the five reasons for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire — secular historian Edward Gibbon

"But why, in spite of all our efforts and endeavors and great advances, is the world still in trouble? Why is every advance followed by regression, every rise by a decline and fall? Why do our attempts to govern the world end in disaster? What is the matter? And there is only one answer. It is due to the fact that men and women have sinful and fallen natures; it is due to their estrangement from God; and, more, it is due to God’s wrath upon humanity in its sinfulness and arrogance. But the tragedy of the world is that it does not realize this.

I was reading again, only the other day, and it struck me forcibly, the explanation given by that great historian Edward Gibbon, who was not a Christian, for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. And if his explanation is not also true of this country today, then I am completely ignorant!

Here are the five reasons he gives:

  1. The rapid increase of divorce and “the undermining of the dignity and sanctity of the home, which is the basis of human society.” Now that is not being said by me, a little evangelical preacher—that is the great Edward Gibbon, and, of course, he is right. The home is the fundamental unit in society and once the home goes, everything will go, sooner or later.
  2. “Higher and higher taxes and the spending of public monies on bread and circuses.”
  3. “The mad craze for pleasure and sport; sport becoming every year more and more exciting and brutal.”
  4. “The building of gigantic armaments when the real enemy is within—in the decadence of the people themselves.”
  5. “The decay of religious faith; faith fading into mere form which has lost all contact with reality.”

The Roman Empire was a wonderful civilization. Those Romans were perhaps the greatest experts the world has ever known on local government and on legal systems. The Roman system—that was real civilization. Add to that the Greek civilization that had gone just before, and you had human endeavor almost at its highest point. But what happened to it? It was conquered by the Barbarians, the Goths, and the Vandals—the ignoramuses. How did they ever conquer this great civilization? Gibbon’s answer is that internal rot in the civilization itself weakened and destroyed the Roman Empire. And that, I repeat, is the story of human civilization.
All human systems fail because the trouble is within the people themselves, and external rules and laws and regulations cannot change them. It is not that we need better laws, but that we need better natures; not better instruction, but better spirits and better desires. And so all this human history comes to nothing. And yet these earthly authorities prohibit the preaching of the Gospel, the only thing that can save the situation."

— Martyn Lloyd-Jones (2003). Vol. 3: Victorious Christianity (1st U.S. ed.). Studies in the Book of Acts (102–103). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Book

Here Christ is hungered, here He is athirst, is naked, is a stranger, is sick, is in prison… — Augustine

"Here Christ is hungered, here He is athirst, is naked, is a stranger, is sick, is in prison. For whatsoever His Body suffereth here, He hath said that Himself suffereth; and at the end, severing off this His Body to the right hand, and severing the rest by whom He is now trodden under foot to the left, He will say to those on the right hand, “Come, ye blessed of My Father, receive the kingdom which hath been prepared for you from the beginning of the world.” For what deservings? “For I was an hungred, and ye gave Me meat;” and so He goes over the rest, as if He had Himself received; to such a degree that they, not understanding it, make answer and say, “Lord, when saw we Thee an hungred, a stranger, and in prison?” And He saith to them, “Forasmuch as ye have done it to one of the least of Mine, ye have done it unto Me.” So also in our own body, the head is above, the feet are on the earth; yet in any crowding and throng of men, when any one treads on your foot, does not the head say, “You are treading upon me?” No one has trodden on your head, or on your tongue; it is above, in safety, no harm has happened unto it; and yet because by the bond of charity there is unity from the head even to the feet, the tongue does not separate itself therefrom, but says, “You are treading upon me;” when no one has touched it. As then the tongue, which no one has touched, says, “You are treading upon me;” so Christ, the Head, which no one treadeth on, said, “I was an hungred, and ye gave Me meat.” And to them who did not so, He said, “I was an hungred, and ye gave Me no meat.” And how did He finish? Thus; “These shall go into everlasting burning, but the righteous into life eternal.”

