Hope of Nations - When Society Shakes, Part 2

If you had spent any time in a classroom or on a college campus recently, you would have been shocked at what is actually being taught. Every day our kids are being told the truth is relative, that God is irrelevant, and Christian values and morals are oppressive. What do you need to do to protect your children and your grandchildren from the wave of ideologies that are turning them against the Lord? Stay with me.

That's today. In this program, John picks up where he left off last time, describing the tremendous impact Christianity has had on world history, and then identifies the major ideologies that have surfaced in the last century in opposition to God. Before we begin, I want to remind you that Chip will join us after this message to share his thoughts on this important subject matter, so be sure to stick around for that.

Well, here's John with part two of his talk, When Society Shakes. Did you know the vast majority of people ever born in human history never learned how to read? Where did reading come from? Well, here in the United States, it came from this same group of Puritans. They said, okay, we're here, we made it to this new world to create a society where our kids can live out the Bible, so we need to get ministers for them, and secondly, we need to make sure they know how to read the Bible. So they created the first public school, and they did so through legislation, a thing called the Ye Olde Deluder Satan Act. Ye Olde Deluder Satan.

And here was their point. Satan's a deceiver. He deceives societies and people through ideas, and so we're going to create a school so that all of our kids can read so they can read the Bible for themselves so they're not deluded or deceived by Satan. First ever public school, social literacy came about as a result, and a first in human history, not only public education, but education for girls. If you look back in human history, and especially if you go back more than about 300 years, girls were often treated as property or as slaves.

They were bought and sold into marriages, often into child marriages. In almost all societies and cultures around the globe, Christianity changed that for women in Christian societies. Now, forgive me a graph, okay? Here's a graph of global literacy, okay? And maybe we'll put this on the side screens in a moment so you can see this starts in the 1400s and 1500s. Now, a significant event happened at that time called the Protestant Reformation, and I won't unpack that today, but the point of the Protestant Reformation is Christians need to read the Bible for themselves. And so a Christian named Gutenberg invented a thing called the printing press so that people could read the Bible, and that's where really books as we know them today came from Gutenberg. Before that, it was manuscripts in libraries.

A book that you could hand to someone came from Christians in the Protestant Reformation saying, we want to hand out the word of God so people can read it for themselves. Global literacy, if you look back before the Protestant Reformation, was around 10%. One in 10 people could read, even in the Western world. After the Protestant Reformation, you see this explosion upward of literacy, and it's led by nations like the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. What did all those nations have in common from 1500 to 1800? Well, it's a fact of history that those were all nations that were predominantly Christian. And so if you remove Christians from world history, you remove literacy as we know it today, because this is not just a graph of literacy in Christian nations. This is literacy in the world. Actually, this yellow line is the world, and you see the world eventually catches up as the West spreads its education around the globe.

So why does this stuff matter? Well, if you take Christians out of world history, you remove our ability to read, and that fundamentally takes society back a thousand years. Well, as Christians started to read the Bible for themselves, they started to look at society, and they started to realize where society was out of line with God's Word. And so one of those issues was slavery.

The more Christians could read the Bible for themselves, the more they could look around and see, we've got to change this, we've got to change that. And so very early, as literacy started, a group of Christians in North America called the Quakers, predating the United States of America, started to write pamphlets and say, we have to end slavery. And their argument was from the Bible that slavery is wrong.

And the Quakers spread this message so aggressively that it made it all the way to England. By the way, you know, slavery was a global norm before this. You can look at every continent, every major civilization in world history had slavery. Egypt had slaves. Rome had slaves. Here in North America, before Europeans came, it's well documented that Native American tribes would enslave each other. Slavery was a global norm before this time. And the Quakers started looking at the Word of God and saying, we can't allow slavery in our society. And they started to spread this message.

As I mentioned, it got to England. And in England, there was a young lawmaker, a guy named William Wilberforce. William Wilberforce was not a Christian at first, but once he became a Christian, he started to experience God's freedom in his own life. And then he started to read the Word of God, and then he met some of these Quakers. And they showed him from the Word of God how slavery contradicts the nature of God and the dignity that, according to the Bible, all people are made in the image of God and should be treated with dignity and respect. And so William Wilberforce became a fanatic about ending slavery in his country and in all of the British territories. And so he wrote a book that helped to end slavery. We call it today Real Christianity.

It's got a really long title, a practical view of the prevailing religious system of professed Christians and the higher and middle classes in this country contrasted with real Christianity. Here's his whole point. He says, here's what the Bible says, England, slavery's wrong.

