Who Has Moved?

Many are trying to convince America that Christians should have no voice in the market place of ideas.  Our insistence upon morality and righteousness in every area of the public scene is stepping hard upon many toes.  One high government official used the platform of the Gay Games in New York to praise homosexuality and to accuse religious conservatives of “selling out their children in the name of religion.”  We who champion traditional morality and believe in godliness are being made to sound like our beliefs have come from outer space (which, by the way, isn’t far from the truth).  The question is, whose teachings really are dangerous?  Who really has beliefs that are “off the wall.”?

For instance, what if George Washington were interviewed on Good Morning America and made his famous statement, “It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible, “ he would be labeled a crackpot.  Or imagine the Supreme Court making a statement, as they did in 1891, that ‘Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teaching of the Redeemer of mankind.  It is impossible that it should be otherwise;  and this sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian.”  What do you suppose the media would do with that?

Without an objective standard we’re never aware how far away we’ve moved.  By the time the Old Testament king Josiah began to reign in Judah, many years of departure from the laws of God had already occurred.  By accident a copy of the Law of God was discovered in the badly neglected temple and read before the king.  He saw immediately how far his nation had strayed from the path of godliness.  He replied:  “Great is the Lord’s anger that is poured out on us because our fathers have not kept the word of the Lord;  they have not acted in accordance with all that is written in this book.”

That is our challenge concerning the next generation.  To ignore divine direction is to ensure a slide leftward.  Will our children sit in judgment upon us because we went along with the cultural drift for fear of appearing out of step?  Or will they reply, in the words of the hymn, “Faith of our fathers, living faith, we will be true to thee till death?”  That chapter has yet to be written, doesn’t it.

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