How should Christians think about the past? Is the world getting worse? Should we desire to go back to the good ole days? In this episode, Pastors Derek Brown and Cliff McManis explain why longing for the past is neither biblical nor spiritually healthy.
Transcript
Derek: Welcome to With All Wisdom, where we are applying biblical truth to everyday life. My name is Derek Brown. I am pastor and elder at Creekside Bible Church in Cupertino, California, and I am here today with Cliff McManis. He is also pastor and elder at Creekside Bible Church, and we are both professors at the Cornerstone Bible College and Seminary in Vallejo, California. Today, we want to encourage our listeners and help you to continue to develop a Christian worldview, particularly in this area of expectations, happiness, looking back on the past, perhaps with rose-colored glasses, romanticizing the past. We want to talk about why Christians shouldn’t want to go back to the glory days. In fact, Solomon, writing at the end of his life, gives us a profound bit of wisdom with this statement in Ecclesiastes. Perhaps you haven’t noticed this verse before, it really struck me just a year or so ago when I read this verse. It felt like for the first time, although I know I hadn’t, it just struck me as profoundly wise. But Solomon says this. He’s writing it at the end of his life. He’s had a long life, learned a lot of things, had trials, had a close walk with the Lord, but then drifted away and then came back. And here’s what he writes at the end of his life. He says, Say not, why were the former days better than these? For it is not from wisdom that you ask this. And so what Solomon is encouraging his listeners to do is to not romanticize the past, to not look back with rose-colored glasses, to wish you could go back to some sort of former glory days. That’s not wise. And we want to talk about why that’s not wise. Cliff, you’ve got a number of things you want to say about this topic, so let me just turn it over to you.
Cliff: Yeah, thanks, Derek. Well, you and I, as we do these podcasts, we usually bring a topic of interest. That we think we need to talk about from Scripture, developing biblical principles to encourage our people. So these issues that we talk about are pastorally driven. These are issues that we hear our sheep and our local church talk about. They raise these issues. They ask us specific questions, and we want to help them go to Scripture to find answers. And here’s an issue that has arisen and has been, I’ve heard it more than a few times during the pandemic, exactly what you just said, is some of our people repeating the statement, oh, if we could just go back to the good old days, or the way it once used to be, or let’s get back to the glory days. Maybe that’s not their exact wording, but many times that’s the implication of what they’re saying. If we could just go back to better times, and they’re longing for that, and desiring that, and even thinking ways that they could bring those glory days back to the present. And then there are even ministries that are well-known, some that if I mentioned their name you’d be familiar with, like the Presbyterian Church, very large Presbyterian Church in Florida that for years and even decades on their main website, along with the Great Commission, one of the main things they think they need to do is reclaim America. That’s the terminology. They’ve had that for 30, 40 years to reclaim America, and the idea is that at one time America was literally a Christian nation, and it was a better nation, and for them as a church and their international ministry, those were the glory days, and they are purposely seeking and calling on Christians to reclaim those glory days. And when I saw that as a quasi mission of a local church, I just thought, that’s not right. That’s not biblically driven. We have the Great Commission. We don’t need another call and mission from God. But on a personal level, we’ve got our saints telling us we need to get back to the glory days, and a corollary statement that they’re making to that is the reason they want to go back to the glory days is because as they look around the world right now, they’re saying the world as we know it right now is worse now than it’s ever been, Pastor Cliff. We recently had Halloween, and they were going around the neighborhood and seeing all the gory costumes and decorations, and Christians were saying, I think this Halloween is worse and more wicked and evil and dark than it’s ever been than it is now, and I’m thinking, no, not really. At least not where I grew up when I was a kid in my neighborhood, it was pretty bad. And sometimes these same people say this every Halloween season, forgetting that, oh, that’s what I said last year. So it’s just the way they’re perceiving things. I can sympathize with people like that because at this time in the world and with the media and turning on the news, we get a constant barrage of a message that bolsters that viewpoint that, boy, things are really bad and really depressing. As a matter of fact, my wife and I were watching the news last night, which we haven’t done in a very long time, and purposely so, avoiding it, and we were with a couple others. So we actually sat down and watched it, and 20, 30 minutes ago, I’m thinking, this is very depressing. Now I know why I don’t watch the news very much. And then not long after that, my wife said, okay, I’m done. This is depressing. No wonder I don’t watch the news. So this is a real problem, and we need to think about it properly and make proper assessments and diagnoses. But at bottom, what you and I wanted to do with our people is encourage them with timeless biblical principles that can really help us gain a proper perspective so that we’re not living in light of the past, a past that doesn’t exist, a past that’s fleeting, a past that actually is contrary to how the Bible calls us to live in the present. So we don’t need to get back to the glory days. So a couple main principles that I just want to explore with you, Derek, and then we can glean some biblical principles to live by, was the first one is this idea that many Christians articulate and actually believe when they say that the world is worse now than it has ever been. And when we hear that, they’re talking, what they’re really saying is that life is worse now than it’s ever been, and because we live in Northern California, they’re saying California is worse than it’s ever been, or America is worse than it’s ever been. Or sometimes, the world is worse now than it’s ever been in the history of the world. There’s never been a time this bad, so what are your initial thoughts when you hear that from a biblical point of view?
