Looking for Answers in All the Wrong Places?

Our nation is afflicted by many maladies: Rampant violence, social strife, political corruption, unethical business practices, immorality at levels no one could have imagined just a couple of generations ago. Almost everyone has an opinion on how to “fix” these problems, often suggesting that more and stricter laws will do the trick. 

 

Laws are necessary, of course. We as individuals and as a society need guardrails to help us recognize what is and isn’t acceptable behavior and practice. However, we have more than enough evidence to show that laws alone have never eliminated wrongdoing. 

 

Consider the operation of motor vehicles: We have many laws against driving under the influence of chemical substances, yet people still drive intoxicated. We have laws against texting while driving, but every day we can see folks behind the wheel, heads lowered as they read or send text messages. Speed limit signs are posted everywhere, but that doesn’t impede motorists who reason those restrictions don’t apply to them.

 

As so-called experts hop on their own “bully pulpits,” offering supposed solutions to everything that’s wrong in our world, I can’t help but wonder whether we’re all searching for answers and solutions in the wrong places. It’s like going to a doctor with an illness, and the physician prescribing acetaminophen or putting a bandage on where you’re feeling pain but paying no attention to the underlying cause. Treating symptoms does little good when the disease causing the problem is ignored.

 

At no time in human history have people been perfect; we’re far from it and always will be. As Romans 3:10 declares, “There is no one righteous, not even one.” Isaiah 64:6 expresses it even more strongly: “…all our righteous acts are like filthy rags.” Imagine trying to clean a kitchen table with a dirty cloth a mechanic has been using all day to do oil changes.

 

And yet, the evil in humankind – the Bible calls it sin – seems to be escalating in horrifying ways. When I was attending public school in the 1950s and early ‘60s, the biggest problems teachers had to deal with were things like running in the hallways, chewing gum, throwing spitballs and occasional playground fights. We never feared someone coming into our school with the intent to kill. Students might have been disrespectful at times, but they didn’t threaten their teachers with bodily harm. Indecent sexual behavior and proliferation of drugs in classrooms were unheard of.

 

What changed? There’s great risk in attempting to oversimplify very complex societal issues. However, could it be that the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision that Bible reading or prayer in public schools was unconstitutional became a catalyst?

 

During my school days, every day started with reciting the Lord’s Prayer, reading a short passage from the Bible (usually the Psalms), and repeating the Pledge of Allegiance, which included the words, “one nation under God.” These did not convert every student to Christianity, but neither did they leave anyone emotionally or psychologically scarred for life. In effect, school began with a reminder of the God who deserves our attention.

 

Then came the school prayer decision, which signified more than the simple removal of “religious” practices. In effect, it was a declaration at the highest level of government that our nation did not need God, that we could do quite well without His presence and interference. Decisions have consequences.

 

Consider some of the societal shifts that have followed: the sexual revolution of the ‘60s; the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision; the breakdown of the traditional family across the USA; the aforementioned explosion of violence in many terrible forms. If we were to “connect the dots,” could there be a correlation to the conclusion that God deserves no place in the public square?

 

The New Living Translation of Proverbs 29:18 declares, “When people do not accept divine guidance, they run wild.” The King James Bible’s translation says it more emphatically: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Today, people are perishing everywhere: School shootings; gun violence every day in our inner cities; domestic violence; an epidemic of drug abuse deaths; thousands of traffic fatalities, many attributable to impaired and reckless driving.

 

This isn’t to suggest that to solve our nation’s ills we need to get “religious.” Not at all. However, a genuine, life-changing relationship with God is the ultimate solution.

 

The ancient people of Israel had laws upon laws, as we discover in reading books like Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. But those did not keep them from becoming a nation riddled with sin. The underlying issue was the evil in their hearts. God asks in the book of Jeremiah:

“What injustice did your fathers find in Me, that they went far from Me and walked after emptiness and became empty?... Your own wickedness will correct you, and your apostacies will reprove you; know therefore and see that it is evil and bitter for you to forsake the Lord your God, and the dread of Me is not in you” (Jeremiah 2:5,19).

