We live in an amazing time, don’t we? We have laptop computers that are literally thousands of times more powerful than the room-sized computers we used to put a man on the moon – actually, 12 men have walked on the surface of the moon … so far. The computer which landed Apollo 11 on the Moon was about as powerful as a contemporary pocket calculator (www.thevintagenews.com). The typical cellphone contains 1,048,576 bits of RAM … or “Random Access Memory” … which mean that this [cellphone] can literally store over a million times more information than the same computers that put a man on the moon … and they can process information over 2,000 times faster (www.realclearscience.com). Wild, huh? This thing comes with a GPS … which communicates with tracking satellites hundreds of miles over our heads. It also has a computer built into it and it has access to the Bible in every known language on the face of the earth. I’m willing to bet that everyone here owns a laptop or a tablet or a cellphone … and if you don’t it’s not because you can’t afford it but that you choose not to … which is understandable.
Medical science is changing almost as fast as computers. I remember when someone getting open heart surgery was front page news … today it is almost a routine procedure which, thanks to the use of catheters and stints, is being performed less and less. We now have artificial knees and hips, as well as mechanical and pig aortas. Stem cell research is advancing by leaps and bounds and is being used to treat a growing range of diseases or re-generate damaged cells, tissue, and bone.
There is a new and rapidly developing branch of medicine known as “telemedicine.” It is what it sounds like. Health care can be provided at a distance via phones and portable transmitting devises. Patients can use these devices to measure blood pressure, monitor glucose levels, and test for conditions from blood samples at home and then send the results to your doctor in real time. They now have a pill that lets you know that you’ve taken it. The pill contains a tiny sensor that records when it is taken and then transmits that information to a patch worn by the patient … which then sends that information to … your smartphone. Computers are being used to diagnosis skin cancer and they are on the verge of having medicine that is genetically designed just for the patient. Like I said, wild stuff, amen?
We live a lifestyle in this country that most of the world envies and which we take for granted: hot and cold running water, refrigerators with food in them, grocery stores … with food in them, fruits and vegetables from around the world all year long. Most of us not only own one car but two … and have garages to park them in … unless they’re full of stuff. Many of us have so much stuff that we have to rent places to store our stuff, amen?
I could go on and on …
And then, I look around, and I ask myself and I ask God just about every day: What in the world happened?
You know … as crazy the world seems right now, we’ve been here before, actually. In the “days of Noah,” the LORD “saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5). In his book about Noah, author Jeff Kinley wrote: “If the Bible is correct in stating that earth’s entire population was thinking only about evil 24/7, certainly those evil thoughts would have included sexual promiscuity, adultery, and perversion, as well as rape, prostitution, homosexuality and lesbianism, and pedophilia. Does that sound extreme or far-fetched?” asks Kinley. “Considering that most of these aberrations and perversions have been prevalent among us since Noah’s day, it’s not a stretch to imagine how prominent they would have been in a world without any moral compass or restraint” (Kinley, J.; As It Was in the Days of Noah: Warnings from Bible Prophecy about the Coming Global Story. Eugene, OR: Harvest House; pp. 15-16).
A world without any moral compass or restraint. Spot on. How did we get this way? Paul would say “the same way that you boil a frog … one degree at a time.” Human depravity is a symptom of our isolation from God … which started when the serpent tempted Eve and Eve tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden. The temptation? To be independent. To decide for ourselves what is right, what is good, what is moral, and what is evil. Without God’s moral compass, we keep getting lost … over and over and over again, amen? As Pastor David Jeremiah puts it: “Without God at the wheel of the human heart, we are like a driverless car careening down the freeway. A crash is inevitable” (Jeremiah, D.; Is This the End?; New York: Thomas Nelson; 2016; p.8) … and the way things are going, I might add, we can expect to crash at any moment … at least it feels that way to me.
How do you boil a country? Let’s start with how you boil your mind. It goes to show how times have really changed … I’m nervous about some of the things I’m about to talk about … but I have to put it out there. Living with our heads in the sand doesn’t make the problem go away … it makes it grow worse … so … here we go.
