“Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of the bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.” Romans 1:24-25
When is God going to judge America? He already is.
The thing to understand is that one of the evidences of God’s judgment is to abandon the sinner to him or herself. God “giving us over” is like a parent letting their disobedient child leave home. Once, when I was very young, probably 5 or 6, my older sister convinced me that we needed to leave home due to our parents’ suffocating rules. I’m sure it wasn’t my idea. The blame rests squarely on my sister. I was a little angel.
But, seriously, we left home with a few meager belongings and went to face the free and exhilarating life ahead. I packed an extra shirt and one of my prized stuffed animals. Like that, I was prepared for life on the road.
Well, we walked to the end of the road and stood at the corner of Asbury and Washington (I still remember). We stood there as the streetlights came on. And we waited. After a while I asked my wise and mature older sister (she was 8) what we were waiting for. She told me, “the bus.” She had a way of saying it that made me feel extraordinarily stupid.
Oh, but of course. The bus. Yeah. That made sense.
After a few more minutes that felt like an hour, I was starting to get cold. Reluctantly, I expressed to her my chilly condition. She told me to put my coat on, assuming, one supposes, that her brother had been smart enough to pack it. Knowing I couldn’t wear my teddy-bear and that the shirt I packed was lighter than the one I had on, I said nothing and dropped the subject.
Then the hunger hit.
Never run away from home before dinner.
When the only light in the street was that from the yellow lamp above and the town looked rougher and spookier than I ever recalled, I mustered the courage to ask if, in fact, a bus ever stopped at this particular corner. I don’t recall my sister’s sensible and shrewd reply (as I’m sure it was) but am sure now, with the benefit of more mature hindsight, that no public bus ever picked up there. Or nearby, for that matter.
Yep…there I was…hungry, cold, under-dressed for the elements with only my favorite stuffed animal, and waiting for a bus that would never come. Isn’t that a perfect picture of man trying vainly to live without the God who created him and everything else? Ah…we might even opine that such a delusional child as I was is, nevertheless, wiser still then rebellious adults.
Anyway, I don’t remember exactly how, but we eventually went back home and apologized our way back into the family. (I suspect that my father was sad to see us come back but that’s another story).
Silly as this episode was, we can only imagine what it would be like if the door to our house had stayed locked that night. In a manner of seeing it, this is what happens when God judges sinners who refuse to acknowledge Him. He opens the door and lets you wander into the clutches of the very things you think will be good for you. It’s this way that we reject God. We choose sin. We insist on it. We demand it and believe it’s the only way for us to be happy. There’s no childish sweetness in it at all because it’s the insistence on our behalf that God is ugly and unfair. To insist on sin is to insist that the world He created isn’t what He says it is and neither is He.
When God gives us over to our lie we’re victimized by the very things we choose.
Aren’t we seeing this very thing today? Hasn’t America abandoned God and now God has abandoned America? The insanities that we keep seeing, nearly everyday, the pure lack of reason and common sense, it’s all explained by Romans 1. To understand the pattern of America’s demise is to come to terms with this verse and chapter.
First, America abandoned God’s sovereignty and refused to worship Him in our schools. The teaching of evolution as the creation narrative of the false religion of secular humanism replaced the biblical account years ago. Evolution directly attacked the first and most important doctrine of Christianity, which is that of God’s sovereign power as Creator. The thing to know about it, though, is that it (secular humanism and evolution) has never been logical. Never. To suggest that everything in the world has come from nothing is preposterous. Nothing begets nothing. It’s logically impossible for nothing to create something but that’s exactly what millions of American school children are taught as fact.
This is a fact we must understand: since something (us and the universe) exists, something has always existed. If there was ever a time that no-thing (nothing) existed, nothing would always exist since it’s impossible to get something from a nothing. Thus, by virtue of the fact that we exist, something must have the power of being unto itself. Something must be eternal and we know it’s not us or material matter, for that’s not in our nature nor that of material things. That many learned scientists are convinced of the lie of evolution is proof of the power of moral rebellion and its impact on our minds.