 

In the writings of another prophet we read, “They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind” (Hosea 8:7). Six decades ago, we could say the “wisdom” of our government leaders found it necessary to “sow the wind.” Do grim headlines and one terrible news report after another serve as evidence that we’re “reaping the whirlwind”?

Things Are Different Today, But What Changed?

Once upon a time, things weren’t like they are today. In some respects, that’s very good. When I was growing up, polio hadn’t been eradicated. And the open-heart surgery I underwent more than 12 years ago probably hadn’t even been envisioned. TVs had only three channels; to select you had to manually change with a dial on the set – no remotes back then. “Late night TV” after midnight was a test pattern.

Telephones had handsets cradled on bases. Many of us shared “party lines” (which had nothing to do with festive events). The notion of phones to take with you in the car seemed like science-fiction.

Air conditioning was a luxury most people didn’t have. Front porches were popular – it was too hot to stay indoors. And people flocked to a new restaurant called “McDonald’s” to buy hamburgers, French fries and milkshakes without having to wait for five minutes. But believe it or not, dinosaurs weren’t still living.

The list could go on and on, but without question things were very different back then. As a whole, western society had made many strides. But not all have been good.

Take, for example, our schools. When I was in elementary school (we called it “grammar school”), we started each day with the Pledge of Allegiance, a brief reading of a Bible passage (usually from the Psalms), and a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Today this happens only in parochial and private schools. 

I even recall participating in a classroom discussion with our teacher about God, but don’t remember anyone suffering emotional distress. I doubt that exchange left psychological scars on anyone.

In the mid-1960s, however, our U.S. Supreme Court deemed it necessary to evict such things as Bible reading and prayer from public schools, reasoning those were violations of the so-called separation of church and state. Freedom of religion was redefined to mean “freedom from religion” by the Left-leaning judiciary.

Although it wasn’t a one-for-one exchange, the most besetting problems in classrooms of the ‘60s – running in hallways, chewing gum, and throwing harmless paper spitballs – have been replaced by violence in many forms, drug use and abuse, and often chaotic environments where students, not teachers, seem in control.

This academic anarchy has advanced to the highest levels of education, again very unlike what I experienced at a public university during the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Yes, there was campus unrest, but all-out rebellion remained decades in the future.

Gun violence in schoolhouses or college campuses were virtually unheard of in the days when mentioning God wasn’t deemed illegal or counter-cultural. Things were far from perfect, without question, but evil seemed to be held at bay.

I don’t need to recite a litany of societal woes, but the breakdown of traditional family structures and the advent of an “anything goes” perspective on life seem at the heart of these problems. Many centuries ago the Scriptures addressed such circumstances for those times as well as ours today. 

Proverbs 29:18 asserts, “Where there is no [prophetic] revelation, people cast off restraint (run wild); but blessed is the one who heeds wisdom's instruction.” I generally prefer more modern translations that express the Scriptures in contemporary language, but I’ve always liked how the King James Version states it: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

It seems that beginning with the 1960s, our nation systematically turned its back on the foundational values and principles that helped to establish the most prosperous society in the history of the world. We clung to the material prosperity and strived to expand it, but snubbed the God who enabled our country to flourish. We became like the people described twice in the Old Testament book of Judges: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6, 21:25).

God wasn’t “forced” from our schools and the public square. But when we as a people made it clear He was no longer welcomed there, He graciously withdrew. Now perhaps the Lord is asking, “So, how’s that working out for you?”

This is why the promise of 2 Chronicles 7:14 is crucial for our future, maybe more than ever: “if My people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

Are we willing to do this? We wring our hands, bemoaning the many evils and ills that afflict our homes, our communities, our nation and our world. It’s time to humble ourselves, pray, seek the Lord, and reject our rebellious, sinful ways. Maybe it’s not too late.