Difficult
Questions?
Question:
What is the judgement of
God today?
Some
people say our nation is under the judgement of God. What do they mean
by that?
Answer:
The
Nature of God's Judgement
In
the Old Testament, most people would see God's judgements as direct
acts of divine intervention of a destructive nature, e.g. destruction
of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen 19). However there are instances where God's
judgement is more in the form of a releasing of the wickedness that
is already there (e.g. Isa 9:18 ,19). This conforms to the revelation
that Paul had when he spoke to the church at Rom about God giving people
up to their sins (Rom 1:24 ,26,28).
The
Reason for God's Judgement
The
obvious reason for God's judgement is the sin of people but behind that
it seems that there are likely to be two objectives that God has in
bringing this judgement.
i)
Curtailing the Sin - total destructive judgement
Without
doubt God sometimes brings destructive judgement, whereby the end result
is total destruction, to stop the further spread of sin in an even worse
way. The implication behind Gen 6:5 was that the sin on the earth had
reached such proportions that the only course open was to remove the
vast majority of the population and start again from a single family.
Whether this was worldwide (as some geological commentators suggest)
or whether if was limited to the area that we call the Middle East is
unclear. Only the reason seems fairly clear. A modern parallel would
be a surgeon cutting out a cancerous organ to save the rest of the body.
Similarly
the deportation of the northern kingdom of Israel and the later destruction
of Jerusalem and the deportation of people of the southern kingdom,
seem to be cases where God was basically saying, enough is enough, this
can't go on any longer. We need to start again. In both cases it was
not a hasty judgement but one that came after years and years of warnings
through the prophets.
ii)
Chastising the people – limited self-destruction
The
form of judgement that Romans 1 refers to, means that God lifts off
His hand of restraint from a people so that they are allowed to continue
to do the sinful things they want to do without hindrance, and self-destruction
takes place. A similar idea is spelled out in 1 Cor 5 where the apostle
Paul instructs the church at Corinth to put out of the assembly the
man who was blatantly sexually immoral, and having no sense of repentance.
The purpose of putting him out, would be that he no longer comes under
the protection of the church so that Satan would have free access to
him, and would no doubt push him further and further into sexual sin
until it would become self-destructive when, it was hoped, he would
come to his senses, repent and be restored.
Thus
the purpose of this form of judgment is to bring people to their senses
and back to God. Yet, observe it carefully, it is simply a judgement
of people being allowed unrestrained activity. We foolishly think that
we can control ourselves, but the reality is that once God takes his
hand off us, the pressures of the temptations of Satan become so great
we go further and further into the sin, until it is completely destructive
of us. The only way to save ourselves from complete self-destruction
is thus to call on the Lord for His salvation.
Stages
of Decline of a Society
The
first stage in any society's decline is godlessness.
Jeremiah explained it prophetically thus as a word from God: “My
people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of
living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that
cannot hold water.” (Jer 2:13). The first sin was the abandoning
of God. This is godlessness, the rejecting and ignoring of God.
The
second stage is always unrighteousness , wrong
behaviour. In the graphic language of Jeremiah's prophecy, it is that
having turned away from God who is the source of all life, they seek
to create structures, or schemes, or philosophies or whatever, that
can sustain their godless lives. This is exactly what atheistic, materialistic
humanism does.
Signs
of this in the United Kingdom
i)
The move towards godlessness
There
are signs of this in other so-called advanced Western nations, but we
will focus on the United Kingdom here. The first stage of decline, we
said, was godlessness, a turning away from God. A century ago, people
referred to Britain as a Christian nation; no longer so. What they meant
by that was that, as a nation at least, we adhered to a Christian value
system based on a knowledge of God through Jesus Christ. This was not
to say that the nation was perfect, or especially religious, merely
that the general underlying foundation was as just described.
Forces
of modernism, unable to be countered by weak theologians at the time,
meant a rise in scepticism and a fall in confidence in the church. After
two world wars, the fifties and sixties saw a youth and music revolution
which, alongside a gradual technology revolution, further challenged
traditional religious belief. The eighties saw the arrival of the computer
revolution and the nineties saw ever increasing affluence and materialism.
Much of the church retreated into an enclave to preserve the religious
ways of life that were now being abandoned rapidly by the majority.
Although
the church was revived in small measure by the renewal movement, the
charismatic movement, the restoration movement, Toronto Blessing, and
the advent of Alpha Courses, by and large, the majority of the nation
remained untouched and church attendance figures continued to fall among
all except the ‘new' churches and black churches. Attendance on a Sunday
morning varies from 3 to 7% depending on who you believe.