The largest porn site on the internet … I’m not going to tell you the name … reported that their customers have watched over four billion … that’s “billion” with a “b” … hours of their “product.” That comes out to 500,000 years. In a year, people view over 87 billion … again, that’s “billion” with a “b” … X-rated videos … 87 billion. That’s 12 videos a year for every man, woman, boy, and girl on the planet … not just in America … but on the planet! The statistic that really sickens me and breaks my heart is that a quarter of the pornography shown on the internet is child related.
We didn’t get here over night, my friends. You boil a frog one degree at a time, right? This stuff … this garbage … is being piped right into our homes via the internet and television … and not everyone who is watching it are adults. Many children … more than you realize … grow up with constant exposure to porn … and they have become used to it. A Barna Study found that most teenagers are so acclimated to the culture that they believe not recycling is more immoral than pornography (www.barna.org/blog/culture-media/david-kinnaman/ the-porn-phenomenon#.Vti-A1kVe2o). Remember this? [cell phone.] Teenagers and young adults today use it to “sext” each other. “Sexting” is the practice of sending explicit pictures of oneself via cell phones. Sixty-two percent of teens and young adults have received a sexually explicit image on their cell phones and 41 percent have sent one (Kinnaman, Ibid).
Writer and political commentator Ben Shapiro made the following observation in his book “Porn Generation”: “I am a member of a lost generation. We have lost our values. … In a world where all values are equal, where everything is simply a matter of choice, narcissism rules the day. … The mainstream acceptance of pornography has become a social fact” (Shapiro, B.; Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future; Washing, DC: Regnery Pub..; 2013; pp. 66, 7-33-74, 77).
Just yesterday … yesterday … I came across a Twitter post from a British fashion journalist named Flora Gill suggesting that someone “create porn for children.” You heard me right. She went on to say: “Young teens are already watching porn but they’re finding hard core, aggressive videos that give a terrible view of sex. They need entry level porn! A soft-core site where everyone asks for consent and no one gets choked, etc.” (YouTube; Matt Walsh Show; Daily Wire; June 30).
The Bible says that in Noah’s day, every thought and intent of the heart was evil continuously … and now we have the technology to take the most lurid fantasies of the human mind and project them on to a screen that a child can hold in his or her hand … and all of this has led to the coarsening or desensitization of our culture. We are becoming a profane people with fewer restraints on behavior and language and a diminishing respect for human life.
How do you boil a marriage? God established the covenant of marriage in the Garden of Eden and then codified our understanding of “marriage” in the Mosaic law. Jesus described marriage like this: “From the beginning of the creation, God ‘made them male and female.’ For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” (Mark 10:6-8) … and this has been the definition of marriage for thousands and thousands of years … until 2015, when the United States Supreme Court “redefined” marriage as any committed relationship between two people … even same-sex couples.
When that happened, we cautioned society that they had ripped the lid off of Pandora’s box … and we got laughed off and accused of being alarmist and crackpots … but here we are. There are people today who seriously claim that they are “polyamorous.” As the name implies, they feel it is possible to be in love any number of people at the same time … which has given rise to a discussion about the possibility of “polygyny” … which is the marriage of one man to several wives … and “polyandry” … the marriage of one woman to several men. If one man can marry another man or one woman can marry another woman, why not expand the concept of marriage to include polygyny and polyandry? Like the original Mormons, there are some Christians who are in favor of polygyny, citing the fact that that it was a common and accepted practice in the Old Testament … over-looking Jesus’ definition that I mentioned earlier.
If two men can get married or two women can get married, why can’t I marry a tree or a picture of myself? That’s what Karen Cooper and Liu Ye did. Karen Cooper married a Ficus tree and Liu Ye married a life-sized cut-out of himself. Can you guess who Erika Eiffel married? That’s right … the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Carol Santa Fe married the train station in Santa Fe, NM … Lee Jin-gyu married a pillow … Linda Duchame married a Ferris wheel … and I could go on and on … but I think you get the point … marriage is being boiled alive, amen?
How do you boil the military? Some of you may remember this story. The Veteran’s Administration in Akron, Ohio, had a put up a display in one of their clinics honoring POWs and MIAs. Among the items on display was a Bible … symbolizing something that was used by many POWs to sustain themselves and help them to endure the grinding horrors of their captivity. A group called the MRFF … Military Religious Freedom Foundation … protested and had the Bible and a Bible verse that was part of the display removed. The empty space left by the removal of the Bible serves as a silent witness to the intolerance of those who are determined to remove as much scriptural and religious influence from American society as they possibly can (Fox News, February 29, 2016).
