Chapter 7: Immorality

In The Book of Signs, Dr. David Jeremiah offers answers to questions including:

• What does the Bible tell us about the future?
• How much can we understand about biblical prophecy and its application in our lives?
• What signs and signals will precede the end of everything as we know it?
• Which of those signs and signals have already come to pass, which are we experiencing now, and which are still to come?

An epic and authoritative guide to biblical prophecy, The Book of Signs is a must-have resource for Christians seeking to navigate the uncertainties of the present and embrace God’s promises for the future with a renewed sense of hope and purpose.

God’s Messages

Dear Lord,
Today…….I am asking all my prayer warriors to say a prayer that may help others. So many people are hurting right now. Many are struggling with finances and need jobs. Some are facing foreclosure and don’t even know how they are going to make it from week to week..

Many are lonely. . Many are heartbroken. . Many are facing sickness and health is fading. . Some are dealing with difficult family members. Many have lost HOPE.. Tonight, let us put our prayers and faith together decree and declare breakthrough over our families. Financial miracles WILL take place. Jobs WILL be found. Our Bodies WILL be made whole & sickness WILL flee. Marriages and relationships WILL be restored. Family members WILL find Jesus. Heartbreaks WILL be healed. JOY WILL be restored and HOPE WILL be found. In Jesus Name. Amen!!!!!! Keep God First…….

