Covenant Presbyterian Church

Older Americans often express their amazement at the negative societal changes of the past few decades. Born in the thirties and forties, their world bears little resemblance to the present. Young people no longer greet parents and their "elders" with respect, make eye contact, and smile. Few families eat together, and fewer have meaningful discussion around the dinner table. Activities once reserved for the back alley with prostitutes are now the daily fare of millions through television and the internet. Keeping up with a favorite sports team by reading the sports page occasionally or attending a game with dad has given rise to a cultural sports addiction. Our leaders seem unable to guide us through catastrophe; their lives and leadership are marked by scandal, ineptitude, and dishonesty. Easy money, consumerism, and incessant advertising have made the new and luxurious a birth right. What has happened to our nation? What is the explanation for the decline of morals, of respect and honor, of self-denial, or any higher purpose for existence than gratification, entertainment, and comfort?

Romans 1 helps us understand what happens to men and nations that reject God. Beginning in verse 18, Paul writes that God has revealed himself to every man both in nature and in man’s heart. In one sense, therefore, all men know God. God is the environment in which we live, and his existence and power confront us at every turn. Yet unbelieving men suppress, hold down, or deny that truth. They deceive themselves into thinking that God does not exist. They devise various scientific theories, philosophies, and social paradigms to justify their self-deception, all in an attempt to silence a gnawing conscience and convince themselves that what they know to be true, for God has written it indelibly upon their conscience, is in fact not true. In this sense, men do not know God. Though God’s revelation is clear, objective, and inescapable, fallen man seeks desperately to evade the claims of God upon his life. He embraces self-deception. He thinks he can build a world in which God is obsolete and unnecessary. But his suppression of the truth has consequences. Because he worships and serves the creature rather than the creature, God judges his sin with more sin, his fundamental rebellion with practical rebellion. He begins to burn out.
Burn out begins when men refuse to recognize that their lives belong to God, when they do not live before him in humble gratitude for his many mercies, and especially his gift of salvation through Jesus Christ. Unbelieving man becomes vain in his imagination - his every thought is folly in that he lives by his own understanding, experience, and feelings. Because there is only darkness in the soul of man apart from submission to the revelation of the Creator, God responds to his rebellion by darkening his heart further, by giving him the consequences of his unbelief. He thereby progressively loses the influence of the natural light that God has implanted within him. He gropes in darkness, seeking meaning, purpose, and understanding in the pitch-black darkness of his self-created delusion. He will not recognize his condition. Burn out is always accompanied by unbelievable pride, the angry response of the unbelieving heart to his inability to find that for which he seeks through his own resources.
We see this process throughout our culture. From politics to education, the cry is for man to rise up and conquer the problems created by his rebellion through money, never-ending lists of slogans and programs, and furious opposition to those who call him away from his depravity to the only source of truth and hope. Many authors, even non-Christian ones, have declared that a dark age is descending if it has not already fallen upon the west. The missing ingredient in their critique, which they largely confine to the functional illiteracy of the population, the entrenched academic antipathy to the western canon of great literature, and the death of meaningful discourse throughout western nations, is that this darkness is God’s judgment. It a divinely imposed burn out upon western culture; it is God’s response to our rebellion. Our situation, moreover, is far worse than any ancient culture, the former USSR, or even present-day China. Our darkness is an intentional rejection of the light we once embraced and that is still shining in some segments of the population. We can expect, therefore, for God’s burn out judgment upon us to be even greater. And it is.
Paul describes this burn out as God giving men over to a reprobate mind. His depictions of sin are compelling and tragic. Sin unchecked by the grace of God in Jesus Christ never rests content. It seeks grosser, more intensified forms of realization. Innuendo gives way to lust: lust to fornication: fornication to adultery: adultery to homosexuality and lesbianism: these to worse, unspeakable forms of perversity. We have seen this trend in American culture: from implied dalliances in earlier movies, to Playboy, to the sexual revolution, to the now unbridled, unbelievably perverse, and quite unabashed expressions of sexuality throughout the culture. But the reprobate mind does not only seek expression in perversion, though this has always been the chief fruit of man’s unwillingness to bridle his passions. It also manifests itself in the parent-child relationship. We have degenerated from respect and honor to parents, to indifference, to dismissal, to outright rebellion. Or from the parental perspective: from Christian nurture, to generally moral influence, to indulgence, to "get them out of the home as quickly as possible," to, as we have seen in recent years, parents killing their children. Abortion is perhaps the most vivid evidence of moral burn out, for it indicates the total quenching of the most basic ties of natural affection that even the animal kingdom often displays. The examples could be multiplied. Once God gives a culture over, the degenerating, debilitating, and destructive influence of sin is inevitable. What was once the unthinkable becomes the accepted and the celebrated.

