Has God Abandoned America?
Publisher’s
Note...
On May 3rd of this year during the National Day of Prayer (NDP), one of
the nation’s most respected Christian leaders, Pastor John MacArthur of Grace
Comminity Church in Sun Valley, CA gave the following sermon entitled A Nation Abandoned by God.
For
those not familiar with Pastor MacArthur, he is a bestselling author and a
popular conference speaker as well as the president of Grace to You (www.gty.org)
and the featured 
teacher
of the Grace to You radio program
which airs more than 800 times daily on stations around the world.
Pastor
MacArthur’s NDP message was considered so important that Dr.
James Dobson (Focus on the Family) featured it for two days on the June 4th &
5th editions of his Focus on the Family radio show.
Most oral sermons by their nature are not
structured as an article for publication. Therefore, I have edited the
following sermon by eliminating a portion of Pastor MacArthur’s
introduction, added some
punctuation, and made other minor adjustments for the sake of clarity and
readability. In no way have I changed
the meaning of this sermon. Those who wish to verify what I am saying is true are
more than welcome to go to the Grace to You website and download the entire
sermon or print it out.
Folks, I have never heard a major Christian
leader proclaim that “God has abandoned America.” That’s a serious statement with serious
implications.
I highly encourage you to read this entire
sermon. Think seriously about what Pastor MacArthur has said. Think about the
founding of our nation and where we are today.
I don’t know whether or not God has
abandoned America. I’m not saying He has and I’m not saying that He hasn’t.
However, I do think we need to pray. I think we need to pray like we’ve never
prayed before. We need to pray for our nation, its people and our leaders to
fall to their knees in repentance. We need to pray that this nation will turn
from its wicked ways, follow God’s Word
– the TRUTH - and
return to Jesus. We need to pray that, as Pastor MacArthur states in his
closing comments, “We might be the greatest recovery story in history.”
A Nation Abandoned by God
By Pastor John MacArthur
It’s not a small thing to have the
opportunity such as I have tonight to try to put a little bit of perspective
and focus on the issue of praying for our nation. There are so many things that
could be said and probably should be said and I certainly don’t intend to say
them all, by any means. But trying to funnel down our thinking a little bit so
that our prayers can be direct is really helpful. I want to try to target our
prayers in what, I believe, is the most needful way -
not to the exclusion of any other things, but this, I think, has to be the
primary focus. It may take me a little while to get to that point, so you need
to stay with me and you’ll see how this unfolds, and hopefully it will be
helpful. That certainly is my prayer.
Samson
Abandoned
One of the most tragic scenes in
the Bible and yet one of the most familiar
to us is the scene of the strongest man who ever lived, a man by the name
of Samson, finding out he had no strength. Judges
chapter 16 records this. “When Delilah
saw that he had told her all that was in his heart, she sent and called the
lords of the Philistines saying, ‘Come up once more, for he’s told me all
that is in his heart.’ Then the lords of the Philistines came up to her and
brought the money in their hands and she made him sleep on her knees, called
for a man and had him shave off the seven locks of his hair. Then she began
to afflict him and his strength left him. And she said, ‘The Philistines are
upon you, Samson,’ and he woke from his sleep and said, ‘I will go out as
at other times and shake myself free.’” And here’s the telling line written
by God the Holy Spirit. “But he did
not know that the Lord had departed from him. So the Philistines seized him,
gouged out his eyes, brought him down to Gaza, bound him with bronze chains
and he became a grinder in the prison.” Sad. He didn’t know that the Lord
had departed from him. I can’t imagine anything worse than being 
abandoned
by God.
Israel
Abandoned
To
the sons of Israel earlier in the book of Judges
in chapter 10, [verses 13-14] God said this, “You have forsaken me, you have served other gods, therefore I will deliver
you no more. Go and cry out to the gods which you have chosen. Let them deliver
you in the time of your distress.” This was God saying to Israel, “I’m
done with you,” - God abandoned them.