Derek: Well, I, like you, as I can sympathize with that, and I think part of that is, you’ve already mentioned, the ubiquity of the news. So we learn of news that 50 years ago we would have never learned about. I mean, I can turn on the news and know about a house fire on the East Coast, and that’s news and the destruction that it wrought there. And so people have this access to depressing news from all over the place. So it just seems like, wow, you know, if you compare that to 20 years ago, you didn’t have as much knowledge of all the bad things going on in the world. It seems like it is getting worse. But thinking about it biblically, you open up the scriptures, and soon after, I mean, immediately after the fall, you have murder. And then shortly after that, you have polygamy and a domineering husband who’s with his wives who’s threatening to kill people who barely hurt him. And it’s just from the get-go, as soon as sin is unleashed on the world, things are bad. They’re really bad. People are dying. There’s murder. There’s an upsetting of the order in terms of marriage. And so when I hear that, again, like you, I sympathize with it, but I need to go back to the Word of God to be reminded that because sin has entered the world, and sin has entered the world, things have been bad. In fact, if you trace the trajectory up to Noah’s time, things were horrible. In fact, that’s what brought about the flood. The thoughts and intentions of the heart were only evil continually, and there was much violence on the earth. And so when you start to trace these things through the storyline of scripture, it’s not you don’t even get to Genesis chapter 6, 7, and 8 that you realize, wow, no, it’s been really bad for a long time.
Cliff: So yeah, that is a great point. Well stated. And I’ll go back to that statement that we hear when someone when a Christian voices this statement, the world is worse now than it’s ever been. As a pastor, as a Bible teacher, we can just say, no, it’s not when they say the world is worse than it’s ever been. We should say, I think we’re obligated to say, no, it’s not. And there’s why. Because really what we’re saying is, well, I think your perspective is wrong, or your thinking is wrong. You’re coming to wrong conclusions because you have wrong understanding, a lack of information, wrong presuppositions. You’ve neglected something, you forgot something. That’s a great passage that you mentioned. I’ll just read it in Genesis 6. People say the world’s worse now than it’s ever been. Then immediately I’m thinking, well, a Christian should never be saying that because they should know their Bible. In biblical history, the book of Genesis is clear. As you said, Adam and Eve sinned. That was real. They were real people. And God got angry and God punished Adam and Eve. He punished Satan and the snake that was involved. He literally put a curse on the earth. And the earth has been under a curse ever since then. And then there was, as people born of Adam and Eve, they were all born sinners. And the more people you have, the more compounded sin is corporately. So it just gets exacerbated and grows worse and worse. And that’s exactly what you’re alluding to there in Genesis 6, where hundreds and hundreds of years go by of people populating the earth, born in sin and born as sinners, the result of the curse and disobedience of Adam, to the point where God wasn’t going to tolerate the widespread sinfulness anymore, either the depth or the breadth of it. And that’s why Genesis 6 says, as Moses is recounting what happened, probably around 2500 BC, in the days of Noah, where God looked down on the earth and the widespread sin, humans began to multiply upon the earth. And then God said, his spirit said, I shall not strive with man forever, because humans are so sinful. And then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man or humanity was great on the earth. There it is. So you take the statement, well, the world today is worse now than it’s ever been. No. God said thousands of years ago in the days of Noah, when the Lord saw and made an assessment that the wickedness of man is great on the earth. That’s corporately. And then he makes a diagnosis of the individual. And that is that every intent of the thoughts of a man’s heart was only evil continually. And that’s been true ever since, of every human being going into this world. So those people were completely wicked and corrupt, and they had the potential to do horrible and wicked things on an individual on a mass scale, and nothing’s changed really ever since. Humans are the same. We’re equally fallen today as we were then. So that’s God’s historical assessment from Scripture. So we need to be thinking biblically when we deal with this issue. So what I wanted to do from a pastoral point of view is ask our people, if you’re a Christian, just consider the following, and there’s a corollary Bible verse or truth to counter the following statements that I want to make when addressing this issue, when people say the world is worse now than it has ever been. Why do people say that and why do Christians say that? I just thought of five basic reasons maybe why people say that and they’re thinking wrong. One you’ve already alluded to, and that is people say this because they romanticize the past.
Derek: Right.
