This post will wrap up my series on what is going on with our culture for the time being, but there is far more to be said about these issues. We need to face some facts. The fact remains that our culture here in the U.S. is not Christian and is in fact quite hostile towards Christianity. We aren’t bleeding for our faith yet, but we are fast approaching that, and there are people who intend to harm us as much as possible in high positions. This is simply fact.
The fact also remains that American Christendom has long departed the tenants of the faith. While many of us long to go back to the good old days when there actually was morality, to be honest, I do not believe there is any going back for this country. I do believe we have crossed the point of no return. That’s as a country. But what about us as individuals?
One thing we have to remember is that we are not of this world. The United States is not our home. While we should cherish what is left of this once-great country and praise God for the little freedom we have left, the U.S. is not paradise. It is not our final destination. Eternity with God in the New Earth is our ultimate destination.
That said, when God judges a nation, the one thing He says to all who may believe is to come out from among them. While that sometimes means actually physically leave the country, sometimes that is not an option. What is does mean in every situation is to come out of that culture. Do not partake in that culture any longer. The church needs to actually obey this. We’ve heard it, but few are listening. The world has so deeply infiltrated the church that it is nearly impossible to identify a genuine sheep anymore. And even when there are genuine sheep, there is no power behind them. Why? Because the world has gotten so deep into our roots that we cannot comprehend what to do apart from it. Need an example? “Youth ministry.” I am not against churches ministering to youth, but how are we doing it. It is exactly as the world does it in our schools: age segregation and be “youth focused” instead of “Gospel focused.”
The church is dead. It has a reputation for being alive, but it’s dead. There is no life in it. Where is the church in which people are genuinely getting saved, holiness is sought, the world is being shunned, and spiritual eyes and ears are being opened? It’s hard to find. Why? The answer is because we have followed the world and left the narrow path.
We have departed the path for so long that we cannot just stop and leap over to the narrow path. We actually have to go backwards and repent of our departing the path. One thing I’ve greatly enjoyed in my pastor’s teachings on Exodus is that God didn’t merely take Israel out of Egypt from bondage to slavery. He took them through the wilderness so He could get Egypt out of Israel. Israel was still hooked to Egypt’s gods, Egypt’s “luxury living,” and Egypt’s authority. The wilderness was scary, and not even the promise of their own land could keep them believing. God had to strip that all away so only teenagers were those alive during the Plagues and the Red Sea Crossing who remembered it when they finally entered in, in their 50s.
Over and over again, we see the same central message: Go back to the ways God taught us from the beginning. To do so, we have to backtrack and pull away from the direction we are going. We cannot simply steer this ship back onto the right course. We made a wrong turn in the maze of life and there is no route out except turning around and going back.
Israel did this during the time of the Judges. They would sin, then God would hand them over to enemies, then they’d cry and go back to God, and then God would send a deliverer. But Israel kept going back to their sin because they really weren’t sorry for their sin. They were sorry they were being oppressed. They went back to just get the difficulty over with, but they never actually went back to their roots and what God established from the start.
The American home departed the path of the Biblical home at late as the Industrial Revolution. Which homes today are actually following the Biblical mandates and the parents can point to which Scriptures they are using for their decisions? Can we find anyone giving examples? We will follow the Bible’s moral standards, but how have we followed Biblical principles for home decisions, job decisions, kid decisions, what we watch and read, who we hang out with, and all that stuff? Is the Bible playing a role in any of it? I’ll be honest: it may be difficult for me to actually say “I do this, this, and that, because Scripture commands me according to this, this, and that passage.” There are things that are there in general principle, but have I actually directed and guided my life according to Biblical principles or just modern “Christian” home traditions? One thing I have been chewing on is to really get a set of “advisors,” a board of directors, good friends who can give me a whopping when necessary. I’ve never had any real mentors in my life with whom I can talk face-to-face. I am so grateful for my current church because they see that need too, and steps are being made to get some kind of mentorship going again. We need to get back to the Biblical principles of Christian living, not American culture living with Christian flavors.
How do we get there? There is one word to describe it all: repentance. We need to completely abandon the world’s way of doing things, turn around, and go back to the basics. There is a reason I keep harping about origins, and a key reason why is that is where most of the departure has taken place. While not a universal statement, if you trace the demise of a church, a seminary, an educational institution, a denomination, etc., many times you will find a caving on origins at or near the beginning of that path towards death. There are other issues such as morality, but when origins go, Biblical authority goes, and everything else spirals. This is a key point of the Romans 1 spiral to depravity. If we want to truly go forward in our walk of faith, we have to go back and return to the very spot where we departed. We cannot just look for a path back to the good path. We have to completely backtrack. And that may include destroying and abolishing “traditional” ministries that have long lost their purpose and have now become institutionalized. We need to cut off and prune the dead branches that are no longer producing fruit or multiplying and get our resources to branches that are producing.
So, as I conclude this series on what has gone wrong with the home and getting back to a Biblical-based home, we need to abandon modern psychology; we need to abandon the American culture of consumerism; and we need to return to the Bible, strip away all that theology and tradition and reset God’s way. The nations want a “Great Reset.” We need one, too. The way forward is back: back to the basics, back to the foundations. And let me warn you what Jesus warned us all: if we do not reset things ourselves, God will do the resetting for us, and He will strip us down to nothing so there is nothing of self or the world dominating our lives.
How can we reset? How can we go back so we can truly go forward? This was not intended as I wrote this series, but my next one is on how to understand the Bible. We have so drifted away from Biblical truth and Biblical foundations that religion is just a matter of interpretations. And it has gotten so bad that in order to justify unfounded positions, people actually turn to hide behind illiteracy. So likely to end 2022, I will do a study on how to read and understand the Bible, and there will be no need to go to seminary to follow up with it.
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