Here's where you are. You might not have a slave in your house, but you're making money off of slave trading companies. And if you're going to call yourself a Christian, you have to end slavery.

That's why the book was called Real Christianity. Don't call yourself a Christian if you have anything to do with slavery. And William Wilberforce, for 30 years, gave his life to spread this message and eventually convinced the entire lawmaking assembly there in England to take his point of view. And they outlawed slavery in England and in all the British territories, and it became the tipping point in world history where a massive global world power outlawed slavery. And soon after that, the abolitionists in the United States, the Quakers, and many others took their arguments and said, now we've got to end it here. They'd been arguing it for more than 100 years before the Civil War, 200 years before the Civil War. But if you look up the people who ended slavery, they're called abolitionists. And if you don't believe me, you can do this on your own. You can just internet search abolition movement and just pick out of the top 10 abolitionist leaders who come up, pick a random two or three, and start digging into their lives. You'll find that they're either a pastor or they were friends with a pastor or they were the son of a pastor or the daughter of a pastor, and then you can read their writings. And in their writings, you'll find that they're arguing from the Bible for the end of slavery. I'm not making it up.

You can go check it out for yourself. The point is, if you remove Christians from world history, you remove the greatest overthrow of slavery in human history. And the story continues into more modern history. Martin Luther King Jr., who no one would disagree, is one of the most influential fighters for human rights in all of history and especially in modern history. Martin Luther King Jr., we often forget nowadays his title was the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. because he was a pastor. He was a man of the book. He was a man of God's word. And you can look at his speeches on videos for yourself, his sermons actually, they're sermons.

And you can read his writings for yourself. And if you do, you'll see what motivated the greatest fighter for human rights in modern history and maybe in all of history was the word of God. Full of quotes like this, when MLK said this, if one is truly devoted to the religion of Jesus, he will seek to rid the earth of social evils.

Why? Because God's truth sets individuals free and it has the power to set families free and it has the power to set societies free. MLK another time said this, Jesus still cries out in words that echo across the centuries, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for those that despitefully use you. MLK was a man of God's word.

As he pursued God's truth, he was key in continuing to set people free. So what have we learned? Well, we've learned that Christians who have pursued God's truth, established the university, created public education and the fact that we can read, launched the scientific revolution. We haven't gone into detail on these, but it's just like the evidence I gave you on the others, the founders of Western democracy, modern medicine and the vaccine, Edward Jenner, the end of slavery in the West, the civil rights movement, and the list actually goes on and on and on. So where do we stand today?

Where do we stand today? Well, I've used the analogy of the fruit on the trees. We've inherited a society that has these fruits. They seem normal to us because we've always lived in this society. Many of us have not known life, you know, in Haiti or in Sudan or in India. And so it seems normal to us, but people from those countries come here and they're like, whoa, how does a society like this even come about?

Doesn't happen by accident. We enjoy those fruits. Now, my assessment, this is my assessment as a researcher, as a reporter, is that what is happening in our lifetimes and actually started shortly after World War II, is that many of our smartest people are being trained at many of our best universities to take out an ax and to chop at those roots. In other words, we don't want God and Christianity anymore, even while they're still eating the fruits.

And so here's point three on your outline. Today, many free and wealthy inheritors are rejecting God's truth, and this is largely because of what they've been taught, how they've been taught to view the world. In time, this is my opinion based on principles from the Word of God, the freedom and wealth that we take as normal will decline if the rejection of God's truth continues.

In other words, you can start chopping at the roots of a fruit tree and still eat the fruit for a little while, but if you keep chopping at those roots, eventually the tree's going to stop producing the fruits if you're chopping at the roots. You know, and as we mentioned, starting in about 1000 AD, Oxford University founded on the pursuit of truth. If you look at the mottos of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cambridge, in almost all of them you'll see the Latin word for truth, veritas, or you'll see the idea of light and God's word. It was this uneven, imperfect pursuit of truth, and it was bloody, and it was not pretty, and I'm not saying that any of these societies along the way were perfect because they weren't. They were messed up, but they rose above the historic norm in freedom and in life expectancy and in human rights. Why? I believe because of their pursuit of truth, and so the thing is when you're in a family, you know the worst stuff about the family.

