Life or Death

First the Bible was taken out of the schools; then the Ten Commandments were banished; then prayer was forbidden and recently any mention of God or Christ became punishable offenses. Abortion is legal. The entertainment that comes into our living rooms is increasingly godless and pornographic. Can’t we see from this trend that the Christian religion is being systematically eliminated from America? How long will we permit this to continue? How long will it be before Christianity is made illegal and driven underground? Why are we doing next to nothing while our heritage is steadily being stripped away from us? There are several reasons, all defective; let’s look at a couple of the most popular excuses:
1. We live in a pluralistic society and cannot assert our religion above other people’s faith.

 There is no such thing as an absence of faith. Humanists or atheists believe that man is his own god and deny the existence of any other gods. They have every right to believe in such foolishness but no right at all to deny that it is a religious belief. When all other god’s are eliminated from the schools, it is their god whose existence is being taught day after day, year in and year out to the children, many of which come from Christian families. In violation of the first amendment, atheistic humanism is the established religion in America’s schools today.

2. The Bible teaches Christians to be pacifists, to pray but leave everything in God’s hands. The world belongs to Satan and no matter what we do, it will continue to get worse and worse until Jesus returns. J. Vernon McGee, a popular 20th century preacher put it in very clear terms, “don’t polish brass on a sinking ship.” The ship he was referring to was the earth, which was beyond hope and not worth expending any effort to improve. Christianity, as a religion, is doomed to failure. Our only hope lies in Jesus’ return.

 This is based on a false view of Scripture, one that was developed in the 19th century. It was not the faith of the early church or of Christians for the prior eighteen centuries. Jesus told us that we are to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. To be salt is to be the preservative, to preserve what is good, to prevent corruption. To be light is to declare the truth as we find it in God’s word and to do that in the face of serious opposition as the early Christians did. Many other Scriptures show us our responsibility as Christians in this world. Take a close look at the Great Commission (Matt. 28: 18-20) where Jesus declared His authority over the nations of the world and told His disciples (all Christians) to teach all these nations to obey Him, to obey all His commandments. This cannot be construed as anything less than a directive to make this world a Christian world! This is most certainly not pacifism and it cannot be limited to telling people about Jesus. If we are to be faithful to this commandment from our Lord, we must do all we can to make the part of this world that we can influence a Christian world. This cannot be reduced to supporting mission work and it must begin at home.

When I attended grade school in the 1940’s, school began with all students in the assembly hall where the Bible was read by the principal, there was a brief explanation of what was read and a hymn was sung before the students went to their classrooms. We have come a very long way since then and it’s time for us to return to our senses. Like it or not, we have a battle on our hands. These godless people that we have permitted to rule over us are not just friendly, live and let live, people that happen to believe differently from us. The Christian faith exposes the falsity of their profession and what they well know is really their rebellion against the only true God. It is repugnant to them and they wish to remove it entirely from view. They are out for blood and will not cease pushing us down until we are totally defeated and the Christian faith is eliminated.
The Christian faith is truth. It is the only hope for the world. As Christians, charged by our Lord to defend and promote this faith, we cannot just stand idly by while it is systematically suppressed. We need to work to reverse the legal and cultural decline that has taken place and then to work, as our Lord commanded, to make America more Christian than it was before. Our children and grandchildren should live in a better, not a less godly, world than our own. Each generation should work toward the fulfillment of our Lord’s Commission until, finally, it is realized. We should begin as the early church did. In the face of seemingly overwhelming opposition, they maintained that Jesus Christ, not Caesar, is Lord and that Caesar is subject to Him. We must hold that Jesus, not anyone or any elected body, is Lord of all things and that America’s laws must conform to God’s laws. This cry, “Jesus is Lord” needs to be repeated until it rings from the rafters of every town hall in America. Only when America’s Christians begin to return to this kind of faith and begin to obey their Lord’s Commission will we see a real reversal of the current trend.