In speaking of His second coming, Jesus Christ said, “As the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be” (Matthew 24:37). What were the days of Noah like? Genesis 6:5 tells us: “Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” This is the description of the society that was swept away by the Flood.
Any person who is keenly observant would have to say that the moral compass of our nation at the current time no longer has a true north. II Timothy 3:1-5 tells us, “There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God – having a form of godliness but denying its power.”
Paul was not saying that in the days before the second coming of Christ everyone living would be depraved. He was giving us in very understandable terms the picture of the culture that will exist in the world before Christ returns. His description reads like today’s newspaper headlines, doesn’t it? The moral decline and depravity of our nation is a symptom of our isolation from God. Without God at the steering wheel of the human heart, we are like a driverless car careening down the freeway toward an inevitable crash.
The moral decline in our nation can be seen in many ways. For example, in a recent year the Internet’s largest online pornography website reported that consumers watched 87,849,731,608 X-rated videos. Over 87 billion! That adds up to twelve videos for every person living on the face of the earth. And the picture is even worse than that, for over one-fourth of Internet pornography is child-related.
The young Jewish writer Ben Shapiro wrote in his book Porn Generation, “I am a member of a lost generation. We have lost our values. In a world where all values are equal, where everything is simply a matter of choice, narcissism rules the day. The acceptance of pornography has become a social fact.”
Moral depravity in our nation is also seen in how marriage and the human family is defined. Jesus described marriage in this way: “From the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh; so they are no longer two, but one flesh” (Mark 10:6-8). But in the 2015 case of Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court by a 5-4 vote took it upon itself to redefine marriage more broadly than God does.
We cannot control what a secular society does, but as Christians we can demonstrate a better way and let the Word of God govern our convictions and our conduct. Nevertheless, the ruling by the Supreme Court undeniably puts Bible believers in a tough spot. Justice Samuel Alito, in his dissent to the majority opinion, predicted that this decision in years to come would become a basis for aggressive legal discrimination against those who hold a biblical view of marriage. His prediction is already coming true.
Space will not allow me in one article to survey the many other areas of societal moral decay –- the loss of ethics in business, the breakdown of family life, the out-of-wedlock birthrate, the loss of the concept of fatherhood in our society, well over one million abortions every year since 1975, rampant materialism, substance abuse, gambling and gaming, the crime rate, our rapidly increasing national debt, etc.
Romans 1:18-32 describes in a graphic way how God feels about what is happening in our nation. These fifteen verses, unless things change, accurately describe America’s future. Please read them, for America has largely forgotten the truth found in Psalm 33:12, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”
The Paper Pulpit 