A
haunting line is found tucked away in the little prophecy of Hosea 4:17, referring to Israel by the
name Ephraim, where God says, “Ephraim is
joined to idols.” The next line, “Leave
him alone.” That sounds out of character for God, doesn’t it? “Ephraim is joined to
idols, bring him back,” might sound a little more like God, but He said “Let
him alone?”
People
and nations - even the covenant nation Israel, can come to a point where they
are abandoned by God. Jesus reiterated this in Matthew 15 when He confronted the Pharisees and then described them
to the disciples. He said, “They’re blind
leaders of the blind. Let them alone.” When God lets you go, it’s serious.
When Jesus pronounces over you abandonment, it’s serious.
America
Abandoned
Now
I’m going to say something; you’re going to have to hold on to your seat a
little bit. I’m convinced beyond doubt that in this same sense, God has
abandoned America. I know that’s a strong thing to say and I’m going to show
you why I believe you can see that clearly in Scripture.
Open
your Bibles to Romans 1. By the way, don’t be surprised by that statement because
while you’re turning there, the Apostle Paul states in Acts 14:16, “In the
generations gone by,” - that’s past history - “God permitted all the nations to go their own way.” This [America] is not the first nation God
has abandoned, nor if Jesus tarries will it be the last, nor is it now the only
nation. This is the cycle of history and it is this very cycle of history that
Paul describes in Romans 1:18.
Here
in Romans chapter 1, beginning with
verse 18 running to the end of the chapter, you have the most
clear presentation of God abandoning a nation; what that looks like,
what happens and why He does it. This is the most graphic and the most detailed
and the most comprehensive discussion of what it means for a people, a society,
to be abandoned by God. And it perfectly describes the moral chaos in our own
nation today.
It
starts with very familiar words in verse 18, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven.” Now, let me stop
you there for just a moment. We’re talking about the wrath of God and I need to
just let you know that in the Scriptures, in reality, there are five different
manifestations of God’s wrath.
God’s
Five Wraths
There
is eternal wrath. That is the wrath which God unleashes on the unbelieving dead
in hell - eternal wrath, suffering eternal punishment forever. That’s eternal
wrath.
There
is also eschatological wrath, that is the unfolding of
divine wrath at the end of the age described in detail, for example, in Revelation 6 through 19 with the pouring
out of God’s wrath in the breaking of seven seals, the blowing of seven
trumpets, and the dumping of the seven bowls of wrath. That’s eschatological
wrath. That wrath is yet to come as is eternal wrath for all society. Right now
there are many experiencing eternal wrath - all the unbelieving who have left
this world are already experiencing eternal wrath.
The
third kind of wrath is what I guess you could call calamitous wrath. That is
that wrath of God which produces calamity in the world. The most notable
illustration of that was the Flood, which drowned the entire world: only eight
people were saved. Massive wrath on the part of God against sinful man.
Fourthly,
there is consequential wrath, the sowing and reaping wrath. That’s the kind of
wrath that comes as the natural end of patterns and choices of sin. Whatever a
man sows, he reaps - that’s consequential wrath.
But
there’s one other kind of wrath that is usually overlooked. We all understand
eternal wrath, eschatological wrath, consequential wrath, calamitous wrath - in
the calamity of the Flood or God destroying Chorazin, Bethsaida, Capernaum,
etc. Throughout history these calamities continue to happen and they all fit in
the category of God’s judgment of sin. But there’s this other category - the
wrath of abandonment, a form of God’s wrath in which He lets go of a society,
letting it catapult at full speed without restraint in the direction of its own
sinful desires, devices and choices. That’s the wrath being described here in Romans 1. The cyclical reality of this
wrath has defined human history and always will until Jesus returns. As Paul
said, in all the generations gone by, God permitted the nations to go their own
way.
