“The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God” (Psalm 9:17).
“The wicked walk on every side, when the vilest men are exalted” (Psalm 12:8).
“Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you: and the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants” (Leviticus 18:24-25).
Alexander Solzhenitsyn became world famous in the 1970s for his writings about life behind the Iron Curtain. His reflections are a chilling reminder that the West has been on a self-destructive path for decades.
- “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days…Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?” He was speaking especially of politicians and educators. But what about the rest of us? Too often parents are afraid of their children, preachers are afraid to preach against sin, and elders are afraid to discipline the flock.
- “The constant desire to have still more things and still better life and the struggle to obtain them imprints many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to conceal them.” Who can argue against this? We know this is true and even say it ourselves, but we go right back to the same rat race of getting more while feeling less satisfied.
- “I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed.” Godless communism has no objective basis for a moral or for a legal standard. It has no real way of distinguishing between the murder of a child and the killing of a dog. Is this the kind of country some in the United States want? Solzhenitsyn’s opinion was that “only moral criteria can help the West against communism’s well planned world strategy.”
- “There are meaningful warnings that history gives a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen.” The disgusting and shameful sculptures and paintings from ancient Greece and Rome are shocking reminders that a culture which loses respect for the privacy of sex in marriage is a civilization on its death bed. Solzhenitsyn warned that “motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror” would continue to erode Western civilization.
- “In early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God’s creature…but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer.” Remember God and prosper; forget God and suffer. That is the warning of passages like Deuteronomy 8 and the book of Judges.
Though this Russian’s insights are interesting, we must remember that these warnings were in the Bible before he was born. If Americans had heeded the Word of God, we would not be in the condition we are in.
—Kerry Duke