Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Let death take my enemies by surprise;
    let them go down alive to the realm of the dead,
    for evil finds lodging among them.
As for me, I call to God,
    and the Lord saves me.
Evening, morning and noon
    I cry out in distress,
    and he hears my voice.
He rescues me unharmed
    from the battle waged against me,
    even though many oppose me.
God, who is enthroned from of old,
    who does not change—
he will hear them and humble them,
    because they have no fear of God.

• Psalm 55:15-19

“The broken home has become the number one social problem of America, and could ultimately lead to the destruction of our civilization.  Since the basic unit of our society is the home, when the home begins to break, the society is on the way to disintegration.  It is a threat to the American way of life.  It does not make screaming headlines; but, like termites, it is eating away at the heart and core of the American structure.  It is high time that our so-called experts on marriage, the family, and the home turn to the Bible.  We have read newspaper columns and listened to counselors on the radio; psychiatrists have had a land-office business.  In it all, the One who performed the first marriage in the Garden of Eden and instituted the union between man and wife has been left out.”

• Billy Graham, Day by Day with Billy Graham (December 1)

NOTE: Please do not draw any lines between the title of this post and the family photo. My wife’s family may not be perfect, but I think they are far above average when considering the modern statistics on the broken home. On my side of the family, the statistics are not as good, but we don’t have a large group photo like this.

When Billy Graham wrote this devotion in the early to mid70s, he seems to have been prophetic.  A few left-wing organizations have among their goals to destroy the nuclear family – the nucleus of our society being a father, mother, and children.  Divorce rates continue to climb.  With the legalizing of same-sex marriages, the marriage as ordained by God in Adam and Eve is crumbling.  As Tim Keller said, homosexuality does not promote the procreation of the species and is thus against the perfect union that God designed.  It goes deeper than that, but when you are being badgered for an answer in a televised interview, it is a short and politically correct answer – other than almost all outside the church today would not call it sin at all.

Some of the Psychiatrists today are implanting ideas within their patients of non-standard sexual orientation as a means of explaining away their patient’s emptiness, when all the patient needs is God to fill the void.

Add to this that when an unborn child is an inconvenience, it can be aborted, and we have one more way of destroying the family unit.

And what is different now than in the 70s when Billy Graham wrote this devotional book?

In the 70s, the threat to the nuclear family was the counterculture.  The parents of the Hippies, Yippies, etc. were those hard-working folk that survived the depression and World War II, many fighting in WWII and/or Korea.  They came back home and made America the manufacturing giant that led the world.

Their children, however, saw the monotonous drudgery of the 9 to 5 job and rejected it for free love and some drugs on the side – not in all cases.  Some found Jesus in the Jesus Movement.  Some found that their rebellion was not the utopia that they had hoped and went back to the drudgery paradigm.  Of course, some never rebelled, and in a way, became even more disillusioned than their parents.

The point is that the people now wanting to blow up the USA in favor of a socialist nation without God and without the family unit are in some part the children of those who were rebelling fifty years ago.  The clothing is different; the behavior is different; but the mantra is not far from the same.  We have gone further down the road of depravity, but we were already on the road.  If you want to see scandalous photos, the Woodstock photos are all over the Internet.  Then again, maybe you should avoid that.  For one you might see more than you bargained for.  And for another, what shocks you more is that you might be looking at your naked grandmother.

Even with a great awakening of the Holy Spirit, like the Jesus Movement of the late 60s until the mid-70s, our nation continued on the downward moral spiral with free sex and illegal drugs – only curtailed shortly during the AIDS scare.  I feel that the Bible Belt may still exist, but while it might have been a strong, solid leather belt in the 50s and 60s, it is now a moth-eaten cloth belt, maybe a linen belt as Jeremiah wore (Jeremiah 13), but with holes in it, like Swiss Cheese.  In the South today, you can find pockets, mostly in the cities, that resemble any non-Bible Belt city of the North or West Coast.

A revival is needed, but it needs to be more well-spread than the Jesus Movement to make an impact.

Oh, Lord, forgive us and save us.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.