“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” With that famous line from the movie version of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her dog, Toto, find themselves in the strange and wonderful land of Oz—quite different from the Kansas of her childhood.
As I wake up and scan today’s headlines, I am often tempted to think, Toto, we’re not in America anymore. I’m exaggerating, of course, but only a little. When I look at the changes that have occurred in the land I love—and in the Church I love even more—just in my lifetime, I have to pinch myself to see if it’s a dream gone bad. Sadly, what I see is all too real. I do a double take several times a week—sometimes several times a day—as I witness more and more changes I never thought I would see.
When I first began my vocational ministry nearly five decades ago, if someone had suggested that I would someday write a book titled I Never Thought I’d See the Day, I would probably have thought, That’s an unlikely idea for a book! What would it be about? Today, I obviously think differently. In fact, I could have written this book many years ago when I first began to see things I never thought I’d see. The changes are coming so fast and furiously that I could no longer put it off.
My calling in life is neither to be an author nor to be a prophet. I am a pastor-teacher, by the grace of God, with shepherding stewardship over a specific congregation of Christian believers in Southern California. My focus throughout my ministry has been on one thing: lifting up Jesus Christ by the faithful preaching of the Word of God through the exposition and application of the Bible to daily life.
But something has happened in recent years. There has always been a stark difference between life as the Scriptures describe it and life in our fallen world, but lately the contrast has grown even more stark. The changes we have experienced in the United States and the world have been more numerous, more consequential, and more threatening than any in my lifetime. As I have addressed these changes from a biblical perspective for the benefit of my own congregation, I have found there is a hunger for answers in a much wider audience. There are many, many Christians across the country and around the world who have seen, and suffered through, many of these cataclysmic events. And they want answers. They want to know what God’s Word says not only about the cultural and spiritual changes themselves, but how to live faithfully in the midst of them.
So I have, over the last four years, preached on and written about these subjects to the best of my ability. I don’t claim that these books are the last word on the subjects they address. But I cannot sit idly by and watch believers be “destroyed [spiritually] for lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6). Life is becoming more challenging in our world, and followers of Christ are going to have to be at their strongest (His strongest) in order to continue standing firm in wisdom and in hope.
These unprecedented times demand unprecedented discernment from Christians. I don’t know what the future holds, but my commitment to God is to do whatever I can to bring biblical light to bear on these challenging times. My prayerful goal is to have the same discerning spirit as did “the sons of Issachar who had understanding of the times, to know what [the people of God] ought to do” (1 Chronicles 12:32).
This is actually the fourth in a series of books I never dreamed of writing. The scope of the first three books was the present and the future—prophetic clues and trends and how to live in light of them.1 The scope of this book is the present as compared with the past—the dramatic changes I have seen in recent years and how they are shaping the world we find ourselves in today. These are large subjects, the kind of trends that develop over years. They move at a glacial pace compared to the frenetic lifestyle most Americans live, which makes them easy to miss.
But no one misses the effects of these changes. They contribute to the deteriorating moral and spiritual culture in which we live. We have this feeling that we’re not in Kansas anymore. America today is not the America we thought it was, but we’re not sure why. I believe some of the subjects I tackle in this book will help connect the dots between this feeling and what we see happening around us. And, it will help us evaluate the changes we’re experiencing from a biblical point of view.
I have chosen to address nine developments that I never thought I would see in my lifetime, all of which have significant implications for the Church of Jesus Christ. The first is the rise of angry atheists. Atheists used to be relatively passive, but we now have a spate of emboldened nonbelievers who are angry and proactive and determined to intimidate believers in God.
Next I address the intensifying of spiritual warfare. The more the Gospel progresses and the closer we get to the end of the age, the more aggressive the enemy becomes. Sadly, many Christians are unaware that a battle is raging all around them, and they have not reported for duty.
No subject in this book grieves me more than the dethroning of Jesus Christ. In today’s America He has moved from the central figure of world history to source material for late-night comics and pundits who would not dare treat other religious leaders with such disrespect.
Next I address the redefining of marriage. The heterosexual union of a man and a woman in marriage is no longer considered the norm upon which nations build their cultures. Marriage itself has become an option, with an alarming number of unmarried couples living together and having children. Following marriage I address America’s loss of its moral compass—its inability to be shocked or shamed by gross immorality. Moral failures, public and private, have become part of the fabric of life.
Intertwined with this free fall in morality is the growing marginalization of the Bible, which has moved from the center of political and cultural discourse to the far edges—from providing the founding principles of our nation to becoming a resource for token verses as ornamental platitudes. Sadly, many Christians and a growing number of churches have followed the lead of the culture and pushed the Word of God away from the center of their lives.
This leads us to the growing irrelevance of the Christian church in the eyes of our society. While society may be biased, the Church needs to ask itself whether it has lost, by its impassivity and lack of zeal, the right to be heard or to exercise its former civil, social, and spiritual roles concerning the major issues of the day.
Moving from internal deterioration to external concerns, I address the growing influence of rogue nations. Iran’s increasing power and radical Muslim theocratic mission have created a whole new level of instability in an already fragile Middle East and destabilized the rest of the world.
Last I address the erosion of America’s loyalty to Israel. Since America’s founding she has been a friend to the Jews, which has resulted in God’s blessing on our nation (Genesis 12:3). But America’s current trend toward reduced loyalty to Israel in an attempt to appease Palestinians or ensure access to oil resources puts her on a collision course with God.
These are serious subjects and I have treated them as such. Every chapter is filled with cultural and biblical information to illustrate God’s standard and how America and the world have departed from it. I believe one of our biggest problems is that America’s departure from God’s standard has occurred so slowly that many of us do not realize just how far we have drifted. To illustrate how this can happen, let me tell you a true story.