Cliff: What do you mean by that?
Derek: I mean that we tend to, for whatever reason, look back and only remember things that were good and we consider how what we had experienced in the past was a simpler time or a better time or we had less trials then or less anxieties then. And what I mean by romanticizing is that we just remember selectively and we don’t actually remember the trials and the struggles that we had. And I was just thinking of this the other day. Right now our family’s facing a bit of a small trial and it’s creating anxiety and my thoughts have been, man, I wish I could go back to three years ago when we didn’t have this issue. But if I went back to three years ago, we got other issues that are causing anxiety and that are trials and that are troublesome. So that’s what I mean. This looking back with a kind of selective memory of only remembering the good things rather than realizing, no, there are always, those things are always attended by struggles and trials and troubles.
Cliff: So yeah, that’s a good point. I think we are all vulnerable to doing that, thinking of only the good things that we grew up with and we forget about the bad things. Or when we romanticize stuff in our past that we grew up with that when we look back, it really wasn’t good at all, actually. That’s another problem.
Derek: That is a problem.
Cliff: Because I grew up not really in a Bible believing home, but we loved Christmas at my house growing up and we had Christmas music and our family had only one Christmas album. I don’t know if you know what an album is.
Derek: I do. I was born in the late 70s.
Cliff: There you go. So that’s what we had. And we would pull that baby out, scratches and all, and listen to it every year, memorize all the songs. And it had like 15 songs on it. Mitch Miller’s Christmas, I think it was called. So then I get saved when I’m 19 and then I’m in college and then I get married. And then I have my first Christmas with my wife and say, oh, I’ve got the perfect album for Christmas music and get a copy of it and start playing that baby. I’m thinking, boy, these songs are really stupid. This is terrible. And I looked at all 12, 13, not one of those Christmas songs had anything to do with Jesus.
Derek: Yeah.
Cliff: And it was just dawned on me. It was like, wow, was I romanticizing the past. And the Bible says, think on things that are true. Don’t romanticize things that are not true. Another reason why people wrongly say the world is worse now than it has ever been is they’re just simply ignorant of history, world history in particular. So if you want to go back to the past, the question is, have you forgotten just the horrible record of human history and misery and sin and devastation, much of which, especially we live in America, where we’ve been shielded from that. So just some of the events. Take the modern pandemic of COVID where they say now 759,000 people have died. With COVID, not necessarily from COVID, there is a difference. 759,000, that’s a lot of people. But that’s not the worst pandemic ever.
Derek: No, not even close.
Cliff: Not even close. It’s just some that I looked at. The plague in around 541 AD, 50 million people worldwide died.
Derek: That’s incredible.
Cliff: 50 million. The Black Death in 1347. In the course of four years, estimates vary. Anywhere from 50 million to 200 million people died.
Derek: I’d only heard the lower range of that.
Cliff: Yeah, the numbers are conflicting, but all the way from 50 to 200 million. And then the one that surprised me, I knew this, but I forgot about it, was the flu pandemic of 1918. 50 million. 50 million people died, not got sick, died, compared to COVID going on two years, 759,000. So just a quick survey of history. Has an account of what the Bible says is true, that since the time of Adam and Eve, their sin, their disobedience, when God cursed the earth, and the wickedness of humanity and God’s curse on the earth has been alive and well. It’s actually not getting any better. So the world is worse now than it’s ever been, so don’t romanticize it, don’t forget about history, and including that is just Biblical history.
Derek: Right.
Cliff: Taught and studied the Old Testament. Derek, as you look at Israel’s Old Testament history, were those the glory days?
Derek: Not at all. They had spots here and there that were encouraging, but overall, it is just a horrendous history of sin, of murder, of leaders turning against their people, turning away from God, all kinds of terrible things happening at the hands of sinful men and women, all throughout the entire history of Israel, and the most important of which, Israel as a nation turning away from God and his law, and God having to discipline them, and that was happening over and over and over because they were continuing to sin and reject God over and over and over.
Cliff: Yes, and starting with Saul, the first king, and then it’s just all downhill from there, spiraling down into the pit of 500s where they actually go into exile because of their compromise, and that was with God on their side and God in their corner. They were a believing nation, which we can’t say about America.
Derek: Right.
Cliff: So, don’t be ignorant of history. The world is worse now than it’s ever been. People say that, I think, just because Christians say that, is they need to, they’re either ignorant or not well-versed in their hamartiology, their study of sin.
Derek: Sin, right.
Cliff: Got any thoughts on that?