It is not only in the world, however, that we see the effects of denying God the glory and submission due him; it is also evident in the church. We have come a long way from the Mayflower to the Megachurch. There have been ups and downs, renewal attempts, and the occasional Spirit-wrought revival. But degenerated we have. Compare the Puritan home in which family worship was held once if not twice a day to the present day Christian home. Compare the one to two hour sermon of careful scriptural exposition to the preferred twenty minute sermonette in which an isolated Bible verse becomes a diving board into the cesspool of pop psychology, self-improvement, and general moralizing. Compare the Mathers, Edwards, and Whitefield to Graham, Olsteen, and LaHaye. The latter are children in comparison, heretics in some instances. These are exceedingly unpleasant, embarrassing comparisons. Churches that capitulate to the culture collapse with it. The result: Jesus is sifting the true from the false. This is one way he rules over all things for the sake of the church. The experience is admittedly unpleasant, but it furthers his kingdom by teaching believers to loathe and turn from sin, to be committed to him completely and personally, and to depend upon his word solely.

Our response is multifaceted. The world is the world. It is in rebellion against God, and we are surprised by the fruits of a reprobate mind only if we forget Romans 1. There is hope. Truly Christian families do not get divorced, capitulate to the culture, or become pornified. There are many, tens of thousands of such families in our nation. From the ruins of secularism will rise a Christian order based upon Scripture, according to God’s promise to disciple the nations and build the kingdom and church of his Son. This will be a gospel order that lives by every word that comes from God’s mouth, rejects easy believism, worships God biblically, and willingly endures hardship and the reproach of the world in order to gain Christ, to be found in him. Do not despair. Resist. Recognize that unbelieving cultures always burn themselves out and eventually collapse. It is a fact of history. It is a truth of Scripture. This is a good thing! It vindicates the truth of God’s word. All those who hate him love death. All who seek to build a culture upon man are doomed to destruction. God is the sovereign judge over men and nations. It also affords the church an opportunity to proclaim with boldness and hope that the only lasting foundation of civilization is life-wide and specific commitment to the word of God and his enthroned Son, Jesus Christ.

The Romans 1 burn out is also comforting. We are not the only people in our nation who sense that something is terribly wrong with our culture, that our leaders are clueless, and that if this process is not halted through divine mercy and gospel advance, we are rapidly approaching if we have not already passed the point of no return. The final step of a burned out culture is to legislate its monstrous regime in order to normalize darkness. Instances of this abound. Hate-crime legislation against those who criticize homosexuality and Islam is already being approved in western European nations; it is on the way here. Believers have already gone to prison in western nations for publicly preaching the gospel. Legislative attempts are afoot to criminalize homeschooling, which secularists realize is a growing dissent movement that threatens their attempts to create an atheistic hegemony of darkness. Wherever one looks, monetary, education, foreign policy, burn out is evident: delusion, darkness, and depravity. This is not, however, because the wrong political party is in office, for there is little difference between the whole cadre of statists that vie for dominance. It is not because government schools are failing; they are actually succeeding in their stated purpose to create a secularist order of populist ignorance, dependence upon the state, and moral relativism. The Christian realization of these problems, however, does not lead to fear, hopelessness, and the vanity of trying to salvage the ruins. Properly understood, this burn out should give us boldness and confidence that our God reigns, and that while he is longsuffering, he will not be silent forever. God’s judgments are in the earth, right now, before our very eyes. This is not the time to sleep, to beg God to do something - he is doing something, a powerful work of judgment and sifting that will, in his providence, subdue all the enemies of Jesus Christ beneath his feet, lead to a return to the word of God among the professing Christians, and undoubtedly cause us to awaken from our slumber and lead us again to make the sacrifices that are necessary to stand for the triune God and his truth. When God works, the nations tremble. Our convulsions, our scurrying about for solutions, our fearfulness are all signs that God is working. And the guilty are trembling, not in repentance, but in furious hatred of the growing realization that autonomous man cannot build the order of his dreams. Since the wicked cannot reach God with their animosity, they lash out against those who proclaim the name of God.
Child of God, there is an explanation for our cultural collapse. It is found in Romans 1. The solution is found in Romans 3-4: we must recognize our sinfulness, turn to Jesus Christ as the righteousness of God, and labor to be found in him. Only those that do will survive. Only the kingdom of Jesus Christ will continue. If you have embraced the Son of God in faith and repentance, if you are endeavoring to live for him in dependence and obedience, you have this promise: "the path of the just is like a shining light that shines more and more unto the perfect day" (Prov. 4:18). Keep shining the light. The darkness does not appreciate the light, but it cannot stop it, for it radiates from the very throne of God, through the enthroned Jesus of Nazareth, by the power of the Spirit convicting the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment, and through believers in whom the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ shines as a beacon that the truth of God will prevail.