I
don’t believe we’re waiting for God’s wrath in this society. We haven’t had a
massive calamity such as the destruction of an entire city. We certainly don’t
want that to happen, pray that does not happen, but it could happen and God
would be just in any calamity that He brought upon us. We have not entered into
eschatological wrath - that comes in the end times. We are experiencing, all of
us, the consequential wrath of sin. But I’m convinced this massive concept of
the wrath of abandonment is now at work in our society. We like to talk about
the fact that America was founded on Christian principles and God was at the
center of it and all that, whatever it might have been in our founding, but
that’s no longer the way it is, and I want to show you how we know that has
happened.
God
Gave Them Over
Go
down to Romans 1:24. You see the
first word “Therefore,” that means we’re
now going to see a description that connects to what has been said. If you go
back to verse 18, “The wrath of God is
revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men,” we
could stop at that point. The wrath of God is revealed. And then it goes on to
talk about the wrath of God and the reasons for the wrath of God. And in verse
24 it then describes the wrath of God and here’s the description. “Therefore God gave them over - or God
gave them up - in the lust of their
hearts to impurity, that their bodies might be dishonored among them. For they
exchanged the truth of 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 over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function
for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the
natural function of the woman, burned in their desire toward one another, men
with men, committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due
penalty of their error. And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any
longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind to do the things that are not
proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of
envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, slanderers, haters of
God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents,
without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; and although they
know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of
death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who
practice them.”
Now let me break that down for you a little
bit. Three times the verb “gave them
over” is used - three times. The wrath of abandonment is when God gives
a nation over. This verb, paradidomi, can have a judicial sense. It’s used
often in Greek literature in terms of law courts and criminal courts. It comes
down to handing a prisoner over for punishment. It’s even used in the case
of Jesus being handed over for crucifixion. Each of these uses of the verb
in this text expresses the fact that the wrath of God has acted to hand over
a society to sentence - to hand them over. As the historian Friedrich Schiller
said, 
years
ago, “The history of the world is the judgment of the world.” There comes
a time in a nation when God has had enough and He literally lets go and turns
them over to the sentence that they have passed upon themselves by their incessant
sinful choices. To see it another way, they are deprived of restraining grace.
Sexual
Revolution
Now, how do we know when this has
happened? Note the progression in verse 24, “God
gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity that their bodies might
be dishonored among them.” Impurity
speaks of sexual sin. The first thing that happens in a nation when it is
abandoned by God is a sexual revolution. Moral, sexual perversion, pornographic
desire describes the general character of the culture. You can’t even count how
many millions of pornographic web sites there are. When a society is abandoned
by God, it operates out of its own perverse sexual passion without restraint.
You can go back to the 60’s and the sexual revolution of the flower children,
or Hugh Hefner in the Playboy world, and it has gone
like a flood since then. It is characterized by, as you look at verse 24, lust
coming from inside the heart as Jesus said, “What
comes out of the heart of a man is what defiles him,” leading to impurity -
sexual impurity, and to the dishonoring of their bodies. The heart is wicked
and the bodies demonstrate it. The body follows the heart. Lust conceives in
the heart, James says, and brings forth sin and sin brings forth death.
The
first thing you look for in a society that you’re trying to discern whether or
not it has been abandoned by God is whether or not that society has gone
through a sexual revolution so that illicit sex, adultery, every form of
immorality is accepted as normal in that society. And we’re there.
Homosexuality
The
second step in the progression is in verse 26, “God gave them over,” not just to passions that are explicable
because they’re men and women, but to inexplicable “degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function
for that which is unnatural.” You know a society has been abandoned by God
when it celebrates lesbian sex. God has given them over to – gross, unnatural,
unthinkable, affections.
