The Great Reversal

Turning morality upside down and inside out:

Great is the gap between how God intended us to be, and how fallen man actually is. His good intentions for mankind have been completely turned around, and we have turned virtue into vice and vice into virtue. Our natural tendency is to love what he hates, and hate what he loves.

Such is the tragic state of man who has turned his back on God. The Bible of course gives us the big picture narrative of how this happened, how damnable it is, and how it can be turned around. But here I want to mention just two standout texts on this.

The first is Micah 3:1-2:

Listen, you leaders of Jacob,
    you rulers of Israel.
Should you not embrace justice,
    you who hate good and love evil;

The second is Isaiah 5:20:

Woe to those who call evil good
    and good evil,
who put darkness for light
    and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
    and sweet for bitter.

Both perfectly describe the moral and spiritual inversion that the Old Testament prophets had to keep warning about. And the really amazing thing about these two passages is that the prophets are saying these things about God’s own people!

We could expect that Joe Pagan would be under such strong condemnation, but sadly ancient Israel went off the rails far too often as well, earning strong rebukes from the prophets and harsh judgment from Yahweh. So if even God’s covenant people can get things so very wrong, how much more everyone else?

The world today is certainly described so very accurately by these verses – both the church and the world. The latter is easy enough to see, with the cult of death reigning supreme, even in the West. Let me simply discuss my nation of birth: America.

Consider these numbers for example: The three greatest killers of all time are as follows:
-2.5 billion babies killed by abortion since 1980
-360 million people killed by Islam since 622
-100 million people killed by Communism since 1917

The Democratic party now seems to support all three of these things. It has gotten so bad that I no longer use tame adjectives when discussing the Dems, be it ‘radical Dems’ or ‘far left Dems’ etc. I now call them what they really are: the ‘demonic Dems’. With a few exceptions, the Dems today are the party of death, of the satanic, and of hatred. Jesus said that our enemy comes to steal, kill and destroy (John 10:10).

The Dems today seem to fully support:
-murderous Islam
-murderous Marxism
-murderous abortion
-even murderous infanticide.
It has become a demonised party.

Of course saying this does not mean that I believe the Republicans are pure, pristine and perfect. But compared to the Dems, they in so many ways inhabit an entirely different ideological, moral and spiritual universe. And it is not just in the world where we see a moral reversal of fortune. It has impacted the churches as well.

This site has plenty of articles calling out apostate Christians and churches that have sold out to the surrounding culture. How many “Christian” leaders now fully support abortion on demand, run with radical sexual agendas, embrace socialism, or promote Islam as just another path to God?

A bit of commentary on these two Old Testament texts nicely gives us a look at our own culture today. Richard Phillips says this about the Micah passage:

Micah’s language is colorful: these rulers found the good to be repulsive and disgusting, while their wicked hearts delighted in upholding evil. Given the accusations of chapter 2, much of this probably had to do with collaborating and profiting with those who oppressed and despoiled the common people for the sake of gorging on riches and land.

 

We are plagued today by a similar calamity of ruling authorities who delight in evil and hate the good. Men and women seated as judges over our courts, entrusted with determining our laws have shown themselves to delight in overthrowing every standard of justice and decency. They preserve the “right” of mothers to have their unborn children killed for the sake of the lifestyle of freedom. Under the authority of our courts, Bibles are ripped from the hands of boys and girls in public schools. Standards of sexual decency and family order upheld since the dawn of civilization are overturned. All the while, the greatest delight is taken in money raised through the gambling addictions fostered by our state lotteries, tolerance is shown for the degradation of women by pornography, and many in power exalt in the opulent lifestyles financed by those who purchased their influence.

 

Through Micah, God called the heads and rulers of Judah to account, and he will hold our leaders to account as well. The condemnation on our wicked rulers, however, will be shared by those whose votes placed them in power.

Commenting on the passage from Isaiah, Paul Wegner says this:

The fourth woe is addressed to those who in effect were rewriting God’s moral code: to those who call evil good / and good evil. The three polar-opposite word pairs – evil/good; darkness/light; bitter/sweet – convey how far the people had turned from God’s standards. Not content merely to remain wicked, they seek to justify themselves by convincing others to follow in their wickedness, stating that God’s commands are evil, while the sin they want to do is good. Redefining sin to make it more palatable is still with us today.

And in his commentary, John Oswalt makes these remarks about how the Christian church is suffering a crisis of worldview: “We have lost the idea that there is a God outside of myself to whom I owe obedience.” He continues:

The challenge to the church is that this kind of [secular] thinking is creeping in among us as well. Studies show that Christian teenagers are almost as likely to cheat as are non-Christians. So also more than half of them think that there are no absolute moral standards. Divorces among evangelicals now exceed the national norm. What has happened? We are slowly losing our grip on the idea that there is a Creator whose character is absolutely consistent and who has created humans in his image. We are losing the idea that this Creator has built into his universe certain spiritual principles that are as unchangeable as any of the natural principles.

 

How has this happened? We are losing the idea of the authority of the Bible…

Oswalt then says this:

In the end, unless the authority for moral behavior lies beyond ourselves, wrong will rapidly become right, and right will become wrong, as we see happening apace in our society. So insistence that homosexual behavior is wrong becomes an act of hatred or fear. The “nuclear family” is said to be one of the main sources of paranoia and oppression. Self-sacrifice is stupid, and marital faithfulness is banal, if not hypocritical.

 

Thus, it is incumbent on the church to reaffirm and strengthen our commitment to the authority of God’s revelation. If we compromise on this issue, we will have lost our reason to exist. The salt will have lost its saltiness indeed (Matt. 5:13), and we will deserve the logical conclusion Jesus declared: being thrown out.

Yes correct. If God was willing to judge not just pagan nations in times gone by, but his own people as well, then we better sit up and take notice. He will judge the nations of today, and he will deal with his people if they simply become a pale imitation of the world.

Remember, “judgment must begin at the house of God” (1 Peter 4:17).

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