Christianity in America is under siege. When I was growing up, most of the children I knew went to church. In our family, we attended Sunday morning, came home for often a fried chicken or Swiss steak dinner, rested a few hours and then went back to church for the evening service. On Wednesday, we went to a midweek service that was often a Bible study for adults with special programs for the kids. Often, yet another night was taken up with choir practice. Revival meetings with a traveling evangelist were common place and would then take up every night of a week or two. One revival we had, lasted for eight weeks straight because people kept coming. When I first started teaching in Paris, Il., I was told immediately that I could not schedule any school activity on a Wednesday night, because that was “church night.”
Paris remains mostly conservative, and although the churches are no longer as full as they once were, the ministerial association still hosted breakfast for all the teachers of the Paris community on the first day of school, with food provided by the church women, as late as my last year of teaching, in the fall of 2017. I hope that they still do.
But the country as a whole has lost much of its religious fervor as secularism has crept in bit by bit. As people learned how to create new types of roses, for instance, by grafting one variety to another, they began to forget that God created the rose bush in the first place. As we learned to fly planes and to send men and women into space, we forgot who created the heavens and the earth. The more we have learned through our God-given intelligence, the more we have forgotten who created us, and, like the infamous people of Babel, imagined that we are so powerful as to build a tower to heaven.
And with that arrogant forgetfulness of God, that naïve idea that we no longer need God, many of us have discarded his teachings, considering the Bible just an old-fashioned collection of fables and philosophy that has no meaning in our modern world. And those who have succumbed to this view of life now live a life with no moral compass. Morality is what they say that it is and it can change from day to day. President Obama was elected supporting the fact that marriage was, in the United States as in every other country in the world for generations, a union between man and woman. Yet, a few years later, he supported same sex marriage, and his liberal Supreme Court found somewhere between the lines of the Constitution invisible words that made it legal.
And that, of course, has only been the beginning. In the last two or three years, transgenderism has become a fad, even though it is scientifically impossible to become a man if you were born a woman or become a woman if you were born a man. Certainly, taking certain hormones will make a woman grow a beard or increase a man’s breasts, and surgery can make outward changes in the genitals, but the skeleton, the size of the heart and lungs, the muscles, the intricate reproduction system – – – these will not change. Thus, born a man, always a man. Born a woman, always a woman — except in the unscientific world of the Democrats where anything they say is possible, is therefore possible! Thus, some parents have begun chemically “changing” the gender of children as young as kindergarten, and we are now in a chaotic situation in which children will grow up having been “changed” from girls to boys or boys to girls, only to discover as adults that they want to be what they were born and what they have really been all along. Transgenders commit suicide at a far greater rate than the general population. Is that not a clue to its destructiveness? And how do we deal with pregnant “men” or “women” with penises? And do you talk of “women’s rights” when talking about abortion, or “birthing people’s rights” (since by transgender definition not only women can give birth) when the whole point of abortion is NOT being a birthing person?
During the pandemic, casinos, marijuana stores, even abortion clinics were open while
churches were closed, and ministers were fined for holding services anyway. When our church
and another got together to hold services in which the minister stood on the church steps and
broadcast music and the sermon through he radios of cars in which the congregation sat, a
member of our local health department complained because our closed cars were not parked
six feet apart. (Had she measured the distance between vehicles at Walmart?) Several
churches have won lawsuits in court against the measures forced upon them by their states,
but why was that necessary when our Bill of Right guarantees the free practice of our religion?
Groups such as Freedom From Religion have forced the removal of crosses at cemeteries and Nativity Scenes on courthouse lawns. They even have forced towns to remove signs at the town limits saying “The churches of [insert town name] welcome you!” Surely that one would be easily defeated in court since signs saying things like “The Kiwanis Club of [insert town name] welcomes you!” are still up. But more often than not, towns can’t afford to go to court and so Freedom From Religion often wins!
Coaches have been fired for praying with their teams before or after a game. Schools are not allowed to have prayers at graduation, even though both houses of Congress open each session with prayer. Students have been forced to change graduation speeches which referenced their dependence upon God and gave thanks to Him for helping them through high school. Bible clubs or prayer sessions during lunch are often forbidden although Muslim students may pray together and some schools actually teach about Islam to their non-Muslim students. In the upside-down world of the Democrats, in a majority Christian country, they cannot teach about Christianity nor read the Bible. An elementary school girl got in trouble in her school because she read her Bible aloud to her friends during lunch. What was the problem? If they didn’t want to hear it, they could have moved to another table.
So how, in a country that is moving farther and farther away from God, where fewer and fewer people attend church regularly, where knowledge of the Scripture is lacking even in church goers, how does a Christian survive? How should a Christian respond to what is blatant sin and evil? James 4:7 tells us “Resist the devil and he will flee from you.” So, we Christians must do what we have been taught not to do. We must resist.