You know the warts. You know the underbelly, and so even if your family's a really good family, you know where it's not perfect, and my generation is inheriting this whole machinery of what used to be called Western civilization, and because we're born into it, we know where it's not perfect, and a lot of those things are very legitimate concerns where we still need to make progress, but the thing is we've lost our perspective of how good our family is compared to other families out there. We've lost our perspective of how unique this civilization is compared to the rest of the world, and so right now people are saying things like we need to blow the whole thing up and start over. The thing is other countries have tried that.

We don't need to blow the whole thing up. We need to keep improving, but the improvement came from pursuing the truth standard. How do we further improve women's rights? How do we further improve racial equality and the striving toward that? We're not there yet. How do we get there? It's by continuing to pursue God's truth and what he says about human dignity and human equality, and if we throw out the standard of truth, we're not going to get to where we want to get as good as our motives might be, and so here's what's happened, I believe, based on my assessment, and I'll show you some evidence for this, is that in the 1800s, Germany was a very, very Christian nation, 90-plus percent Christian.

This was before World War II, before the Holocaust, before racism in Germany at the level of World War II, and a number of their smartest philosophers started to say in their highest universities, you know what? We could make a better society without God. That old Bible stuff we think is maybe myths and fables. Let's create a new society without God's truth. Let's do better. We now have science and philosophy at a level that didn't used to exist, so let's create a better society without God, and that's what this point is, is this is a moment in history that I believe was a defining moment when a famous German philosopher, you've maybe heard of Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche, wrote God is Dead, and at the time, it was an idea in an elite university that sounded really neat to smart people, and Nietzsche and some of his peers, like Karl Marx, started to come up with new visions for a society that doesn't need God or churches or the Bible, and Marx got so excited about his, he wrote a whole system called Marxism, the foundations of communism, and it started as ideas in the university, but as more and more of the professors started to believe this, they started to train the culture shapers, the teachers, the lawmakers, the artists, and so you got a trickle down from the university where the smartest people and now all the shapers of culture believe we don't need God anymore. That Bible stuff's outdated.

We can do better. And so from the time of Nietzsche, about 50-some years pass, and this trickles down from the intelligentsia to Main Street, and now you've got normal people in the Boy Scouts of Germany learning we don't need God to make a better society. We can do it on our own, and learning these lies like the Jewish people are our enemy. Here's a picture of Adolf Hitler next to a statue of Friedrich Nietzsche, and to me it's a symbolic image that shows here's what a largely Christian nation, when it turns away from the truth standard and says we can do better without God, here's where it can end, and Germany is not the only case study in how terrible society becomes when it has the science and technology and power that came about from Christian study, but then throws away Christianity. And Satan, who came into the world to kill and steal and destroy, primarily kills and destroys people through ideas, and Satan loves to get a whole society or group of people to adopt a lens of reality that says we don't need God or the Bible.

It happened in Germany, and the ends were some of the worst industrial scale killing and genocide in all of human history with the Holocaust. But Germany wasn't the only nation to adopt this idea from the German thinkers in the 1800s that we don't need God. In fact, a little further east in a giant nation called Russia at the time, there was a young academic who also came across the writings of Nietzsche and his friend Karl Marx, and this young academic started to think what if Russia, which at the time was known as the Holy Rus, Holy Russia, land of a thousand domes or steeples, Eastern Orthodox Christianity was the prevailing cultural center in Russia, a little different flavor of Christianity but still Christianity, and this young academic thought let's make a new society in Russia, let's have a revolution, get rid of the churches, get rid of all the Jesus and Christianity stuff, let's outlaw that stuff, make a new and better society without it.

This young academic had a really long, hard to pronounce name. He knew if he was going to get famous and make a change in the world, he had to shorten it. So he shortened it to Lenin, and Lenin and his friend Stalin took the writings of another one of these German thinkers, and they launched about a hundred years ago what was called the October Revolution in Russia, which was the beginning of the Soviet Union. Now it should be just well-known history, but I'll declare it that under the Soviet Union tens of millions of people were killed.

Freedom of speech completely disappeared, freedom of religion completely disappeared. The largest scale tyranny and just stamping out of human rights and human history happened as a result of ideas that were embraced and spread across the nation. In Russia, which became the Soviet Union, there was a brilliant writer, and forgive me on the name, Solzhenitsyn, bear with me, okay? Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a genius writer who, like all the smart people in Russia eventually, if he didn't tow the line of the Soviet Union, he got sent to the Gulag, similar to a concentration camp in Siberia, where he nearly froze to death, but he lived, he became a Christian while he was there. And after the Soviet Union fell, Alexander Solzhenitsyn looked back at the 60 million people who died from famine and from outright murder by a fist of a government. And here's what he said looking back, Alexander Solzhenitsyn says this, if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, translation, why did 60 million people die in my country? Alexander Solzhenitsyn says this, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat, men have forgotten God.

