Having entered into the year of 2014, there is much to be thankful for as providence continues to preserve God’s saints amidst the worst season of human history. These desperate days of moral and spiritual decline are bringing us closer to the Tribulation Period of Judgment from God. There is, however, another judgment we are witnessing:
For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God (1 Pet. 4:17).
It is clear that a judgment upon the Church will begin before God’s judgment upon the world.
Our burden for the first article of Straightway draws our attention to the judgment of the world at this time in history; a second article will soberly draw us to the judgment God is now sending to the institutional Church bringing it to its end. May the Lord help us as we prayerfully enter into these two end-time judgments from heaven upon humanity on earth.
The Present Judgment of God Upon America
One of the passages of Scripture that rises in condemnation of our time in history is Romans 1, the presentation of one of seven New Testament apostasies. This passage concerns the apostasy of the natural man through immorality. Though individuals may be found in various sins of fornication (the general term for all sexual acts of uncleanness), a line can be crossed where one goes beyond the acts of fornication and enters into a state of those sins, making a supreme ruling choice to never leave that state of sin. Only God knows when this line is crossed and when He has given an individual up to the state and power of that sin.
The acts of fornication are mentioned in several passages of Scripture. One of the classic contexts is found in 1 Corinthians 6:9:
Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind.
This is a day where man boldly attempts to excuse his growing perverted sins. Some societal leaders declare that such behavior is due to genetic flaws, or the side effects of animal behaviorism from our evolutionary past, or poor education, or family background, or even the alignment of the stars and planets at our birth. These leaders refuse to acknowledge God, the fall of man from original goodness, and his own personal birth pollution in sin.
First Corinthians 6:9 strongly declares that no such person can be a Christian with these forms of wickedness still part of his life. The phrase “them that defile themselves with mankind” (1 Tim. 1:10) is the description of sodomites; Jude in his brief epistle declares this sin as “going after strange flesh” (v. 7). These words of 1 Corinthians 6:9 were very confrontational from Paul to a city like Corinth. Paul continues, “And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11). Among the people of the church of Corinth there had been a radical change from these various forms of evil lifestyle.
Though God has delivered and radically changed lives from such sins, a growing number in our society are giving and have fully given themselves over to the depth of these sins. God knows that no matter what He does, these people will never turn from such fornicating sins. The power of pride has congealed their wills in defiance against God and in the perseverance of these sins. Such sins are the worst in the natural pride of man, for they are sins of “self-gratification.”
In Church history these sins are often called “brutal lusts” or “unholy indulgences.” To quickly note the terms mentioned in the list of 1 Corinthians 6:9, the first sin mentioned is fornication. It is a term that we generally think of as a sin between two unmarried persons or two persons not married to each other. However, the Greek word here covers the gamut of all sexual uncleanness. The second term adultery is sexual perversion against the marriage union. Effeminate is the term that identifies a man possessing characteristics of a woman. Until recent attempts by modernistic liberal teachers to reinterpret Scripture to fit their immoral programs, this word has been interpreted as referring to men who are womanlike. It is a word aptly applied to sodomites. This word effeminate comes between “adulterers” and “abusers of themselves with mankind,” both of which refer to sins of immorality. It has always been interpreted throughout Church history as sodomy (coming from the sins found in the city of Sodom in Genesis 19) and is contemporarily called homosexuality.
When Paul, writing to the Romans from the deeply immoral city of Corinth, presented the sins of the Gentile world, he gave a classic presentation of sodomites in Romans chapter 1. In this passage of Scripture, three vivid steps or stages are presented of God’s judgment of giving up either a person or a nation. These steps need to be carefully viewed in the light of where the United States is at this time in its deep plight of immorality. We must acknowledge at the outset of this presentation that the United States has entered the third and final stage of God’s giving us up. But how did we come this far? Historically, how did the unfolding take place?
First Stage: God Gave Them Up to Uncleanness
This first stage is recorded in Romans 1:24, 25:
Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves; who changed the truth of God into a [Gr., the] lie and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.
