The Commentary

I know this will not make happy reading, but the woes of our country are piling up.

First, of course, our economic problems are now enormous. The City has been a major contributor to the exchequer in recent years, but the economist Ruth Lea has written, ‘in the wake of the current crisis, this sector is not expected to be a major source of growth — on the contrary it is likely to contract’. Then there is the loss of manufacturing. The French President has described Britain as a country that doesn’t manufacture anything. In fact, manufacturing still accounts for 13% of GDP, but, with the recession, companies are closing. The steel producer Corus is under pressure. Then there is the depletion of our oil and gas reserves.

But our decline is not just economic. Our prisons are running at full capacity, with more needing to be built. According to a study last year, 45% of marriages in Britain will end in divorce. Despite record spending on the NHS, our hospitals struggle to keep clean and scandals about the mistreatment of patients, especially the elderly, have become regular news stories. When it comes to education, many people believe that standards have plummeted in the last 30 years and it certainly seems that anti-social behaviour from young people has increased in our schools and on the streets. The police often remind us that terrorist plots are being hatched against our citizens.

And, on top of all this, the whiff of sleaze now hangs over our Parliament with the recent revelations concerning the expenses of many MPs. This has caused some people to express a loss of faith in our democracy.

Eerie silence

Surely, as we look at this picture of Britain through biblical eyes, we must see a country under the judgment of God. The word of God asks the rhetorical question, ‘When disaster comes to a city, has not the LORD caused it?’ (Amos 4.6). We believe God is sovereign over the nations and his judgments are in the earth. And yet, as we are living through these scary times, I am not hearing the church explaining the situation either to its members or to the nation. An eerie silence prevails. It is as if we are in denial. There are three elements which foster the silence. The first is the rationalist outlook which sees our troubles as purely man made and, therefore, fixable by man. The second is the abandonment of a moral worldview for a purely therapeutic one. ‘Why would God want to judge us, even if we have aborted seven million lives since 1967 and derided his laws? Isn’t he a God of love?’ And the third reason the church is so silent is our fear of being ridiculed if we speak out.

The worry is that the situation is deteriorating and at some time it could become of crisis proportions. At such a time a government might propose something stupid and the electorate go along with it to get us out of the hole. Extreme right wing policies? Arab money and shari’a law? In emergency situations we are encouraged to believe that extreme and radical solutions are necessary. Fanatics wait in the wings to take their opportunities.

God’s call

We must stand against this. We are being judged by God, and what the country needs to hear is the gospel. The LORD has a word for our times: ‘If at any time I announce that a nation or a kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned’ (Jeremiah 18.7,8). There is still good news in Christ.

Country in denial

Eerie silence

God’s call

John Benton

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