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A bountiful, but bitter harvest of dishonor, immorality, profanity, drug and drink addiction, and blatant secularism have become commonplace in our beautiful USA. These behavior patterns extend from the powerless poor to the wealthiest and most powerful figures in government and business. They involve all intermediate levels of society. Homosexual activists are successfully waging their relentless campaign to make this abominable practice appear “normal.” The abortion industry has proved its willingness to sacrifice the sanctity of life on its baby-murdering altars. Nothing-left-to-the-imagination pornography stares us in the face at almost every turn.
As late as the 1960s, while America was not a “Christian nation” in any accurate sense of the term, the general populace of our nation at least still paid lip service to the Bible as the Word of the only true and living God. Most citizens then respected the moral, if not the doctrinal, absolutes of God’s Word. My, how far we have come since that time.
A concerted, openly announced, move is afoot by such organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union to erase every vestige of the God of the Bible from the national consciousness. In the early 1980s, a death penalty verdict of a convicted murderer-rapist in Brighton, Colorado, was thrown out because the jury was influenced by the Biblical statement, “Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be rendered unto him” (Lev. 24:20). I suppose the judge was not even aware that both criminal and civil laws in our nation are based to a great extent on Biblical laws.
The harvest is never reaped without the seed-sowing before it, and the harvest proves the identity of the seed (Gal. 6:7–8). To change the figure, the amorality and secularism of modern culture is only the symptom. The symptoms can never be completely cured without finding and removing their cause or causes. It is imperative that we discover the seed that has produced this corrupt harvest.
Some of the philosophies that became popular during the youth rebellion of the late 1960s are worthy of mention at this point. “If it feels good, do it” and “Do your own thing” are prominent among them. Rather than being seed, however, I judge them to be part of the harvest. The seed behind such philosophies is much older. It is so old and has been repeated so many times that its origin has likely been utterly obscured.
This “seed” doubtless started in reference to religion. It has been used for untold generations to defend division and sectarianism and to mitigate strict adherence to the New Testament pattern for the church. The religious version reads: “It makes no difference what you believe as long as you’re sincere.” If this were true about religious doctrine (which, most assuredly, it is not), then it is but a small step to apply it to moral principles.
By this very rule the philosophy of “situation ethics” holds that such things as adultery and fornication are wrong only in certain “situations.” It argues that if “true love” (“sincerity”) is present, adultery and fornication are “innocent.” This philosophy denies the existence of any objective and unwavering standard of moral conduct. If it makes no difference what one believes about God and religion, then, logically, it makes no difference how one behaves—if one is “sincere,” of course.
By this dictum our world has come to call good “evil” and evil “good,” as God’s own people did in the days of Isaiah (5:20). The distinction between Truth and error, right and wrong, and good and evil is destroyed by following this philosophy. It teaches that wrong is made right and error is as good as Truth if one sincerely believes it to be so. However, try as one might, sincerity does not make 5 to be the sum of 2 + 2. Neither does it purify immorality or turn religious error into Truth.
[Note: I wrote this MS, and it originally appeared in the June 2003 issue of The Gospel Journal, a 36-page monthly of which I was editor at the time.]
Attribution: From thescripturecache.com; Dub McClish, owner and administrator