So
you follow a sexual revolution with a homosexual revolution, and homosexuality
becomes normalized. Verse 27 adds the male part, “In the same way the men abandoned the natural function of the women,
burned in their desire toward one another...” And by the way, it is a
burning that is just hard to comprehend. There was a coroner for the city of
New York, Halpern, who did, I think, 26 or 28 thousand autopsies in his day. He
said, “we can look at a corpse that had been murdered
and tell whether a homosexual killed that person by the multiple wounds.” He’s
not Christian, but Jewish, and he said, “There’s something about the passions
of that kind of involvement that are not explicable.”
But
interestingly enough, the Holy Spirit here puts the women first and the men
after. Why? The Holy Spirit first refers to the degradation of women because
they’re usually the last to be affected in the decay of morals because their
hearts are so naturally inclined toward a husband, and the responsibility of
nurturing children. But when they lead the parade, God has removed His
restraint. And the amazing thing of it is this, in verse 27, “The men abandoning the natural function of
the women, burning in their desire toward one another, men with men, committing
indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their
error.” Right into this wrath of abandonment comes
the consequential wrath, and even though it generates venereal disease and
AIDS, they keep doing it. This is what step two looks like and we know this has
come like a flood in our nation. But it’s not the final step. The final step
comes in the middle of verse 28, “God gave them over to a depraved mind.”
The
Final Step
I’m
reading from the New American Standard
Bible - the version you have might have a different translation for
depraved, so let me tell you what the word means: non-functional, useless, it
doesn’t work, can’t think, can’t reason, can’t comprehend. And you look at this
world and you say, “Rampant sexual immorality, out of control, destroying
people willy-nilly even in the Church, even in the leadership of the Church.
Homosexuality, same thing, rampant, out of control, demanding to be accepted as
normal and our society rushing to affirm that acceptance. Isn’t there anybody
in the system who would stand up and call this what it really is, a massive, moral disaster? Can’t they see it? Can’t they
figure it out?
No…
First Corinthians 1 says, “Man by wisdom knew not God.” Human wisdom on its own just doesn’t get
there. Then you add that the god of this world [Satan] has blinded the minds of
them that do not believe and you’ve got a compounding blindness. And then you
add the fact that they are blinded by virtue of the sweeping, dominating
elements of their culture and you’re just not going to get anybody to rise up
and take that position and have people rally around it. You’re going to have
more people in leadership in the country outing themselves as homosexuals. If
you think you’ve seen a lot of that, you haven’t seen anything yet as it
becomes more and more accepted.
A
depraved mind in the original language is one that’s tested and found useless,
therefore disqualified for its intended use. The reasoning faculty has been
corrupted by the influences that surround it. MTV did a survey on morality. They
took the Middle Ages idea of the seven deadly sins -
lust, greed, all those things - and they surveyed their audience about what
they thought about that. And basically they thought all those things were
virtues. That’s right – virtues! And when that happens and your entire sense of
morality is warped, then your conscience is ill-informed and it doesn’t
function. So you have unconscionable behavior. And then you laugh at the Jerry
Springer Show instead of falling on your face and weeping at the aberrations. You have a depraved mind, a reasoning faculty
so corrupt that it must be rejected as non-functioning. And, as a result of
that, what happens? Verse 28, “God gave
them over to a depraved mind.” So, as a result, they do the things that are
not proper, fitting, sensible, reasonable.
What
do they do? They’re filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, envy,
murder, deceit, malice. What’s that? That’s the nightly news. It’s the local
newspaper. Slanderers, haters of God, and on and on it goes.
They’re unconscionable. Conscience is a device, a mechanism,
that reacts to your moral code. If you’re a radical Muslim, your conscience
tells you to blow up infidels because conscience is not a set of moral laws,
not a set of moral rules. It’s a mechanism, like pain. Pain is a mechanism God
gave you that is a response to your physical
condition. Pain tells you something is wrong with your body. Pain is simply the
device that tells you that. And that’s a good thing, isn’t it? It’s a good
thing because it tells you’ve got a problem with your body you need to deal
with. That’s what conscience is. It’s a mechanism God gave you that accuses you
or excuses you, Romans 2 says, but
only functions if it is morally informed accurately. And if you have a culture
that has developed an aberrant morality, then you have consciences that
function off of that aberrant morality. And you get all the stuff, all the
inexplicable behaviors. And that’s why in Romans
1:32 it says, “Although they know the
ordinance of God, what is right and what is wrong, and that they who practice
such things are worthy of death, they do them anyway and they give hearty
approval to those who practice them.”
