When a Country is Gone to Hell

I look around at all the countries that once stood strong for God, and I hang my head in shame at what they have become. Scotland, the land of preaching, has seen its churches go vacant and buildings become house government offices or public taverns. England, the land of the Bible, has become a country with little interest in the Bible.

As the churches are more empty than full. Wales, the land of revival, has become a country of humanism and paganism, and revival is as scarce as Christians. America, the land of spiritual awakenings, has become a godless nation of perverts and pagans.

It seems at times the light of the gospel has almost flickered out in a room with no oxygen. What religion exists is either dead orthodoxy with embalmed formalism, or the other extreme of easy believism where church growth expands but without conversions. It seems at times in these last days in which we live that the whole country has gone to hell and there is no turning back.

A reprobate nation has no hope from a sealed heaven. I can put my finger on the cancer that crawled into the church in the form of compromise with the world and conformity to a God-hating society. When pastors quit preaching man's ruined natural condition, and stopped preaching man's duty of repentance and God's sovereignty and salvation, then the gospel took a back seat to society and churches became a spectator rather than a participant.

They chose comfort and security and self-preservation. Over the battle against Satan by proactively storming the gates of hell with fervent prayer and sweat-soaked sermons, dripping with the blood of Christ and warning sinners of the fires of hell. When a country has gone to hell, there is no hope for it.

The nations of the world, by endorsing and promoting the same sins that caused fire to fall out of heaven on Sodom and Gomorrah, take a united stand against a holy God who hates sin and who holds justice and judgment in his hands. Mercy is clean gone as the nations of the world stand like dominoes ready to fall from the breath of a provoked sovereign who looks down in disbelief on a world he has created that has turned its back on him. We have become the people spoken of by the apostle Paul in Titus 1.16. They profess that they know God, but in works they deny him, being abominable and disobedient and, unto every good work, reprobate.

When the people of a land are so dulled by sin that they fail to see the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, glistening with their own blood, then there is little hope left for them. The Puritan John Owen said it best when he said, When a sinful church or people have passed the utmost bounds of divine patience and forbearance, they fall into such abominable, crying sins and provocations as shall render the utmost vengeance beneath their desserts. So Josephus affirms of the Jews, after they had rejected and slain the Lord Christ, that they fell into such a hell of provoking abominations that if the Romans had not come and destroyed them, God would have sent fire and brimstone upon them from heaven, as he did on Sodom.

Oh, when a country has gone to hell, then hell is where the country will go.