CURRENT AFFAIRS
"Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people". (Proverbs 14:34)
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Unless otherwise stated the articles are by David W. Norris
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THE SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE GOSPEL
There is no occasion, no situation arising, including when social and political issues are in focus, when we can set the Bible to one side. Many are reluctant to do this fearful of charges of obscurantism or even worse being condemned as ‛extremist’ by our godless rulers. Yet the claims of the Gospel of Christ cannot be compromised. As a result, many professing Christians when defending their views on any number of matters hide their true biblical convictions hoping to gain respectability in the eyes of unbelievers. As a result, the claims of Christ on the thought and life of unbelievers remain unstated and godless men go away unchallenged by Him. A people whose life is not guided and moulded by the teaching of Scripture can in no way be thought of as a Christian nation. Unless a challenge goes out from the Word of God, defeat is inevitable. Evangelicals stand facing both ways at one and the same time, saying one thing to outsiders and another to their own people.
We need to remember that no legal order, be it Christian or something else, can be successfully imposed on the nation on a permanent basis unless the people themselves are carried along with it. The political system of a country will always reflect the faith and condition of the people. A system that enslaves will live produce a slave state. Only were the population to consist to a large degree of mature Christian believers would we be able to speak of a biblical political system. This is not the case by any means in modern Britain, far from it.
A genuine biblical social order will be based on the teachings of the Scriptures. All law is based on a system of morality and is therefore necessarily religious. Non-biblical social or legal order is also religious with implications for the Christian faith. It will be Christian or it will be anti-Christian. Revolution provides no solution. The outcome is rarely, if ever, helpful to anyone and historically has ushered in a way of life far worse than the one overthrown. The only way of change is regeneration and conversion through the preaching of the Gospel. Certain is that godless men will never produce a good society. Social renewal must begin with individual regeneration. Only then will anyone willingly submit to Scripture. Would to God we still had politicians of the calibre of the Victorian statestman, William Gladstone, who wrote of the Bible as "the impregnable rock of Holy Scripture".
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THE COMPREHENSIVE CLAIMS OF CHRIST
Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche put words into the mouth of a madman, who ran everywhere crying: “Where is God gone? I mean to tell you, we have killed him, you and I. We are all his murderers.” Going from church to church, he announces the death of God. Asked the reason for this outburst, the madman replies, “What are these churches now, if they are not the tombs of God?” The significance of this story was to some extent lost on Nietzsche’s own generation; it would take another hundred years for its meaning to fully unfold. Buildings that then resounded in the praise and worship of God are gone and many remaining now stand derelict, or have been turned into homes, theatres, antique shops, museums, Sikh temples. But the death of God has taken place only in the human mind as He has faded from the consciousness of our fellow men and nowhere else. Christ has been driven out of Christendom, yet He lives still; it is just that men live without Him as though He were dead. Nietzsche gives his prophetic words to a madman to announce, reflecting the words of Scripture: “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God” (Psalm 14:1). Today, the rejection of God by so many has left a vacuum waiting to be filled by opportunistic forces of unbelief, godlessness: a vicious, destructive, bigoted, intolerant, and militant atheism with a not so smiling face.
Godlessness expresses itself in every area of British life. Understandable cynicism has developed towards corrupt and deceitful governments as they introduce legislation that often seems only to featherbed themselves, secure their own positions, and benefit their friends. Those who dare to challenge publicly the prevailing new morality being imposed on our people, introduced often against the better judgement of a majority, are more than likely to receive a knock on the door from the local police. They “call evil good, and good evil; … put darkness for light, and light for darkness” (Isaiah 5:20). Personal sin has been raised to the level of a new righteousness. Oblique persecution meets any Christian seeking to follow the dictates of conscience. Teachers who look to their own their own conscience on how and what they teach their charges, hotel and guesthouse owners refusing to accommodate homosexuals, doctors who reject abortion and refuse contraception to underage unmarried teenage girls, along with many other professionals in public service, particularly those professing Christian convictions are with increasing frequency being forced to quit. Truly: “The wicked walk on every side, when the vilest men are exalted” (Psalm 12:8).Freedom of conscience is only permitted where there is no contradiction of the perverse mores of godless parliamentarians. It was Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms (1521) who warned that it is dangerous to go against a conscience informed by the Word of God. The freedom of conscience to hold and express distinctively Christian beliefs won over centuries is being deliberately and systematically eroded.
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THE WEST ON THE BRINK
Over the past fifty years or so I have watched how England and the western nations in general have embarked on a steady slide of self-destruction and disintegration. It is undeniable that this dismal state of affairs has been brought about by a rejection and piece by piece dismantling of the Christian heritage that has shaped these countries for centuries, in Britain, in Europe, and in North America.
