Drifting From God
Ask people in their twenties or thirties what freedom means, and you would likely hear, “It’s the freedom to be me! Give me a job where I can use my skills and make money. Give me friends and family who support what I want to do.” Young adults want to express themselves, preferably alongside like-minded people. Many are deeply suspicious of restraints on their freedom to express who they are and what they want to do.
American culture is upside down from where it was just a generation ago. In Slouching Toward Gomorrah Robert H Bork argued that the fierce rebellion of the 60s followed an unprecedented time of peace and prosperity during the late 40s and 50s.[i] Americans reaped the benefits of the hard work and sacrifice of those who survived the depression, fought and won WWII, and rebuilt America. Each did their part with little complaining. As a child I saw people work hard in rural Wisconsin in the 1940s. Here is a one example.
Doing Laundry
My mother, who had four children, washed dirty clothes and bedding in a steel tub filled with warm soapy water. She scrubbed the clothes on the washboard inside the tub, emptied the dirty water into the drain on the floor, and filled the tub with cool rinse water from the water hose attached to the sink faucet. Next she fed each piece of clothing through the wringer by turning the handle with one hand and guiding the clothes through the wringer with the other. Then she carried the basket full of wrung out clothes outside to the clothesline where she hung them with clothespins. Sheets, shirts, shorts, dresses, long pants, and underwear flapped in the wind. That afternoon, my mother took them down, folded each one, and put them in the basket. She separated clothes that she would iron the next day.
In the winter, my mother hung her laundry in our basement. She pounded nails in the cement walls, wound the rope around the nail heads and pulled the rope taunt across the basement to the nail on the other side until she created six clothes lines. If all went as planned, my mother spent two days each week doing laundry. She also canned fruit and vegetables because the ice box was not that reliable, nor was the man who delivered the block of ice. Every Sunday my family attended our Presbyterian church. Every meal we thanked God for his provisions.
Imagine how my mother’s life improved when she got a washer and dryer. Imagine the transformation across American with the availability of refrigerators, garbage disposals, electric stoves, power lawn mowers, televisions, and reliable, warm cars. American lives had dramatically improved before the turbulent sixties. That said, America had to confront and correct serious injustice embedded in our culture. But the turbulence of the 1960s scared and shocked Americans as revolutionaries ridiculed all authority and opposed military and commercial successes that had vastly improved our lives.
In November 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F. Kennedy. August 1965, while driving the Los Angeles freeway, I heard gunfire and saw wafts of smoke rise in the blue sky as race riots burned Watts. April 1968, Martin Luther King collapsed on a balcony from an assassin’s bullet. The following June on television I watched an assassin kill Robert F. Kennedy.
Bork’s point is that rebellion and violence of the 1960s occurred because America prospered and was at peace. I’m reminded that first couple in the Garden carelessly walked away from God when they had everything.
The Garden
God had created Adam and Eve with a will and the ability to think, create, feel, act, explore, relate, and work. They weren’t robots. The Garden flourished under their care. They lived with abundance, empowerment, and freedom. They represented God in his creation—his goodness, justice, holiness, and majesty. Adam and Eve lived in peace and prosperity as they walked in the Garden that fateful day.
But genuine liberty always has conditions. God had said, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die” (Ge 2:16–17). God’s command should have been so embedded in their minds that when tempted, a warning sign, written in indelible black ink flashed in their minds, “Don’t do it!” But they had no fear of God. They grossly overestimated their ability to live life on their own terms, just as we do today.
Satan masqueraded as a serpent and asked, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” (3:1, see Rev 12:9).
Eve waffled, answered, and ate. Adam ate. Both should have immediately turned to God. Why didn’t they? Why don’t we? To their shame and peril, they failed to comprehend that disobedience led to captivity, not freedom. In fact, genuine freedom occurs as people draw near to God and listen to what he has to say–as they love and obey him.
In times of peace and prosperity, Christians are prone to drift from God like the man in a boat who drops his oars and allows the current and undertow to carry him into deep waters, even over rapids and waterfalls.
Liberalism
Twentieth Century Liberal German theologian Rudolf Bultmann set the stage for Germany’s severe drift from God. He argued that spiritual, mythical elements such as the Holy Spirit, miracles, angels, and demons should be removed from the Bible to make Christianity relatable for modern Germans. The people were better off relying on medicine, psychology, the hard sciences, and philosophy. The Bible was reduced to a resource for ethics and morality.
Bultmann and others jettisoned God the Holy Spirit, Satan, and angels and demons—all things supernatural and spiritual. [2] Evil filled the void. Having rejected God’s Word and his spiritual presence in Christians, the German church collapsed under the weight of Nazism.
Drifting from God and his Word
Psychological and social science theories so dominate American culture today that it’s difficult to have serious discussions about what the Bible says about God the Holy Spirit, angels, demons, sin, salvation, hell, and the war for our souls. Such things seem outdated to modern sensibilities. They prefer to examine and come to terms with childhood relationships and traumatic experiences to heal themselves. Most would be hard pressed to explain “By his wounds we are healed” (Isa 53:5). Most could not explain the nature of sin or what demons can and cannot do given the gospel of Jesus Christ. But they are relevant!
I watched the White House Correspondence dinner where a tuxedo-clad mentalist entertained the audience that included the President. The mentalist, or more accurately the medium, asked a question of the group and wrote down the private thoughts of certain people in the room. Common sense tells us no human being can exactly know what a stranger is thinking. But the Bible warns that demons do inspire mediums to impart such knowledge (Dt 18:10ff). Neither God nor one of his angels would ever inspire a practice he condemned. Satan would. The mentalist was 100% accurate. Did anyone suspect that demons inspired and enabled the man to read minds? Did Christians in the room discern that evil masqueraded as light?
Previous generations knew about such practices and immediately said, “Don’t do it!” Today people are apt to rely on their personal experiences to determine good from evil, right from wrong, and they adamantly defend their right to do so.
Each generation must learn about the Bible and who God is and who we are in relationship to him. James warned us.
Don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? . . .
“God opposes the proud
but shows favor to the humble.”
Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you (4:6-8).
[1] Robert H Bork, Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: Harper Collins, 2003) 21–31.
[2] In the early 1940s, Bultmann (1884–1976) wrote New Testament and Mythology that is available online.
