We Fall So We May Rise Again Confucius
Kerby Anderson considers factors which may pb to the pass up of this nation'south position as the simply world super-power. He points out the human relationship between moral and spiritual turn down and the reject of society in general. We demand to return to godly principles if we are to avoid a descent into irrelevance and depravity.
This article is also available in Spanish.
Doomsayers for many years have been predicting the refuse and fall of this state. And while many of these brusque-term predictions have proved inaccurate, there is some truth to the prevailing belief that this nation will fall like every great nation before information technology. Apart from revival and reformation, this nation is destined to pass up.
The problem with many of these doomsayers is that while their prognosis is correct, their diagnosis is incorrect. Yes, the futurity is bleak. But our problem is not ultimately political, economical, or social, as these doomsayers would have us believe. The decline of this nation (simply as the decline of every other nation) is due to spiritual factors. The political, economic, and social problems nosotros run into are the symptoms of the spiritual deterioration of a nation.
Just as there are spiritual principles that influence the life of an individual, so there are political-spiritual principles that govern the life of a nation. And though we may experience that these are obscure and difficult to discern, in reality they are visible to anyone willing to look at the tape of history.
Our problem is that we don't really larn from history. George Santayana said that "those who forget the by are condemned to repeat it." The philosopher Hegel said, "What experience and history teach u.s. is this: that people and government never have learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from information technology." Or as Winston Churchill said, "The one thing we have learned from history is that nosotros don't acquire from history."
The refrains that are oftentimes heard are: "It tin't happen here," or "Our country is different." But the reality is that nations are born and die just like individuals. Their longevity may exceed the boilerplate person's lifespan. Simply the reality is that nations also dice.
History has shown that the average age of the great civilizations is around two hundred years. Countries similar United kingdom exceed the average while other countries similar the United States are just now reaching the average age.
Each of the nifty civilizations in the world passed through a series of stages from their nascence to their decline to their death. Historians take listed these in ten stages.
The first stage moves from bondage to spiritual faith. The second from spiritual faith to great courage. The 3rd stage moves from great courage to liberty. The fourth stage moves from liberty to abundance. The fifth stage moves from abundance to selfishness. The sixth stage moves from selfishness to self-approbation. The seventh stage moves from complacency to apathy. The eighth stage moves from apathy to moral disuse. The ninth stage moves from moral decay to dependence. And the 10th and last stage moves from dependence to bondage.
These are the ten stages through which the great civilizations have gone. Observe the progression from bondage to liberty back to bondage. The starting time generation throws off the shackles of bondage but to accept a later generation through apathy and indifference allow itself to once over again exist enslaved.
This is the direction this and every other country is headed. The book of Judges shows that the nation of Israel passed through these aforementioned stages. And this country will do the same unless revival and reformation suspension out and opposite the inexorable turn down of this nation.
The Cycle of Nations
In his book The Finish of Christendom, Malcolm Muggeridge makes this powerful observation. He says:
I conclude that civilizations, like every other human creation, wax and wane. By the nature of the case at that place can never be a lasting civilization anymore than at that place can be a lasting spring or lasting happiness in an individual life or a lasting stability in a club. It's in the nature of homo and of all that he constructs to perish, and it must ever be so. The world is full of the debris of past civilizations and others are known to accept existed which have not left whatever debris behind them only accept just disappeared.
He goes on to say that
…whatever their ideology may be, from the Garden of Eden onwards such dreams of lasting felicity have cropped up and no dubiety always volition. But the realization is incommunicable for the uncomplicated reason that a fallen creature like human though capable of conceiving perfection and aspiring after it, is in himself and in his works forever imperfect. Thus he is fated to be in the no human being's land between the perfection he can conceive and the imperfection that characterizes his ain nature and everything he does.
Nations rise and nations autumn. Every nation has followed this progression from bondage to bondage. The nations of this century will be no different. Just allow us not accept the Marxist notion that these are fixed and intractable laws of history. Christians can signal to unusual times when revival has redirected the inexorable pass up of a civilisation. In the Old Testament, Jonah saw revival postpone God's judgment of Nineveh. In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther and John Calvin saw a Protestant Reformation transform Europe. And fifty-fifty in the history of the United States the First and 2nd Bully Awakenings changed individuals and our social club.
But apart from God's intervention, nations will decline and eventually pass off the scene. Much of the Onetime Testament records the history of the nation of Israel. It passed through these same stages and then will every country in the world.
Every bit Christians we must recognize that nations will rise and fall but as individuals will exist born and die. Our civilisation volition not last indefinitely, just will eventually pass off the scene. Only God's Word endures forever. Nosotros should not put our trust in the things of this world for they are destined for destruction. Instead, we should put our faith in God and His word.
