Cause and Effect

As Americans have become increasingly ignorant of the Bible, there has been a corresponding deterioration of right living.

Polls have shown that the majority of the people do not know who gave the Sermon on the Mount, could not name one Old Testament prophet, do not know even one of the Ten Commandments.

But no polls are necessary to show the results of such ignorance. One need only observe the obvious spiritual poverty, moral degeneration, political confusion, economic uncertainty, judicial inefficiency, and social disorders that characterize our times.

But few are facing up to the basic cause of this chaos.

The Church could learn much from a modern medical clinic. A patient is admitted so that doctors can determine the cause of his symptoms, and then treat that cause with the best medicines or methods available. The Church, on the other hand, has become so sociologically oriented that often it tries to treat the symptoms rather than the cause of the human predicament.

There is grave danger that the “Christian era” will give way to a “humanist era,” for we have “changed the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom. 1:25).

We have changed the truth about God for a lie by denying his creatorship and by attributing that which we see and know about the universe to unknown forces.

We have changed the truth about God for a lie by overlooking or even denying God’s sovereign rights in his own creation, by thrusting him from his throne and putting sinful man in his place.

We have changed the truth about God for a lie by denying the truth about man—that he is a sinful and lost creature in need of a redemptive work beyond his own power to achieve.

We have changed the truth about God for a lie by substituting the mirage of reform, education, and rehabilitation for the message of salvation, by deciding that the answers for man’s problems are to be found in something other than the redemption of the cross.

Refusing to admit the basic cause of man’s troubles, many within the Church join with the world in looking for new solutions that rise no higher than human intelligence. And so the dismal routine goes on and on and on.

Ignoring the grim truth that the wages of sin is death, the Church has lost its sense of urgency. Frantic for change, yes. But unwilling to admit that preaching the Gospel is the chief calling of the Church and that receiving its message is man’s only hope.

Rejecting God’s loving warnings as “irrelevant,” we find history repeating itself as the blind attempt to lead the blind.

The situation of nations and individuals can be compared to the condition of a desperately ill patient wheeled into the emergency room. Indeed it is far more tragic than that, for in a medical center every effort will be made to diagnose and treat the patient. But in the spiritual realm those who need Jesus Christ above all else are being treated for results of the sin that plagues us all, while God’s Son is left in the waiting room to weep over our disobedience to his command that we are to be his witnesses.

The very heart of the message is that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3,4). To fail to make this truth known to others is to fail to witness.

Does the Gospel we profess open the eyes of the spiritually blind? Does it turn men from darkness to light, from the power of Satan to God? Does it offer the forgiveness of God in and through faith in his Son? Does it make men citizens of heaven through faith in the Lord of heaven? Does it transform hate into love, selfishness into sacrifice, pride into humble dependence on what God has done for us?

Peace for the troubled soul can never come from within. God knows the hell we have made of this earth, and he has given the way out. Do we feel within us a burning desire to tell others of the cure that the Christ of Calvary offers?

One wonders these days if God is not showing us portents of the end of the world. The vileness of man is seen in the vaunting of evil in every form, insensate brutality and violence, lawlessness on every hand. As man demonstrates the depths of his revolt against his Creator, perhaps God is giving a final warning through catastrophes over which man has no control—earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and drought, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves.

Just as there is a continental divide determining the ultimate destination of the river systems—some to the Pacific, some to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean—so there is a spiritual divide, the Son of God, who is to some “a stone that will make men stumble, a rock that will make them fall; but he who believes in him will not be put to shame” (Rom. 9:33).

The Apostle Peter adds, “They stumble because they disobey the word” (1 Pet. 2:8). This brings us back to a basic problem of individuals and of the Church—neglect of God’s Word, even though nowhere else can be found the revelation of God and his Truth. Within the pages of the Bible, men and nations can find the basic solutions to all their problems. The difficulty is that men refuse to believe and to obey.

If all patients admitted to the emergency room of a medical center ended up in the morgue, there would be investigations that would shake that institution to its very foundations.

How much more should there be a re-evaluation of the present programs and messages of many churches! Every legitimate means should be used to alleviate the symptoms and results of man’s sinfulness in the society of which he is a part. But to ignore or neglect the God-given cure is to sin against God and man.

The advances in the medical profession stagger the imagination, and each is used as it appears. But for the soul-sickness of man there is no new cure, nor will there ever be one. Each generation finds new means and methods of presenting the Gospel, and all of them should be used. But woe unto us if we think there is a new remedy, a new way to the healing of the soul. The blood of Calvary is the only cure.

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