We can easily wonder what is happening in our world.  Certainly, many of us, especially those of us who are older, can say that the present world around us is very different from the one in which we grew up.  I am old enough to remember when there were no drugs in our local high school.  Alcohol was clearly present and often abused; but drugs as such didn’t come for another year or two.  At that time, school offenses involved things like fighting or running in the hallways or perhaps even chewing gum or eating candy in class.  It was also a day when most businesses were closed on Sundays, and no one ever thought of scheduling sporting events for children and youth on Sundays.  I can also remember when our home phone number went from 4 digits for our two-party line to 5 digits for a private line, and then before long on to 7 digits; and when postage for first class letters went up from 4 cents to 5.  Fuel oil cost 16 cents a gallon when I was a boy and even when I was in graduate school, gasoline was 39 cents a gallon for regular.  But wages were also different; $10,000 a year was good money for a working man or woman.  A lot has changed since then.

Here’s a question: Is our world getting better or worse?  Are things improving or going downhill?  Questions like these don’t have simple answers, and how we answer them depends at least partly on who we are and what areas of life we are looking at.  Certainly, technology has changed drastically, and usually for the better.  I can remember looking at the first transistor radio we owned when I was a teenager (it was also one of the first products I had ever seen that was not made in the USA), and sometime after I got married seeing my first handheld electronic calculator—so much for mechanical adding machines and slide rules.  Fifty-five years ago, I was a freshman in college and used my first computer, a Univac 1107 building-size computer, complete with IBM punch cards to enter data, and even then, it had far less computing power than our cell phones today.  I can also remember my father dying of heart problems in a normal hospital room because there were no ICU’s or electronic heart monitors.

Technology has certainly changed our lives, but the question is where are we morally and spiritually?  Let’s look at three different areas.

(1) The broader culture.  Not too many years ago the broader culture around us functioned on what we could call a Judeo-Christian worldview.  Regardless of where individual people were spiritually, most people accepted and lived on the general basis of things like the Ten Commandments.  There was a clear sense of right and wrong.   There was also a general agreement on the existence of God in the broader culture, the reality of a final judgment, and a final destiny in either heaven or hell.  All this—and much, much more—has changed.  Life today lacks clear agreement on these kinds of foundational beliefs, and most people are guided almost exclusively by their own human reasoning and subjective personal feelings as well as by the external pressure of a distinctly self-centered social order.

It is difficult to date the timing of these changes.  Recently I was surprised to read how Francis Schaeffer believed that these changes date back to failures in the church between 1900 and 1936.  The truth of the matter is that our culture’s turning away from a biblical God to an individualistic, self-centered way of life dates back to the account in Genesis 3 of the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden at the beginning of human history.  Key milestones along the way in our current cultural decline include things like the Renaissance with its focus on a distinctly humanistic worldview, the Enlightenment with its foundation built on human reason apart from Scripture, Romanticism with its emphasis on being guided by one’s own subjective feelings—and this list could go on.  The impact of many of these influences has been gradual but at the same time it is also cumulative, and it is continuously accelerating.  The net result is what Kevin Swanson describes in his 2021 book Epoch as “the fall of the West.”

God is clear in His Word that rebellion against Him has consequences.  The reality of God’s coming judgment is a frequent theme throughout the Old Testament prophets.  The New Testament is equally clear that the time will come when God will bring His wrath to bear on “all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth” (Romans 1:18).  Suppressing the truth, as Paul describes it here, shows itself in such things as a failure to “honor him as God or give thanks to him” (Romans 1:21).  Romans 1 also goes on to tell us three times that the net result of this failure to honor God as God is that that God “gave them up” to the resulting natural consequences of their rejection of Him.  It is not surprising that “they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened” (verse 21).  We are currently seeing this judgment come on our country and our culture.  It is not a pleasant sight, and it will undoubtedly get worse.  Today is a time to grieve and lament, as we see our culture turn its back on God and all His many spiritual and material blessings over the years. 