Chapter seven, immorality.
On May 8th, 2011, Tony Bennett walked across the stage of the Jacob Javits Center to sing a couple of ballads and open the program for a famous New York City charity.
The full crowd before him was a glittering cosmos of New York’s brightest celebrities.
Bennett’s timeless voice thrilled the house and everyone marveled at the 85 year old crooner’s enduring ability to charm an audience.
But later in the evening, it was Bennett himself who was charmed as he listened to a singer.
Exactly 60 years his junior, he was swept off his feet by the Clarion voice of Lady Gaga.
Meeting her backstage, Bennett regaled her with stories of his favorite songwriter, Cole Porter and impulsively asked her to sing on his 2011 album duets.
Number two, a few years later, the two collaborated on another album, Cheek to Cheek.
And the opening song was Porters. Anything goes, it was an apt choice.
Anything goes as a bouncy toe tapping number can’t help but smile as you hum the melody.
But its words written in 1934 celebrated the moral freefall of the American 20th century.
The song boasts of how times have changed and claims the puritans are in for a shock.
The lyrics brag that profanity and nudity are in vogue and for all its toe tapping trendiness, anything goes represents the moral relativism that has infected our culture.
Leaving the West on the brink of spiritual collapse. Ironically, it is a philosophy that ruined Porter’s own life.
The famous composer grew up on an Indiana farm, his mother went to church but her young son was not impressed.
He said, I never felt religion was serious to her. It was of no importance.
She went to show off her new hats.
Porton learned to play the violin at age six and the piano.
At age eight, he wrote his first Broadway show tune in 1915 and went on to provide crooners such as Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra with dozens of hits like I’ve got you under my skin night and day.
Just one of those things don’t fence me in and I get a kick out of you.
His fans did not realize that his love songs were written for his boyfriends.
That his marriage was a sham or that his music financed an endless series of anything goes parties.
Porter lived as he sang, anything goes.
But after being injured in an equestrian accident, he never regained his health or happiness.
He became reclusive and spent his last years, depressed, diseased drinking and drugging.
1964 Porter was wheeled into a California Hospital.
For the last time, the nurse studied the patient perhaps wondering how anyone so famous could look so cheerless.
Clicking off the items on the questionnaire. The nurse came to the issue of the patient’s religion.
Put down. None replied border. The nurse said Protestant put down none.
Shortly after Porter sent someone to destroy his pornographic photographs. And with that done, he died.
He was terribly alone at the end said a friend, he really didn’t have anything or anyone.
He was close to his secretary lamented that her boss never found the strength that came from faith in God and without faith, one is like a stained glass window in the dark.
She said, how to reach his particular darkness she added is an enigma.
A similar darkness has descended on our world.
And American culture now resembles that stained glass window through which no light is shining.
We are living in a world where anything goes but nothing satisfies the expression of our moral decline.
The Bible anticipated that decadent times like our present age would come in.
Speaking of his second coming, the Lord Jesus said, but as the days of Noah were so also will the coming of the son of man be Matthew 24 37.
What were those days of no alike?
Genesis 65 tells us then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
This is a description of the society swept away by the flood.
Perhaps America has not yet sunk to the lows of Noah’s Day.
But our moral compass seems no longer to have a true north.
The needle spins crazily looking for a direction on which to settle.
Second Timothy 31 through five puts it this way.
But know this, that in the last days, perilous times will come for men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money boasters, proud blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving slanderers without self-control, brutal, despised of good traitors, headstrong haughty lovers of pleasure, rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness, but denying its power, the description of Noah’s generation and Paul’s prediction of the generation that will introduce the last days summarize the depravity of man.
Yes, even the total depravity of man.
And I know that total depravity is a controversial term and certainly one that is often misunderstood, total depravity does not mean as most people think that human beings are as depraved as they could possibly be.
This would by necessity mean that there is no good in humans at all.
But we know that this is not the case, not all human beings are drunkards, felons, adulterers or murderers.
Many are noble, generous, self, sacrificing, highly moral and loving, total depravity defines the extent, not the degree of our sinfulness.
In other words, while our depravity does not make us as bad as we could be.
It does affect us in every area of our being corrupting every part of our humanness at varying degrees.
Charles Swindall wrote, if depravity were blue, we’d be blue all over.
Cut us anywhere and we bleed blue, cut into our minds and you’ll find blue thoughts cut into our vision.
And there are blue images full of greed and lust cut into our hearts.
And there are blue emotions of hatred, revenge, and blame cut into our wills.
And you’ll find deep blue decisions and responses.
This depravity or godlessness is the root cause of America’s moral decline.
We grasp for what feels good instead of what is good in those day, every thought and intent of the heart was continuously evil.
And now we have the technology to take the most lurid fantasies of the human mind and project them onto a screen.
The child can hold in his or her hand. All this has led to the coarsening of Western culture.
We have become a profane people with fewer and fewer restraints on behavior and language and with a diminishing respect for human life.
In his book, Vanishing Grace, Philip Yancey summarized the moral freefall of our nation.
He wrote in my own lifetime, the divorce rate has doubled.
The rates of teen suicide and violent crime have both tripled.
The births out of wedlock have sex toppled with less than 5% of the world’s population.
The US has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
About the same number as Russia and China combined, we have become accustomed to homeless people, sleeping in parks and under bridges, something virtually unknown in my childhood.
The leading causes of death are self inflicted.
The side effects of tobacco, obesity, alcohol, sexually transmitted diseases, drugs and violence.
The explanation for our moral decline.
It’s time to ask the question, how did Western morality stray onto such a slippery slope?
What happened to us? I can explain it in two ways, historically and biblically, the explanation from history.