Much has been made in the past decades of God as the great provider of riches or God as a God of love. Indeed, God is both of these things, but the riches He provides may not necessarily be material wealth, and while He is a God of love, He is also a God of judgement. Hebrews 9:27 warns us “And as it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgement.” So, while many churches have accepted homosexuals into the ministry and transgenderism as being a real thing “out of love,” these are not practices accepted by God, but instead are contrary to His Word, and Christians who accept these more easily begin to accept any sin “out of love for the sinner.” This is not what God intends. He intends us not to tolerate sin out of “love,” but to resist evil. Yet many churches have found it more expedient, more acceptable to their communities to fall in line with what the “new order” preaches. Of them the words of Jeremiah 18:15 would be appropriate: “. . . my people hath forgotten me, they have burned incense to vanity, and they have caused them to stumble in their ways [from] the ancient paths, to walk in paths, [in] a way not cast up;”
During the Babylonian Captivity, the brightest of the young Israelite men were carried off into Babylon. Among these was Daniel. Despite a decree by King Darius that for a month no one was to petition anyone but the king, Daniel continued praying to God three times a day. Daniel knew that the penalty for what he was doing was to be mauled and eaten by lions, but that did not stop him. He remained true to his faith, not bending or twisting it, or praying in private so that no one would see him. He demonstrated his faith publicly, praying by a window facing Jerusalem as had always been his practice. We all know that he was, in fact, thrown into a den of lions, but that God sent an angel to shut up the mouths of the lions. Daniel 6:23 tells us “So Daniel was taken up out of the den, and no injury whatever was found on him, because he believed in his God.”
Now, there is little chance of our being thrown into dens of lions in the U.S. for practicing our faith, but we might be fined, sued, run out of business, doxed, ridiculed, and called all kinds of names. Or we might simply be snubbed by former friends or relatives for expressing our beliefs which, while coming from the Bible, no longer align with the modern, secular views of life. Still, we must dare to be Daniels. Dare to stay the course, to remain true.
And if we see evil, what do we do? In Matthew 7:1-3, Jesus warns us “Judge not, that you be not judged. 2 For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. 3 And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?” Many Christians look at these verses and become afraid to call out evil when they encounter it. We are not to find fault with others simply because they do not do things the way we think they should be done, unless what they are doing is Biblically wrong. In that case, we can remember a phrase perhaps wrongly attributed to Edmund Burke that warns, “The only thing necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.”
During WWII, no doubt many Christians watched the Jews being tormented, arrested, and dragged away by the Nazis and did nothing. But others hid the Jews and helped them escape at the peril of their own lives. And during the years of slavery in the U.S. most Christians simply accepted slavery because it was the accepted way of life in the South. But others stood against it, spoke loudly for its abolition, and worked the underground railway to smuggle escaped slaves to the free Northern states and Canada. Out of their words and actions came the resolve of the Northern states to make true the words that “all men are created equal,” and brought about the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in the United States. What if those Christians had feared to “judge” and had instead remained silent?
Jesus Himself turned over the tables of the sellers and money changers in the court of the Tabernacle in Jerusalem, crying out to them, “It is written, ‘My house is a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a ‘den of thieves’ ” (Luke 19:46). That was not the gentle, loving Jesus of whom so many modern churches teach. That was the wrathful Son of God confronting evil in the House of God!
And how often did Jesus rebuke the empty religious façade of the Scribes and the Pharisees? At one point He even told them “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.” Matthew 23:27. Where was the meek Jesus then?
And to us Jesus warns, “For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:20). Evil exists, and it infects men and women, beguiling them into believing that achieving what they want is worth whatever harm it may do to others. Many of these people can be found in our colleges, the media, and in Washington D.C. Others may be found in the pulpits of some of our churches, reminding us to “turn the other cheek” and not to judge. But evil must be confronted and defeated, as, in the end, it will be by God. But I find it hard to believe that when we appear before the judgement seat of Christ he is going to accept our feeble excuses for not standing firm in our faith, for not confronting evil where we find it, for not warning others of its seductive dangers.
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego refused to bow down to a statue of King Nebuchadnezzar and were thrown alive into a fiery furnace. But first the king gave them one more chance to ignore their faith and fall in with accepted practice. Their answer should be our answer to the secular world in which we live.
“If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king.
But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.”
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego came out of the furnace to the King’s shock without even the smell of smoke on their clothes, and the Son of God walked in the furnace with them. But in the book of Hebrews, chapter 11:35-38, Paul ends a long recitation of those whose faith in God helped them succeed with this reminder:
“Others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection. Still others had trial of mockings and scourgings, yes, and of chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, were tempted, were slain with the sword. They wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented— of whom the world was not worthy.”
We cannot know what might be the result our steadfast faith in God and his laws in the world in which we live. We do know that the secularization of much of the world, the U.S. included, might well be ushering in the Second Coming of our Lord. But whether it happens in our lifetime or not, we must stay true to Him and to His Word, even when everyone around us claims the Bible is old-fashioned and no longer applies to our lives. We must stand firm. We must be vocal. We must resist.
And we must say as did Shadrach, Meshack, and Abednego, “But if not. . . .” If God does not save us from the punishments of the secular world for defying their lies, if not, we will still stand firm for God and His Word.
Let us say with Joshua, “. . . but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord!”