— Augustine of Hippo. (1888). Sermons on Selected Lessons of the New Testament

the great love and mercy of our God — C.H. Spurgeon

“If it comes to a pitched battle between sin and Grace, you shall not be so bad as God shall be good. I will prove it to you. You can only sin as a man, but God can forgive as a God! You sin as a finite creature, but the Lord forgives as the infinite Creator…
The riches of the Grace of God are above all limit… the grace of God surpasses all you know, all you see and all you think…
 We cannot allow you to apply the word “great” to your sin, we need to reserve it for the mercy of God. We must monopolize the word; for all greatness dwells in the love and mercy of our God. However much you may have wandered, however black you may be, however defiled, God delights in mercy: it is the joy of his heart to pass by transgression and sin through the precious blood of Christ. Do not do my Lord so great a dishonor as to measure your sin and affirm that it outstrips his mercy. It cannot be! You know nothing about the glorious nature of my Lord. A child may fill its little cup out of the great sea, but the sea never misses it. Your sin is like that cup, and you may fill it to the brim with mercy, but the ocean of love will never miss all that you can take from it. Come, take all that you can take, and none shall question you. Wash out your crimson stains in this pure flood, and it shall remain as pure as at the first. I would not speak lightly of your sin: it is an exceeding great and grievous thing: but still I do say over again that as compared with the infinite mercy of God it is but as a shadow to the sun, or a grain of sand to the full ocean at its flood.”

— C.H. Spurgeon

The freer gospel, the more sanctifying is the gospel — Thomas Chalmers

"The freer gospel, the more sanctifying is the gospel; and the more it is received as a doctrine of grace, the more will it be felt as a doctrine according to godliness…
Salvation by grace—salvation by free grace—salvation not of works, but according to the mercy of God, salvation on such a footing is not more indispensable to the deliverance of our persons from the hand of justice than it is to the deliverance of our hearts from the chill and the weight of ungodliness. Retain a single shred or fragment of legality with the gospel, and you raise a topic of distrust between man and God. You take away from the power of the gospel to melt and to conciliate. For this purpose the freer it is the better it is. That very peculiarity which so many dread as the germ of Antinomianism, is, in fact, the germ of a new spirit and a new inclination against it. Along with the lights of a free gospel does there enter the love of the gospel, which, in proportion as you impair the freeness, you are sure to chase away. And never does the sinner find within himself so mighty a moral transformation as when, under the belief that he is saved by grace, he feels constrained thereby to offer his heart a devoted thing, and to deny ungodliness."

 — Thomas Chalmers. The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. The World’s Great Sermons, Volume 4: L. Beecher to Bushnell (G. Kleiser, Ed.) (75–76).

spiritual strengthening ― B.B. Warfield

“The spiritual strengthening is contingent on, or let us rather say, is dependent on the abiding presence of Christ in their hearts. The indwelling Christ is the source of the Christian's spiritual strength...

Your strength is grounded in the indwelling Christ, wrought by the Spirit by means of faith. Thus we have laid before us the sources of the Christian's strength. It is rooted in Christ, the Christ within us, abiding there by virtue of the Spirit's action quickening and upholding faith in us. And only as by the Spirit our faith is kept firm and clear, will Christ abide in us, and will we accordingly be strong in the inner man (Ephesians 3:16:19)…

Here then is an intermediate link between the strengthening by the Spirit and the enlargement of our spiritual understanding. It is "love." The proximate effect of the Spirit's work in empowering the inner man with might is not knowledge but love; and the proximate cause of our enlarged spiritual apprehension is not the strengthening of our inner man, but love. The Spirit does not immediately work this enlargement of mind in us; He immediately works love, and only through working this love, enlarges our apprehension (Ephesians 3:16:19). The Holy Ghost "sheds love abroad in our hearts." Love is the great enlarger. It is love which stretches the intellect. He who is not filled with love is necessarily small, withered, shrivelled in his outlook on life and things. And conversely he who is filled with love is large and copious in his apprehensions. Only he can apprehend with all saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth of things. The order of things in spiritual strengthening is therefore: (1) the working by the Spirit of a true faith in the heart, and the cherishing by the Spirit of this faith in a constant flame; (2) the abiding of Christ by this faith in the heart; (3) the shedding abroad of love in the soul and its firm rooting in the heart; (4) the enlargement of the spiritual apprehension to know the unknowable greatness of the things of Christ.”

― B.B. Warfield

What does repentance mean? ― Martin Lloyd-Jones

“What, then, does repentance mean?… Our word repent comes from a Latin word that means ― to think again. But the corresponding Greek word for repentance means ―a change of mind…

The world is as it is today because it does not think. What utterly ridiculous ideas people have of Christianity. They think that people are Christians because they do not think and are still behaving like children. “If Christians would only think”, people say, “and apply their minds to what is happening in the world, they would give up their Christianity”. But it is the exact opposite. The people who watch television by the millions, are they great thinkers? I wonder whether their minds are being tested as yours are as you consider these things. I am reasoning with you. I am appealing to you to think.