The historical explanation dates back to the 18th century enlightenment throughout the middle ages.
The Western world for all its darkness and depravity at least had an understanding of objective truth.
The existence of God was taken for granted which provided a basis for belief in absolute values of right and wrong.
The reformation of the 15 hundreds, set this truth on fire but hard on the heels of the reformation, the secular thinking of the enlightenment or the age of reason radiated from France like a force field across Europe and to the new world.
Many of the enlightenment thinkers could not totally shake off belief in the existence of God, but they dispatched him to an insignificance by promoting a religion of deism.
The teaching that the creator if he does exist is disinterested and uninvolved with the world.
They believed humans were the true moral force of the universe.
Dave Brees in his book, Seven Men who ruled the world from the grave wrote the early 19 hundreds was the first era in which Darwin and his ideas had come to full flower.
By that time, evolution was well on its way to capturing the world of academia and the thought processes of the average man.
Virtually everyone believed that history was moving up from the gross and the animalistic into the sublime and even the Angelic social Darwinism was fast persuading society that no problem was unsolvable, no difficulty unresolvable.
Given enough time all would be well, humanity had within it a potential that would not be denied.
The rising tide of humanistic secularism was sho horned into America’s educational system by John Dewey, a shy bookish educator who hailed from Vermont Dewey’s core principle was the rejection of absolute unchangeable truth.
Final truth he believed was illusionary.
Brees explained this humanism of which Dewey was a fountain head became pervasive in our American schools, especially on the graduate level.
From that point on the ruling point of view in American education was that there was no ruling point of view against this backdrop.
Moral relativism entered pop culture with a vengeance between the 19 twenties and the 19 sixties.
Setting the stage for the sexual revolution of the 19 sixties through the 19 eighties, Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon and America’s moral values turned downward.
Like the economic charts of the Great Depression.
In the meantime, secularism, the removal of theism or God consciousness from public life has become America’s de facto religion.
A secular worldview writes Robbie Zacharias is admittedly and designed the underlying impetus that presently propels Western culture.
Albert Mohler helpfully summarizes how we got where we are today in the premodern age of antiquity and the medieval period.
It was impossible not to believe there was no intellectual alternative to belief in God in the modern age.
It became possible not to believe as philosophers began to posit alternatives.
Nowadays, secularists are asserting it is impossible to believe. The alternatives to God have become dominant.
Christians have become intellectual outlaws in the secular world.
Says Mueller secularism in America has been attended by a moral revolution without precedent.
And without endgame, the story of the rise of secularism is a stunning intellectual and moral revolution.
In short, there is no telling where a society will end up when anything goes.
Or rather we do know where such a culture ends up. Sooner or later.
It circles around to the days of Noah.
The explanation from the Bible, if you really want to understand what is happening to western morality today, trace the theological chain from the rejection of the creator to total moral collapse.
As Paul described it in Romans, one for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.
Because what may be known of God is manifest in them for God has shown it to them for since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead so that they are without excuse, Romans won 18 to 20 whether looking through a telescope or microscope.
I am amazed at the symmetry, the scope and the systematic order of creation.
As Psalm 19 1 tells us the universe itself makes the existence of God too obvious to deny the heavens proclaim the glory of God.
The skies display his craftsmanship.
The new living translation, the bottom line reason for humanity’s rejection of this obvious evidence is that the existence of a creator implies his authority over all his creation.
If we are subject to a maker, we are not autonomous for morality is intrinsically rooted in his holy character, we cannot live however we would like nor should we.
God’s personal purity supplies a moral baseline for the universe and provides the guidelines by which we live healthy and holy lives to escape these implications.
Our society has chosen to believe the unbelievable that everything came from nothing in an unexplainable explosion of dense matter with an inexplicable origin.
That primordial sludge was jolted from death to life. That molecules develop from randomness into complexity.
And that human beings are the resulting accidents, mere pieces of Carmen destined to die as quickly as we arose, living in a universe without purpose and facing a future without ultimate hope.
That is the foundation of secularism and it leads downward in belief and behavior.
Here are the downward steps as the Apostle Paul described them in gratitude, Paul wrote, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful but became futile in their thoughts and their foolish hearts were darkened.
Romans 1 21 idolatry professing to be wise, they became fools and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man and birds and four footed animals and creeping things.
Romans 1 22 and 23 God created the human heart with a vacuum that can only be filled by the love of God.
That whole demands to be filled with something.
And when we reject the true God, we inevitably form other gods to fill it. And that is called idolatry.
An idol is whatever comes first in your life.
Anything that comes before Jesus Christ in your affections or priorities. That is your idol.
In our materialistic age, millions of people are serving the God of money, possessions and the accumulation of wealth.
When our desire for financial success overshadows our love for God, it becomes just as idolatrous as bowing before a manmade image, make no mistake.
When we reject the creator God of scripture, we must find a substitute.
When we reject God, we turn away from his love and his provision and we become our own God.
Donald Bailey. Helps us visualize what happens when we turn away from God’s love.
He pictured humanity standing in a circle facing God at the center.
In that circle, we ought to all be standing linked together with loving joined hands, facing towards the light in the center, which is God seeing our fellow creatures all around the circle in the light of that central love which shines on them and beautifies their faces and joining with them in the dance of God’s great game, the rhythm of love, universal.
