Associated Press called, and I quote, a toddler was found in a pool and declared dead. He's alive and his parents could be charged. A little bit of a crazy story. Here's how it goes. An 18-month-old boy was pulled from a backyard pool in Gilbert, Arizona after he drowned. He was declared dead at the hospital. Approximately five hours later, a medical examiner staff member discovered the child was still breathing in the hospital's morgue. Think about that. So they declared the kid dead, a doctor declares him dead. They take the kid down to the morgue, and it turns out, oops, he's not dead. He's actually alive. In fact, he's already been released from the hospital. That is a wild story. And I bet you think I'm gonna spin it into a talk about resurrection. Well, you could, but I'm not going to. I'm actually gonna talk about why he was drowning in the pool in the first place. Because police, when they showed up to the home, noted there was a strong odor of marijuana in the home, meaning mom and dad were high. And that's why the 18-month-old kid was unsupervised and that's why he was drowning in the pool and nobody noticed. In fact, the parents are most likely facing charges because of their drug induced negligence as parents. Now I am returning again to the legalization of marijuana because I think it's such a problem for our country. And I'll put it this way, it seems to be in our culture that we have this kind of moral idea that as long as something isn't hurting someone, it's okay that you can't hurt other people. But if you're not hurting other people, then you should be free to, to pursue whatever you're interested in. In fact, that's the argument made for marijuana. Who's it hurting if I get high? Who's it hurting if I recreationally use medicine or use it at my own discretion to treat whatever symptom or pain I think I have. Well, the answer in this case is it's hurting an 18-month-old. You see, the problem when we play the who's it hurting Game is that we can't see all the possibilities, we can't see all the eventualities, the Only way you could ever know if a moral action hurts no one is if you could play out the ripple effect of that moral action to the 10th, 11th, 12th degree. Do you know what you would call a creature who can do that? God. Only God can see the eventual moral implications of our actions. Which is why we should listen when he tells us what isn't good for us. The Apostle Paul writes this in 1 Corinthians 10. He says, all things are lawful, but not all things are helpful. Then he gives us this principle. Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor. Listen, marijuana use in a recreational way may not be as devastating for the individual using it as we once thought. I don't think anyone's arguing it's healthy, but maybe it isn't as dangerous to the individual as we were led to believe in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. But that doesn't mean it isn't harmful to society. It doesn't mean we aren't seeing more and more drivers who are impaired, more, more and more parents and caregivers who are impaired, more and more children smoking marijuana because we are seeing those things. Legalization has opened a Pandora's box of cultural issues. This is yet another example of that. So my question to us as a society is pretty simple. People are getting hurt because we have legalized marijuana. So are we now willing to say it's immoral? Or can we at least acknowledge that all this ever was was a naked attempt, to want to get high or to want to make money off of other people getting high. That's what this was about. Personal freedom and making money. And if that's the case, then my question becomes, well, are we okay with profiting either personally, experientially or financially at the cost of an 18-month-old kid? Because that's what was going to happen in this story. we have to ask ourselves if this is the world we want to live in. Because in an American system, we're not victims of circumstance. We can change the laws. And I'm hoping this is one we will change in the future. Hey, thanks for checking out Wake Up, Look Up. For more content, be sure to visit the Christ Community Chapel app or website cccchapel.com.

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