As we heard from General Mark Milly, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s testimony before Congress recently, members of our armed forces are facing new restrictions on expressing their religion and political beliefs. While there is no official policy banning voluntary prayer, religious services, or pastoral counseling at this point, some chaplains have inadvertently run into some politically correct buzz saws recently because they prayed in Jesus’ name, counseled soldiers from a “Christian” perspective, or expressed Biblical standards for sexuality (Jeremiah, D.; 2016, p. 12). John J. Murray, a minister with the Free Church of Scotland, observed: “We are back to the situation as it was in the days of the early church. … The Roman Empire, under which so many Christians were martyred, was pluralistic and supremely tolerant of religion. The only people they could not tolerate were the Christians” (www.theaquilareport.com/moral-and-spiritual-erosion-in two-generations/).
How do you boil the medical profession? Well … one million babies at a time. Since the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, the lives of over 58 million babies have been terminated by a medical procedure. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the rate of abortions in the United States since 1975 has consistently been over one million per year (www.nrlc.org/uploads/factsheets/ FSO1AbortionintheUS.pdf).
Sons are valued in many Asian cultures because they can carry on the family name, receive inheritance, perform important religious funeral rites, and care for their parents in sickness and old age. Thanks to ultrasound technology, the practice of “sex-selective abortion” has spread like wildfire in places like China, India, Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea, the Caucasus, and the Balkan Peninsula. Approximately 15.8 million girls have been eliminated through sex-selective abortion and other forms of prenatal daughter elimination since 1990. To put that in perspective, that is roughly the equivalent of the population of Portugal and Finland combined (www.christianpost.com/voices/sex-selective-abortion-asias-lost-girls).
Some medical professionals are pushing for legislation that would permit them to chemically and surgically change a child’s biological gender without their parent’s approval or permission. A school district in Minnesota, for example, worked with local government and medical professionals to help a 16-year old boy “transition” to the opposite sex without parental consent and without a court order legally emancipating him. The case has reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which hasn’t ruled on the case yet (dailycitizen.focusonthefamily.com/ minnesota-government-helps-provide-sex-change-for-teen-without-parents-consent). In a bill that went into effect in January of 2020, Washington state lowered the age of consent for medical treatment to 13. “This bill would allow a child to make an appointment during the school day, and Mom and Dad would never know about it,” said Jennifer Heine-Withee, a mother of three who runs Washington Parents Rights in Education (pjmedia.com/columns/stacey-lennox/2020/12/10/).
How do you boil a country? Obviously, I don’t have the time to go into all the other areas of societal moral decay that’s happening all around us … the loss of ethics in business … the breakdown of the family … the out-of-wedlock birth rate … the deliberate removal of fathers from the family … the attack on masculinity … the rampant materialism that is driving us deeper into debt … substance abuse … alcoholism … the lack of civility in public discourse … racial tensions … gambling … cheating and bullying … our insane crime rates. As one Christian author observed, even our comic book superheroes have become “grittier, grimmer, and darker as the lines between good and evil have been blurred and broken” (Jeremiah, D.; 2016; p. 13). I’ve told you before about the series “Lucifer” on Netflix which portrays the devil as a pretty nice guy in an evil sort of way. The series has received high ratings and has been critically acclaimed and is entering into its sixth and final season. Trust me … it’s as weird as all this sounds. This is the world that we live in today.
How do you boil a society? How do you boil a whole nation? Paul knew the recipe or formula two thousand years ago and he spelled it out very clearly in his letter to the Christian community in Rome. You might want to turn to the first chapter in the Book of Romans and follow along with me.
First, you put the frog in a pot of cool water and begin to turn the heat up every so slowly. In our case, it begins with the denial of creationism and the Creator. Look at verse 18 through 20:
“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse (Romans 1:18-20).
In other words, we begin to deny the reality of God that is clearly all around us.
Why would we do that? Because the existence of a Creator implies that He has authority over His creation. If we are subject to a Maker, then we are not autonomous … and our autonomy … the right to decide for ourselves what is good and what is evil … is something that we have insisted on since the fall in the Garden of Eden. And yet, time and time and time again it seems that we have to learn that we cannot do what we want when we want without consequences. God is a moral God and He has clearly provided us with moral guidelines by which we can live and grow and prosper … and when we follow those moral guidelines, that’s exactly what happens …. we live and we grow and we prosper. We may be living and growing and prospering materially but we are clearly decaying morally.