Derek: Yeah, so I think when we recognize, when you really do grasp the reality, and for whatever reason it’s challenging to do this, maybe we want to believe the best about people or sometimes it’s just hard to believe that people can be so evil. But the doctrine of sin, biblically speaking, teaches us that apart from the grace of God, apart from God’s intervention, either spiritually or in a physical way actually stopping the evil, as we saw in Genesis 6, the heart is constantly churning out evil. And so, when you understand that, when you understand that an unredeemed person, unregenerate person, all of us in our natural state tend towards evil, tend towards rejection of God, tends towards hatred of others, tend towards total selfishness, tend towards the kinds of sins that begin in the heart that eventually end in, say, hatred leading to murder, lust leading to adultery. We are all, our hearts are constantly churning out evil. And so, you should not be surprised, therefore, when you see serious acts of sin in society or serious corruption within institutions or within nations, because this is what sin does. This is what the heart is truly, really like, and really the only reason why you have a, why you don’t have people being as outwardly evil as they could be, because total depravity, that’s what we believe the scripture teaches, that the whole person, every part of that person is infected with sin. But they’re not as evil as they could be, at least in terms of their outward actions, because God, by His grace, actually holds some of that evil back so that society can even function in some semblance of order. So, but if He were to let go and remove His hand, we would be in a wash of anarchy, because that is the direction that the sinful heart goes. That’s the doctrine of sin.
Cliff: Yeah, well stated. So, if I’ve got a congregant, or one of my saints comes up to you or me, and they say, Pastor Cliff, the world is worse now than it’s ever been. One thing I could tell them is, brother, sister, you need to beef up your hamartiology, or you need to better inform your Christian worldview. And that seems like what we keep trying to get back to on all these issues, is have a well-balanced, thoroughly informed Christian worldview, which is the whole spectrum of systematic theology, which would include hamartiology, the doctrine of sin. And you nailed it. I think of two verses when I think of having a biblical hamartiology that are kind of pillars or a foundation of proper thinking, is that one you referred to in Genesis 6.5, and that’s the heart and the thoughts of sinners. And then this one, Jeremiah 17.9, which we know so well. This is God’s assessment, again, the heart, and that’s the heart of man, the heart of every human. This is the heart of you, if you’re listening. It’s the heart of me as I’m talking. Human age, we’re all born with this heart. That’s the innermost recesses of our very being. The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick or wicked. Who can understand it? That’s true of every human being. And you made a key statement in your last paragraph there, where you said it’s hard for a lot of people to believe. They want to believe the best in everybody, you know? People are good, and by nature we’re good. And that’s not what God says, if we’re being honest about the doctrine of sin. So, one last point, just close with this, and that is when somebody says, the world is worse now than it’s ever been. I think sometimes people say that because their thinking is wrong, they’ve been misled, they’ve been deceived. And a lot of times you already mentioned that in light of all the media out there. And it’s so humanistic, anti-biblical, it’s everywhere you go, it’s in your face, it’s negative, it’s undermining Scripture, they glamorize and normalize immorality. And they want you to think that you are in the minority with your Christian virtues and your Christian convictions. And they want you to think that everybody else in the world embraces all this grotesque sin that they are, like I said, glorifying.
Derek: That’s right.
Cliff: And as a result, and then we’re in our little bubble and we start thinking, yeah, maybe they’re right. And with that, I just counter that with the emphasis in Scripture that we need to put a priority on controlling our thinking and having biblical thinking. Philippians 4:8 is a great one where Paul says, whatsoever is pure and lovely and all these beautiful biblical, whatever is true, let your mind dwell or meditate on these things and peace will result.
Derek: And that’s such an encouraging reminder because that whole passage in Philippians 4, a good portion of it, is about the peace that counters our anxiety. And I tell you what, constant talk from the news about all the various kinds of wickedness that they’re having, that creates anxiety. And I need to have my mind refreshed by the truth of God, the truth of God’s word, these things that are lovely, pure, and honorable. And that brings about, by God’s grace and by His Spirit, that brings about peace and a true inward peace that actually surpasses all understanding that Paul says just before in verse 6. And so, such an important reminder, Christians to continue to cultivate that biblical worldview, continue to saturate your mind in the Word of God, to be strengthened and encouraged by it, and to not look back at the glory days, not look back and romanticize the past. In fact, in that same book of Philippians, Paul even says that there’s one thing that he does. If you wanted to summarize his Christian life, here’s what he does. He doesn’t look back. He looks forward to the upward call of God in Christ Jesus, forgetting what lies behind. We press on towards the coming of Christ and being with Him. And that is the encouragement for all Christians. So, Cliff, great discussion. I appreciate all of your excellent insight on this topic, and we’re glad that you joined us today. And if it’s your first time, let me just tell you about withallwisdom.org. We want you to check out that website. It’s a place where we have all of our written and audio resources for your growth in the faith, a lot of different articles on a lot of different topics, both theological and practical. And until next time, have a great week and continue to seek the Lord in His Word.