The Decline of the Family
Nations most often fall from within, and this fall is normally due to a decline in the moral and spiritual values in the family. Every bit families go, so goes a nation.
This has been the main premise of thinkers from British historian J. D. Unwin to Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin who have studied civilizations that have collapsed. In his volume Our Trip the light fantastic Has Turned to Decease, Carl Wilson identifies the common design of family unit turn down in ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. Notice how these vii stages parallel what is happening in our nation today. In the first stage, men ceased to lead their families in worship. Spiritual and moral development became secondary. Their view of God became naturalistic, mathematical, and mechanical.
In the 2nd stage, men selfishly neglected care of their wives and children to pursue material wealth, political and military power, and cultural evolution. Material values began to dominate thought, and the human being began to exalt his own role as an private. The 3rd stage involved a modify in men's sexual values. Men who were preoccupied with business or war either neglected their wives sexually or became involved with lower-class women or with homosexuality. Ultimately, a double standard of morality developed. The fourth stage affected women. The role of women at abode and with children lost value and condition. Women were neglected and their roles devalued. Soon they revolted to gain access to material wealth and likewise freedom for sex outside marriage. Women also began to minimize having sex relations to conceive children, and the emphasis became sex activity for pleasure. Marriage laws were changed to make divorce easy.
In the fifth stage, husbands and wives competed against each other for money, home leadership, and the amore of their children. This resulted in hostility and frustration and possible homosexuality in the children. Many marriages concluded in separation and divorce.
Many children were unwanted, aborted, abased, molested, and undisciplined. The more than undisciplined children became, the more than social force per unit area there was not to accept children. The breakdown of the habitation produced anarchy.
In the sixth stage, selfish individualism grew and carried over into club, fragmenting information technology into smaller and smaller group loyalties. The nation was thus weakened by internal conflict. The decrease in the birthrate produced an older population that had less ability to defend itself and less will to do so, making the nation more vulnerable to its enemies.
Finally, unbelief in God became more consummate, parental authorisation diminished, and upstanding and moral principles disappeared, affecting the economy and government. Thus, by internal weakness and fragmentation the societies came autonomously. In that location was no way to salve them except by a dictator who arose from within or by barbarians who invaded from without.
Although this is an ancient pattern of decline plant in Greece and Rome, it is relevant today. Families are the foundation of a nation. When the family crumbles, the nation falls because nations are built upon family units. They are the truthful driving social force. A nation volition non be strong unless the family is strong. That was true in the ancient world and it is true today.
Social commentator Michael Novak, writing on the importance of the family, said:
One unforgettable law has been learned through all the disasters and injustices of the last 1000 years: If things go well with the family, life is worth living; when the family unit falters, life falls apart.
The Decline of Values
There are many factors in the decline of a nation. Certainly a major 1 is the breakdown of the family. But another potent but less perceptible force is the power of ideas.
False ideas are bringing about the decline of western culture. Carl F. H. Henry, in his volume Twilight of a Groovy Civilization, says:
There is a new barbarism. This barbarism has embraced a new pagan mentality . . . not simply rejecting the legacy of the West, but embracing a new pagan mentality where there is no stock-still truth.
Today we live in a world where biblical absolutes are ignored, and unless we return to these biblical truths, our nation will continue to decline.
To understand how we accept arrived at this appalling situation, we demand to become back a century and await at the influence of 5 intellectual leaders who even so profoundly affect the modernistic world. The starting time person is Charles Darwin (1809-1882). In 1859 he published The Origin of Species and later published The Descent of Human being. His writings blurred the distinction betwixt humans and animals since he taught that we are but role of an evolutionary progression from lower forms of life. Darwinism, as it came to be called, not merely affected the field of biology, only became the foundation for the fields of anthropology, sociology, and psychology.
The second person is Karl Marx (1818-1883). He and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto effectually 1850, and Marx devoted his life to writing about the demise of capitalism and coming of communism. He understood the importance of ideas. Marx once wrote: "Give me 20-six lead soldiers and I volition conquer the globe." (And so did Benjamin Franklin.) The xx-six lead soldiers are the keys on a typewriter. The pervasive influence of communism in the world today is testimony to the truthfulness of his statement.
The third person is Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918). Although he may not be besides known as the other two men mentioned, his influence was but as profound. He was a German Bible scholar whose theory on the dating of the Pentateuch completely transformed Sometime Testament studies.
Wellhausen argued that the early on books of the Bible were not put together past Moses but were gathered together many centuries later past several dissimilar men called redactors who wove various strands together. He and his disciples established an anti-supernatural approach to the scriptures which is influential in most denominational seminaries today.
