When societies fall apart, they do not do so in an orderly manner. When God strikes a people with a judicial stupor, the result is not a feast of reason and flow of soul.
“For the LORD hath poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep, and hath closed your eyes: the prophets and your rulers, the seers hath he covered” (Is. 29:10).
But when God does this thing, the people under the judgment would have it so. They murmur amen as they roll over for some more shuteye.
“Which say to the seers, See not; and to the prophets, Prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things, prophesy deceits” (Is. 30:10).
And when this happens, the pomomush gets mushier, and the conservative responses get increasingly bewildered and ineffective. The conservative gets out his sharp knife of dialectical analysis, in order to carve up a bowl of soup.
Once the intellectual dishonesty has gotten to this stage (as it has in our society), our response must be to turn to the scattered flocks that have seen their shepherds go mad, and preach the gospel to them. And as we undertake this crucial task, we should not make common cause with any of the raving shepherds.
The Jews can get all the signs they could want, and the Greeks might get all the wisdom that a fifty pound book of philosophy could hold, but at the end they still wouldn’t know God. The modernists might get all the technological geewhizzery they can invent, and still not know God. They did not find the Lord in outer space, and they did not find Him in the microchip. The postmodernists might get all the sexual licence that every one of their arguments leads to . . . and they would not know God. They did not find Him in any their pomosexualities.
We do not look to the modernists for anything but stainless steel despair. Bigger, faster, shinier! And we do not look to the pomos for anything but bootless confusions. When you finally get that quorum of clowns, you are going to have a circus. What did you expect?
Societies need to know God, just as individuals do. If a society does not know the true God, the only God, then they will commune with idols. When they commune with idols, nothing good comes from it. You cannot, Christian, dispense with the Savior and keep the salvation. When Jesus Christ is declared to them, in their office of nationhood, the biblical process of biblical transformation gets under way. If not, then not. Jesus said to preach to every creature. Jesus said to baptize the nations. Jesus said to disciple the nations. Whatever do you suppose He meant by it?
The means that He ordained for the conversion of this sorry excuse of a world was the folly of preaching. We will not bring this about because we have reached into our arsenal, and pulled out our armies and navies, our parliaments, our laws, and our ivy-covered halls of learning. The next Christendom will come to be when Christian preachers speak it into existence through the folly of preaching. See? Clean out of my mind.