So here’s how Paul says we turn up the heat on the pot that we’ve put ourselves in. First, we remove God from our world view. Then we become ungrateful for what we have and begin to demand more and more of what we believe will make us happy. “Although they knew God,” Paul says, “they” … meaning us … “did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Romans 1:21; italics mine). A thankful heart is a happy heart. A heart that is constantly dissatisfied is an unhappy heart … a darkened heart.
In order to be happy … to fulfill our demands for the things that we believe will make us happy, we seek out the aid and comfort of idols … gods of our own making who will dance to our tune and serve us. “Claiming to be wise,” says Paul, “they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles” (Romans 1:22-23).
Our chase after other gods leads us further and further from the One True God. “Self-deception about our sin is a narcotic,” says Theologian Cornelius Plantinga Jr., “a tranquilizing and disorienting suppression of our spiritual central nervous system. What’s devastating about it is that when we lack an ear for wrong notes in our lives, we cannot play right ones or even recognize them in the performances of others. Eventually we make ourselves religiously so unmusical that we miss both the exposition and the recapitulation of the main themes God plays in human life.” As a result, says Plantinga, the “music of creation and the still greater music of grace whistle right through our skulls, causing no catch of breath and leaving no residue. Moral beauty begins to bore us. The idea that the human race needs a Savior,” he concludes, “sounds quaint” (Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; 1995; p. 199) … and our hearts grow even darker without this music of grace.
In antiquity, idolatry meant worshipping statues, images, and fetishes … but you do not have to bow down to a stone statue to be an idolater, amen? An “idol” is whatever comes first in your life … anything that comes before Jesus Christ in your affections or priorities. When we reject the Creator-God of the Bible that is on display all around us, we must find a substitute. Today, our substitutes are our money, our possessions, our goals, our ambitions, our dreams, our obsessions, our addictions, our pleasures, our opinions. When we reject God, we turn away from His love and provision and we seek the gods that the world has to offer. When we try to satisfy our thirst for the living water of God with the water of the world, it’s like drinking salt water to cure our physical thirst … it doesn’t satisfy our thirst but only makes us more thirsty, which leads us to drink more salt water, until it eventually kills us.
Our quest for self-satisfaction leads us down a path away from God. How can God, as the Bible puts it, give us up to the evils that we choose? He doesn’t. God doesn’t want to see any of His children go astray but He also gave us what we asked for in the Garden of Eden … free will … the ability to decide all on our own what paths we choose to tread … and for some reason, we have to keep finding out that these paths lead to suffering and destruction over and over again … and we find ourselves back in the times of Noah where all our thoughts … where all our hearts … where all our intent … where all of our actions are continually on one thing only … our self-gratification.
How do you lead a person astray or how does a person lead themselves astray? One bad, self-serving choice after another. “And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge,” says Paul in verse 21, “God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting; being filled with all …
• Unrighteousness (click)
• Sexual immorality (click)
• Wickedness (click)
• Covetousness (click)
• Maliciousness (click)
• Full of envy (click)
• Murder (click)
• Strife (click)
• Deceit (click)
• Evil-mindedness (click)
The result is a generation that Paul describes as:
• Whisperers
• Backbiters
• Haters of God
• Violent
• Proud
• Boasters
• Inventors of evil things
• Disobedient to parents
• Undiscerning
• Untrustworthy
• Unloving
• Unforgiving
• Unmerciful
Man … sounds like an eerily accurate description of what we’re seeing today, amen? And the late pastor and medical doctor, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones says that it is only going to get worse: “Hell is a condition in which life is lived away from God and all the restraints of God’s holiness. All that is described in this passage” … referring to what we’re reading here in Romans … “exaggerated still more, and going on endlessly!” In other words, says Dr. Lloyd-Jones, “hell is people living in all eternity the kind of life they are living now, only much worse! That is hell!” (Romans: Exposition of Chapter 1, The Gospel of God; Grand Rapids: Zondervan; 1985; p. 392).
Amen!