That's why all this happened. The crazy irony of history is that after the United States won World War II physically, its leading professors and universities started to adopt the same view of reality that Germany and Russia adopted before World War II. And this is documented in a book called The Soul of the American University, written by a guy named George Marsden, and the point is this, in this book, it's very academic, it might be boring, but the point is, he documents to the month and the day and the year when Yale University turned away from the word of God. For hundreds of years it believed this was the source of truth, there was a time when it turned away. He documents when Harvard turned away.

He documents when Princeton, which was the most recent, turned away. And the subtitle of his book, From Protestant Establishment to Established Non-Belief. And the reality, whether we like it or not, is that now the smartest people in our society, for a number of decades now, have been taught the same thing that the smartest people in Germany and Russia were taught, that we don't need God to make society better, that actually Christians are the dangerous ones and we could do better, make a better society without them. Now I'm not predicting exactly how it's going to end, where it's going to go for the United States. Hopefully it takes a long time. Hopefully there's, you know, major movement of God and there's a revival and things change. But what we know from history is that when societies do this, it doesn't usually end well.

And we can't predict exactly how it'll end. Here's Allan Bloom. Allan Bloom was a professor at Yale and at Cornell. He himself was not a Christian.

Allan Bloom is not writing as a Christian. He lived through this era where the leading American universities that trickle down culture to the rest of the country adopted the German philosophers that led to World War II. He says, the popularization of German philosophy in the United States.

Does that make sense? The popularization of that is of peculiar interest to me because I've watched it occur during my lifetime. And he writes this, he's now dead, but he says, I feel a little bit like someone who knew Napoleon when he was six.

There was a time when Napoleon was six years old and playing on holiday and no one knew that someday millions of people would die because of this little boy. And Allan Bloom writing as a non-Christian in the Ivy League setting says, I've seen my peers adopt the very ideas that led to death and destruction in other countries and I kind of can't believe it's happening. Also writing as a non-Christian, Allan Bloom says this about God's truth, the Bible, which was the center of American society until that turn. He writes this, in the United States, practically speaking, the Bible was the only common culture. Now to people my age and younger, they're like, oh, someone's making that up, a pastor's making that up.

No, it's true. You can read books from the 1800s. If you could go back in time, almost every American home had a big old Bible in the middle of the living room. Even if the people didn't do what it said or read it, they had one, okay? And Allan Bloom writing says that's what made this melting pot possible where people could come from Ireland or from Russia, from all around the world. And some were Catholic, some were Protestant, but the one thing they had in common was they at least had a respect for the Bible and for Jesus.

They weren't perfect people, but they had that in common. Did you know that as recently as the 1940s, 98% of Americans identified as Christian? So, you know, some of our kids nowadays get taught, well, America was never a Christian nation. Well, it was a nation primarily of Christians, okay? But Allan Bloom says this, the Bible was the one thing that united simple and sophisticated, rich and poor, young and old, without the book, the Bible, the idea of the order of the whole, a stable American melting pot society where people are all treated equally is lost because that's where it came from.

That's his assessment as a non-Christian academic. Without the pursuit of God's truth, we know we lose the roots that made freedom possible. So here's the real question, how can we respond? Very simply, we cannot control society. We can't control society, but we can control ourselves and we can control our families and we as a church can control our movement, which is a pretty significant movement, by the way.

So don't despair. God has given us great responsibility with what we can control. How do we respond to all this? Well, first, we decide that we will remain rooted to the Christian scriptures, no matter what happens in culture or in society, no matter what names we get called, no matter as the society turns away from God's word. And so we've got to decide right now when the pressure comes, if someday churches lose their nonprofit status, if pressure comes, we've got to decide as a group of people, we will remain rooted to the word of God because it's his truth that leads to freedom and we won't give it up. And because we're committed to his truth, we'll always be loving. We'll pray for those who persecute us. We'll forgive our enemies. We'll love our enemies because we're committed to it. But we're also going to be unapologetic that this is the standard for what we do and believe, and that's the people we are. Second thing is the training of our young.

