WHO NEEDS MORALS?

One of the indications that our day of grace may be running its course and that we are nearing its end is the steady decline in morals. The movement in this direction is unmistakable, not only in what one sees, hears and reads but in the frequency with which the subject is being discussed in major publications.

It is true that men have always been sinners and there has always been both overt and covert sin. But perhaps never has sin been so flagrantly paraded without shame and even glamorized. Morality is condemned as Victorian, as though that good lady invented morals. Queen Victoria no doubt was a believer in the Lord Jesus and endeavored to maintain a high moral standard, both personally and in her realm, but she did not invent biblical morality; she accepted it and tried to follow it.

In fact, one doesn’t need the Bible to distinguish sin from righteousness. Joseph, one of the sons of Jacob, when tempted by Potiphar’s wife to commit adultery with her, knew enough to say, “Thou art his wife: how then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?”

Who told him such an act would be sin against God? He did not have the law of Moses; Joseph died before Moses was born. He had a conscience given to him by God and each of us has this faculty which enables us to know right from wrong.

It is no sign of progress that many people are becoming amoral, recognizing no standard of morality but doing what they please. (Ostensibly they choose with the proviso that what they do does not hurt others, although in the finality even that reservation is dropped.) This is not rising to a higher standard of human dignity; it is descending to the level of the beast.

Such actions are not new in human experience. Paul’s letter to the Romans tells us in its first chapter that in earliest times men gave up the knowledge of God and became amoral in their relationships one with another. Convenience and gratification were the watchwords and moral standards were out.

However we find in history that when, as the Bible puts it, a people’s “cup of iniquity is full,” God intervenes in judgment. If we should be near the end of the day of grace, the climactic judgments described in Bible prophecy await this world.

In any case there is a law of sowing and reaping in the moral realm as well as in the material realm. A nation which gives itself to indulgence in sin soon learns that it has lost the moral fiber which once sustained it in its times of trial. We do not know what lies ahead for our country and the so-called civilized world, but we do know that no nation can defy the laws of God and hope to prosper.

Editorial in a Religious Publication

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