Chapter 4
IN TIMES LIKE THESE
Anyone who has lived fifty years has been in two different worlds. The
world of the last quarter
of the twentieth century is not the world of the first quarter. The century began with
philosophers cheerfully predicting the advent of a "golden age." Machines were taking the
drudgery out of human labor. New forms of transportation were being invented which were
expected to revolutionize travel and the hauling of commodities to market. It was freely
believed the skies would be conquered and the ocean would become a highway for sleek
ships plying the waters of every continent.
Poverty would be banished. Education would become universal. Illiteracy
would disappear.
Leisure to be utilized in self-improvement would be increased. It was a dream woven from the
fantasy that man was basically good and not evil. Only environment shaped character, and
when slums disappeared the slum mentality would disappear with it. Education was the magic
wand which could be waved to banish the dirty, the ugly and the unseemly. Man had the
potential to change his world and given due exposure to the arts and sciences he would do it.
The dream exploded like a balloon filled with hot air when two conflicts of
such magnitude as
to deserve the designation World Wars, swept over the globe like the poisoned breath of hell,
with a frightful depression sandwiched in between. In the very year that the self-styled "Pastor"
Russell, father of the cult now called Jehovah's Witnesses, predicted the times of the Gentiles
would be fulfilled and universal peace be ushered in, the first World War broke out. In the
United States of America the death of hope was hard and lingering. Woodrow Wilson was
elected for a second term on the basis of the shouted slogan, "He kept us out of war." When
we entered the rapidly-spreading conflict shortly thereafter we did so in the forlorn hope that
we were fighting the war which would end all wars.
The depression served to give the lie to the prophecy that in our land
poverty would disappear,
lingering only in memory as a crude relic of those days when man had not yet achieved his full
potential. Bankrupt financial tycoons dashed themselves to the sidewalk from the windows of
palatial suites in skyscrapers. Wealthy men of the year before sold apples on the street
corners. Freight trains were filled with gaunt and starving men moving from place to place in
the forlorn hope of finding employment. The slightest rumor set off a stampede. Long lines
formed at soup-kitchens hastily set up in cities, where one could get a bowl of hot gruel and a
crust of day-old bread. The garbage cans in the alley at the rear of hotels and restaurants were
thoroughly picked over for the morsels which they held, and for which human beings fought
with rodents.
But it was the second World War which finished off the idea that deep
down inside of every
human being there is a reservoir of good which requires only an emergency to bring it to the
surface and relate it to human need. The concept that education, learning in technology, and
exposure to theology make it possible for a people to have a polish which reinforces natural
moral goodness was buried in the mass graves where thousands had been lined up and
methodically shot in the head and were still twitching and groaning when huge bulldozers
pushed the cover of dirt in upon their emaciated and skeletal frames. It was wafted away in the
blue-gray smoke from the furnaces in concentration camps where human beings were fed to
the flames like ranks of cordwood.
Man's inhumanity to man, of which the poet wrote, reached its zenith in
Germany, and not in
some remote emerging nation seeking to free itself from black magic and voodoo. Here was a
nation known for its refinement. Its educational system reached back to the Middle Ages, and
under its benign influence illiteracy virtually became nonexistent. Great universities such as
those at Marburg, Cologne, Munich, Tubingen, Jena, Berlin and Leipzig had become
world-renowned. Heidelberg University, established in 1386, was justly famous.
Germany was the land of Luther and the Reformation. Its populace had
been exposed to a
culture shaped by theological discussion. Powerful preachers declaimed from the pulpits of
great religious edifices. But much of the ritual proved to be superficial and in the showdown
with naked power and raw savagery the faith went underground to avoid open encounter.
Out of the experience of war came cynicism and unbelief. The moral code
of the past was
swept away by the blood of the battlefield. A new order came in on the wings of revolution.
Men secretly doubted the existence of a God who remained silent during the holocaust. The
world was becoming secularized. The new religion was humanism. An affluent society basked
in the sheer enjoyment of things. Hedonism, with its pandering to the sensual became the new
philosophy. Once more the slogan of the ancient Epicureans became the guiding light for action.
"Let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die."
The spirit of adventure was being smothered by the life of indolence and
ease. It sought to
exist for awhile in the rareiBed atmosphere of self-indulgence but finally gasped its last. In its
expiration it took with it man's purpose for existence. The frontiers had disappeared. The land
had all been staked out. There were no more rivers to cross and no more mountains to climb.
