And there arose another generation after them which knew not the Lord
nor yet the works which He bad done for Israel. And the children of
Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord and served Baalim. And they
forsook the Lord God of their fathers. Judges 2:10-12.
THESE words tell us of two successive generations of
the same people, living in the same country, of the same heredity and
the same environment, but two generations that spiritually were as
divergent as any two opposing extremes can be. The one was the first
generation of Israelites to occupy the Promised Land, the multitudes
that had marched under Joshua through the blistering heat and the
sandstorms of the desert and had been the witnesses of Jehovah’s
omnipotence; the fathers and mothers who, prompted by a grateful
recognition of God’s merciful providence, served Him all their days in
love and gratitude. And the other generation was made up of their own
sons and daughters, who had begun to enjoy the easy and undeserved
prosperity of the land that flowed with milk and honey, the smugly
self-satisfied generation, which found the desert and these Exodus
stories distasteful; the second generation, “which knew not the Lord
nor yet the works which He had done for Israel,” which forsook the God
of their fathers and served Baalim, the idols of production and
fertility, in the sensuous and degrading worship of their degenerate
neighbors. And the result? Our text tells us, “They did evil in the
sight of the Lord”; they inaugurated a period of debauchery, of which
the moral lapses in the following chapters of the Book of Judges offer
tragic record.
I have never been able to read the account of this
stupendous change in two successive generations without drawing almost
an unconscious parallel with a notable change that has come over the
American people. You may search the records of the century and a half
in which our God-blessed nation has enjoyed its independence; you may
go back another century and a half to the Colonial days, when the
Pilgrim Fathers first set foot on the forbidding shores of New England;
and never in the three hundred years of our national existence will you
find two generations that even begin to differ as those two generations
do that have formed history from the days after the close of the Civil
War down to the present moment. Never has there been a change as
startling and deplorable as the contrast that has made this age the
generation that has forgotten God.
Think of the remarkable parallel and repetition of
history. As those conquering Israelite armies marched into the
Promised Land, so the last three decades of the past century, the years
in which the fathers and mothers of many who are listening in tonight
grew up in these United States, brought more than 12,000,000 immigrants
from Europe to the Promised Land of magic America. During the same
period practically two-thirds of the United States, the country west of
the Mississippi River, began its real and lasting growth, being settled
by the sturdy pioneers who went out from the seaboard and the Central
States in their creaking covered wagons to stake their claims within
the confines of twelve territories that are now flourishing States of
the Union.
And because they believed that God had led them
across the Atlantic or across the plains and the Rockies as He had led
Joshua’s men through the trackless wilderness, they served God. They
organized most of our Christian congregations; they built the majority
of our church edifices. They gave the impetus to much of the
mission-work at home and abroad. They established many of our Christian
schools, as did the founders of my Church, men with university
distinctions, who, before they had lived a year in the hinterland of
Missouri, cut down the trees that were to build the walls of a
backwoods divinity school. That generation had its faults, frailties,
that everlastingly mark the moral feebleness of humanity, and we do not
make the mistake of showing reverence to the past simply because it is
so far distant that its shortcomings may be glossed over and minimized.
But with all necessary concessions one definite and unalterable fact
stands out sharply and distinctly — the generation of our fathers and
mothers knew God; it recognized His providential deliverance, the
certainty of His judgment, and the boundlessness of His grace.
And then there arose this generation, this cynical,
sophisticated, self-satisfied generation, which so largely knows not
the God of its fathers and prides itself in this ignorance, which so
frequently has set up the modern counterpart of the ancient Baalim, the
idols of mass production, grinning Mammon, the false gods of material,
selfish, sensual worship, with the tragic consequences that we are
living in the greatest away-from-God movement that the country has ever
known.
See how all this has been demonstrated, for example,
in the delusive and destructive attitude which men have taken toward
the foundation of our faith, the Bible, the revelation of God to man,
which is “able to make us wise unto salvation,” coming to every one of
us with the Savior’s own benediction, “Blessed are they that hear the
Word of God and keep it.” We know, of course, that throughout the
centuries there has always been opposition to the Word of Truth; yet
such opposition came almost entirely from men who were without the
Church and who laid no claim to the title “Christian.” In the age of
Roman imperialism it was a brutal heathen, Diocletian, who set himself
the futile task of destroying the Bible. In the eighteenth century it
was professed infidels of the type of Voltaire and the French
Revolutionists. In the past generation it was the like-minded scoffers,
such as Ingersoll, together with a growing number of outspoken Bible
critics in European universities. But in this generation it is the
liberal churchmen and the highly paid instructors at poorly attended
theological seminaries who are fighting in the very front ranks of the
anti-Biblical forces.
While I am grateful for the privilege of speaking to
you as a representative of that Church which still bows unconditionally
before the authority of the Word of God, and while I thank God
especially for the millions in other churches who still refuse to bend
their knees before the Baal of modernistic unbelief, a survey of the
outward Christianity shows that this opposition to the Word is found
within many Christian churches and that even those denominations which
were founded on Christian and Biblical principles and which during the
past generation contended for the divine truth have frequently been
moved and controlled by unholy and destructive forces. Not long ago a
questionnaire was sent to some seven hundred representative pastors of
the various Protestant churches, and do you know that almost forty per
cent. Of these religious leaders did not hesitate to declare that in
their opinion the Bible was not the infallible truth of God? The
tragedy of modern American church-life is this, that, like the
generation after Joshua, it refuses to recognize the God of truth and
love.
