People in the Western world today inhabit a very different spiritual and moral environment from, say, 150 years ago. Church attendance has plummeted in most Western countries; people do not feel their need of God; they do not realise that they need to be saved from sin and guilt; they are not conscious of needing to listen to what God has to say in His Word; so they do not turn to Him. Yet the fact is that many, even if they did feel their need of hearing the Scriptures expounded and applied, would struggle to find the Word proclaimed in its purity in their neighbourhood.
The Lord complained of Judah: “The prophets prophesy falsely . . . and My people love to have it so” (Jer 5:31). They did not want to hear the demands of God’s law and the warnings that faithful prophets like Jeremiah were drawing to their attention. Similarly people today do not want to hear such demands or warnings, but preaching that lacks them is tragically deficient. It cannot give anyone a sense that it is relevant to the human condition, and so, in general, fewer and fewer are attending church services.
One can only assume that Bible-reading has declined in line with church attendance. And as contact with the law of God, as revealed in the Bible, has declined, so there is a decline in the attention that is paid to the Commandments. The First Commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me”, is certainly broken by those who follow false religions. But it is also broken by those who ignore what The Shorter Catechism identifies, from Scripture as “required in the First Commandment” – “to know and acknowledge God to be the only true God, and our God; and to worship and glorify Him accordingly” (Answer 46).
Not only is there generally no consciousness of the obligation to worship God, there is no sense of the duty to know Him by faith – not merely to know about Him. A significant proportion in many countries accept that God exists; yet in practice they regard Him as irrelevant. “God is not in all his thoughts”, says David of the ungodly man (Ps 10:4). So, if one could examine all the thoughts of the majority of people today, one would not find any thought of the Most High, who created all things, including mankind.
In his Commentary on the Psalms, W S Plumer remarks on the verse just quoted: “If sin had its way, it would both dethrone and annihilate God. As far as it can, it acts and feels and thinks as if He existed not”. Plumer is describing sin operating in creatures who have intelligence. Human beings may not always spell out to themselves the implications of their thoughts, but the consequence of people ignoring God, and the revelation He has given, is a society where God’s authority is rejected and men and women live as if He did not exist. But there need be no doubt that Satan, as he goes about seeking to tempt sinners away from the truth, is doing so with a view to bringing about a world where God is universally rejected – a world where people live as if He had indeed been annihilated.
Every false religion, every heresy, every godless philosophy is the result of “the god of this world” blinding “the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them” (2 Cor 4:4). Satan is determined to do all in his power to keep sinners in rebellion against God and bring them down at last to a lost eternity. But a particularly potent philosophy in the past century and a half has been evolution, with its idea that everything, including living creatures, has developed from the simple to the complex, without being directed in any way. The whole process that has brought the universe and everything in it to its present stage of development, so it is usually claimed, has at no point been under the control of any being.
One of the strongest arguments for the existence of God has always been the fact of creation. Paul speaks of God’s “eternal power and Godhead” as seen in the creation, leaving people “without excuse” (Rom 1:20) when they deny His existence. And when Paul began to expound what the men of Athens described as “strange things”, he pointed to God as “God that made the world and all things therein” and “Lord of heaven and earth”, implying that He has authority over, in particular, all human beings. This, of course, is still true, but the blinding power of evolution has resulted in the testimony of nature and Scripture to God being obscured, if not entirely obliterated, in the minds of many today.
Some who, if pressed, will acknowledge that God exists, yet succeed in keeping Him out of their thinking. They live as if He did not exist; they do not consider His law and their responsibility to obey it; they ignore the fact that they are guilty because of their disobedience to the Commandments; they do not set aside time to worship Him; they do not consider their latter end. Behind this rejection of God and His authority lies the widespread acceptance of evolution, which means that they do not feel any responsibility to treat God as their Creator, with all that this implies about God’s authority
over them – His authority to direct them as to how they should live, and His authority to punish them for their sin both in time and in eternity. These implications are unwelcome to the natural heart. Like Pharaoh, they say, in effect, “Who is the Lord, that I should obey His voice?” (Ex 5:2). And they add, Who is the Lord, that He should have the right to punish me?
One cannot avoid seeing such attitudes behind the ferocious opposition to teaching about creation. Minds are being blinded to the existence of God and to His authority as lawgiver, and evolution is used to buttress the atheism of those who do not wish their consciences to be disturbed overmuch by their wrongdoing. But God has spoken. Because He is our Creator, He does have the right to demand that we worship Him and that we cease immediately our resistance to His authority. He says, “O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the Lord our maker. For He is our God; and we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand. Today if ye will hear His voice, harden not your heart” (Ps 95:6-8).
Science has discovered much and lies behind many useful inventions. It has therefore acquired an aura of infallibility, but in the area of evolution, what we see is science as a philosophy, not as a series of conclusions which are testable by experiments. No one can go back and rerun the origins of the universe; if we are to know about its early history, we need a revelation from the only One who was present “in the beginning”. Apart from such a revelation from the true God we could not reliably know anything about what happened then. And we must bear in mind that it is “through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God” (Heb 11:3). Even a historical faith – a mere acceptance that the facts of Scripture are true – has a useful influence on people, bringing about a sense of God’s authority and outward obedience to His commands.
But historical faith will save no one; saving trust in Christ is necessary. Unless people have that trust, there is no fear of God in their hearts – that holy respect for God and His law that leads to an obedience which is not only outward but inward. Where the fear of God has been planted, the soul cannot be satisfied without faith in Christ, without being reconciled to God, without being the subject of the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit.
If we are again to see widespread church attendance, study of the Word of God, sinners convinced of sin and seeking salvation, and going on to live godly lives, there must be a powerful work of the Holy Spirit. Yet we must not despair; for God has promised that “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (Is 11:9) – not only in one district or country, but everywhere. Satan can never sweep true religion out of the world; he cannot have the victory, for Christ has conquered him.