You know what that reminds me of? Bill
Clinton’s approval ratings went up in the middle of the Monica Lewinsky affair.
Why? Because a culture like this approves of somebody like that. It’s a perfect
fit. He’s our kind of guy.
So
they are without reason, without conscience. This is what it means when God
abandons a society.
Sexual
revolution, down one more step; homosexual revolution, down one more step; you
can’t ever get your way out of it because the mind, the cultural mind is gone -
it’s gone. And I would put it this way, maybe simply, there’s no surer
indicator of a corrupted, wicked and abandoned society under God’s wrath than
when that society does not tolerate anger against sin. This society will not
tolerate you standing up and displaying righteous indignation against sin. How
long is it going to be before if you preach against it in your pulpit the
government is going to come in and tell you, you can’t do that? They’ve done it
in Canada!
One
night Larry King said to me, off the camera, “You know, I like you a lot but...
you’re all caught up in the words of the Bible
and you miss the message.” So I said, “Well, what’s a message with no words?” I
don’t think we miss the message. It was C.S. Lewis who said, “The last
experience of the sinner is the horrible enslavement in the freedom he desired.”
So,
Paul is unfolding for us this picture of what a society looks like when it’s
abandoned. It’s not my description. Now you see why I said I think America is
here going through the cycle of Romans
1.
It’s
About Truth
Why does it happen? Let’s go back to verse 18 and find out. I’m going
to give you the short version. Verse 18, “The
wrath of God is revealed from heaven”- in this form
of abandonment –“against 
all
ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress...” what? Who “suppress the truth.” That’s why I wrote
the book The Truth War. It’s always
about truth, always. From the Garden, it started out as a war of truth, right?
God said you eat the fruit, you’ll die. Satan said,
no you shall not surely die. There it is. Adam and Eve believed Satan. They
thought God was lying to them. That started the truth war – and it’s going
on today. It’s always about the truth. This happens when you suppress the
truth.
What
truth? Real truth! As Francis Schaeffer used to say, the true truth - biblical
truth. You suppress it and we are at where we are today. Take the Word of God out of the place of its
supremacy and you suppress the truth. Deny that the Bible is true, deny its veracity, deny its authenticity, deny its
inerrancy, deny its inspiration, deny its sufficiency, deny its clarity - that’s
the latest one – that nobody really knows what the Bible means anyway, it’s a wonderful book, we believe God gave it
to us but we have no idea what it means. Isn’t that convenient! The Bible
is coming under attack from every imaginable angle - the truth is always under
assault. This nation has succumbed to that. There are even churches that have
decentralized the truth because they think it offends, it’s divisive. Folks, it’s
all we’ve got. It’s all we have. God saves through the truth. You’re begotten
again, Peter says, by the Word of truth. You’re sanctified by the Word of
truth. Jesus said, “Sanctify them by Thy
truth, Thy word is truth,” John 17:17. That’s all we have.
Of
course God’s Word is being assaulted
by Satan. Of course the critics come along and say God’s Word is not inspired, it’s not true, you can’t believe it. Of
course the mystics come along and say no, it’s fine, but we have more
revelation over here and more over there, and more over there. And the cults
all develop out of extra-biblical revelation. And then there are others who
come along and say, “Well, the Bible’s
fine, it’s just not sophisticated. You need to add philosophy and other kinds
of things to the Bible to fill it
out.” And now there are those who come and say, “Well, it lacks clarity.” That’s
an attack on the old perspicuity, the doctrine of perspicuity,
that Scripture is clear, that
God intended it to reveal not to hide. So the truth is diminished in its place -
it’s denied and rejected. It’s amazing how people mock biblical truth today -
amazing.
