The Guess Who: "Undone"

This song is based on a tragic event in November of 1969. A teenage girl dropped acid and thought she could fly off of a Vancouver high rise apartment balcony. Randy Bachman wrote this song about her. Check it out.

Deception certainly is a powerful force. Since Israel kept turning away from God and they killed the Messiah, God let them be victims of their deceit. As Romans 11:25 (Bible in Basic English) reminds us gentiles, "For it is my desire, brothers, that this secret may be clear to you, so that you may not have pride in your knowledge, that Israel has been made hard in part, till all the Gentiles have come in;"

Back in Romans 1:32 (BBE), Paul shows how sinners are hardened when God removes his grace from them. "Who, though they have knowledge of the law of God, that the fate of those who do these things is death, not only go on doing these things themselves, but give approval to those who do them."

One line in that song offended me at first. I thought "Too many churches and not enough truth," was an insult directed at believers. Sadly, it is true that we don't have enough truth preached in churches today.

The first-century congregations certainly had  deceived members who deceived others. As 2 Peter 2:1 and 2 (BBE) warned, "But there were false prophets among the people, as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly put forward wrong teachings for your destruction, even turning away from the Lord who gave himself for them; whose destruction will come quickly, and they themselves will be the cause of it. And a great number will go with them in their evil ways, through whom the true way will have a bad name"

By the time Jude 1:4 (BBE) was penned, the infiltration of the church had happened. "For certain men have come among you secretly, marked out before in the holy Writings for this evil fate, men without the fear of God, turning his grace into an unclean thing, and false to our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ."

The Guess Who, "Hand-Me-Down World"

 One of Canada's most notable bands, The Guess Who, released this excellent song back in January of 1971. Though it wasn't their first international hit, the song did chart in America.

Listen to it here.

Everything we have in this world is secondhand. First of all, God made every single particle in the universe. Whatever we have is from his creative hand.

Psalms 95:3-5 (Bible in Basic English) expresses this truth well. "For the Lord is a great God, and a great King over all gods. The deep places of the earth are in his hand; and the tops of the mountains are his. The sea is his, and he made it; and the dry land was formed by his hands."

And in the world of ideas, nothing is new. Ecclesiastes 1:9 and 10 (BBE) reveals, "That which has been, is that which is to be, and that which has been done, is that which will be done, and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there anything of which men say, 'See, this is new?" It has been in the old time which was before us."

Some folks might claim that redemption is a new thing. But we read in Genesis 3:14 and 15 (BBE) how God promised a redeemer to Adam and Eve when Satan led them to sin. "And the Lord God said to the snake, 'Because you have done this you are cursed more than all cattle and every beast of the field; you will go flat on the earth, and dust will be your food all the days of your life: And there will be war between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed: by him will your head be crushed and by you his foot will be wounded.'"

We also see that sin occurs the same way from the beginning. As James 1:13 and 14 (BBE) describes, human propensity to sin has never changed. "Let no man say when he is tested, I am tested by God; for it is not possible for God to be tested by evil, and he himself puts no man to such a test: But every man is tested when he is turned out of the right way by the attraction of his desire."

That's how the first two humans fell and how we are tripped up today by our thrice-unholy tendencies.

If our Saviour hasn't returned by Monday, I hope to post about a great song by a former Guess Who.