According to the Bible, men and women, ever since they first disobeyed God, have been sinful in all ages and in all generations.
But there are epochs and times when they are unusually, exceptionally sinful. You will find ages when the Israelites were certainly not living perfect lives, but they were comparatively good. Then there were other outstanding periods when the whole position became desperate.
You see this sort of undulating graph as you follow the history of the human race. Take, for instance, the account which the Bible gives of the destruction of the world in the Flood. That generation was one when mankind sinned with all its might and defied God with unusual arrogance.
And again, in Isaiah's time, the people in the land of Judah were sinning in a particularly wicked way.
The Bible teaches us that at such times God withdraws his restraining power and allows human beings to fester in their iniquity, and then he visits them with punishment. But he never does that without warning. He always sends his prophets to speak to the people individually and collectively.
At such times nothing is more prominent than the element dealt with in this verse and that is moral perversion. 'Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!' (Isaiah 5.20).
The new morality
Sin is always sin, but there are degrees of sin. It can appear in different forms and different guises. Sometimes men and women sin and are ashamed of it. That is one condition of sin. But there are other times when people no longer feel shame; they sin openly; they are proud of it and even boast of it. That is different. But there is something even beyond that. They reverse morality and put evil for good, and good for evil; darkness for light and light for darkness. It is a deliberate reversal of what has hitherto been more or less universally accepted and they glory in the fact that they are doing so. That was the condition of the people living in Jerusalem when Isaiah addressed them.
Is this not equally true today? We have almost reached the stage in which not to be a pervert is to be abnormal. The pervert is glorified. There is nothing so wonderful as the love of perverts! This can all be summed up in the phrase which has become the slogan of the modern generation: 'Evil, be thou good'. ('Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil...') That is precisely what is happening in so many countries today in cultured, learned circles, among the intellectuals and those who claim that they are leaders of society. Is it not a repetition of the days of Isaiah?
The case for perversion
What case do the devotees of such perversion attempt to put up for it? One of the great lines of justification for all this is that at any rate it is not hypocrisy.
Now no-one, obviously, wants to defend hypocrisy, but that famous utterer of maxims, Count de la Rochefoucauld, uttered a truth about hypocrisy. He said: 'Hypocrisy is the homage paid by vice to virtue' - and that is a very profound statement. In other words, a hypocrite is a man who knows he is wrong and is trying to hide that wrong, trying to pretend he has not done it. He recognises morality and he is, at any rate, paying tribute to it. There is, therefore, always some hope for the hypocrite; he is a twister, but at least he knows that he is wrong.
The second element in the case for the justification of the new morality, is that it is right to question the existence of any external objective, universal moral standard. Hitherto, mankind in general has believed that there is such a standard. They have sometimes called it 'natural law' and it has been more or less recognised in all societies, Christian or not. But we are living in an age when that is being seriously questioned and we are told there is no such thing as an external moral standard, that every man is his own standard.
What is normal?
Another very serious point is that such people are querying the whole category of the natural, or the normal. We are told that we must not use this term. They ask: 'What do you mean by 'natural' and 'normal'?' They add: 'What you really mean is natural for you. But if another man is different, it is not natural for him.' There is no difference, ultimately, between the sexes and there is no such thing as 'natural'. And so this behaviour is being justified by questioning the natural difference between man and woman, and the natural desire of woman for man and man for woman. It is said that it may be 'natural' for man to desire man, and woman to desire woman. All the standards have gone because the category of the natural is no longer recognised.
And, of course, on top of that, people say there is no such thing as sin because there is no God. If there are no universal moral canons there is no sin.
Then the justification of wrong-doing takes the form of the cult of self-expression. We are told: 'You have these powers within you, so surely you were meant to use them. They were not meant to be repressed and held back. Express yourself.'
Then there is the putting up of love against chastity. 'The trouble in the past,' they say, 'has been that chastity has been regarded as the great thing instead of love. But love is what really matters, chastity only comes second.' So you have all the muddle and promiscuity and perversions of today.
But our Lord puts it like this: 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself' (Mark 12.30-31).
