August 30, 2023
In the days of a more Christian culture, a lone individual with the Bible could judge and warn society, regardless of the majority vote, because there was an absolute by which to judge. There was an absolute for both morals and law. But to the extent that the Christian consensus is gone, this absolute is gone as a social force. Let us remember that on the basis of the absoluteness of the 51 percent vote, Hitler was perfectly entitled to do as he wished if he had the popular support. On this basis, law and morals become a matter of averages. And on this basis, if the majority vote supported it, it would become ‘right’ to kill the old, the incurably ill, the insane – and other groups would be declared nonpersons. No voice could be rasied against it.
Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?
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When Pilate was questioning Jesus, he asked him an interesting question: “What is truth?” (John 18:38) Jesus doesn’t give a response, but just a few chapters earlier, in the high priestly prayer, he provided the answer:
Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. (John 17:17)
God’s word is the absolute truth, and Jesus is God’s word made flesh (John 1:14). Pilate was looking at the truth.
This absolute truth created Western civilization as we know it, but the sand of relativism is replacing our rock foundation. Our society is abandoning God’s word, and now morality and truth are no longer from God but determined by the 51 percent majority vote. Democracy worked when the majority followed Christ and had the law of the Bible as their foundation, but this is not the case anymore, and you can see the horrendous effects everywhere in our culture.
When God’s law was our foundation, abortion was murder. Then, we abandoned our Biblical foundation, and the masses decided it’s no longer murder but a “human right.” Note that this is entirely arbitrary because it’s built on nothing but the will of the sinful majority. It makes me think of the closing statement of the book of Judges, one of the bloodiest books of the Bible:
In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. (Judges 21:25)
At some point, everyone’s mother has asked the classic question: “Would you jump off a bridge just because everyone else is?” Ironically, this is exactly how democracy works; if the majority wants to jump off a bridge, we all go off with them. The majority in Sodom wanted to “know” the angels that visited Lot. Did that make it right?
We must stand firm against this. We have God’s word as our moral compass, so it doesn’t matter what the masses are doing. When we see things in our culture that don’t align with the word of God, we must not conform, even if that means going against the majority. And we especially need to be intolerant of this “everyone else is doing it” mentality within our churches. But discernment requires us to know God’s word – all of it. If we don’t know it, how can we know the truth?
Increasingly, we are going to see the masses determining “morality” that opposes the Bible. I know how hard it can be to stand out in a crowd, but take this as an exhortation to study, absorb, and stand firm on the truth of the word, even if it means you are up against the world. It’s better to be on God’s side than the world’s.