The Fabric of Morality: Being Torn From Top to Bottom

“Gay [female] pastor reads at White House prayer event;” “Feds ease access to pill for abortion;” “Stars entering cannabis business.” Those are just some of the headlines that surprised me today as I read the newspaper. Now, I don’t usually read newspapers. I really have little time to do so, but since I’m traveling away from home and away from the family, I have much more free time on my hands than I usually do. And today’s headlines, such as the ones above, reinforced my distaste for reading the news.

A saying, attributed to John Adams, goes the effect that “Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the governance of any other.” As I observe the moral fabric of our nation being torn, seemingly with little remorse or thought, I have to wonder at the foresight that our Founding Fathers had. Many of them, you may recall, were believers in Christ. And practically to a man, they were believers in God. Admittedly, many were believers in what would be termed deism, the idea that God “wound” the world, set it in motion and then retired to observe what went on, but they nevertheless operated on the basis of the belief that there is a God and that He will judge us in the end.

And now? Our elected officials give lip service to the idea of religion and belief, but make no mistake, their allegiance to faith and morals sway with the shifting tides of society. Would it have been possible for those among us who are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ to have thought it possible that the highest elected official in the land would invite a homosexual “pastor” to read the Bible at the White House? Would it enter anyone’s mind a few short decades ago that the agency charged with ensuring the safety of our medications would give the go ahead to a pill that will kill the life conceived in the womb hours after its conception?

Although there is little doubt that our country is still among the freest ever conceived, that freedom is slowly being eroded. We are becoming freer, but in the wrong direction! Instead of using our freedom to seek our God and to make it easier for all of us to worship according to the dictates of our conscience, we are being herded in the direction that the society wants to go, which increasingly means the direction of immorality and sexual deviancy. Those of us who dare to speak against the increasing moral looseness of our country, are described as bigots and are accused of engaging in hate speech. Even many within the church are more and more often becoming indoctrinated by the dribble that our elected officials and our institutions of higher learning consider acceptable. The words of the apostle Paul have been fulfilled in great measure "you have been called to liberty, but do not use your liberty as an occasion for the flesh" (Galatians 5:13).

Is it possible to arrest this slide into the abyss? Certainly there is a way we can find our way back. But the only way that can happen is by bowing the knee to the Lord of heaven and recognizing that He, not we, is the Sovereign and that His will, not ours, must be done. Absent that determination, our society will continue to wax worse and worse. We have been here before. The world of the early church was full of immorality and filth. If you remember, even the worship of the gods involved sexual relations with prostitutes among other debauchery. In our own day, there are those who engage in such actions in their “worship” of whatever their particular deity may be. The result was that eventually the words of the early disciples against such perversion cost them their lives. Could it come to that again?

Romans chapter one warned us long ago about the society that will result when men make the creature, rather than the creator, their god. When that happens, the first sign will be sexual perversion and looseness. Indeed, we see that in our own day as sex is increasingly becoming the end all and be all of our daily existence. From homosexuality to pedophilia and everything in between, our world is soaked in the perversion of sex that comes when man becomes no better than a beast. Without God, that is what results! The worse thing about it all is that this is taking place while all along the purveyors of such sin do so in the name of faith and love.

As in the days of Jeremiah when the people of Israel had filled the measure of their sin and went into Babylonian captivity, our nation finds itself at a crossroads. The question is whether we will continue, like the Israelites of old, to insist in worshiping the “work of our hands” or whether we will heed the word that comes through God’s preachers and repent and turn to God for healing. May God be merciful to us and may He grant us the repentance that leads to life!