The Diseased Tree: An Autopsy of Our Lawless Age and the One Who Makes All Things New

From Broken Neighborhoods to a Broken World, and the Path Back to the One Who Heals

Jul 16, 2026

Good morning, and hello friends.

I want to tell you a story about a tree. Not a metaphor yet, but a real one. A hundred years ago, on the edge of a small town, a grandfather planted an apple sapling for his newborn son. He tended it. His son climbed it, built a treehouse in it, and as a man, harvested its fruit for his own family. The neighborhood knew that tree. Kids knew which branch would hold their swing. The scent of its blossoms meant spring; the tart crunch of its apples meant fall. It was a landmark, a silent witness to generations.

Now, I want you to see that same spot today. The house is gone, replaced by a concrete slab. The yard is a tangle of weeds and litter. And the tree? It’s a twisted, skeletal thing. Its bark is scarred with graffiti. Its few remaining branches are brittle, bearing only hard, worm-ridden knots that no one would call fruit. It’s not dead, but it is diseased to its core. It no longer gives life. It’s a monument to decay.

This tree is our story. The story of the last hundred years.

We look around at our world, at the normalized lawlessness, the fractured families, the hollowed-out churches, the tension that hums in every city street…and we wonder, “How did we get here?” We’re like the grandson staring at the gnarled, fruitless tree, struggling to imagine it ever being healthy. We’re told this is progress. We’re told we have more freedom, more rights. Yet we feel a deep poverty. We work more for less. We are connected yet profoundly lonely. We have entertainment, but no peace. We have information, but no wisdom. We have rights, but no righteousness.

We are living in the harvest of a diseased tree. And we must understand that this harvest did not appear by chance.

The rot began where all life begins: at the root. And our root, our first and most fundamental institution, is the family, under the headship of the father, under the authority of Yahusha, under the blessing of Yahuah. When that order is rejected, the entire organism sickens.

The Unraveling: A Chain Reaction of Failure

Our spiritual autopsy must begin where Paul directs our gaze: “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:12, ESV). This is the critical first truth. Our battle is not primarily against people, policies, or social trends. Those are merely the symptoms manifesting in the flesh. The war is first waged and lost in the spiritual realm.

The chain reaction is visible, but its origin is invisible.

Churches failed. They ceased being pillars of truth and lamps on a hill. They traded the narrow way for the broad path of cultural relevance. They offered therapy, not transformation; comfort, not conviction. They stopped teaching the Bible from beginning to the end and began teaching selective passages, which are embedded in man made doctrine and traditions. When the Church abdicated its role as the guardian of divine Holy truth, it created a spiritual vacuum.

As a response to failed churches, churches became businesses. The focus shifted from discipleship to attendance, from holiness to budgets, from the message of the cross to the method of the market. The house of prayer became a corporation with a spiritual mission statement. More buildings sprung up, but the power was departing.

When the Church, the spiritual foundation, crumbled, the earthly foundation was next to crack. Fathers failed. They abandoned their posts. They traded their sacred duty as protector, provider, and priest of the home for the pursuit of comfort, prestige, or mere escape. They left a void where godly authority and loving discipline should have been.

As a response to fathers failing, mothers were forced to play the role of both mom and dad. This was not a liberation; it was a crushing, doubling of burden. The rational, necessary response to this abandonment was a social movement that sought to empower women to do it all, because men would not do their part. Feminism, in its modern form, is the logical fruit of widespread paternal failure.

The fruit of this broken family unit was inevitable. As a result of broken families, the children in the neighborhood became lawless. A child with no father has no living picture of a loving, strong, protective authority. He rejects all authority. A child raised in instability, stress, and the chaos of a broken home learns that the world is not safe, that commitments are not kept, that love is conditional. He becomes a fortress of self-reliance or a vacuum of neediness. He becomes easy prey.

Neighborhoods fell apart. The communal fabric, woven from strong families who knew each other, looked out for each other, and held each other’s children accountable, frayed and tore. Suspicion replaced trust. Anonymity replaced community.

Entire communities, followed by cities, broke up and fell apart. We traded front porches for fenced backyards, then for high-rise balconies. We replaced the shared responsibility of a village with the cold, distant bureaucracy of a city department.

This was not an accident. It was a cascade. A spiritual failure at the top (the Church) led to a failure of earthly authority (fathers), which collapsed the primary cell of society (the family), which destroyed the connective tissue (the neighborhood), which doomed the larger body (the community, the city).

