Death Valley

Can These Bones Live?

The roots of our rapid devolution from public and official Christianity in the West to radical secularism are fascinating to trace.  You can take a long bow, a short bow or a medium bow vista.  All are valid to some degree.

The "short bow" view traditionally commences with the sixties as the beginning of a time of rapid change: the Beatles, the pill, no fault divorce, secular feminism, a rapid expansion of a vast government income re-distribution system, the legalisation of killing unborn children on a mass industrial scale, the official promulgation of evolutionism as a religious certainty--to name but a few of the many devolutionary milestones--with the result that the West is now in a place which few foresaw when John Lennon and his mates boasted they were more popular than Jesus Christ.  Today the West is engaged in furious debates over whether homosexuals can legitimately be married, whether incest and pederasty should be classified as human rights, and how many genders there are.  As Theoden of Rohan once said, "How did it come to this?"  No doubt many folk today who were alive in the fifties are likewise shaking their heads in astonishment at the devastation wreaked upon the law and culture and religion which had stood unassailable for centuries. 

The causes of such a rapid and comprehensive devolution are complex to be sure.  But we suggest that one precipitous factor was the most widespread religion of the day.
  This particular religious faith is presented cogently in the following profession of faith which appeared in a Melbourne newspaper in 1959 just as the Beatles were coalescing into a "group".  The occasion was the Billy Graham crusade in that city, and a correspondent wrote:

After hearing Dr. Billy Graham on the air, viewing him on TV, and reading reports and letters concerning him and his mission, I am heartily sick of the type of religion that insists that my soul (and everyone else's) needs saving--whatever that means.

I have never felt that it was lost.  Nor do I feel that I daily wallow in the mire of sin, although repetitive preaching insists that I do.

Give me a practical religion that teaches gentleness and tolerance, that acknowledges no barriers of color or creed, that remembers the aged and teaches children of goodness and not sin.

If in order to save my soul I must accept such a philosophy as I have recently heard preached, I prefer to remain for ever damned.  [Anonymous, cited by Leon Morris,  The Cross in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1965) p.271f.]

We doubt not that such self-righteousness was typical of the heirs of English Victorianism.  "We are so good, so worthy, so holy, that even the suggestion that we might be sinful and lost without a saviour is offensive."  The Gospel of redemption from sin is of no relevance whatsoever to someone convinced of his own moral rectitude.  But this false religion was at that time still in its early days--it still spoke of moral values such as gentleness, but in that empty platitudinous manner.  Gentleness and tolerance meant accepting every creed.  It celebrated an intrinsic goodness of all.

What can we conclude about such a portentous, prophetic statement of faith?  Many things, but chief among them is this: it is very clear that the correspondent was a person who had been passed over by the Holy Spirit of the Living God.  Whilst professing a higher, better light they remained in a deadly darkness of soul and mind.  The Messiah of God, Jesus Christ solemnly declared that He had not come to call those who were as self-righteous like the correspondent.  He came only to those who knew themselves to be sinners, lost and without hope. (Mark 2:17)

But how does one come to a certain conviction of their own sinful depravity?  It comes from an encounter with God, the Spirit.  When He comes, said Jesus, "He will convict the world concerning sin, and righteousness and judgement." (John 16:8)  But His coming is as the wind: "Do not marvel that I said to you, 'You must be born again.' The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. (John 3: 7,8)

The benighted letter writer, who saw himself as upright in thought, word, and deed professed that he would rather be damned than give up on the belief in his self-righteousness.  The Spirit of God had evidently passed him by and left him in his ignorance and darkness.  He had heard the Gospel, but had not heard it at all.

We suggest that the rapid and calamitous decline into the realm of animalist secularism can be explained by the sort of religion espoused by this letter writer, archetypical of a generation.  Now, in the West, a couple of generations later, we are confronted with the fruits of this arrogant, self-righteous, hard-hearted religion.  A people who profess themselves righteous, and without sin are the most dangerous of all, for whatever their hand finds to do becomes righteous in their own eyes.

They would rather be damned than contemplate the alternative possibility: that they themselves are corrupted and all they do is tainted with poison.

Now this does not mean that all it lost for God's Kingdom in the West.  But it does mean that we must be clear whence our help must come.  We, like the exile Ezekiel, are living in a valley of dry, dead bones.  Only God can raise dead bones to be reconstituted as living beings.  When God asked Ezekiel, "Can these bones live?" Ezekiel knew the truth, and replied, "O Lord God, you know."  (Ezekiel 37).  So, our hope and help is the Lord.  He alone can cause the Western dead, who lie as bleached bones on every hand, to live again. 

And God, let us remember, is never held back from working, either through many or through few.  As the old saint put it, one man, with God at his side, is a majority.