This is not a judgment upon a nation for its violence against another nation. This is a spiritual judgment, and such judgments are the sorest kind. This stage is when God Himself gives up an individual, a people, a nation to the most brutish and unnatural lusts of the body. He leaves them alone unto themselves. In past seasons of our country, God through great mercy called and wooed us back. However, as in the medical world, if the patient will not submit to the methods prescribed but willfully seeks his own harm, the physician cannot be blamed. Likewise, God cannot be blamed for our condition.
This principle is also seen in 2 Chronicles 36:15, 16:
And the Lord God of their fathers sent to them by his messengers, rising up betimes, and sending; because he had compassion on his people, and on his dwelling place: But they mocked the messengers of God, and despised his words, and misused his prophets, until the wrath of the Lord arose against his people, till there was no remedy.
Although the Lord permitted Babylon to take Judah down into captivity, in Romans 1 God is finally giving up a people. Unto what were they given?
We believe the first giving up of our country took place in the 1960s, the most demoralizing decade in our country’s history. In 1961, when John F. Kennedy took the presidency, a new youth movement commenced in America. That same year the Berlin Wall was erected, escalating the “Cold War” and contributing to a mood of despair and a hopeless tomorrow to the youth. In that same year the race riots began all across America. We also will acknowledge the influence of the Vietnam War, especially through Lyndon Johnson, who took the place of John F. Kennedy. Kennedy’s assassination only added grief to the youth of America as older man Lyndon Johnson took office. The youth came to a belief of “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” A similar spirit had taken over after World War I, when the 1920s brought risqué sexual liberation before the Great Depression economically was sent by Providence to humble America.
The 1960s was a decade of decadence, plunging the youth into the abyss of deep immorality. Many powers fed these visceral fires of lusts. The powers of rock music deepened in this decade with a greater emphasis upon the manipulation of the mind (Bob Dylan and Joan Baez) as well as the introduction of the occult. The free love movement brought forth unbridled lusts in fornication; the hippy movement focused on a freedom of sin and sexuality, throwing away all restraints of morality. This period witnessed an escalating rise of sexually transmitted diseases. The illicit drug movement profoundly chemically-induced a whole generation with mind-escaping imaginations. It was the decade in our country of anarchy, of riots, and of a cultural revolution led by the influential powers of the rock group called the Beatles, particularly through the leadership of John Lennon. Western civilization was introduced to Eastern religions with their lies and worship of the creature rather than the true Creator.
The 1960s was also a decade when Neo-Evangelicalism rose with great influential force in American churches destroying historic Christian faith. The churches had no power to quell the tide of this judgment from God, for they were part of the problem.
Yes, it was this season in our history when God gave us up as a country to uncleanness and vile affections “through the lusts of their own hearts.” We must candidly acknowledge that what was witnessed through the 1960s was America’s true heart. It was the debauched decade of the lusts of hearts given over to the “dishonoring” of their own bodies between themselves. A whole generation was given up to the great slavery of their own lusts. Oh, the uncleanness and the moral impurities that enslaved our country! Why did such vileness take over our country with such force? God gave us up to it!
Second Stage: God Gave Them Up unto Vile Affections
The second stage is found in Romans 1:26, 27:
For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.
I believe we witnessed this giving over by God in the early days of President Obama’s administration, when the floodgates were opened to make lawful such inverted sins. The first stage of “giving up” by God was in the realm of the perverted sin of fornication. In contrast, this second stage is in the context of the inverted sin of fornication. Loosing himself from God, man sinks into degradation beyond all words. “God gave them up,” all because they gave up God. Man only realizes his dignity when he realizes his God.
In this stage men are given over unto “vile affections,” or passions of dishonor. Romans 1:26, 27 is a clear description of sodomy, of homosexuality, of lesbianism, and all evil, inverted forms of that realm of darkness. Paul calls it, “that which is against nature.” The degradation of sexuality is what Paul here notes as one of the results of heathenism—the loss of God in the life of man. The word affection here concerns “inordinate affection” (Col. 3:5) and “lust” or “intense, burning lust” (1 Thess. 4:5). These affections or burnings are the morally diseased condition out of which lusts spring. These individuals are given over to a condition and not merely to an evil desire. We read here that men “burned in their lust one toward another”; the statement here is literally “burned out,” “to set on fire,” and even “to inflame with anger or lust” in such passions.