As the knowledgeable historian reads the daily newspaper and the weekly
news magazine he
is struck with the fact that what he is reading is not really new. He has read it all before. And as
he begins searching for the time in history which provided a preview for the present, it dawns
upon him that the era which began with the death of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, and
continued through the first century of the Common Era, was just such a time as this.
Increasingly, men with analytical minds who are interpreters, as well as chroniclers of events,
are saying this in their books. Even Time magazine in its issue for August 23, 1976,
published
a bicentennial essay which compared the state of affairs in Rome at her fall with conditions in
our society today.
It was this world into which the Son of God descended to become the Son
of man. It was this
world which was penetrated by the most outstanding missionary who ever lived. And it was this
man who, in a letter addressed to residents of the capital of the world government, painted a
lurid picture of the degradation and vice which prevailed, and which causes a shudder to go
through the frame of the sensitive reader to this day. Against that world, a little minority group
made up of social outcasts and virtual unknowns, pitted its strength in a dedicated effort and
won! They were soldiers of the cross, an emblem of shame, and they did not stop until that cross
was made an ensign of honor and courage.
Theirs was a battle for the minds of men. They were not interested in
lowering national
banners of cloth and hoisting a literal flag to flap in the breeze above government structures.
As one of the soldiers put it, "For though we live in the world we are not carrying on a worldly
war, for the weapons of our warfare are not worldly but have divine power to destroy
strongholds. We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and
take every thought captive to obey Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:3-5).
This is battlefield talk, but there is one phrase which stands out like a
towering peak. Divine
power to destroy! This was a search and seizure mission. Those who volunteered for it knew
that a malign force was loose in the universe. It enslaved the minds of men and motivated
them to every kind of vicious behavior. They designated the hidden and mysterious
proponents of that ruthless force as "the world rulers of this present darkness" (Ephesians
6:12). But the battalions of the cross carried no visible weapons. They were out to take
thoughts captive and you do not capture thoughts by sword or spear, or by side arms or
cannon. And they won the war!
Since the Prince of the Universe is again enlisting troops to battle "the
spiritual hosts of
wickedness," let us understand the kind of a world in which the ragged remnant won such a
victory in Century 1. One historian, Frederic W. Farrar, in a book which he dedicated to his
friend Robert Browning, the poet, began with these words: "The epoch which witnessed the
early growth of Christianity was an epoch of which the horror and the degradation have rarely
been equalled, and perhaps never excelled, in the annals of mankind."
Rome had become a world power but was rotten to the very core. One of
the contributing
forces to inner corruption was the fact that there were sixty-million slaves in the empire. These
had no family, no unifying faith, no hope, and no recognized rights. We get an insight into how
slaves were regarded from Marcus Terrentius Varro, who was employed by Julius Caesar to
collect and arrange the great memorial library of Rome. Varro himself wrote about 620 books,
covering a score of subjects. In a volume on husbandry he divides farm instruments into three
categories- the articulate, the inarticulate and the mute. The first comprised the slaves, the
second the cattle and asses, and the last the vehicles. A slave was a farm animal, a brute,
possessed of the power of speech. He had no more rights than a farm wagon or hay rake.
Marcus Porcius Cato, commonly referred to as "the Elder" to distinguish
him from his illustrious
great-grandson of the same name, was born on a farm in Tusculum, and grew up in a rural
setting. He retained a love for the simple life and became a real enemy of Greek culture which
he believed was destroying the very foundation of manliness and virtue. His book De
Agricultura advises farmers to discard everything that is incapable of further production.
Plows
that were broken should be thrown on the scrap-heap. Cattle that were too old to draw a
burden should be killed, slaves who were aged and sick should be allowed to starve to death.
As a result of the multiplicity of slaves there were two ensuing conditions
which eventually
caused the empire to disintegrate. One was the lordly pride of the wealthy nobility which
looked upon all work as contemptible and undignified. The upper classes were indolent. They
lolled about sumptuous banquet tables, engaged in sexual orgies and excesses, and through
gluttony and lust created an age of monotony and despair from which thousands sought
escape by suicide.