If you look at it like that, you will not justify everything you do simply by saying 'Oh, I love'. You will recognise that it may be lust, and that you must not harm the other person. You will realise that you are not animals - but responsible beings before an Almighty God who meant you to live a higher and nobler life. You will realise that you must therefore discipline yourself and control yourself, and that you must express your love by considering your neighbour as yourself, and not be always considering your desire for self-gratification.
Biblical answers
No, the answer is quite simple to those who know their Bibles. The first thing the Bible has to say is that there is nothing new about the 'new morality'. It is as old as the period before the Flood. It is as old as Sodom and Gomorrah! A new morality? It is as old as sin!
But the Bible can tell you why it arises and why people behave like this - and that is the important thing. Why are we being affected by all this now?
The main explanation is that sin can never satisfy - never. It pretends it is going to. It says: 'Only once.' But you can never stop at 'once'. Sin never satisfies and people therefore become tired of their particular sins and want more. When they have exhausted the whole gamut of known sins, they invent different ones and they twist and pervert.
(I once knew a tragic case of a medical man who became a drug addict. I remember asking the poor fellow, who had been a student with me: 'How did you ever come to do this?' And he told me that he had always been a heavy drinker, and he had reached a point where drink did not seem to affect him. But he must have some sensation, so with the failure of drink he started on drugs.)
But here is a second reason. Have you ever noticed the contradictory and unintelligent aspect of these perversions? On the one hand, here are men and women boasting of their great advances, boasting of their knowledge, looking back upon and despising their forefathers. People, it is said, are too intelligent to be Christians!
But look at them on the other hand, with a writer like D.H. Lawrence denouncing the over-development of one part of the brain, and saying that people think too much, and that the way to be happy in this world is to stop thinking and let themselves go. To be sophisticated nowadays is to go back to the primitive, to the original and elemental. This is amazing, because it is unintelligent. This is the contradictory element always found in sin, that while people are trying to boast that they go forward beyond everybody else, in reality they are going right back to the beginning.
All this is ignorance. All we are witnessing is ultimately to be traced to a failure to understand the true nature of men and women, the nature and meaning of life and its end and purpose.
The gospel
I am not merely saying all this in criticism. I am a preacher of the gospel and I desire people to be saved and given true happiness in Christ. I am making these points, therefore, in order to help. I believe that the main cause of this perversion is frustration and aimlessness.
Modern men and women are lost: they do not know themselves; they do not know that they are beings made in the image of God; they do not know how to use their mind and brain. They do not know that they are not meant to be creatures of lust, but are meant to reflect something of the eternal God himself.
The fact is that sin is something which grips and masters people, turning them into slaves.
If you are a follower of the 'new morality', it is not because of your head, it is because of your heart. I have proved that you are not governed by your head. If you were, you would not be contradicting yourself as you do - you like sin, it is lust, it is an evil heart. That is the real explanation of it all.
Let me ask a question. What is the end to which all this invariably leads? It leads to the Flood, to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. It leads to disaster.
Take it in secular history. We have seen that this very thing was the cause of the decline and fall of the great Roman empire. Rome fell because she became rotten in her heart. Authorities writing on this say that ancient societies lost their drive and their power as their morals relaxed. It is always the same. They loll in the baths, commit their fornications and adulteries and allow their empires to go to ruin.
I remind you again of the solemn words of the Son of God: 'As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be . . .' (Luke 17.26ff). Though modern man does not believe in God and moral standards, though he believes in nothing except himself and his own lusts, it does not affect the situation at all. God is still in his heaven; he is still all-powerful and he is still the 'Judge eternal'. God is still going to bring history to an end, and he will end it with judgement and the everlasting destruction of all evil and wrong.
Yet I do not despair of modern men and women with their so-called new morality and perversion. The gospel is 'the power of God unto salvation' (Romans 1.16). The apostle Paul preached it in the seaport city of Corinth, down in the dregs, in the vileness, in the riot of evil that was Corinth. He preached it there, and it was the power of God in the lives of men and women. 'But ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of our Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God' (I Corinthians 6.11). And, thank God, it is still true.
This article is taken from A Nation Under Wrath by Dr. Lloyd-Jones published by Kingsway , £7.99, on July 4 and is used with permission.