Without
Excuse
Oh,
you can figure out a way to make the Word
of God smooth and soft and take out all the hard parts so it doesn’t have
the sting. But if you give the unadulterated, unexpurgated, pure Word of God, it will generate a negative
reaction in many environments. We need to speak the truth in love because it is
the truth. We cannot suppress the truth! Let me expand that a little bit. Give
you four things to think about, four reasons for wrath that have to do with the
suppressing of the truth.
Number
one, revelation. We’ve been given the truth. “Suppress the truth in unrighteousness because that which is known
about God is evident within them for God made it evident to them for since the
creation of the world, His invisible attributes, eternal power, divine nature
have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made so that
they are without excuse.”
What is this? This is not even talking
about the Scripture. This is talking about the fact that God has inlaid His truth
into the fabric of every man’s being. He is not without a witness to the truth.
Look at Romans 2:14, “For when Gentiles who do not have the Law
do instinctively the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a Law to
themselves, in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts,
their conscience bearing witness.”
Part of being human, like all the other
parts of being human, is being able to think and to form relationships. To
speak and to act in the ways that humans act are the familiar components of
what it means to be human. Another part is the Law of God which is written in
the very fabric of man’s nature so that he cannot plead ignorance. In fact, it
says in verse 20 that he has enough of the Law in himself, enough of reason to
be without excuse. You cannot plead ignorance, that which may be known of God.
What is knowable regarding God. What man can know, what of the light that lights every man that comes
into the world, John 1:9, is written
in the heart. It is evident in them.
Reasoning
Two ways, one, in reason. Where does reason inevitably take you? Reason
inevitably takes you to an ultimate cause. Reason is simply a cause and effect
device. Reason is simply thinking our way through patterns of cause and effect.
This leads to this, this leads to this and that’s how reason works. And eventually
you get back to the first cause of the massive universal effect of creation,
so reason is a device 
given
by God to all human beings that leads them directly back to Him. Any thinking
person knows that. You can’t have an effect without a cause, right? I mean,
how simple do we have to be? You ask me where this watch came from- if I say,
well there’s a bunch of tin floating in a box and I pulled it out and it started
to tick that would be ridiculous. How can you explain the universe that way?
It’s an absurdity. Nobody times nothing equals everything? That’s totally
irrational.
I’ll
give you a little thing to think about. There was a gifted mathematician named John
von Neumann. And van Neumann invented, or conceived of an invention, called the
ultimate machine - the van Neumann Machine. All engineers and scientists know
about it. The von Neumann Machine, he said, is the ultimate machine. It’s
self-perpetuating. It has the capacity within itself to sustain itself. Wow! Secondly, it is self-repairing. Anything that
ever goes wrong with it, it can fix. It has within itself the ability to fix
itself, to generate whatever new parts it needs to reassemble them so that it
functions. And then thirdly, it reproduces itself. It multiplies itself. This
would be like having a car that generated its own fuel, fixed itself, and when you came out in the morning there were
three little cars sitting next to it. Okay? This is a von Neumann Machine.
The
complexity of this machine is staggering. But it can’t be built, it’s way too complex. And yet, that is exactly what every
single organic cell in existence in the biological world does. It’s a factory
of perfect self-generating, self-repairing, self-reproducing machinery. Don’t
tell me that one time there was a pile of protoplasm and it decided to become this.
My reasoning tells me there has to be a Creator. And do you know the whole
world believed that until Darwin came along? Jonah out on a boat, and the
sailors (pagan sailors) said to him, “Why is this going on?” He says, “It’s my
God, He’s doing it because He’s punishing me. And so it’s my God.” And they
say, “Well who is your God?” He didn’t say, “Well, let’s see, He’s the Hebrew
God, He’s the God of the Hebrew people, that’s who He is.” He didn’t say that.
