America Today: Calling Evil Good and Good Evil
Being an old man, I have lived through many changes, changes that caused Americans to disagree, but never have I seen anything like the division and outright hatred we see today. Here are a few of the things that are causing the division: immigration policies, rampant crime, gun control and legalization of drugs. Making solutions more difficult are news media that over time have fragmented into niche offerings so that consumers can “enjoy” only those viewpoints that reinforce the consumers’ opinions. This is not progress; it is neglect. As a pastor, I see our basic problems as religious.
Through the Twentieth Century, church membership in America stayed at roughly 70% of adults. In the last two-and-a-half decades, church membership has declined from 69% down to 50% today. As a young man, I could go to virtually any protestant church and hear the Word preached, not today. We have more than a few churches that sanction things that the Bible clearly says are wrong. Oter things have changed, and it seems for the worst. As a young man, I have lived through the Asian Flu in 1957, the Hong Kong Flu in 1968, and the Swine Flu in 1976 but never have I seen anything like we went through with Covid-19. Moreover, eighteen nations are currently at war. People ask me, “Are we in the last days?” I am no prophet, but I doubt it; I do think that God wants us to consider why all of this. Are the American people, doing something wrong? I turned to the scriptures looking for answers, looking for wisdom and understanding. I present my worst thoughts not to convince you one way or the other but do please listen and just think about what I have to say.
What do the scriptures say about times that resemble our time? 2 Timothy 4:3-4, “For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths.” In this scripture, “truth” refers to the Bible. Are we living in a time when many Americans have forsaken the truth of the Bible and have wandered away to pursue their own sinful desirers?
Isaiah 5:20-21 voices a similar warning, “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. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight.” Are people now calling evil things good and good things evil? Do these people think that they are wiser than God is?
God’s rewards for following His laws are wonderful. Deuteronomy 28:1, 3, “If you fully obey the LORD your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. … You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country.” America started as a Christian nation and, as the results, God has blessed us; we have become to the richest most powerful nation the world has ever seen.
What happens to a disobedient nation? Chapter 28:15-16 & 20-21, “But if you will not obey the LORD your God by diligently observing all his commandments and decrees, which I am commanding you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you: You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country … The LORD will send upon you disaster, panic, and frustration in everything you attempt to do, until you are destroyed and perish quickly, on account of the evil of your deeds, because you have forsaken me. The LORD will plague you with diseases until he has destroyed you from the land you are entering to possess.” Are we cursed in the city and cursed in the country? Are you frustrated with much that is going on? Is disease plaguing us?
For the people and nations that failed to do even the minimum God requires judgments came. Examples: Noah and the great flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the destruction of the Canaanite nations, the destruction of Israel (the Northern Kingdom) by Assyria, the destruction of Judah (the southern Kingdom) by the Babylonians and on and on. Has God changed? America has fallen away; even in some of our churches, we are seeing people calling right wrong and wrong right. Does the God of the twenty-first century still punish nations, even powerful nations?
I am now going to address briefly one of the ways America has fallen away. Proverbs 6:16-17, “There are six things the LORD hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood.” If you ask any American if they are against the shedding of innocent blood, I expect you would get a yes.
It is an ancient issue. The City State of Spartan practiced infanticide of newborns deemed unfit for Spartan life. There is considerable evidence that other Greek regions also killed unwanted children. A study published in Archaeology, a publication of the Archaeological Institute of America, reports that archaeologist found the remains of more than 400 infants in an abandoned ancient well in Athens in 2018. Further, when Rome ruled the world, its laws permitted killing unwanted children. The Roman historian Tacitus deemed it a contemptible prejudice of the Jews, that “it is a crime among them to kill a child!” On the other hand, the Jews viewed babies as “the Messiahs of humankind.”
Indeed, the scriptures give unborn children and their mothers’ legal protection against any violence. Exodus 21:22-24, “When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined what the woman’s husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine. If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, [damage for damage].” This passage says that if someone causes a woman to miscarry, then the family has the right to compensation: do not harm expectant women. However, if someone causes a woman to miscarry and that action hurts or kills the baby, the punishment’s severity is equal to the damage done but not in excess. The punishment, imposed by a judge was usually a finical consideration but it could be death.
Adams and Eve’s son Able was innocent. Genesis, 4:5 records what God said to Cain after Cain killed his brother Able, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother's blood cries out to me from the soil.” If God heard one man’s blood crying out from the ground, how loud are the cries God hears from the more than sixty-million aborted American babies, “the Messiahs of humankind”. Parents, does hearing one baby cry get your compassionate attention? How loud do sixty-million babies’ cries sound to the Father? The sound must be as loud as a screaming freight train constantly passing God’s ears. Will the Father respond to the cries of His children?
Abortion is but one of America’s sins. Nearly two thirds of men and nearly half of woman watch pornography. With the problems cigarettes and alcohol cause, did you ever think that states would legalize marijuana, a smoke that affects people in many of the same way as alcohol? Oregon has even legalized personal use of hard drugs such a heroin and LSD; is that okay? Then there are children who go to bed hungry, people that engage in cruel speech and bear false witness and on and on. Should God be pleased?
2,300 years ago, Aristotle said that people rarely think about what they believe in logical terms. He said that people tend to believe what their peers believe. That is true, for the first time in America’s history; it is becoming unpopular to be a Christian. Our secular world has swept many Christians into one of those junctions in history where people think that they have discovered the almost rightness of a great deal that is wrong and the almost wrongness of a great deal that is right. Rather than standing firm for those things that are correct in God’s eyes, many Christians are bowing to peer pressure. A new ethic has arisen, as subversive as it is godless, which bids each man, woman and child to do that that seems right in his or her own eyes. We seem to believe that all moral laws are human-made and thus can be unmade. We tolerate things that deserve unqualified condemnation. We have lost sight of our pilot star for moral guidance, the Bible. The Apostle Paul said that God gave us the law that we might know what sin is; have you looked at God’s law lately?
