HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Reason 1: Bad parents and absent parents
“Wake up, Gary, we’re in Florida.” I was just a sleepy kid in the back seat of our family car on a family vacation but I remember waking to see palm trees everywhere and wondered — “Wow, how did we get here?”
It seemed like I had just fallen asleep for moment. But when I opened my eyes it was as if I had traveled forward in time to another place.
I have the same feeling nowadays when I wake up and watch news coverage about the overnight murders, looting and latest popular perversion in America. And I wonder, “How did we get here?”
It has been a perfect storm of conditions in which I will outline in future columns but one major reason for the mess we’re in is bad parents with an unbiblical worldview.
Every child has a free will and a sinful nature so even good parents have difficulties in shepherding their progeny to live godly lives.
But according to a Barna Research Poll, only two percent of parents of preteens and only six percent of Christians have a Biblical Worldview. When asked if they believe that God exists, that He is the Creator of everything, that Jesus Christ is the Savior of mankind, that the Bible gives us moral guidance on how to live and that Satan is real, ONLY SIX PERCENT of Christians agreed.
Dr. Jeff Myers, President of Summit Ministries, defines a worldview as “a pattern of ideas, beliefs, convictions, and habits that help us make sense of God, the world, and our relationship to God and the world.”
The majority of people today have a syncretistic worldview which is a hodgepodge of beliefs, behaviors and philosophies taken from a variety of sources like, Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism, Eastern Mysticism and everything in between.
Look, parents can only teach what they know. They can only reproduce what they are. Just as apples trees make apples, so parents who are confused about their worldview produce confused children.
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” - Jeremiah 17:9.
Since we are all descendants of Adam we have all inherited a sin nature. Children don’t have to be taught to sin, it is their default. What they need to be taught is that there are negative consequences to sin.
“Discipline your son, for in that there is hope; do not be party to his death.” - Proverbs 19:18
Along with bad parents, America has an ever-increasing number of broken homes led by single-moms. Children need both a mother and father in the home. But no-fault divorces produced broken homes and matriarchal-led families and the results have been disastrous. Without a father in the home, it appears that most children have not been taught to respect authority. Watch the news and you’ll see that undisciplined children become dangerous adults.
A decade ago, I produced a graphic novel called, The Father Factor about children who grew up without a father in the home. In it I quoted statistics that prove the negative effects of fatherlessness listed at Fatherhood.org.
Government politicians cannot solve this problem because America has a spiritual problem that can’t be fixed with material solutions.
In the Old Testament book of Judges, an oft-repeated phrase is, “Everyone did what was right in their own eyes…and they sinned against God.” This is America in 2023. In order to live in a civil society citizens need to be able to control themselves and treat others with respect.
Robert Winthrop, the 18th Speaker of the House of Representatives said, “Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled either by a power within them or by a power without them; either by the Word of God or by the strong arm of man; either by the Bible or by the bayonet.”
Our Founding Fathers understood this principle and encouraged religious faith in early America. But through a series of events in the 20th century, America turned its back on God and replaced Him with the theory of evolution. (I’ll write in detail about this in future columns).
The Bible predicted all of this. In 2 Timothy 4:3 (NLT) it says, “For a time is coming when people will no longer listen to sound and wholesome teaching. They will follow their own desires and will look for teachers who will tell them whatever their itching ears want to hear.”
When 94 percent of people who call themselves Christians don’t believe the Bible, I’d say people are no longer listening to the truth. Notice too, that people will replace Biblical truth with teachers who will tell them whatever they want to hear. Why? To make people feel good about their sin. This is America today.
If you read the Old Testament, you’ll see that this never ends well for a nation who turns its back on God and His law.
Two thousand years ago, the Apostle John was in exile on the island of Patmos, when the resurrected Jesus appeared to him and showed him the future and he told him to write what he saw. (I believe he saw our time period). John must have wondered, ‘Wow, how did we get here?’