The Most Fearsome Judgment

Many remember Ruth Graham’s quip of a few years ago: “If God doesn’t bring judgment on America soon, he will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.”

To be sure, her words were tongue-in-cheek, but truth contained in sarcasm is all the more biting for the humor that masks it. Soaring divorce and crime rates, the mounting death toll of slaughtered unborn, sexual mores so permissive as to be perverted are but the most visible manifestations of our decadence.

The fact is, we are a nation overrun by hordes of little tin gods all made in our own image, their charge led by the crown prince of self riding his shiny golden calf. Our various sins spring from one common cause: we do precisely what we want to do, answering only to the whims of our desires.

Mrs. Graham is right. What in the world is God waiting for?

Many Christians keep one eye anxiously cocked on the skies, watching dolefully for signs of God’s wrath—perhaps drought or earthquakes or plague. Maybe the locusts of Exodus have become the medflies of the eighties. Or perhaps Mount Saint Helens is merely a preliminary rumbling of things to come. We tense as each crisis flashes across our TV screens. Then, when the medflies are sprayed into momentary extinction, or the volcano is quiet, we breathe easily again. But deep inside, I suspect, we all know we deserve God’s judgment. A perfect God cannot tolerate flagrant disobedience; we must be living on borrowed time. So our churches fill up with more and more people professing to be born again while the sins that so grieve and offend Almighty God continue. And no matter how much incense we may burn in the shadow of stained glass windows, its scent is overwhelmed by the stench of our sin. Religion is supposed to cure our ills, yet the more religious we are, the more those sinful conditions worsen. Why?

The answer to that seeming paradox may give us a clue: Could it be that judgment is already upon us? Instead of balls of fire hurled down from above or visitations of plagues and boils, perhaps God is simply allowing us to wallow helplessly in the mire of our sin. Augustine’s statement, “The punishment of sin is sin,” captures the essence of this kind of judgment. The apostle Paul explained to the Romans how the sinful are cast out and punished: not by exterior censure, but by a rotting from within. The lustful and depraved are given over completely to their own passions and depravity (Rom. 1:23–32). The message is clear: if we insist on continuing to eat forbidden fruit, then we will be allowed to glut ourselves with it until we retch and vomit—or until our stomachs burst. Sin leads to certain destruction.

It is the most fearsome form of judgment. Our passions and lusts are insatiable; the more we continue to indulge them, the more they imprison us. Unrestrained license can only lead to bondage. “By what a man is overcome, by this he is enslaved,” Scripture tells us (2 Peter 2:19).

A recent Psychology Today article illustrates this. A woman in her mid-20s is undergoing psychiatric treatment, her nerves shot from too many all-night parties and discos, her thoughts tangled by pot, booze, and sex. “Why don’t you stop?” the therapist asks.

Startled, she replies, “You mean I really don’t have to do what I want to do?”

That insidious tendency toward self-destruction is a sure sign of judgment upon us. And the craving to destroy is voracious. It sucks us dry, then moves on to attack those in authority over us as well. Consider the ill fate of our political leaders over the past two decades:

• The charismatic young President, John Kennedy, was felled by an assassin’s bullet. The memory haunts us to this day, the wounds unhealed.

• Lyndon Johnson, one of the most indomitable personalities ever to become President, was driven out of the White House, a beaten, whipped man.

• The Nixon years, with which I was so intimately involved, produced unprecedented triumph, then awful tragedy.

• Gerald Ford, who had but a brief tenure, was defeated in his first try for election on his own.

• A man straight from Plains, Georgia, full of fresh hope and promise, was next to come to power. He, too, left office, rejected after one term, his record discredited.

• Now Ronald Reagan, after a recent plummet in the public opinion polls is on a course not unlike his predecessors.

It is almost as if we elect them to enjoy watching them fall.

In the first century, Peter wrote that “to despise authority is characteristic of unrighteousness.” And the bitter, envious venom we spew on our leaders is but a symptom of the hate with which we are so terminally diseased.

British journalist Henry Fairlie wrote: “The envious person is moved, first and last, by his own lack of self-esteem.… We feel cheated by our newspapers and magazines if no one is leveled in the dust in them, We wait in ambush for the novel that fails, for the poet who commits suicide, for the financier who is a crook, for the politician who slips, for the priest who is discovered to be an adulterer. We lie in ambush for them all, so that we may gloat at their misfortunes.”

With God’s hand removed from us, there is nothing to restrain our sin. It makes us hate ourselves. It impels us to pull down our leaders—yet it is never satisfied until it infects everything we touch. And so the cancer spreads. Now it seems that our Western society as a whole is afflicted. It was evident several months ago when two million Europeans, who didn’t want the risk or bother of defense stations in their own back yards, flooded the streets to protest NATO nuclear weapons in Western Europe. Yet when Communist tyrants imposed martial law in Poland and Soviet divisions poised on the borders, the “peace” protestors were strangely silent. Their Polish neighbors were being stepped on and ruthlessly oppressed, but as long as it didn’t bother them, they would look the other way.

So, having unleashed all self-restraint and thrown off our authority, we are in the same condition that the author of the Book of Judges described when he summed up Israel’s periods of apostacy: “… there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes” (21:25).

The hope for our society today is not in clichés and slick religious slogans. Nor will it come by droning 2 Chronicles 7:14 until it becomes some sort of liturgical chant. Only by radical repentance, and the deepest hunger for God’s justice and righteousness, can we be saved from our judgment.

It is better to have locusts or famine than the sentence of being gradually swallowed up unawares in the cesspool of our own greed and lust and hate. To starve to death has some degree of dignity—it is the result of exterior forces. But to die a slow and dull-eyed death of excess, even as we cram more sweets into our drooling mouths, is the ultimate debasement. Yet we continue to inflame our passions, swollen and gluttonous, gorging ourselves and sleeping it off.

With broken and contrite hearts, let us pray that there is still time for God to spare us from ourselves.

Charles W. Colson is president of Prison Fellowship, Washington, D.C. He was special counsel to former President Richard Nixon, and is the author of Born Again and Life Sentence (Chosen, 1975, 1979).

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