In
the new millennium parts of the church have been working into the community
as has rarely been seen before yet, numerically at least, there is little
change for the nation at large. Although about three quarters of the
population would declare a belief in God, that is a passive belief with
no practical outworking. As a nation therefore, we have rejected God.
ii)
The Advance of Unrighteousness
Unrighteousness
should not be seen as a simply religious concept. It has its origins
with God and relates to God, but it is a practical word that refers
to living in ways that are out of kilter with God's design, contrary
to it. The Bible declares that God designed and created this world,
including the people on it. That design means that, in the same way
that say Ford design a car to work in a particular way, so God has made
human beings to ‘work' in a particular way, and when they refuse to
do that, they ‘break down'. With the arrival of godlessness, that can
be observed in a variety of forms of social breakdown.
We
now consider some of those observed forms of social breakdown, especially
in the light of our earlier comments on them being expressions of God's
unrestrained-sin form of judgement, that go from one level of self-destruction
to another. What follows is only a random selection which will only
receive a very shallow comment in order to simply paint an outline picture
rather than a fully detailed and conclusive panorama. To maintain this
as simply an overview exercise, we will not quote statistics but will
simply suggest that they are there, and the comments being made are
made in the knowledge of those figures. They are there on the Internet
if you wish to go looking for them.
a)
Family Structure Change
Change
of family structure over the part 2 or 3 decades has involved the following
that seem to have become acceptable, common and normal:
- divorce,
- cohabitation,
- changes of
partners,
- abandoning
of families by fathers
The
downside of these changes include:
- great
financial cost to society as abandoned mothers need support,
- abandoned
partners coping with pain and anguish,
- abandoned
partners coping with ongoing loss of security and lowering of self-esteem,
- children of
divorces or abandonment coping with anguish of loss,
- the same children
coping with living two lives if seeing both partners,
- antisocial
behaviour growing in such children,
- schools, education
and social services, police etc. coping with the strains of coping
with these children,
- a future generation
who will cope with parenthood and marriage based on the insecurity
they have learned.
A
word that is applicable over all of this change is “coping”. Partners
cope, parents cope, children cope, schools cope, social workers cope,
etc. Coping here means we get by – just! But it shouldn't have to be
like this.
Restraint
was removed from relational behaviour in marriages and the “coping lifestyle”
is the result. Modern psychologists and sociologists are now talking
about the “shame” that is under-girding so many lives in modern society,
meaning the deep inner feeling of failure. Slowly and gradually, voices
are beginning to be heard declaring, there must be a better way.
b)
Social breakdown
Whether
it flows from the above or whether it flows from the gradual erosion
of a ‘standards-based' society (one that believes in right and wrong
as absolutes), or a combination of the two, the result is that we find
behaviour in society that was not here in this measure fifty years ago.
The following are some examples which all have negative or destructive
outcomes for the individual or for society:
- theft at high levels,
- violence in the
streets, especially at night, at high levels,
- vandalism of property
at high levels,
- drunkenness on the
streets not uncommon, especially in towns at night,
- violence from football
supporters still not unusual,
- availability of
drugs on the streets or in schools in large measure,
- road rage not uncommon
- rapes apparently
at high levels, especially associated with drinking
It
should be observed that the question here is not whether these things
are on the increase at the present, but whether they have increased
over the past fifty years. In most, if not all, of these cases, these
things have escalated in that period of time. It is very easy to accept
these things as the norm. The are not and should not be.
c)
Drink, Drugs, Sex, Gambling & Debt
We've
grouped these things together because they have each merited the attention
of the government and the media in recent years as causing serious concerns:
Facing
the Unpalatable Truth
Read
any broadsheet newspaper for a month, talk to people in each of the
areas itemised above, or search the Internet, and the truth of our situation
will be seen to conform to what has been suggested above.
The
atheistic humanist has had his day. A society that has rejected its
God (and an examination of history shows the reality of that) is now
shaking at its foundations. Increasingly journalists are predicting
worse to come. Increasingly research shows the folly of the ways itemised
above. How long will it take us to come to our senses?
The
rejection of the Christian faith in this country over the past fifty
to a hundred years, has not been because it didn't work. It was much
more basic than that. It was simply that the grass over the over side
of the fence looked more inviting, the grass where there was no accountability
to a higher power, only to yourself.
Saying
God isn't there, does nothing except utter empty words into the air.
Nothing has changed in that respect. There have always been those who
declared, “There is no God!” and they have been declared fools! (Psa
14:1) They have been revealed for what they are by the fruits they produce.
Well
the fruits of godlessness and the ensuing unrighteousness are now plan
and obvious to see – well, except for those who refuse to see! Indeed
it has to be a certain sort of blindness that fails to see the real
state of this nation that once proudly went by the name of GREAT Britain
. The Bible calls it a wilful blindness, a blindness that refuses to
accept the truth, refuses to acknowledge God, is unable to hold onto
goodness, and therefore a blindness that bears the fruit of self-destruction,
which is in fact the judgement of God.
It's
time to come back to God. It's time to cry out for goodness, wholesomeness,
faithfulness, honesty, integrity and so much more, to be returned to
our national life.
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