WESTERN CULTURE HAS REACHED a place of moral and rational insanity. We have decoupled gender from biology. You can invent your own gender, and there are at least fifty options. We assert adamantly that there are no physical, mental, or emotional differences between men and women. The more ultrasound technology proves that the “product of conception” is a human being, the more stridently the Progressives argue that it isn’t. Despite the obvious effects of single parenting in our inner cities, the dominant culture insists that marriage is malleable and disposable. We have even replaced the word “spouse” with the word “partner.” Members of the same sex can now marry each other, and teen-aged boys can shower with teen girls. 

We require our public-school students to wear masks even though, as of this writing, we have 75 million students and only 400 total deaths from COVID since Jan 2020.[1] We don’t mask up to prevent pneumonia even though, during that same time, nine hundred children have died from Pneumonia. Then there are all the lies inherent in the 1619 Project, BLM, and Critical Race Theory, not to mention the drive to implement socialism, even though socialism has never worked anywhere at any time for anybody—except the ruling class. These are the symptoms of irrationality. To an outsider, it looks like an attempt to commit social suicide. 

God Is Our Problem

The only explanation is God! Romans 1:18ff tells us that he expressed his wrath toward the first-century world by giving them up to their lusts. He let them believe what they lusted to believe and then let them walk out the pernicious consequences. 

Therefore, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.

Romans 1:24-28 Italics Mine

Is this our contemporary problem? Has God given us up? His willingness to do this is an expression of his righteous anger, and it would explain our contemporary irrationality. 

Giving people up is one way he judges individuals and social groupings. When they persist in sinful desire long enough, God eventually says, “OK. You can have what you want. But the consequences will be exceedingly painful.” When the Jews complained about the monotony of daily manna God gave them quail, but it made them violently ill. When Adam and Eve lusted to “be like God knowing good and evil,” God judged them by giving them what they wanted, the delusion that they were gods, and that is the heart and soul of Original Sin. Paul adds that when people refuse to love the truth, God gives them up to a “strong delusion” so that they will believe what is false (2 Thes. 2:10-12). The examples go on and on. 

I was with a group of Christian men recently. We were discussing the possible collapse of what has been the United States. One of the men asked, “What can we do?” We can do two things, repent and pray for revival. 

Repentance

If God’s wrath is the problem, then God is also the solution. Repentance, not only for our sins but also for the sins of the church and the nation, is our duty. That was Joel’s advice to ancient Israel. 

Put on sackcloth and lament, O priests; wail, O ministers of the altar. Go in, pass the night in sackcloth, O ministers of my God! Because grain offering and drink offering are withheld from the house of your God. Consecrate a fast; call a solemn assembly. Gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land to the house of the Lord your God, and cry out to the Lord. 

Joel 1:13-14
Revival

In addition to repentance, we also need to plead with God for revival. We need a great infusion of the Holy Spirit, first in the church and then the conversion of millions from the general population. We need a new Pentecost, and God is big enough and good enough to bring it to those who humble themselves, confess their national sin, and cry out to him for mercy. 

You might be thinking, God would never do this for a nation as perverse as the United States. 

That is how the prophet Jonah thought. He didn’t understand the mercy or power of God. Ancient Nineveh was as bad or worse than the United States. Yet God sent Jonah with a message of repentance, God sent the Holy Spirit, and the Ninevites responded. 

Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s journey. And he called out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them. 

Jonah 3:4-5

In the same way. Our great temporal hope is God’s great mercy and his power to change hearts. Join me in prayer for a wicked nation in need of God’s everlasting mercies.


[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#SexAndAge