Judgment unfolding on the culture
- 10 hours ago
- 7 min read
We are not waiting for judgment. We are living in it.
Most Christians who are paying attention to the current moral collapse around them have come to the same conclusion. They believe judgment is coming. The conviction is right at the level of instinct but wrong at the level of timing, and this misreading of timing is producing a great deal of confusion in the church. We are not standing in the days before judgment falls. We are already living inside the judgment that has been unfolding for decades, and the failure to recognise where we actually are in the timeline is leaving believers unprepared for what is already happening to them and to the cultures they live in.
Paul describes the pattern of divine judgment on a society that has rejected God with a clarity that should be read carefully because it is happening in front of us. The passage is Romans 1, and what Paul describes is not the future. It is sequential. Three times in that passage we read the phrase God gave them over. Each instance marks a stage in the unfolding judgment of God on a culture that knew the truth and suppressed it. The repetition is deliberate. The handing over is itself the judgment. And the stages are progressive in a way that should make every honest reader sit up, because they match what we have watched happen over the last several generations with disturbing precision.
The first handing over comes in Romans 1:24. "Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity so that their bodies would be dishonored among them." The first stage of judgment is the unleashing of sexual sin without the restraint that conscience and culture had previously provided. We have lived through this phase. The sexual revolution that began in earnest in the middle of the twentieth century swept away the inherited moral framework that had governed Western culture for centuries, and what filled the vacuum was a comprehensive sexualization of everything, including marriage, dating, education, advertising, entertainment, and eventually childhood itself. This was not the beginning of the judgment. It was the first visible stage of a judgment that had already begun in the suppression of truth Paul describes in Romans 1:18 to 23.
The second handing over comes in Romans 1:26 and 27. "For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their persons the due penalty of their error." The second stage is the normalization of what Scripture describes as degrading passions, the abandonment of the natural sexual order in favor of what Paul says God Himself classifies as unnatural. We have lived through this stage as well. What was unthinkable in the mainstream culture of fifty years ago is now celebrated at the highest levels of government, education, corporate culture, and entertainment, and the speed of the normalization has been such that anyone who can remember the past three decades has watched the transition occur in real time.
The third handing over appears in Romans 1:28. And just as they ceased to acknowledge God, God gave them over to a depraved mind to do improper things. This phase is the most terrifying stage because it describes a judgment at the level of cognition itself. The mind is given over to a state in which it can no longer reliably distinguish good from evil, true from false, and real from constructed. The list of behaviours that follows in verses 29 to 31 is not a list of obvious external sins. It is a description of a cultural condition. Filled with unrighteousness. Wickedness. Greed. Evil. Envy. Murder. Strife. Deceit. Malice. Gossips. Slanderers. Haters of God. Insolent. Arrogant. Boastful. Inventors of evil. Disobedient to parents. Without understanding. Untrustworthy. Unloving. Unmerciful. The list reads like a documentation of contemporary public life. It is not coincidental. It is the visible result of a culture whose mind has been given over to depravity by the very God it spent generations rejecting.
This third stage is what the contemporary world is currently inhabiting, and it explains things that would otherwise be inexplicable. It explains how educated people can hold positions that would have been considered insanity in any previous century and call them progress. It explains how governments can pass laws that destroy the very societies they claim to be protecting. It explains how corporations can deliberately damage their customer bases in pursuit of ideological commitments their shareholders never sanctioned. It explains how popular culture can celebrate what previous generations would have buried in shame. The depraved mind is a collective moral failure. It is a corporate cognitive judgment on a culture, and that judgment is operative right now in the institutions that shape contemporary life.
This is also why the church is now experiencing pressures it has not experienced in generations and why those pressures are increasing rather than diminishing. We are living in a culture under judgment, and such a culture will not tolerate the presence of those whose existence rebukes its trajectory. The hostility toward Christians is not a temporary inconvenience that will eventually pass. It is the natural reaction of a depraved mind to the people who refuse to participate in the depravity, and the reaction will intensify rather than soften as the judgment continues to unfold. Jesus said such hostility would be the case. "If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of your faith the world hates you" (John 15:18 and 19). The hatred is not personal. It is the natural response of a system under judgment toward people who are not under the same judgment because they belong to a different kingdom.
What does this mean for the church? It means we need to stop waiting for a judgment that has already begun and start preparing for the conditions we are already in. A decade ago, the suggestion that Christians would face genuine persecution was dismissed as alarmist. The dismissal has not aged well. We are now watching believers lose jobs for biblical convictions, watching pastors fined and imprisoned for preaching the actual content of Scripture, watching parents lose custody for refusing to participate in the sexual confusion being forced on their children, and watching legal frameworks reshaped in ways that will make faithful Christian existence increasingly difficult in the very nations that were built on Christian foundations. The trajectory is not improving. The pressure is increasing. And the church that has built its life around the comforts of cultural Christianity is unprepared for what is already pressing in on it.
The pressure is going to get worse before it gets better. Scripture does not promise us a comfortable existence in a hostile culture. It promises us that the hostility will intensify and that those who remain faithful will suffer for their faithfulness. Paul tells Timothy directly. "Indeed all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted" (2 Timothy 3:12). All. Not some. Not the unusually bold ones. All who genuinely follow Christ in a culture under judgment will face the pressure of that culture against them, and that pressure will look like persecution because that is what it is. The question is not whether we will face it. The question is whether we will be ready for it when it comes in greater measure than it has already come.
What does readiness look like in such a time? It looks like a return to the only foundation that holds under sustained pressure. The Word of God is read carefully and obeyed faithfully. Prayer offered honestly and constantly. Fellowship with other believers who have not capitulated to the surrounding culture. Worship that is genuine rather than performed. And a settled conviction that the God who is sovereign over the rise and fall of nations is also sovereign over our specific lives within those nations, placing us in this exact moment and culture for purposes that exceed our understanding but never exceed His care. "He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation." Acts 17:26. He determined the times. He determined the boundaries. We are not here by accident. We are living in this moment because the God who placed us here has work for us to do in it.
And there is more. The judgment unfolding on the culture is not the final word. It is the warning before the final word. The same God who has been handing the culture over to its preferred depravities is the God who continues to call individual souls out of depravity and into the kingdom of His Son, and the gospel still has power to reach hearts that the cultural collapse cannot touch. Every person who comes to faith in a culture under judgment testifies that the God who judges nations also saves sinners, and these two activities happen simultaneously in our generation. Our task in such a time is not despair. It is a faithful witness in the rubble of a civilization that rejected the God who made it, confident that He is gathering His remnant from that rubble and bringing them home through the gospel we are entrusted to carry.
So we do not panic. We acknowledge when conditions are not normal. We do not assume the pressure will go away by itself. We accept where we actually are, prepare ourselves for what is already happening to intensify, and continue to preach the only message that has ever offered hope to souls trapped in the kind of cultural collapse Scripture describes. The judgment is real. The pressure is real. The cost is real. And the same God who is sovereign over all of it has promised that nothing will separate us from His love and that those who endure to the end will be saved. Romans 8:38 and 39. Matthew 24:13. May we be among those who endure, may we be faithful in the moment we have been placed in, and may we trust the God who has not lost control of any of it to bring His own through the storm to the safe shore. He has prepared for everyone who belongs to Him.
He, who has ears to hear, let him hear. (Matthew 11:15)
Image: Jeremiah Knight
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