We can trace this sickness through the headlines of the last century. Watch the language shift. Watch the “troubled youth” of the 50s become the “delinquents” of the 70s, the “gangs” of the 90s, and the “violent flash mobs” of today. Watch the celebration of the “single mother doing it all” morph into the normalization of fatherlessness as just another “family structure.” The fruit tells you everything about the tree.

The Seeds of the Thistle

So what seeds were planted to produce this harvest of thorns? You named them. They are the tools of the “cosmic powers over this present darkness.”

Drugs to numb the pain of the fatherless, to pacify the angry, to enslave the searching soul to a chemical master.

Guns in the hands of the lawless, a symbol of the fear and chaos that fills the vacuum where peace and order should be.

Media to shape the perception, to sell the lie that broken is beautiful, that rebellion is freedom, that you are the god of your own universe.

Educational System Programming to institutionalize the lie, to separate generations from His story, from truth, from the very concept of a Creator to whom we are accountable.

These are not random social ills. They are strategic weapons in a spiritual war. Their purpose is to cement the delusion.

And what is that delusion? The prophet Isaiah named it a millennia ago: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20, ESV).

We are living in the age of the Great Exchange. Paul diagnosed it in Romans 1:25: They “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.” We traded the infinite for the finite, the eternal for the temporary, a world of multiplication for one of extraction, the Creator for the creations.

And when a society persistently, willfully makes that trade, a terrifying judicial act occurs. Yahuah, in His righteous judgment, hands them over. “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity…” (Romans 1:24, ESV). And for those who refuse to love the truth, “God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false” (2 Thessalonians 2:11, ESV). The lie becomes our reality. The inverted moral compass becomes our only guide.

This is why our leaders proclaim madness with a straight face. This is why the culture celebrates what Yahuah calls an abomination. Jeremiah saw it in his day: “The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests rule at their direction; and my people love to have it so” (Jeremiah 5:31, ESV). We have learned to love the lie because the truth demands something of us: repentance, humility, surrender.

A Life Under the Hater

This brings us to the stark choice laid out before us. We must open our eyes to whose world we are living in.

Imagine living in a time where we are taught by the one that hates us. From kindergarten through graduate school, we are taught a story of cosmic accident, of human sovereignty, of moral relativity. We are taught we are advanced animals, our lives have no inherent purpose, and our highest goal is our own pleasure and fulfillment. This is the curriculum of the hater, designed to separate us from the knowledge of our Creator.

Imagine living in a time where we toil for the one that hates us. We spend 40, 50, 60 hours a week building systems, companies, and economies that are fundamentally built on greed, exploitation, and vanity. Our labor is co-opted to enrich the very principality that despises the image of God in us.

Imagine living in a time where who our enemy is, is defined by the one that hates us. We are told our enemy is our neighbor who votes differently, or a people group across the globe, or a “system” that we must tear down. We are never told our true, ancient enemy is the spiritual force that feeds on this division and hatred.

Imagine living in a time where the food we eat is produced and concocted by the one that hates us. It is designed not for nourishment, but for addiction, for sickness, for dependency. It weakens the temple of the Holy Spirit.

Imagine living in a time when we are taught who we are and where we come from by the one that hates us. Our identities are reduced to race, gender, sexuality, political tribe, or consumption habits. We are told we are products of meaningless forces, not beloved creations fashioned in the very image of God.

Imagine living in a time where the medicine we use to heal our bodies is produced by the one that hates us. It often treats symptoms while ignoring root causes, creates lifelong customers rather than healed people, and often becomes another chain of dependency and profit.

This is our reality. We have become walking advertisements for the products of our own destruction. We consume the poison and call it progress. We wear the chains and call them jewelry. This is the pinnacle of lawlessness: a life willingly surrendered to a rebellious creation, while spurning the loving Creator.

And we think the solution is more laws. More regulations. More government programs. But we cannot legislate a heart. We cannot reverse spiritual decay with a political policy. Chaos, once unleashed, has only one natural direction: increase. A society can, at best, build a dam to hold it back for a season. But the pressure builds. The dam cracks. The chaos floods through again, worse than before. We are watching the dam crack.

The Good Tree: A Life Under the Creator

But there is another reality. A parallel kingdom. It exists right now, in the midst of the chaos. It is the Kingdom of the One who created us, who loves us, who redeemed us.

Imagine living in a time where we are taught by the one that created us. His Word becomes our lens. We learn wisdom, not just information. We understand our origin, our purpose, our destiny. We are taught by the Spirit of Truth Himself.