He said, “Well, He’s the God who made the earth and the sea.” Oh, that’s a
natural assumption. Go to Mars Hill, Paul’s up there,
they have a deal there for the unknown god. Paul says, “I want to tell you who
this unknown God is.” He doesn’t say, “This is the Christian God of the New Testament.” He says, “This is the
God who created everything. This is the God in whom we live and move and have
our being.” Everybody got it. Only in the modern world do we not get it.
You
go back to God, the massive first cause of everything. So that’s in the fabric
of being human. And you know, you have to work very hard for a couple of
hundred years to convince an entire society that that’s nonsense and that what
makes sense is nobody times nothing equals everything. And though it doesn’t
make sense, it works in a totally immoral culture because if there’s no
Creator, there’s no judge. So reason is the first thing that shows you God.
Morality
The second thing is morality which
is built into the fabric of all of us and has again to be cultivated to the
point where you’ve got a society of people whose reason doesn’t need God,
and whose sense of morality has been totally perverted.
Here
we are. Even though since the creation of the world His invisible attributes,
His eternal power, divine nature clearly seen, clearly understood so that we’re
without excuse, this society has rejected God. That’s our second point. Point
one, revelation, God has revealed Himself to every
person. Second, rejection, men have turned away from the truth. Romans 1:21, interesting, “Even though they knew God,” that is
humanity, society in any given period of time, by God’s creative design have
the knowledge of moral law and reason that leads them back to a moral law-giver
and a judge and a Creator; even though they know that innately, they did not
honor Him as God, or give thanks, but instead of doing what was reasonable and
moral, they became empty in their speculations and their foolish hearts were
darkened. And the bottom line is: they don’t like the God their reason leads
them to, and they don’t like the God that their innate sense of what is right
and wrong leads them to, and so they abandon that God and the lights go out.
And then you come up with stuff like a rock is a rat is a dog is a boy. Life is
random. Truth is relative. People are basically free to do whatever they want.
It’s all good. Everyone ought to be free to do whatever he wants. The goal of
life is self-satisfaction. Live it up and don’t let anybody tell you that you
can’t do anything.
So
they didn’t honor Him as God. They weren’t thankful to Him for what He had
given. And the lights went out. They became empty in their speculations, their
thinking, their patterns, their ideologies, their foolish hearts went black.
Empty human ideas, now you can’t know God, can’t know the truth.
But
you think you’re smart. Look at Romans
1:22. “Professing to be wise, they became
fools.” That’s the third step. You go from revelation to rejection to
rationalization. Men insist they’re doing fine, never did better. We’re very
advanced. Professing to be wise... reminds me of the guy lying in bed in the
nut house, pounding his chest saying, “I’m Napoleon, I’m Napoleon, I’m
Napoleon.” And the guy in the next bed saying, “Well, I’m God, I’m God, I’m
God.” Just that kind of insanity. Or the lady who came to the psychiatrist’s
office with a duck on a string and said, “You’ve got to help my husband, he thinks he’s a duck.” This is no perception of
reality. In fact, it says, “Professing to
be wise, they became fools.” The word is ‘moraino’ from which we get moron,
proud morons giving each other Ph.D.s.
Man
at His Lowest
Finally,
it goes from revelation to rejection to rationalization to religion. Yeah,
religion. That’s right. Romans 1: 23,
(They ) “exchanged
the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man,
birds, four-footed animals and crawling creatures (reptiles).” What religion is that? Oh how about ‘environmentalism’
where you worship what - the creation, not the Creator. You say, “Isn’t this
man at his highest? He’s worshiping?” No, this is man at his lowest. False
religion is man in the pit. He’s gone so far down he’s created the fantasy of
false religion. Religion is not man at his highest, it
is man at his lowest. The ultimate insanity is to worship any other than the
true God, right?
