Welcome to the
Pioneer and Bell Church of Christ

Foreword: Why Repent?

One of the wonderful things about today is that we evidently live in a sinless world.  There is no longer right or wrong, good or bad, nor black or white.  We live in a lovely world where everything is gray. Describing a similar situation in the Old Testament, "everyone did that which was right in his own eyes" (Judges 21:25). For over fifty years our nation has suffered our elite to lead us to a perfect society with liberty and social justice for all.  What have they produced for the 21st century?  Their "free speech movement" has produced a repulsive and vulgar vocabulary that makes old fashioned cussing seem wholesome. Their "free sex" movement has produced a Woodstock generation, utterly without morals or ethics.  Honor and principle has been relegated to the ash heap of history.  As a consequence, we are on the brink of becoming a "third world" nation.

This is what happens when a nation, or a people, gives up the standard for their moral and ethical conduct.   Their culture becomes diluted and eventually destroyed. Who would have thought that "alley cat morals," same sex marriages, and pornography would be casually accepted by a nation "endowed by their Creators with specific unalienable rights, including Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness; or a nation, in its Declaration of Independence from England appealed to the "Supreme Judge of the Universe; or a nation that no longer believes God is the Judge of man's conduct in this world, much less in the final Judgment Day of Almighty God; or a nation that in its beginning had a "firm reliance on the Protection of divine Providence"; or a nation whose Politicians seem unwilling to "mutually pledge to each other our Lives and Fortunes, and our sacred Honor."

When God's people in the Old Testament lost their way, as we seem to have done today, they repented and turned back to God.  God then accepted them and continued to bless them as long as they continued faithful to Him.  Jehovah warned Israel (Leviticus 18:24-30), "For in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you:  And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants.  Ye shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, and shall not commit any of these abominations; neither any of your own nation, nor any stranger that sojourneth among you:  (For all these abominations have the men of the land done, which were before you, and the land is defiled;)  That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you.  For whosoever shall commit any of these abominations, even the souls that commit them shall be cut off from among their people.  Therefore shall ye keep mine ordinance, that ye commit not any one of these abominable customs, which were committed before you, and that ye defile not yourselves therein: I am the LORD your God."

Many of the sexual immoralities practiced by the pagan nations of Moses' day are advocated or practiced by too many today in our nation.  They include (1) incest (sexual relations with relatives) Leviticus 18:6-18; (2) adultery 18:20; (3) homosexualism 18:22; and (4) bestiality (sex with animals) 18;23.  If these abominations were so sickening the land itself (attention all ecology partisans) vomited out her inhabitants, is it any less repulsive today?  If the God of Nature considered these abominations disgusting then, are they less so today?  Repent or perish may not be the kooky warning we once took it to be.

Dale I. Royal, Elk City OK