You Can’t Go Back

Perry Como died recently. Most young people either never heard of him, or else know him as the guy who sings Christmas Carols a few weeks out of each year.

Perry was from a different era. His songs were melodic, and the lyrics could be easily understood. His style was smooth and easy, and his manners impeccable. He stayed married to the same woman for over sixty years. Perry would never make it in today’s music industry.

His passing saddened me, as I reflected on how far American society has come since the 40’s and the 50’s, mostly in the wrong direction. As I get older, I find myself looking back frequently, grieving for the way things used to be. I was transfixed by Tom Brokaw’s excellent book, “The Greatest Generation,” which chronicles the lives of a number of men and women who sacrificed and struggled during the tumultuous World War II years.

Things were so much more black and white in those days. The Nazis were evil and the Americans virtuous. Good girls wore their dresses and skirts well below the knees. Homosexuality was dirty and sick, and pregnant unmarried women would go off in hiding so as not to publicly display their sin. You could sit through a dozen movies and not hear one curse word, and the closest thing to a sex scene would be a lingering kiss with a fade to black. Divorce was rare, and considered a great moral failure when it did occur.

As I have read a number of books that deal with the life and times of the “Greatest Generation” it has affected the way I look at people who are in their seventies and eighties. Knowing what they have been through, the challenges they faced, and the resolute, uncomplaining way in which they met those challenges, I almost feel apologetic for the way that we, their children (the baby boomers), have squandered the freedom for which so many fought, sacrificed, and died.

Half of couples who marry now get divorced, with no stigma at all. Homosexuality has multiplied and today, instead of hiding their shame in the closets, gays march down the main streets of large cities, parading their sin proudly. Thirty-minute television comedies now contain more filth and lewdness than the most risqué movie Betty Grable ever dared make. Athletes like Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams have been replaced with pampered superstars who choke their coaches and punch fans.

We can’t go back, of course. It’s fun to look back, and the tens of thousands of antique and nostalgia shops across our nation amply testify that many of us have an inner yearning for simpler, kinder, and gentler days.

It’s not going to happen.

Our world is on a track it cannot get off. Its speed constantly increases, and there is no reverse gear. Two powerful forces are at work in the earth, forces that will soon bring the nations into a final cataclysmic conflagration of death and destruction, spoken of by Jesus and vividly described by John in the book of Revelation.

One of those forces is called the mystery of iniquity. The Scriptures tell us that a spirit of lawlessness is at work in our world, which will continually rip and tear and the fabric of society until we ultimately come within a hair of destroying the entire human race.

This spirit of lawlessness has a great variety of manifestations, from such simple things as lowered SAT scores to school shootings and the murder of parents. We see this spirit in dirty little sit-coms that compete to outdo one another is sleaze, and in a steakhouse that proudly advertises it’s product with the slogan that the serpent himself once used with Eve: “No rules; just right.”

There is another force in this world. Our Savior called it the Kingdom of God. Headed by the Lord Jesus Himself, fueled by the power of the Holy Spirit, and manifested through born-again Christians in every part of the globe, this kingdom cannot be stopped.

The truth is that the evangelical church is growing stronger every day. In Africa there were ten million Christians in 1900; today there are over three hundred million Christians in Africa. More Muslims have become Christians in the last twenty-five years than in the previous one thousand years! And among the Jews, more are turning to Jesus than at any time since the days of the early church.

No, we are not going to “save the world.” The gate to destruction is wide, and many will choose to take that way. We are not to expect some world revival that will turn every nation to Christ. The Bible makes it plain that the reason the antichrist will be so successful is because multitudes “did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved” (2 Thessalonians 2:10).

We can make a difference, though. I love the story of the man who was found on the beaches of Mexico, tossing dying starfish back into the ocean. The beach was littered with starfish that had been tossed up by the tides. Another man, seeing what he was doing, asked him, “Why are you bothering? There are hundreds of starfish all over this beach, and probably thousands more all up and down the coast beyond here. You can’t possibly make a difference!”

The compassionate savior of the starfish calmly reached down, picked up another starfish, heaved it into the sea, and answered, “Made a difference to that one.”

May the Lord find us so doing when He comes.