Certainly, England has a godly heritage to look back upon, one she now despises. In Puritan England, godly preachers regularly addressed members of Parliament from the pulpit of St. Margaret’s. At one point, both Houses of Parliament agreed to a monthly Fast which everyone throughout the land was expected to observe and it was only brought to an end by the reprobate king Charles, who paid a high price indeed for his treachery. On a Fast Day nothing was to be sold, eaten or drunk, no tool used, no wheel was to turn until the preachers had delivered their sermons. It is difficult to imagine such a thing today, when the even Lord’s Day itself is now trampled upon by everyone. Those seeking to observe it can lose their jobs or even be denied employment, and all within the ‘law’. All that is godly is everywhere debunked and the results of wicked and godless behaviour and the blame for the consequences placed elsewhere, even upon the cure. The sick man cries: it is the medicine that has brought about my ruin!
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WHEN I AM OLD AND GREY-HEADED
Despising the old is a mark of a godless society
It has been said that a society can be judged by the way it treats its children and its old people, those among us least able to care for themselves. The Bible demands that we honour our parents and revere all those older than we are and there is good reason for it. Minimising or trying to obliterate differences of age even in small ways – e.g. by the recent common tendency to use Christian names when addressing older people without being bidden – is all part of a move to deny the passage of time and break with the past along with all the good that has come to us from it. It is a sinful and revolutionary age that cuts through this continuity, this historical umbilical cord, and turns on its elders with vitriol and hatred. We receive life from our parents; therefore to hate our parents is a form of self-hate. The expression heard all too often ‘I didn’t ask to be brought into this world’ betrays a love of death; it is a kind of suicide note.
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OUR NATION AND THE SCRIPTURES
There was a time when the Bible enjoyed a privileged place at the heart of British life. This is far from being the case today.
The influence of the Christian Scriptures on our nation and people is undeniable and truly remarkable. The source rarely recognised today, the words of the Bible have become part of the woof and warp of our culture and language.
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THE DANGER FROM WITHIN
The greatest threat to our nation today is not something emanating from outside. Quite the contrary, the danger that will one day ruin us if left is one that has grown from within. No enemy from without need invade to destroy us, we are doing this very well for ourselves without the help of anyone. There is a festering rot within. At one time this was not easily discerned, but in the last forty years or so like some gangrene, putrefaction has pushed its way through to the surface as an undeniable and highly visible stench-ridden affliction.
All is well, we are told. Yet, a tree may well appear healthy externally, no canker apparent, whilst within all is not well. Then one windy day when a gale blows with some force, the tree, although its life may have spanned the centuries, will fall ignominiously and its true internal state be open for all to see. Such is our beloved country today: rotten inside and a fall is inevitable when once the cruel winds of adversity begin to blow. A fall one day will most certainly come, for we no longer have the moral fibre and backbone to resist in times of dire trouble. This weakness is already more than apparent.
Our institutions are able to function only within structures that operate within a context of inherent corruption. We have made no move forward, but have regressed to an epoch when power was inherited or purchased, retreated to an era many thought had largely disappeared, when appointments could be obtained in return for favours, when a chosen few owned the country. Government today in Britain is dominated by an openly godless and perverse self-perpetuating élite motivated solely by greed and self-interest. A cosy cabal, an insular ‛chumocracy’ is determined, at whatever cost to the nation, to defend and preserve the privileged position it has arranged for itself. Vested interests hold sway over politicians of all colours and determine the direction of travel for our country, operating the levers of power.
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Once we were a nation with clearly defined beliefs and an acute moral consciousness. The seeds of our civilisation and culture were sown around two thousand years ago when the Christian Gospel reached these shores. It was this faith that over many years shaped our morals, our political system, and all aspects of our culture. Within a very short period of time, this and much of what has meant to be Christian and British, has been systematically dismantled and destroyed by a vicious adversary active among us. This home-grown enemy is attempting to reshape our nation surreptitiously, erase our historic identity and all without the consent of the population, frog-marching us along a pathway many, if not most of us find obnoxious. To surrender up our Christian faith to these ideological vandals will have irreversible and devastating results and ultimately bring about the disintegration of our nation. Yet in truth, sadly Great Britain shrank away and ceased to exist long ago.
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HUMANITY & THE NATIONS: A CHRISTIAN VIEW
The Christian Scriptures are very instructive when it comes to matters concerning the identity of nations and the shared blood of the human race. The apostle Paul summarized Christian teaching aptly in his address to the Greeks in the midst of the Areopagus in Athens (Acts 17). The Greeks had many gods and an altar to the ‛unknown’ God just in case they had missed one. They realised, that despite their understanding of philosophy and religion, there were areas where their knowledge may not have reached and some divine being existed to whom worship was due. This personal God, whom they did not know, was the One that Paul had come to declare unto them.