At what point is the frog finally cooked? What happens to a society where anything goes, and we live by own rules and standards? In the case of Noah, God sent a flood. Another time, He departed from the people themselves. In 1st Chronicles, God descends into the Temple built for Him by King David and King Solomon, where He abided with His people for 400 years. By the time of King Zedekiah, however, Israel had followed the path that Paul has been describing: The rejection of the Creator … the proliferation of idols … lust-driven hearts … a sexually saturated age … leading to a total moral collapse. God not only gave them over to their passions and the lusts of their hearts but gave them over to their hand-crafted idols … and they were utterly destroyed by the Babylonians.
One of the survivors who was led off as a slave was a young priest by the name of Ezekiel. While in exile, he ministered to God’s people while receiving visions and messages from God. In chapters 8 through 11, Ezekiel described a frightening vision … that of God departing from the Temple. In Chapter 8, Ezekiel is shown the debauchery and idolatry that is taking place amongst his beloved Jews in Babylon … and then he watches as the glory of the Lord begins to move out of the Holy of Holies. Before leaving the Temple, Ezekiel says that the glory of the Lord “paused over the threshold of the Temple; and the court was full of the brightness of the Lords’ glory” (Ezekiel 10:4) … and then “the glory of the Lord departed from the threshold of the temple and stood over the cherubim” (Ezekiel 10:18) … and from there it “went up from the midst of the city and stood on the mountain, which is on the east side of the city” (Ezekiel 11:23).
The meaning of Ezekiel’s vision is clear. Our holy God could no longer live with a nation that had descended into depravity. The clouds of God’s glory … which had filled the Temple from Solomon’s reign … now moved from the Holy of Holies, to the threshold of the Temple, then the rafters of the Temple, then out of the building … where it disappeared over the Judean hills and presumably returned to His city and His Temple in Heaven.
The Hebrew word used to describe what happened when God departed from the Temple is “ichabod” … which means “the glory had departed.” Has the word “ichabod” been written over us … over our country? Before you despair, let me offer you some hope.
“There is no more wonderful word than ‘grace,’” say Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones. “It means unmerited favor or kindness shown to one who is utterly undeserving. … It is not merely a free gift, but a free gift to those who deserve the exact opposite,” he explains, “and it is given to us while we are ‘without hope and without God in the world’” (Lloyd-Jones, ibid.).
“To speak of grace without sin,” says Plantinga, “is to trivialize the cross of Jesus Christ, to skate past all the struggling by good people down through the ages to forgive, accept, and rehabilitate sinners, including themselves, and therefore to cheapen the grace of God that always come to us with blood on it. What had we thought the ripping and the writhing on Golgotha were all about?” he asks. “In short,” he explains, “for the Christian church … to ignore, euphemize or otherwise mute the lethal reality of sin is to cut the nerve of the gospel. For the sober truth is that without full disclosure on sin, the gospel of grace becomes impertinent, unnecessary, and finally uninteresting” (Plantinga, ibid.). Impertinent, unnecessary, and uninteresting … is that what the gospel of grace has become?
How do we unboil a frog? We can’t once it’s cook but we can take it out of the pot before it dies, can’t we? How do we turn our society off the path that it is on and guide it back on to the path that God intends for it to be on? Well … we can’t but God can … which is why we need to get down on our knees and pray … pray with all our hearts … with all our might … for a repentance and a revival. We need to pray but we need to pray rightly. We can’t just pray in general terms. Our prayers can’t be vague. In order for our prayers to be powerful … in order for our prayers to be effective … they have to be specific … and in order for them to be specific, we have to know our enemies, we have to know what we are praying for and what we are praying against, my friends. We can’t keep our heads in the sand any longer.
The Apostle John teaches us that we should pray with confidence because “if we ask anything according to HIS will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of Him” (1st John 5:14-15; emphasis mine). Near the end of his letter to the Christian community in Rome, Paul encouraged them to pray together for his ministry. I’m asking you to join with me in prayer for this world and for our great country … and I’m dead serious about this. Every Sunday I will be preaching on a different challenge to our country and our world and then I will be here the following Friday in this sanctuary at 6 p.m. to talk and pray about the things that we have discussed the previous Sunday. For example, I will be here next Friday at 6 p.m. to pray about the moral decline that we have been talking about today. I hope and I pray that you will come and join me.
Speaking of which, let us pray right now …