Those who owned hundreds of slaves had to expand their acreage in order
to keep them
employed and to feed them. Inflated prices were offered for land and small farmers, previously
the backbone of the nation, sold out to syndicates and moved into the cities. Italy was
converted from a rural to an urban culture with all of the tragic upsets which occur under such
a transformation. Unsuited to city life the peasants became beggars and idlers, demanding
that the government furnish them food and games for entertainment. They turned the civic
center of Rome into a slum district where they existed in six and seven story insulae,
government housing projects which were dirty, miserable and dangerous. Murder and violence
became an accepted way of life in the narrow winding rabbit-warren of streets. The "long hot
summers" were filled with screams and cries for help which were seldom heeded because of
the fear of personal danger from involvement.
Pornography flourished in every form. This word means literally "the
writing of harlots," and
referred originally to the drawings and suggestive poetry used by prostitutes to lure customers.
In the age of the apostles it was rife. A good example is found in the ruins of Pompeii,
destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., while the apostle John was still living. When
the site was excavated in modern times the moral filth and obscenity portrayed upon the walls
of the homes and public baths was so vicious that the general public was debarred from
access to some areas.
It is generally conceded that the literature started on the road toward utter
and fatal
degeneracy with the writings of Titus Maccius Plautus, who died less than two centuries before
the birth of Jesus. Plautus went to Rome while very young and was employed in a
theater. He took the money he made and invested it in a business which ended in bankruptcy,
forcing him to secure employment in a mill. It was at this time he decided upon a career of
writing comic and satrical plays for the stage. His plots were all based upon love affairs, some
of them homosexual in nature. He is credited with more than a hundred productions, some of
which were vulgar and bawdy burlesques. He set the tone and prepared the stage and it was
climaxed in the sordid fiction of men like Gaius Petronius, who committed suicide the year that
Paul was beheaded.
The state of things in the Empire was reflected in the decay of married life
and the downfall of
the home. In the early days family life was a sacred and treasured heritage. For 520 years
divorce was absolutely unknown, until Carvilius Ruga divorced his wife in 234 B.C. This
opened the flood-gate and marital fidelity was swept away in the on-rushing tide. Before long,
according to Horace and Ovid, Roman poets who lived near the time of Jesus, marriage had
fallen into such disrepute that free love was advocated without legal restraint.
Seneca, the philosopher, was contemporary with Paul. He had been
recalled from exile by
Agrippina, wife of the emperor Caligulus, in 49 A.D. to serve as tutor for Nero. It was Gallic, the
brother of Seneca, who was proconsul of Achaia, when Paul was brought before him by a
Jewish mob (Acts 18:12). Seneca is an authority for the condition of things at the very time in
which we are interested. He declared that "women were married to be divorced, and divorced
in order to marry." He also added that noble Roman matrons counted the years not by the
Consuls, but by their discarded or discarding husbands.
It is remarkable how the writers of the
age emphasize the fact that children were neither wanted nor desired. To have a family was
regarded as a
serious misfortune. Children were regarded as units of consumption and not production. They
acted as drags upon the social life. When there were children they were placed under the care
of slaves who were decrepit and useless for other work, and they soon caught the contagion of
vice by which they were everywhere surrounded.
In the maelstrom of horror and immorality, of cruelty and sadism, moved
the little band of
adventurers, who had enlisted under the standard of the crucified One. They knew they were
engaged in a war for life and death. Their writings betoken the fact that they recognized
themselves as soldiers. Their metaphorical allusions are those of the battle-field. They were
fighting the good fight of faith. They endured hardships and combat weariness. There was
nothing namby-pamby, wishy-washy or fiddle-faddling about their lives. They were not
play-acting. It was for real!
Their persecution was real. They spoke of fiery trials, of suffering and
abuse. But they also
talked of victory and triumph. They comforted and strengthened one another. And they won
the fight. Their voice went out to all the earth and their words to the ends of the world. Now the
call comes to you! It comes incessantly! It comes with the fresh breeze of the morning as you
awaken. It comes on the night winds that blow outside your window. It is the call to enroll
and-enlist, to join the martyr-ranks of the ages.
It is the call to identify with the Christ who died, and with the multitude of
the living who need
Him. No one else can take your place. If you resist and refuse, the ranks will be broken where
you ought to be. Rise up above the trivia of daily life and join the force of the world-beaters,
the joy-proclaimers, the strangers and pilgrims who are marching toward glory. The new
frontier is spiritual! There are undiscovered areas in your own heart and soul. There are depths
of being not yet probed. There are soul-heights not yet ascended. Find them and take
possession of them for the absent King!
Contents
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