I do not believe it would be very hard to convince most observers whether they were conservative, liberal or moderate, that our society in the West is profoundly diseased. For a correct diagnosis, one must first be able to know the signs of good health, both physical and mental. Then you can more accu­rately spot what is wrong. It is the same with counterfeit money — banks train people to spot counterfeit notes by having them observe closely and repeatedly true pound notes, euros or dollar bills. Similarly, in order to diagnose what is wrong, we must first ask the question, “What is the proper wholesome relation­ship of human beings with Almighty God?”

If we wish to summarise the entirety of the written Word of God, surely we could say that both the Old and New Testaments are covenants. The two parts of this book are bound together by the concept of God’s one covenant of grace with sinful humanity in sovereign mercy: He plans that we should be His, allows the Fall, puts human beings as part of the plan, intervenes as the trinitarian God in His redemptive mercy and ultimately sends down the new Jerusalem where He will be our God and we will be his people. By His inexplicable grace He chooses to be our God and He chooses us to be His people.

The essence of the covenant of grace is that we know God, as we see in Jeremiah 31:31-34, taken up in Hebrews 8:6-11; He is our God and we are His peo­ple and as such we know him. When the culture is rotting and breaking down, it is because the people do not known God. The word “know” must be given its full biblical sense of personal relationship, intimate trust, deepest fidelity, tenderest communion.

The Authorised Version of Genesis 4:1 tells us that Adam “knew” his wife and they had offspring. The Lord Jesus says in John 17:3,

Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.

Salvation and health are ultimately know­ing God. The sanctity of the human marital relationships is a reflection of this most pre­cious and crucial form of “know­ing”.

Essentially this is the disaster of our culture, that instead of knowing God, our people know idols. We are called to minister in a time that is characterised by idolatry more than anything else. What is idolatry? It is a vicious, heartless rejection of the noble, generous and tender Lover to whose infinite mercy and affection the otherwise helpless beloved owes absolutely everything. That is how God sees idolatry. That is why He reacts against it so powerfully and sent a whole people into captivity for it.

A crucial principle about the nature of idol worship is that persistent spiritual idolatry leads to intellectual and physical adultery, then on to other kinds of mental and sexual perversion. It is important to note here that there are more kinds of idolatry than literally bowing to images of Baal, or taking part in orgiastic rituals in the groves of Ashtoreth. If we do not realise this, I think we will not be able to analyse properly the ravaging cancer of our times and the culture in which we have to minister, raise our own children and live our own lives. Because we may not see actual idol statues, we must never imagine that our culture is idol-free.

Decades ago Carl Mannheim, a German sociologist, stated: “Civilisation is collapsing before our eyes.” “If God is dead,” said Dostoyevsky, “everything is permitted.” I believe that a large part of God’s judgment on our idol­atrous culture is to let it take the logical consequences of the horrendous choices it has made in abandoning Him, the framework of His saving gospel, and His holy, secure law.

Sections of the church have played a large part in this drift away from God. C.E.M. Joad saw that the Church of England was being transformed by the process of accommodating the views of naturalism and materialism. He accused it of becoming a mere purveyor of vague, ethical, religious uplift.

The Old Testament reminds us that when the prophet and priest are cor­rupted, cultural disaster cannot be far behind. Amos says there is no famine like a “famine of hearing the words of the Lord” (Amos 8:11). Yet no matter how bad our cultural collapse, God can change it; His gospel is competent to handle it.