This false creation narrative is the greatest horror of mankind’s dark history. That’s not hyperbole. Not only does it lie about the nature of reality and origin of life, but it casts us into a meaningless universe of personal despair. What’s the purpose of our lives if we are, in the main, nothing more than cosmic accidents? What a terror! What an appalling thing to tell our young! The secular humanist doctrine of creation (evolution) creates a moral/philosophical vacuum that can’t be filled. It eviscerates the human soul and reduces us to the state of animals. Left to run its course, it reduces love to animalistic sex, art to ugliness and shock, and truth to personal appetite. The truth of biblical creation – that God made us in His awesome image – is what makes our lifetimes wonderful, sweet, beautiful and worth living. Evolution makes us not much more than technically skilled animals.
But why would man do such a thing? What possible reason would we have to believe what’s so obviously irrational? Why would we endure the stark and dire consequences of such a belief, calling it science, when we know, at the bottom of it, at its root, that it’s logically impossible?
We don’t want God. The source of our problem is moral. We don’t want God’s righteousness. We want to sin.
In “Ends and Means”, Aldous Huxley wrote:
“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem of pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove there there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning – the Christian meaning, they insisted – of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.”
And there we have it. Huxley is the prophet and voice of the modern West. To escape God’s moral law, we embrace a philosophy of meaninglessness so that we might run wild sexually, like dumb beasts in a field. Being the forefather of the modern priests of sexual liberation, Huxley believed that mankind’s sexual urges were too powerful to be denied and that Christianity had to go. That God provided marriage for the free and loving expression of sexuality wasn’t enough for Huxley then nor us now. He, like our culture today, demanded that ALL sexual acts be permitted and even celebrated because this is, after all, a meaningless universe. (Of course, Huxley never bothered to answer if, indeed, this is a meaningless universe why he needed to prove it in the first place!).
So, when we mindlessly worship at the rickety altar of science and evolution we’re making a package deal in order that we might be sexually free. That’s basically it, as Huxley articulated so long ago. We accept the metaphysic of meaninglessness and all its concomitant personal terror (like aloneness, depression, etc.) so that we might be sexually profligate. R.C. Sproul has said that America has had three revolutions: the War for Independence in the 1770’s, the Civil War in the 1860’s, and the sexual revolution in the 1960’s. Of the three, Sproul said, the latter was the most destructive.
Today, depression and aloneness stalk us. Mental illness, isolation, and suicide are terrible blights that terrorize our land. Betrayal and the wreckage of families litter our country. Lack of trust, bitterness, and loss of emotional intimacy are nearly ubiquitous. We murder millions of babies in the wombs of our mothers whose bodies are used by men who don’t know how to love. We’ve raised up boys, not men. They consume sexual gratification without honor or commitment. And many of the babies that survive the slaughter mill of Planned Parenthood are born to parents who abandon each other because the sex was easy but the relationship hard. Yes, they speak of love, but it’s the love of animals in heat. When it comes to the fruits of love – personal discipline, leadership, denial of instant gratification, service, truth, and the assurance of responsibility, we have none.
All children need the unconditional love and loving discipline of their parents. What do they get instead? A worldview of meaninglessness and parents who abandon each other when they aren’t convenient anymore. This is the ethic of the day. Sex is love and when sex is the goal and foundation, not Godliness, not righteousness, everyone uses each other.
The very restraints that God places over us are actually the evidence of His love. Holy shackles keep us from the sins that will destroy us. His rod of discipline and staff of direction are meant to protect His flock from the evils (especially the lies) that will rob of us life and dignity. Yes, the law of the Lord is wonderful, directing us to goodness and true love. Love is the fulfillment of the law (Romans 13:10). Don’t read that verse with the world’s eyes. It means that love, true love, and God’s moral order are inseparable. We can’t break God’s moral law and call it love as so many are doing today. So, yes, “choose love” (as the slogan of the atheists preaches), but choose rightly. Choose today to follow Jesus Christ.
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