What a mess!
The news has been full of it – the scandal over MPs’ excessive and inappropriate expenses claims. It has plunged Parliament into disrepute. But we’re not surprised. Our nation has lost its way morally.
Basically, it has turned its back on Christianity. The Bible no longer has a place in public life. The authority of the Bible has been generally undermined in the mainline churches. And if a people lose a sense of their answerability to God and become detached from the Bible as the infallible Word of God, it is little wonder that they drift into a sort of moral quagmire where there are no absolutes, and no real righteousness.
Darwinian evolution and naturalistic science dominates our outlook on life these days. What sort of morality or moral sense does that deliver? None at all. We need a return to biblical Christianity.
BBC religious head
Several other things of considerable significance hit the news in recent weeks. It is almost incredible to think that the BBC has appointed a Muslim as its head of religious broadcasting. It has to be said that Muslims are no more in need of salvation than anyone else in this country. But this is simply an indicator of the increasingly weakened state of Christianity in our society. What a mess.
Also, there is the appointment of Carol Ann Duffy as the new Poet Laureate. Ms Duffy is openly homosexual and has stated that one of her intentions in this position is ‘to give the laureateship a 21st century overhaul by using the event of a royal wedding to celebrate civil partnerships’. She is a professed atheist and apparently thinks of poetry as a ‘secular prayer’. What a mess.
Pray for reformation and revival
Then there’s the matter of the openly gay church minister recently confirmed in his appointment to a congregation at the Kirk’s General Assembly. This has rightly caused great concern among Evangelicals. What hope can there be for any church that endorses such a thing?
The Bible is clear – all sex outside marriage is sin. Homosexual behaviour is condemned in Scripture. The editor of the Kirk’s magazine lent support to such an appointment in the Kirk, saying that, after all, the arguments against homosexual behaviour were based on ‘redundant’ Old Testament passages.
Not so. The Bible’s position is perfectly clear from the New Testament too, not least in all those passages that indicate that sex outside marriage between one man and one woman is sin (Romans 1:26-7; 1 Corinthians 5:1-8; 2 Corinthians 12:21; Ephesians 5:3-5). What a mess.
What need there is for concerted prayer to God, that there might be reformation and revival in the churches! This is our only hope – that the Lord would come to our society again in transforming power, re-establishing the values and virtues of biblical and Christian morality, both in our lives and in our land.
John W. Keddie
