Calming the Cultural Storm

Tracking bad news, as I do, can get to you. For me, recently, the last straw was the appointment of an avowed homosexual, owner of a “leather bar,” to be president of the school board in Asbury Park , New Jersey .

On the heels of many other stories just as bad, I threw up my hands. “We’re finished, we’ve had it! Why even bother anymore?”

When I was in school, you couldn’t be elected to the board of education if you owned a regular bar, let alone one with weekend drag queen contests. What had happened to my country?

After about an hour of scanning the news, I was ready to believe in the Rapture. There’s no hope, I thought: the disease is too far advanced; the country’s too far gone. Everybody’s dancing ‘round the golden calf.

Liberal judges, unelected bureaucrats, teachers’ unions, and manic mayors do anything they please and get away with it, imposing their ungodly innovations on America. They get all the help they need from apostate clergy, media and movie stars, two-faced politicians who run as Christians and govern as pagans, and tiny but powerful special interest groups — not to mention the vast inertia of the American people, who won’t utter a peep of protest as long as they get their bread and circuses.

“Who can stop an avalanche? Not me!”

I didn’t say a great prayer; it was more a cry of “Help! Lord, I’m beat, I don’t understand any of this stuff that’s happening. I just don’t get it, and it’s making me crazy. The whole country seems to be crumbling like a sand castle at high tide. I know I ought to trust you, but how? The bad guys are winning, and I’m losing hope....”

God didn’t let me get away with my self-pity. Instead, He did something I didn’t expect. He answered my prayer.

It’s embarrassing when you think you understand a Bible story, just because you’ve known it since you were a little kid in Sunday school. The story that God used is one of the best-known Bible stories of them all. Everybody knows it! Or thinks he does.

In Mark 4:36-41, Jesus and His disciples are in a boat on the Sea of Galilee. Jesus is asleep when a storm blows up. The disciples panic. Convinced they’re about to be drowned, they wake Jesus and babble at Him. He stands up and commands the storm to stop. And to the disciples He delivers this stinger: “Why are ye so fearful? How is it that ye have no faith?”

Ouch! That hurt. But it was exactly what the disciples — and I — needed. I was focused on today’s cultural storm, and I forgot Jesus was in the boat.

Just like the disciples, I was in a panic. You remember the disciples. They’re the poor guys who never understand the parable, so Jesus has to spell it out for them. We read the Bible and we shake our heads, wondering how they can be so thick and still be disciples.

Maybe they looked so thick to me because of the two-by-four in my own eye.

God was pulling it out, so I could see.

R.J. Rushdoony spoke less gently than the parable. In Politics of Guilt and Pity, he wrote: “To recognize the existence of some conspiracies is one thing. To ascribe to conspiracies the power to determine history is another thing: it is blasphemy” (p. 50).

To put it another way: Do I really think, even for a minute, that God’s plans are going to come to nothing? That He’s going to wring His hands while homosexual militants take over the United States, or even the world, and abolish Christian faith?

I wouldn’t want to admit I ever thought so; but I was carrying on like I did.

As Psalm 73 describes what I experienced that weekend, “So foolish was I, and ignorant; I was as a beast before thee” (v. 22).

Maybe I’ve been too caught up in these news stories. Prayer brought Asaph’s Psalm to mind again:

Until I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I their end.

Surely thou didst set them in slippery places: thou castedst them down into destruction. How are they brought into desolation, as in a moment! they are utterly consumed with terrors. As a dream when one awaketh; so, O Lord, when thou awakest, thou shalt despise their image (v. 17-20).

A few days later, when I studied the news again, I noticed something startling.

It wasn’t making me feel hopeless.

It was still the same old bad news. The ungodly still labored on gutting the Constitution, trashing the family, corrupting the churches, and crushing anyone who stands in their way. They’d added a new wrinkle while I wasn’t looking: a plan to revoke the tax-exempt status of churches that won’t support homosexual “marriage.” It was all rolling forward while our so-called leaders twiddled their thumbs.

“That’s a pretty bad storm raging out there.” But now I remembered: Jesus is in the boat. He won’t let it sink.

I thought of another well-known Bible story: the Tower of Babel. God could have prevented the construction of that folly. But He let them bake a few million bricks, draw up their plans, and sweat, and stagger as they built it up as high as they could go — and then He confused their language and scattered them across the earth. So much for that project.

So it will be, from San Francisco to Boston, with abortion, human cloning, “gay marriage,” same-sex adoptions, the advance of the homosexual curriculum in America’s public schools. One of these days, it’ll all be over. You don’t break God’s law and prosper.

Humanity will wake up someday and find the nightmare has passed; God’s hand has erased it. But God’s Word will not pass away.

Marriage between a man and a woman, and the family, are eternal human institutions ordained by God. “Alternative family structures” currently excite the imaginations of apostates, pagans, and atheists — but it’s only a storm that one day Jesus will stand up and put down.