I believe based on the rate of cultural change and the current of cultural force that if we're not very intentional about how we train our young people, that we'll lose them ideologically because they're getting a lens to view the world that says you don't need God or the Bible, almost everywhere else they turn. So if we really want them to live those lives of freedom, we'll be intentional. We want to help you be a family that trains your young people to know the word of God.

Why? Because that's what leads to freedom and we want them to live lives of freedom and prosperity. Well, let's close by just imagining for a moment our kids and our grandkids being rooted in the word of God and living lives of freedom. Freedom that keeps them away from vices and addiction. Freedom that hopefully will keep them from divorce, has the power to. Freedom that can set them on the path of their best life possible.

And what we know is that apart from God's word, there is no true freedom. And so as the world around us perhaps gets darker because some people will be pursuing their idea of freedom without God and the consequences may be bad, we can be a lighthouse that shines brighter and brighter the hope that in Christ there is freedom. You're listening to Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. John Dickerson has been our guest teacher for this program, When Society Shakes, from his series, Hope of Nations.

Chip will be here with us in just a minute to share his application for this message. As you look around, are you filled with anxiety? Are the instability and chaos overwhelming? If you're looking for tangible hope, not only for yourself, but for the future of our society, this series is for you. John explains where we can find true hope in a world spinning out of control. Matthew chapter 12 says, In his name the nations will put their hope. Stay with us as we discover what that means and how we can find encouragement in these trying times.

For a limited time, the resources for Hope of Nations are discounted. For ordering and pricing details, visit livingontheedge.org. App listeners tap special offers. I want to pause just for a minute, and if you're a financial partner with Living on the Edge, I just want you to hear a message that we received from a lady named Kelly who listens every single day. She said, Thanks so much for your ministry and daily podcast.

I listen every day. I'm a recovering addict of many things. I grew up in a Christian family and was saved at the age of 17. Shortly after that, because of peer pressure in school, I started doing drugs. I now have a few years of sobriety, and God saved my life, and He has totally removed the physical urge to use drugs and alcohol and cigarettes. I've now joined an awesome church that has small groups, and Christ has blessed me in recovery meetings. Anyway, thanks so much for sharing your life with others. You've made a positive difference in my life. You know, Kelly is one of hundreds, actually thousands of emails that we get at Living on the Edge. I just call them life change.

Spirit of God took the Word of God, and it might have been on a podcast, could have been on the radio, could have been in a small group, could have even been a CD or a book. But God intervenes with their life, and something happens that changes the course of their life. And I just want to pause and thank you. You know, some of you write a check every month. Some of you have it taken out of your account every month.

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App listeners, tap donate. Your partnership is a great encouragement. Now with some final thoughts, here's Chip. As we wrap up today's program and John continues to teach us about history, I liked how he came to the end and said, there are two things that we've got to do. Number one, stand on truth.

And number two, we have to train the next generation. And by the way, that's not the church's job. The church needs to help, but that's mom and dad's job. That's grandparents' job.

That has to happen in the home. And what I would say is, so often we as believers have missed the boat by always being reactionary. Most believers, and Chris and I am right now, so much in America is about we're against this, and we're against that, and we're against that.

We need to get on the offense, and we need to be more preventative than defensive. You need to start now, and the kind of things that you're hearing in this series, your kids need to learn. You've got to move them off of screens and sound bites and off their phone and have them read and think and ponder, and not just about the piety of reading the Bible or having your prayers. They need to be vibrant, intellectually astute, people that can discern between right and wrong. This requires moms and dads to sit around the table, to have discussions around meals, to read books, to think carefully.

Does it sound like it's a high mountain decline? Yes, I think it is, but the consequences are so devastating if we don't do it. What has kept certain cultures intact for thousands of years is they were absolutely committed to training and teaching their own. Cultures, tribes, have gone off the face of the earth, and Judaism has been preserved because at the core of the Torah is the mom and the dad.

Deuteronomy 6, they teach their children in the home, this is who God is, this is what is true, this is what we believe, and this is how we will live regardless of the consequences. I think we need to take a page out of their book and follow it closely. Just before we close, I want you to know that as a staff, we ask the Lord to help you take whatever your next faith step is. Now, if there's a way we can be helpful, we'd love to do that. Maybe give us a call at 888-333-6003, or connect with us at LivingOnTheEdge.org. And while you're there, you'll find resources on all kinds of topics, many of them absolutely free. Well, I'm glad you've been with us, and until next time, this is Dave Druey saying thanks for listening to this Edition of Living on the Edge.