Sir William Edward Parry (1790–1855) was an English naval officer and record-setting explorer of the Arctic—and an Evangelical Christian. He made one of the very first attempts to reach the North Pole and, in doing so, penetrated farther north than any previous explorer—a record that stood for nearly fifty years. On one of his trips to the Arctic, Parry and his men were pushing hard, trekking across the ice toward the Pole. At one point he stopped and recalculated his position by the stars, then continued pushing north. Hours later they stopped, exhausted. Again Admiral Parry calculated his position and discovered something unbelievable: They were actually farther south than when they made their previous calculation! Parry was an expert in astronomical observations and calculations (he wrote a book on the subject), so a mistake on his part was not likely. He eventually discovered the problem: He and his team had been on a gigantic ice floe that was moving south faster than they were trekking north. It was a classic example of the old “one step forward, two steps backward” routine.
The ice floe was so big and moving so slowly that Parry’s loss of position was imperceptible until he recalculated. While he thought he was gaining ground, he was losing.
This is what has happened in America. When we calculated our position back in the 1950s, we thought we knew where we were. We had just defeated Nazism and the Axis powers in World War II, we had a world-famous Army general for a president (Eisenhower), the economy was booming, churches were full, and it seemed that most everybody loved God, Mom, Chevrolet, and apple pie. So we marched on. But in the first decade of the twenty-first century, many of us began to sense that we had long ago veered off course. A new set of calculations—nine of which I describe in this book—have revealed something I never thought I’d live to see: We’ve been losing spiritual and moral ground in America.
America is big, multicultural, and ever-changing. We are like that giant ice floe Admiral Parry was on—so big that changes over the last fifty years have seemed of little concern on a day-to-day basis. But on a century-to-century basis, these changes stand out like a flashing neon warning sign. Fifty years ago, standards of marriage and morality and respect for Jesus Christ, the Church, and the Bible were widespread. Iran was never in the headlines, and in 1948 President Harry Truman was the first head of state to openly declare his nation’s support for the newly formed political State of Israel. When you examine these and other areas of our national life, it is all too obvious that we have lost, not gained, ground in the last half-century.
Now we come to the big question Christians are asking: What do we do in light of the devolution of society around us? When we ask the question in that way, we betray a misunderstanding of the problem. We mistakenly think the problem is outside us—that it originates with the non-Christian population. We sometimes adopt the attitude of the Pharisee who prayed, “God, I thank You that I am not like other men—extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector” (Luke 18:11).
The truth is, we can echo the words of Pogo in the old Walt Kelly comic strip: “We have met the enemy and he is us!” All too often we Christians are like “other men.” We have allowed the world to conform us to its image instead of allowing the Holy Spirit and the Word of God to transform us into the image of Christ (Romans 8:29). Our records on faithfulness to marriage, standards of morality, support and involvement in our local churches, honoring the testimony of Scripture, and other critical areas of life are too often similar to those of the world. We who profess to believe in Christ often make no more difference in the world than those who profess no such belief.
So when it comes to answering the question, “What do we do?” the first thing we do is let judgment “begin at the house of God” (1 Peter 4:17). We must remove the beams from our own eyes before we point out the speck in the world’s eye (Matthew 7:3–5). Christ declared us as Christians, not the world, to be salt and light (Matthew 5:13–16). In prerefrigeration days, if a slab of salt-cured pork went bad, nobody blamed the pork. They blamed the quality, amount, or application of the salt! And the Church of Jesus Christ is the salt of the earth.
Therefore, in the final chapter of the book I have addressed the “What now?” question by focusing on Christians instead of the world. In Romans 12:1 the apostle Paul uses two words that represent essentially opposite conditions: conformed and transformed. We live our lives on a mountain peak, always standing at a tipping point. If we allow the world to conform us to its image, we slide into the world’s valley. But if we allow ourselves to be transformed into the image of Christ, we live in the opposite valley. Because we stand balanced at that tipping point, it is critical for two reasons that we address the issues I raise in this book from a Christian perspective:
First, we are to be a means of preservation. Even if we live the best and brightest life possible for Christ, the world may continue to decline. But we do not have to be pulled down into the valley with it. Only by renewing our minds with God’s truth can we defend ourselves against the conforming power that the world constantly exerts against us. If you or I were the last Christian on earth, God would still expect us to live a life that is pleasing to Him, not yielding to the world, the flesh, and the devil even though they are all around us.
Second, we are to be a source of inspiration. We can make a difference in this world! Salt and light radically impact everything they touch. Every time the world comes in contact with a Christian, a transference of hope, love, and relevancy should occur. But we will not change the world by living like the world. Jesus did not change the world in His day by embracing the values of the culture around Him. People were attracted to Christ because He was different. In Him they saw something that neither the Romans nor the established Jewish religion had to offer. And if we are being transformed by that same Christ, the One who lives in us (Galatians 2:20), people will be attracted to Him through our manifestation of His righteousness, His purpose, His love, and His unchanging ways.
If we will allow our minds to be renewed continually by the Word of God, we will spot immediately when we, or the world, have gone off course and need correction. We will not drift slowly, carried along by the winds of change. Rather, we will implement corrections in our course countless times each day—for preservation and inspiration.
I recently read that the world has changed more in the last two or three decades than in the previous twenty or thirty centuries. And unless some cataclysmic event throws the entire world into a decades-long black hole, change is going to occur only faster. Therefore, the potential is great for Christians to be overcome by the world and to lose their voice in the world. But neither has to be true.
To prevent these failures we must learn from history by measuring the past against the present. Then we must commit to a different future by measuring our power to be transformed by Christ against the pressure to be conformed to the world. I pray this book will help with both sets of measurements: that we may stand firmly and faithfully until we see our Lord face-to-face.