Science equips man but does not guide him. Listen to the scriptures: In Number 15:39, God says that we are to follow His law “so that you do not follow your own heart and eyes in your lustful urge[s].” Yet, some churches excuse lustful urges with silly notions like, “Sex is a complex issue; we must make allowances for that.” God knows that sex is a complex issue; He invented it. He also gave us rules to follow that it might be Holy.
Christ warned us about following our own silly notions. Matthew 7:21, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father in heaven.” John 8:11, “Go, and sin no more.” For decades, we have preached God’s grace and totally neglected God’s justice. We have become lukewarm Christians. Revelation 3:15-16, “I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spit you out of my mouth.” Should those two scriptures frighten many Christians?
It is time for us to get serious about our Great Commission: Matthew 28:19-20, “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” Witnessing is our job. Christ prayed to His Father that He protect His witnesses in times such as these. John 17:14-15, “I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.” That is saying, do not think that true Christians will not face pain; times will not be easy: Matthew 10:22, "You will be hated by all because of my name.” Yet, if we want to turn things around, we must accept the cost: many Americans will hate us.
Our Founding Fathers established our Nation on Christian principles and spoke plainly of the difficulties, responsibilities and the risks we, a free people, would face. A powerful warning came from John Adams’ lips, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Later he said, “The Declaration of Independence laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity." Are we a moral and religious people?
Thomas Jefferson, "Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His [God’s] wrath?” John Hancock, “Resistance to tyranny becomes the Christian and social duty of each individual … Continue steadfast and, with a proper sense of your dependence on God, nobly defend those rights which heaven gave, and no man ought to take from us.” Are we nobly defending the rights that Heaven gave us, or do we deserve God’s wrath?
Do we Americans acknowledge the dependence on God; are we following Christian precepts? Hear Thomas Jefferson: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” If God is just, and we know that He is, should we be trembling?
Abraham Lincoln said that we are the masters of our fate, “We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” Do some people pervert Congress and promote runaway courts?
James Madison wrote of how easily freedom could slip away, “I believe there are more instances of the abridgement [loss] of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” Are our freedoms slowly slipping away?
Listen to these words of George Washington, “It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favors.” Do we acknowledge and obey His will?
Our Founding Fathers had grown up in a time affected by the First Great Awakening, a revival in the American Colonies. The First Great Awakening began on July 8, 1741, when a preacher by the name of Jonathan Edwards delivered a sermon to his congregations titled "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." The published sermon circulated throughout the Colonies. Edwards’ scripture was Deuteronomy 32:35, “Their foot shall slide in due time.” He said that it was only God’s hope that sinners would repent that kept them from immediately sliding, “falling into the ‘bottomless gulf’” [the fires of hell]. Edwards said that human attempts to avoid hell were as useless as “a spider's web” is “to stop a falling rock."
The First Great Awakening led to America’s founding principle: our freedom and liberty come not from kings but only and alone from God. That changed colonial America’s view of its King. The First Great Awakening led to our independence. Not only did we win our freedom from the British King’s rule; other things changed too. Pennsylvania abolished slavery in 1780, New Hampshire and Massachusetts in 1783, Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784 and, in 1791; Vermont became our fourteenth state, a free state. In the 1840’s and 1850’s, a Second Great Awakening happened and along with it a growing abolitionist movement and the expansion of the “Underground Railroad”. By 1850, the Northern states had almost eliminated slavery. Finally, the Nation was willing to go to war over slavery and abolished it on December 6, 1865, passing the Thirteenth Amendment. Obeying God makes things right.
Why do I use abortion and slavery as primary themes in this sermon? Abortion and slavery have to do with one human having total control over another human being’s life. Slavery and abortion are completely contrary to the American promise of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Our churches busy themselves with debates concerning Gays in the pulpit and the elimination of all racial prejudice; as important and immediate as these issues are, they pale in significance to the cost to our Nation’s soul once caused by slavery and now caused by abortion.
There is a documentary titled “The Silent Scream”. The video features a sonogram taken in mother’s womb. The star of the movie is a beautiful little baby, beautiful and well formed, silently sucking its thumb. Suddenly, a large needle appears; as it touches the child, he tries to fight it off but cannot get away in the tight confines of his mother’s womb. Against the struggle with the needle, the child could not win; the needle enters the child’s tiny innocent body, his mouth instantly opens wide in a silent scream, silent because amniotic fluid that the child peaceful floated in cannot conduct sound but make no mistake, the scream is real. The most innocent of all humans, the child dies.
If you can watch that movie without breaking down, you have no soul. All human life is created in God’s image; to murder is blaspheme God. To murder is to extinguish not only that life, but also ever life that may have come from that life. I ask you again, will God the Father respond to the screams of His children?
Jesus knew that speaking the truth to devout sinners would be difficult, but He ask us to stand strong as He stood strong against the opponents of righteousness. Matthew 10: 22 & 34 is where Jesus said, “You will be hated because of my name. … Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Jesus also said, John 14:18, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.”
I asked you; do you hear the screams of the unborn? Does it make you fall on your knees and beg God to forgive this Nation? If it does, pray that God to gives you strength, strength to stand and work vigorously that our Nation may abolish this horrible sin and return to Godliness. Pray for another Great Awakening across this Nation! Pray that you have the strength to work to that end!