The fourth person is Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). He merely took the logical implications of what Darwin was doing in biology and applied them to what today is known equally psychology and psychiatry. Freud argued that humans are basically autonomous and therefore practice non demand to know God. Instead, nosotros need to know and understand ourselves since our problems stalk from those secret things that take evolved in our lives from our past.
A fifth person is John Dewey (1859-1952). He is the founder of modern educational activity and published his first piece of work, The Schoolhouse and Society, in 1899. John Dewey was also one of the co-signers of the Humanist Manifesto in 1933.
Dewey, like Darwin and Freud, believed that humans are autonomous. They don't need to accept an authority to a higher place them but tin evolve their our own system of teaching. Thus the very foundation of modern education is anti-supernatural.
Ideas take consequences, and simulated ideas can bring down a nation. The theories of these five men are having devastating consequences in our nation and world. Unless we return to biblical absolutes, our nation will continue its pass up.
Spiritual Decline
The turn down and autumn of nations is commonly due to internal factors rather than external threats. Even though some may have fallen to barbarians, their demise ultimately came considering of moral and spiritual weakness which manifested itself every bit military weakness. Historians have listed the stages in the refuse of a nation. These should not be too surprising to any student of the Quondam Attestation. The stages of decline parallel the stages through which the nation of Israel passed.
But neither should they surprise a student of the New Testament. In the opening affiliate of the Campaigner Paul's letter of the alphabet to the church building in Rome, he traces a similar progression. In fact, Romans one shows the refuse of a civilisation from a societal perspective. Looking at the Hellenistic world of his time, he reflects on the progression of sin in a nation.
The get-go stage is when people plow from God to idolatry. Although God has revealed Himself in nature to all men so that they are without excuse, they even so worship the cosmos instead of the Creator. This is idolatry. In the by, this took the grade of bodily idol worship. In our day, information technology takes the form of the worship of money or the worship of self. In either case, it is idolatry. A further example of this is a general lack of thankfulness. Although they have been prospered by God, they are ungrateful. And when they are no longer looking to God for wisdom and guidance, they become vain and futile and empty in their imaginations. They no longer honor God, so their foolish hearts become darkened. In professing to be wise, they have become fools.
The 2nd stage is when men and women substitution their natural use of sexual practice for unnatural uses. Here the Apostle Paul says those four sobering words, "God gave them over." In a society where animalism- driven sensuality and sexual perversion boss, God gives them over to their degrading passions and unnatural desires. The 3rd stage is anarchy. Once a society has rejected God'southward revelation, it is on its own. Moral and social anarchy is the natural effect. At this point God has given the sinners over to a depraved listen and and so they practise things which are not proper. This results in a society which is without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, and unmerciful.
The terminal stage is judgment. God's judgment rightly falls upon those who practice idolatry and immorality. Certainly an eternal judgment awaits those who are guilty, but a social judgment occurs when God gives a nation over to its sinful practices.
Notice that this progression is not unique to the Hellenistic world the Apostle Paul was living in. The progression from idolatry to sexual perversion to chaos to judgment is found throughout history.
In the times of Noah and Lot, there was the idolatry of greed, there was sexual perversion and promiscuity, in that location was anarchy and violence, and finally there was judgment. Throughout the history of the nation of Israel in that location was idolatry, sexual perversion, chaos (in which each person did what was right in his own eyes), and finally judgment.
This progression happened throughout the Bible and to Greece, to Persia, to Babylon, and to Rome. And if it happened to these nations, and so it tin happen today.Unless we return to God's principles, turn down and devastation are inevitable.
©1991 Probe Ministries.
Kerby Anderson
Kerby Anderson is president of Probe Ministries International. He holds masters degrees from Yale Academy (science) and from Georgetown University (regime). He is the author of several books, including Christian Ideals in Apparently Language, Genetic Engineering, Origin Science, Signs of Warning, Signs of Hope and Making the Most of Your Money in Tough Times. His new serial with Harvest House Publishers includes: A Biblical Bespeak of View on Islam, A Biblical Point of View on Homosexuality, A Biblical Point of View on Intelligent Design and A Biblical Point of View on Spiritual Warfare. He is the host of "Bespeak of View" (USA Radio Network) heard on 360 radio outlets nationwide besides equally on the Cyberspace (www.pointofview.net) and shortwave. He is also a regular guest on "Prime Time America" (Moody Broadcasting Network) and "Fire Away" (American Family unit Radio). He produces a daily syndicated radio commentary and writes editorials that have appeared in papers such equally the Dallas Morning News, the Miami Herald, the San Jose Mercury, and the Houston Post.
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