Has America embraced a culture of death? Step by step we are abandoning the moral standards that have under-girded our nation. When decadent standards are elevated to the status of equality with godly standards, the complete desecration of a nation cannot be far behind. The ultimate aim of a minority in our country is the abandonment of traditional Judeo-Christian-based culture.
Meanwhile, the majority sit back, oblivious to what is happening under our noses, and are well-deserving the title “silent majority.” I believe it is true for a nation, even as it is true for individuals: “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). One obvious evidence of the lateness of the hour is the increasing efforts to portray homosexuality as equally normal and acceptable as the marital union of a man and woman, being given by liberal judges equal status with God-ordained marriage. The youngest of school children are even being targeted with the message that there is no difference. Churches are even accepting those who practice homosexuality as ministers.
Going beyond merely being accepted in a diverse society, the obvious goal of radicals in the LBGT movement is to increase their numbers while silencing any contrary voices. But those who do so have abandoned the authority of the Bible, in which God warned: “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…”. (Rom. 4:26-27). To legitimatize such is to trample into the dust that which is sacred. Those ensnared by this perverse lifestyle are not to be hated, but drawn to Christ who alone can provide deliverance from sin’s yoke of bondage, as with all who, in any manner, rebel against the Law of God. God’s Law (His word) is the “Law of Liberty” (James 1:25 & 2:12), liberating us to “walk in the Spirit” rather than in the “lust of the flesh” (Romans 8, in its entirety, but especially vs. 1, 4 and 12, and Galatians 5:23-24).
The culture of death is also evident in the promotion of abortion—the taking of the lives of innocent children while in their mothers’ wombs, and now even after a botched abortion, when children are left to die without a mother’s love. About 60 million unborn children have been killed in the U.S. since the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in February of 1973. Abortion is the leading cause of death in the United States. Has our national conscience died? Infanticide, not only of children yet in the womb, but also of children surviving abortion, is a reality—the purposeful killing of a human child, one made “in the image of God”. Recently the “Reproductive Health Act” was signed into law by New York’s Governor Cuomo, a law allowing the poisoning and crushing of a fully formed baby in a full-term pregnancy, and giving the choice of life or death to the parent(s) of surviving children. The governor celebrated the event by ordering that the World Trade Center (“Freedom Tower”) and other landmarks to be lit at night in pink, declaring that this achievement would “shine a light forward for the rest of the nation to follow.”
A movement that began with the popular motto to “make abortion safe, legal and rare” has sunk to even lower, satanically inspired depths. May God have mercy upon a nation that has lost its way and embraced a culture of death!
Ronald Bartanen is the preacher at the Arthur (IL) Church of Christ