With the president’s own involvement in such perversion reaching back to his early years in Chicago, this present administration has unleashed “executive orders” encouraging this sin nationally, oppressively forwarding the legalization of same-sex marriages. These actions from the leader of our nation are evidence that God has been giving our nation over to the “strange flesh” of the end time. The Bible warned of days such as Lot’s (Luke 17:28); these wicked powers are beginning to beat on the doors of our homes, schools, and churches. Laws of our land no longer protect us from open depravity. Even the courts have been given over by God to such vile persuasions of freedom. Certain judgments await such people who have denied the Author of nature. God will have His vengeance by payment in full from such individuals and nations. This vengeance of God will be found within their bodies and souls, and is “meet” or proper for them to receive.
Third Stage: God Gave Them Over To a Reprobate Mind
The third stage of the descent is inevitable:
And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient (1:28).
I believe this has taken place in the past three years. Now insanity rules the leadership, the courts, the schools, the businesses, the music, the art world, the economy, and every part of the government. Our country is in the final judgment; it must, apart from a miraculous delay of providence, go under overthrowing itself. Such a people had some kind of God-consciousness at one point; now they have turned away from Him. The word knowledge here is the Greek word epignosei, meaning a “full, experiential knowledge.” They rejected God, and they rejected Him for every part of their lives. Therefore, God will reject them and give them over to a reprobate thought life. Our nation’s leadership hates God: it refuses to acknowledge God in anything or for anything. Because of this and the evils of the first two judgments, God now has given them over to a mind void of judgment. At this time in our country, we cannot expect leadership to think rightly and rationally; God has now made them incapable of sane judgment.
We as a nation first have been given up to our own hearts’ lusts, then to our vile affections, and finally, to a mind void of judgment. Sin itself has no rationality to it; therefore, when God gives a person or an entire nation over to such sins, insanity controls all its judgments.
Conclusion
Romans 1 does not conclude with these three judgments. The chapter continues with three final verses concerning wickednesses that fill up such a people and nation. Those whom God has given “up,” and “over to,” are given the final judgment by God: they are “being filled with all” forms of wickedness. This “being filled” in the Greek is with a perfect passive participle explaining that this filling is to completion—“filled to the brim.” Note what Paul says they overflow with:
Unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity, whisperers [they speak into the ear secretly], backbiters [to talk back, whether secretly or openly], haters of God, despiteful [insolent], proud [arrogant in thought and conduct], boasters [to appear above others], inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant breakers [ever promising but ever breaking their word], without natural affection, implacable [their will is sealed and unchangeable], unmerciful: who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them (1:29–32).
No doubt we have wondered how such things that we are witnessing in our American society have come about. How can such executive laws be passed? And there are more to come. Greater than that observation, why are such actions not being stopped? Because a sovereign God has given us up to uncleanness; He has given us up to vile affections; and He has given us over to a reprobate mind. When God goes this far, there is no recovery; there will be no return to former days. Until God finally seals His judgment upon a person or a nation, there is hope; but once God sets his seals upon them, He has given them up and over. We are witnessing providence dislocating the brakes of laws and hindrances; the speed of our descent into the abyss of calamitous destruction is accelerating at a shocking velocity. What that final destruction is, only God knows. But we are sealed to become a nation of only a dim memory.
The average American does not know how severe these judgments of God have become in our country. Any restraint by the remaining conservatism of our country is merely a hand trying to keep back a tidal wave of destruction. The only reason we have not totally collapsed into ruins is the mercy of God for His remnant. Will we as true Christians experience the full collapse of this country before the secret coming of Christ for the Elect, or will we go through it as a prelude to the coming Tribulation Period? America, as we have known it, must die. And its death will be the worst in history, for we have had the greatest light of biblical truth through many stirrings of awakenings and revivals. But alas, those days are both gone and despised by the present generation, yea, even the present generation of the institutional Church. To be a “true” Christian today makes us a prey for the government and for the nominal church. To be a “true” Christian makes one an enemy to society and to the new age of man to come.
In the next article we must turn from God’s judgments already upon our nation to God’s judgment upon the institutional Church.