But instead of that, we have each one turned our backs upon God and the circle of our fellows and face the other way so that we can see neither the light at the center nor the faces on the circumference.
And indeed, in that position, it is difficult even to join hands with our fellows.
Therefore, instead of playing God’s game, we play each one, our own selfish little game, each one of us wishes to be the center and there is blind confusion and not even any true knowledge of God or of our neighbors.
And that is what is wrong immorality.
Paul continued in Romans 1 24 and 25 with this.
Therefore, God also gave them up to uncleanness and the lust of their hearts to dishonor, their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.
Amen. When we give up the true God of heaven.
All other gods lead to an erosion of morality, to sensuality, to sexual sins and to lust driven lives.
In fact, this passage says that God gives people up to this kind of depravity.
How can a loving God give people up to the evils they choose?
He does not cause anyone’s demise, the natural law of consequences does he cannot abide in the presence of sin, which is why he abandoned his own son at Calvary as Christ bore the sins of the world?
How sad to follow this downward course when God offers us an upward path, but when we step off of his path, the steps keep descending toward the days of Noah in equity.
When a culture denies its creator worships its own gods and succumbs to a lust driven existence, it inevitably becomes overly sexualized.
Paul put it plainly for this reason, God gave them up to vile passions for even their women exchange the natural use for what is against nature.
Likewise, also the men leaving the natural use of the woman burned in their lust for one another.
Men with men committing what is shameful and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.
Romans won 26 27. The headlines of recent years are simply our society’s commentary on this passage and this downward spiral of indecency leads to a total moral collapse.
Doctor Donald Gray Barnhouse weighed in on these verses marking the downward steps to their inevitable end.
He wrote this is the description of mankind abandoned by God. And the scene is a frightful one.
The cause of the abandonment was the success of departure from God by the human soul in the successive steps of desertion that began with a failure to acknowledge God in worship and thanksgiving and continued through the various stages of the deification of human reason to the ultimate folly of man in the most corrupt form of idolaters practices, having departed from God.
Man made a God in his own image.
As appalling as this passage is, Doctor Martin Lloyd Jones says it is merely a preview of something even worse.
Hell he wrote is just what is described here exaggerated and going on to all eternity. That is hell.
Hell is a condition in which life is lived away from God and all the restraints of God’s holiness.
All that is described in this passage exaggerated still more and going on endlessly.
In other words, hell is people living in all eternity, the kind of life they are living now.
Only much worse that he wrote is hell.
I know that some of you are thinking, do we really have to deal with all of this?
Why can’t we just focus on the grace of God and get away from all this sin stuff?
But before we ignore sin and bask in the grace of God, we need to hear these words from theologian Cornelius Plante Junior.
He wrote that to speak of grace without sin, is to trivialize the cross of Jesus Christ to skate past all the struggling by good people down the ages to forgive except and rehabilitate sinners, including themselves and therefore to cheapen the grace of God that always comes to us with blood on it.
What had we thought? The ripping and the writhing on Gal Gotha were all about to speak of grace without looking squarely at these realities, without painfully honest acknowledgement of our own sin and its effects is to shrink grace to a mere embellishment of the music of creation, to shrink it down to a mere grace note in short, for the Christian church, even in its recently popular seeker services to ignore euphemism or otherwise mute.
The lethal reality of sin is to cut the nerve of the gospel.
For the sober truth is that without full disclosure on sin, the gospel of grace becomes impertinent unnecessary and finally uninteresting the escape from our moral decline.
One of my most memorable moments as a teacher of the word of God took place on Sunday night, April the 28th, 1995.
I was just beginning to teach the book of Romans in our evening service.
And my scheduled passage was Romans 1 29 to 32.
On this particular night, we were planning to observe the Lord’s table at the beginning of our service.
But after studying these verses from Romans. I decided to teach first and observe communion afterwards.
I waded through the words of Paul used to describe the corruption and depravity of man.
And then we celebrated communion and in that service, something beautiful occurred in my heart and I sensed that it was happening in the hearts of many of our people as well.
I saw tears. I fought back my own on Monday morning, still somewhat mystified by what had happened the night before I read these words in a book called Not the Way it’s supposed to be a breviary of sin.
Here are those words, self-deception about our sin is a narcotic, a tranquilizing and disorienting suppression of our spiritual central nervous system.
What’s devastating about it is that when we lack an ear for wrong notes in our lives, we cannot play right ones or even recognize them in the performances of others.
Eventually, we make ourselves religiously so unmusical that we miss both the exposition and the recapitulation of the main themes, God plays in human life, the music of creation and the still greater music of grace whistle right through our skulls, causing no catch of breath and leaving no residue.
Moral beauty begins to bore us. The idea that the human race needs a savior sounds quaint.
I thought, how many times has the music of grace whistled right through our skulls during our celebration of the Lord’s Table.
But that Sunday night, we all caught a fresh glimpse of our sinfulness and realized just how badly we needed a savior.
And then we were caught up in the fact that Jesus came and through his death, he washed all that ugliness and filthiness away from our souls.
I don’t ever remember being more thankful for grace and forgiveness than I was that night.
And maybe for the first time I understood what Doctor Martin Lloyd Jones said about grace.
There is no more wonderful word than grace.
It means unmerited favor or kindness shown to one who is utterly undeserving.
It is not merely a free gift, but a free gift to those who deserve the exact opposite.
And it is given to us while we are without hope and without God in the world in Romans one, we get a picture of what we would be apart from the grace of God and the death of Christ.
No wonder Paul said he was not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.
It’s the good news for you and for me that we can escape the moral decline in our world and in our hearts by trusting in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Will you turn to him.