Legendary college basketball coach John Wooden often said, “Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.”
Reading the book of Revelation is a bit like visiting the hospital or learning to drive a car with a clutch; you begin confused, but gradually you find your way until it becomes second nature as you grow more and more familiar with it.
“Then I saw another beast, which came up out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb's horns, and it spoke like a dragon. It used the vast authority of the first beast in its presence. It forced the earth and all who live on it to worship the first beast, whose wound had healed.”
— Revelation 13: 11-12
It’s still, like everything Satan does, a fake — a copy of the real thing. God’s Trinity includes a loving Father, a joy-filled Son, and a peace-filled Holy Spirit.
Satan’s trinity includes Baal (god of money and power), Ishtar (goddess of passion and sex), and Molech (god of darkness and death).
Maybe you know there’s not much to see in Coffee County, Ala. But you ought to go at least one time to see the 13foot marble statue of a woman with her hands held up as if she’s worshipping God. But what you’ll see in her hands makes the trip worthwhile — it’s a giant, black boll weevil.
Boll weevils came up from Mexico and ate their way across the southeastern United States. By 1910, they’d cut cotton production by 40 percent and cotton incomes by 70 percent.
Families abandoned their farms, and those who didn’t, lost their cotton crops. Historians tell us that only the Civil War damaged the South as much as the boll weevil.
So why build a statue to an insect after it destroyed Coffee County?
It’s because the boll weevil forced farmers to diversify and by 1917, after the boll weevil came and destroyed their cotton, Coffee County was producing a million bushels of peanuts a year and Enterprise was known as the peanut capital of the world.
And maybe you remember Wooden saying, “Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.”
Charles “Buddy” Whatley is a retired United Methodist pastor serving Dawson Street Methodist Church in Thomasville, Ga. With wife, Mary Ella, they are missionaries to the Navajo Reservation.