And
so we see what happens in a society when God turns them over and we see why He
turns them over. And that was just a quick overview. We look at our nation -
our hearts are broken, the mind is depraved, they think they’re smart, but they’re
morons. They can’t get to the truth, the mind is completely gone. They invent
bizarre religions. They become ‘religious.’ And today they like to talk about
being spiritual, right? I’m very religious, I’m very spiritual. What in the
world does that mean? As if you can invent your own worship and your own
religion. That’s man at his lowest. That’s all the way at the bottom, total
complete rejection of the true God and the true faith. That’s where we are. Now
the question is... how do we pray?
Our
Only Hope
Turn to Psalm 81. I want the Holy Spirit to give you direction here as we
think about this. See if this doesn’t sound familiar - Psalm 81 verse 11, “But My people
did not listen to My voice, and Israel 
did
not obey Me.” Now verse 12, “I... what?...
gave them over.” Wow. If He would do that with Israel, a covenant
people, what do you think is going on in America - we’re not a covenant people?
“So I gave them over to the stubbornness
of their heart to walk in their own devices.” God let them go to the consequences of their
choices. This is God, He’s abandoned them. But look at verse 13, and here’s
the heart of God that I think we have to grasp in America in this hour, here’s
God, His words, “O that My people would...
what?... ?... yeah, there it is... that
they would “listen to Me. That Israel
would walk in My ways.” Right there, folks, is your mandate to pray.
What
do you have to pray for? You have to pray for the Word of the living God to be proclaimed across this nation. And if
it’s not being proclaimed in churches, it’s not going to be proclaimed anywhere
else. This is not a time for weak men in weak ministries preaching weak
messages. This is a time to call on God to raise up a
generation of passionate, faithful, gracious, loving preachers of the Word so that a nation can listen to God.
That’s the answer.
Think
God might react? He said- I love this, verse 14, “I would quickly...” you like that word? Isn’t that a good word? I
don’t get the picture God’s dragging His heels here. “I would quickly subdue their enemies, and turn My
hand against their adversaries,” and it would be so great that even “those who hate the Lord would pretend
obedience to Him.” And then I love this, I love verse 16, “I would feed you with the finest of the
wheat and with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.” That’s metaphoric-
I would just drown you in blessing.
God
only wants one thing out of a nation. Listen and believe this Book. I really
get grieved even when I hear evangelical people in the media and the public eye
equivocating about the clarity of the Gospel. It’s all we’ve got. Or about the
clarity of what Scripture says. Your prayer and mine has
to be that God would raise up faithful preachers and people who would proclaim
His Word across this land. Pray for
this generation of young men that God will call and shape and send, pray for
pastors everywhere. Pray for lay people, for Christians to be bold. There’s
only one solution and that’s the truth - the truth by which God saves, by which
God sanctifies, and if this nation will respond and listen to His truth, God
will open the flood gates. We might be the greatest recovery story in history.
But there’s no other way than that people listen to God and walk in His ways.
It’s not going to happen if there’s a famine of the hearing of the Word of God. Pray that the Word, as Paul said, would have free
course and that it would run with all its power across this land. With all its
beauty and magnificence, all its power and grace, that people would hear and
believe and be saved and be obedient, all that to the glory of God.
I
don’t know what God’s plan is, I just see here what
His heart is. “O, that My people would
listen to Me,” that’s the heart of God.
Our
Father, we thank You for simplifying things, as You
always do even in the midst of what is so profound. It all comes down to the
truth again, the truth. Make us people of the truth. May we trust the truth,
unleashing it in all its power, knowing that we have no other weapon but the
sword and it is sharper than any other. So, Lord, we just plead with You that Your Word in
all its saving and sanctifying and transforming power would explode across
this nation, that the truth would replace the lies that abound everywhere,
not for us but for Your own glory. This we ask in the name of our Christ.
Amen.