(2) The institutional church.  The institutional church is what some people have described as the visible church.  It is the collective church composed of those local churches we can see all around us.  Mainline denominations have been in clear decline for the past 50 or 60 years, where some have lost one-half to two-thirds of their members.  There was a time in our country’s past when there were clear social advantages to being a part of a local church in terms of maintaining personal relationships with others and perceived standing in the community.  These so-called nominal members are now leaving churches in record numbers.  As our culture becomes increasingly post-Christian and even anti-Christian, there is nothing to attract them to organized religion.  As we look ahead, we should expect to see both church membership and financial giving plateau or decline.  Again, we are living in a changing world.  Plans and strategies that once worked in local churches and other Christian ministries will no longer work in the future.

This decline will inevitably mean increasing social pressures for believers, if not outright persecution.  Yet God often uses trials and tribulations to advance His purposes.  Paul tells us this in Romans 5: 3-4, “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.”  James tells us the same thing in James 1:3-4, “for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.  And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”  In many ways, we are entering into a new and more difficult period of time here in America, but God is still in control, and He calls us to trust Him.

(3) The true church.  This is what is sometimes described as the invisible church.  It is the church as God sees it.  It is composed of the sum total of all those who are truly God’s children.  The reality that God is God and that He is both good and at the same time fully sovereign is the one bright spot in this entire analysis.  God is still at work in this world, and He is continuing to work all things together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose, as He promises us in Romans 8:28.  The number of those who are predestined to be God’s elect is as certain as ever, and God remains fully committed to building His church.  Although statistics for the broader institutional church may well be in decline, the true church composed of true believers continues to not only hold its own but, as in every other period of history, it is the Lord who adds to His church “those who [are] being saved” (Acts 2:47).  He is as fully in control as ever.

At the same time, we also need to recognize that throughout church history God has often been doing different things at different times and in different places.  Here in America, we have enjoyed times of revival, most notably the First Great Awakening in the early 1700s and to a lesser extent the Second Great Awakening in the mid-1800s.  Awakenings and revivals, both regional and local, are times when God is doing something unusual and pouring out special blessings on His church.  More recently God seems to have shifted the focus of His work to other places around the world. 

Church growth—in terms of numbers of people actually coming to Christ—is currently taking place most rapidly in such unlikely places as Iran where it is illegal to evangelize, or for Muslims to leave Islam, or for people even to own or read the Christian Bible.  The flipside of this reality is that God currently seems to be doing relatively less here in our own country.  We see this trend especially in statistics for young people who have grown up in Christian homes and churches leaving the faith in record numbers.  God is clearly still at work here in America, building His church, but at the same time, He also controls the rate of growth.

Jesus partly explains this phenomenon is His parable of the four soils.  Here He describes how some seed fell along the path or “way side,” other seed fell on rocky ground, still other seed fell among the weeds or thorns, but at the same time some seed fell on good soil, where it “produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty” (Matthew 13:8).  As any gardener knows, the important thing is not seed sprouting, but actually bearing fruit.  We may plant or water, but ultimately it is always God who gives the growth (1 Corinthians 3:6).  There is always something mysterious and supernatural about people coming to faith.  Spiritual growth takes place in such a way that the farmer of gardener “knows not how” (Mark 4:27).  The true church will continue to grow and bear fruit as God chooses.  This will be true during each period of church history and in each part of the world, even while the broader institutional church and the surrounding culture may be headed toward a time of decline here in such areas as America and Western Europe.

The net result of all this is that we should grieve over the sin, pride, and rebellion that characterizes so much of our broader culture as well as the ongoing decline in various churches and ministries.  This lamenting is appropriate even as we rejoice in the sovereignty of God and how Christ continues to build His church in such a way that even “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18).  God is always on the winning side, building His kingdom, and accomplishing all His purposes.  So yes, we rejoice in and celebrate the goodness of God and His perfect plan for this world in which we live.  As believers, we are always on the winning side, and in this sense, things are getting better even in a time of social and moral decline.