When people talk about God’s judgment against nations they are usually referring to some calamity, an earthquake, storm, famine, or act of war. But in this first chapter of Romans, I believe Paul reveals what God’s judgment against a nation really looks like: a complete spiritual black hole.
Reading what Paul wrote in Romans 1 reminded me of a message from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author of The Gulag Archipelago and the 20th century’s foremost dissident against the Soviet Union and communism.
The Solzhenitsyn Warning
In his Harvard commencement address entitled A World Split Apart, Solzhenitsyn described western nations as being in a state of spiritual exhaustion. He traced it to the humanistic view of man as the “measure of all things” and the casting aside of all higher spiritual authority. In his view, instead of pursuing virtue and higher ideals, western nations had lost their moral compass and their courage.
He stated that western societies had become complacent and paralyzed, and that western mass media was suffocating the inner life of individuals, creating an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity.
He gave that address in 1978, before there was the Internet and social media.
What Paul Actually Warned Against
This is precisely what Paul warned against in Romans 1. He was describing nations that would be given over to a corrupt state of mind to such a degree that they could no longer discern between right and wrong. People would be so spiritually disconnected in their thinking that they would call what is good, evil, and what is evil, good. They would even abandon what nature reveals to them about what is right in terms of sexual relationships and God’s gender design for men and women.
When a culture or nation that was grounded, or in America’s case founded, on Christian principles begins to drift from that foundation, it will inevitably begin to decline. Or as Solzhenitsyn described it, those nations will become spiritually exhausted. That is what Paul warned against, and what Solzhenitsyn saw was already happening nearly fifty years ago.
The Deeper Question
Perhaps the steady decline of America’s morality is directly associated with an increasing number of people who claim to be Christians but who are ashamed of the gospel, at least in the context of a gospel-defined lifestyle.
The gospel is the power of God to salvation. It transforms our thinking. It changes people. And a changed people will make a changed nation.
What is needed now more than ever is another Great Awakening. We should all be praying that God in His mercy will ignite that fire in our own hearts and in the hearts of countless others across this nation.
The question is not whether America is under judgment. The question is whether enough of us are willing to return to the One who can restore her.