But how can conditions be
different when some of the oldest and wealthiest theological seminaries
in our country, schools which in their charter are dedicated to the
advancement of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, have studiously and
completely rejected the Bible as the inspired guide of humanity, in
direct fulfillment of Peter’s prophecy condemning “the false teachers
among you” who preach “destructive heresies, denying even the Lord that
bought them and bringing upon themselves swift destruction”? What else
can we expect when you can go into churches that claim membership in
fundamentally Christian denominations, churches that were built by
believing and trusting fathers and mothers, and hear the members of
these churches complacently tolerate a rejection of everything
essential to a Christian’s confidence in the Bible and listen without
protest to a denial of Christ that could well be uttered in a Jewish
synagogue or in a Confucian temple?
And the result of all this? We
heard before that a moral breakdown followed in the wake of Israel’s
forsaking the Lord God of their fathers. And you can all see the
modern parallel in our own country. Millions of Americans are
forgetting or ignoring God in our political life, in our home-life, in
our business life, and in every walk of life. And this forgetfulness
helps to account for the supertragedy in our American life that in this
new era of radio and television, of 102-story sky-scrapers and
around-the-world fliers, voyages into the stratosphere and submarine
cruises to the poles, we have brought upon ourselves the unenviable
distinction of having broken more records in our departure from
morality than any age in this country before us. With more comforts,
more conveniences, more attractions, more opportunities, more
blessings of all kinds than in any former generation or in any other
country of the world, our overcrowded jails, our mounting crime waves,
our unmistakable growth of unhappiness and cynicism, emphasize a
depressing contrast and should shock us into the realization that,
while our twentieth-century generation may say more and know more about
everything than any of its predecessors, it actually says less and
knows less about the verities of the soul and the hope of its salvation
than any previous age in American history.
Now, don’t blame the war for this! Don’t blame
Prohibition! Don’t blame the industrial upheaval and the depression!
Beyond whatever contributions they may or may not have made to our
national delinquency and to this countrywide breakdown of morals is the
direct and inevitable connection between irreligion and immorality.
Tear the fear of God out of the hearts of any people, remove the sense
of sin and individual responsibility which the Bible so repeatedly
stresses; let them trace their own origin and descent, not as the Bible
does to the creative hand of God, but directly or indirectly to the
blubbering baboon; let them set aside the divine revelation with the
sacred obligations which it lays upon men, and you have the real and
basic cause for the terrifying conditions that surround us. For the
Word of God testifies, “The nation that will not serve Thee, O God,
shall perish,” — and that means perish morally, perish spiritually,
perish politically, as the voice of history solemnly warns.
But here as in every aspect of its work the true
Church’s duty is thoroughly constructive and happily remedial. In the
whirl of worldliness and the pandemonium of grasping, clashing
selfishness with which it is surrounded it must send out in more
insistent and uncompromising terms than ever before the one message
which by the very promise of God can yet save the ungrateful of this
generation. And that hope of modern humanity, the individual hope of
every single soul that may hear these words, is not to be found in any
radical departures, in any so-called twentieth-century religions, in
any allegedly modem conception of Christianity, but simply, thank God,
in the unchangeable, unmodified, unalterable Word of which Jesus
Himself testifies, “If ye continue in My Word, then are ye My disciples
indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
Put into the pulpits of America’s churches men with
the spirit of John the Baptist, who without fear or favor, but with
unqualified allegiance to their God and Savior, will call out to this
generation of unbelief, “Repent ye”; give us pastors and teachers who
on the basis of the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments will
tell self-sufficient and self-righteous men that they are sinners,
murderers of their own souls, and driving on to an inevitable
perdition; that the best that they have, the best they can offer, the
riches of the rich, the brains of the brainy, the might of the mighty,
cannot work immunity or escape from the curse and blighting
consequences of sin; and that we must “all appear before the
judgment seat of Christ”; give us faithful messengers of God who on the
basis of divine promises will point all men, as I now direct your
vision, to the love of Christ, in whom, according to the apostolic
pledge, “we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins,
according to the riches of His grace,” — restore the Bible, and the
Church and the nation will enter into a new era of hope and promise.
There, in the return to God, not in any modern sociological, economic,
or legislative program, not in any political, industrial, or
educational reforms, lies the hope of the nation. “Seek ye Me,” God
says to apostate Israel, and He repeats to ungrateful America, “and ye
shall ‘live.”
Therein lies your hope. For tonight I want to give
you who may never have experienced the comfort of the Scriptures and
the power of the truth that they contain a solemn and divine assurance.
Conscious of the fact that these words are heard in tens of thousands
of cities and hamlets throughout the nation and beyond its confines and
that in these uncounted localities, as your deeply appreciated letters
assure us, there are unnumbered souls listening in who can be witnesses
of what I am to say, I give you this assurance on the basis of hundreds
of passages of God’s Word: There is not a single trouble of soul or
body that cannot be relieved; no wound or grief, no matter how deeply
it may cut into the quick of a quivering conscience, that cannot be
healed; no black and brutal sin or a crushing mountain of such sins
that cannot be removed; no question of your soul-life that cannot be
answered; no problem that cannot be solved completely and convincingly
by faith in “the glorious Gospel of the blessed Lord” Enthrone that
Bible with its exalted keynote and center, the divine Redeemer, in
your heart by reading it and hearing it and believing it, and if you
exclaim with the great apostle, “I am not ashamed of the Gospel of
Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that
believeth,” you will acknowledge the one power in which lies your hope
and the salvation of the present generation. Amen.