Imagine living in a time where we toil for the one that created us. Our work, however mundane, becomes an act of worship. We see our labor as a stewardship, a way to provide, to create, to serve others, and to glorify Him. Our vocations become our ministries.

Imagine living in a time where who our enemy is, is defined by the one that created us. We recognize the true battle is “against the spiritual forces of evil.” Our human neighbor is not the enemy; he is a captive we are called to love and free. Our fight is against the lies that bind him.

Imagine living in a time where who our friend is, is defined by the one that created us. Our fellowship is with those who fear the Lord. Our community is the body of Messiah. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, past and present.

Imagine living in a time where the food we eat is produced by the one that created us. We seek to nourish the bodies He gave us with what He designed for them. We eat with gratitude, seeing it as provision and a reminder of His faithfulness.

Imagine living in a time when we are taught who we are and where we come from by the one that created us. We are the children of the King. We are image-bearers of the Most High. We are known, chosen, and loved from before the foundation of the world. Our identity is unshakeable because it is rooted in Him.

Imagine living in a time where the medicine we use to heal our bodies is produced by the one that created us. We seek the healing properties in His creation. We understand that true healing often involves the spirit and soul as much as the body. We trust in His wisdom for our health.

This is not a fantasy. This is the offered reality for those who are in Messiah Yahusha. It is a transfer of kingdoms. It is a shift in citizenship. It is choosing which tree we will draw our life from.

Yahusha was brutally direct about this. “Beware of false prophets… You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit” (Matthew 7:15-18, ESV).

Look at the fruit of the last hundred years. Look at the harvest of our cultural tree. Is it love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control? Or is it anxiety, depression, division, rage, addiction, perversion, and death?

The fruit tells you the root. We are feasting from a diseased tree. A thornbush. A thistle.

The Path Back: Grafting onto the Good Tree

So what do we do? We don’t start by trying to fix the tree. We start by fleeing from it. We start by being grafted onto the good tree.

The path back begins with a question from the Psalms, a question that cuts through every layer of delusion: “O LORD, who shall sojourn in your tent? Who shall dwell on your holy hill?” (Psalm 15:1, ESV).

The answer is not a politician, a program, or a policy. The answer is a person. A person who “walks blamelessly and does what is right and speaks truth in his heart.” It starts in the heart. It begins with us, in our closets, on our knees, speaking truth in our own hearts. Admitting the delusion we’ve believed. Repenting of the lies we’ve loved. Turning away from the diseased tree and its rotten fruit.

It means looking at our own lives, our families, our choices, and asking: “What fruit are we producing? Does it resemble the fruit of the Spirit, or the fruit of this present age?” This is the personal autopsy that must precede the cultural one.

We must stop consuming from the orchard of the hater. We begin the slow, often difficult process of aligning every part of our lives, what we learn, what we watch, what we buy, what we eat, how we work, how we raise our children…back under the authority of the One who created us and loves us.

We reconnect with the true Vine. Yahusha said, “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5, ESV). Our power to produce any good thing, to resist the decay, to be a source of life in a dying world, comes only from abiding in Him. It is not a self-help program. It is a total dependency on divine life.

This is how order is derived from chaos. Not from within the chaos, but from outside it. “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2, ESV). The Spirit hovered. Then He spoke. And order came. Light broke in.

He must hover over the chaos of our hearts, our families, our lives. Then we must let Him speak His Word into it. His Word brings order. His Word brings light. His Word brings life.

The societal decay may have begun in desperate and poor neighborhoods, but the spiritual decay began in the human heart. The healing must begin there, too. One heart at a time. One family at a time. One small, grafted branch on the good tree, beginning to bear the faint, first blossom of true fruit.

It will look foolish to the world. It will look like retreat. It will look like we are not “engaging with the culture.” But we are. We are engaging at the root level. We are planting a seed of the Kingdom in the ruined soil of our own lives. We are becoming a pocket of order within the chaos, a point of light within the darkness.

Woe are we, yes. The diagnosis is dire. The tree is diseased. The fruit is poison.

But hope is not found in nursing the diseased tree. Hope is found in the Good Tree. Hope is found in the One whose name is worthy. The One who brings order from chaos, light from darkness, and life from death.

The harvest of lawlessness is fully ripe. But so is the offer of the Kingdom.

Which tree will you draw your life from?

That is all, and thank you for reading.

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