This generation that boasts so much about its intellect does not think. If it did, it would not believe all the advertisements on television. That is just psychology, subliminal thinking, and does not bring about active, conscious thinking. People are given information by constant repetition and absorb it without knowing it. This is probably the most drugged, deluded, controlled generation the world has ever known. This is the age of propaganda and of advertising and of the negation of thinking. Obviously, not everything that is recommended is bad. No, but whether good or bad, people will buy something if they are told sufficiently frequently to do so…

Furthermore, you must think again. In other words, repentance means thinking in a new way. This is what Peter was really saying. We only have a synopsis of his sermon here, his main points, but here is the way he undoubtedly put it: “You are looking at this man, and you are looking at us. Now you must not do that because that is just excitement. It is just rushing over in amazement. Stop! Think now! Take this miracle and make it the starting point in a process of thinking. You think you have thought, but you have not. So I want you to start thinking in an entirely new manner.”

That is the great appeal of the Christian Gospel. Our natural thinking is prejudiced, and that is why it goes wrong. We start with certain presuppositions that we take for granted and have never examined, and then we argue round and round in a circle. Most people today who are not Christians start by deciding there is nothing in Christianity. They have no reason for that decision except that they think it is the twentieth-century, grown-up thing to do. Then all their thinking is designed to prove that there cannot be anything in it.

I have often used this illustration. Matthew Arnold put it like this: “Miracles cannot happen; therefore miracles have not happened.” Of course, if they cannot happen, they have not happened. But the question is: Are they impossible? Matthew Arnold was thinking badly when he laid down his postulate and then reasoned from it. The Gospel tells us to come further back and to examine this first postulate. Is a miracle inherently impossible? Think again! That is exactly what Peter was getting these people to do. He said in effect, “Can you not see that this man here, whom you know so well, who was born lame and has never walked in his life, is now walking, leaping, and praising God? Can you not see that your thinking must have been wrong somewhere? Look at the facts staring you in the face. Here is a concrete event. Here is a revelation of the power of this risen Jesus and of God His Father. Think again. Start afresh."

 And this is still the great appeal made by the Gospel. In exactly the same way, it turns to modern men and women and tells them, “As you see life collapsing all around you, the call of the Gospel to you is to think again and to think in the light of the teaching of the Bible.” Men and women do not just start with their own thoughts or the cleverness of popular newspaper articles. They start with prejudices and then cleverly work them out. But that is not thinking. Start with the revelation of this book.
 

Start with this great message. Think through your whole position again in terms of this. That is what is meant by the call to repentance. So are you ready to reexamine all your thinking? Are you ready to test your presuppositions in the light of this contention? Are you ready to admit that there is at any rate the possibility that you might be wrong?

You now come to the point of saying, “Very well, I‘m prepared to listen.” That is the beginning of repentance. And is that not what is needed in this country and in every other country at this present moment? Men and women have never considered this message. They think they have, but all they have done is dismiss it. They have never faced it. They have never brought all their thinking to the bar of this Word. They have never really come with an open mind and given it an opportunity. The call to repentance is a call to men and women to say, “Perhaps we‘ve been wrong. Is there something to this after all?” That is the first step.

 But what are you to think about? First, you must think again about God. Maybe you do not believe in God at all. You say, “It was all right to believe in God until the middle of the nineteenth century, but science has put God out. There‘s no need of Him. I believe in a universe apart from God. In a sense, if I have a god at all, my god is the universe.”

 Are you prepared to think again about that? That is what these apostles pleaded with their contemporaries to do. Paul says to the Christians in Rome in essence, “Can you not see that God has left His mark on the whole of creation? The invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made” (Rom. 1:20). They declare His Godhead and His creatorship. Can you really explain our universe without God? Does an original bang explain everything satisfactorily? Is it all an accident? Where did that matter come from that was exploded and dispersed in the big bang that scientists talk about? That leaves so much unexplained, and as you look at all the order and the design and the arrangement and the perfection in nature, and at providence and history and many other things, I ask you, are you comfortable with your neat little theories? Can you really explain the whole cosmos without God? I am simply asking you to be big enough to think again.” 

― Martin Lloyd-Jones, Authentic Christianity