A Threat Greater Than a Nuclear Bomb

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A Threat Greater Than a Nuclear Bomb

Where our teenage-dominant culture is leading us

Way ahead of his time, Herbert W. Armstrong once wrote, “Few people stop to realize to what extent the teenagers have taken over today. They pretty well dominate the world picture” (God Speaks Out on “The New Morality”). He wrote that in 1964—more than 45 years ago!

Mr. Armstrong asked, “Who determines what is ‘popular music’ today? The ‘teens.’ …

“Adolescents determine dancing trends, motion-picture themes, radio formats, and even advertisements and most fields of entertainment!”

Yes, indeed. Teenagers pretty much dominate Western culture.

Mr. Armstrong continued, “What many do not realize is that this teenage influence on the whole society is predominantly sexual influence. There is much more intense preoccupation with sex during these years than in later maturity.

“Therefore sex became the basic formula for motion pictures—along with crime, including murder.”

Here again, this was written in 1964!

By today’s standards, of course, television, movies and music from the early ’60s certainly seem harmless. But that is exactly the point—look at today’s “standards”!

Cultural Disease

With about 75 million in America, children 18 and under make up almost 25 percent of our population. In a godly society, we would be applauding and encouraged by that statistic. God has always intended for children to be a blessing to their parents—like “olive plants” around the table (Psalm 128:3)—and to society (Proverbs 20:29; 1 Timothy 4:12).

In these latter days, however, prophecy points to our youth as being a burden on society. Instead of helping to build it up, our own offspring are tearing it down. Isaiah 3:12 describes our children as being “oppressors”—a word that means to tax, harass and tyrannize.

This prophecy in Isaiah 3 is being fulfilled in two ways, primarily. One is in the more literal sense of youth oppressing society by their rebellious disregard for adult authority (verse 5).

The other fulfillment of this prophecy is even deadlier. It’s described in verse 4: “And I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them. God isn’t talking about children with respect to age necessarily, but rather the way adults are ruling: like children! Read the first three verses of Isaiah 3 and you will see all the qualities of leadership that have vanished from our society: vision, prudence, judgment, wisdom, honor and eloquence. God said these kinds of qualities would be practically extinct today. And it’s because, in far too many cases, our leaders—whether in the home, within education, or business, or in government—have degenerated to a child’s level of understanding. Instead of preparing our children for the responsibilities of adulthood, we, as adults, are acting like children.

In 1 Corinthians 13:11, the Apostle Paul wrote, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” Today, instead of putting away childish things and preparing our own children for adulthood, we are letting youth culture educate us.

“It’s the commercial media entertainment economy at work,” wrote Marcel Danesi in Forever Young—the Teen-Aging of Modern Culture. “Age is now considered a disease. Youth sells. There’s a big emphasis on having it all: good living, keeping your youth, having as much fun as you can. It’s empty because there is no wisdom behind it.” Worse still, he goes on to explain, “It’s a cultural disease. And now we’re into the final silly stages.”

A Different World

There are those who brush aside our cultural slide into gross immorality as being no different than previous generations. In one sense, that’s true—human nature has always been hostile to God’s law. But in these latter days, we are beginning to see just how rotten human nature is.

“But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived” (2 Timothy 3:13). People deceive themselves by thinking there is no special danger right now—that the world has always been like this. It has always been bad—but it’s getting so much worse. And today, unlike eras of old, modern advances have made the possibility of human annihilation a stark reality. That, of itself, ought to wake us up!

Of greater concern is our upside-down society—our rapidly deteriorating marriage and family structure. “Few, indeed, realize the shocking facts of this accelerating downward plunge,” Mr. Armstrong wrote. “It is rapidly becoming a greater threat to humanity than the hydrogen bomb!” (ibid.). This statement will be proven true.

Jesus assured us of that in Luke 17:26: “And as it was in the days of [Noah], so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man.” Christ said these latter days would be comparable to the days before the Flood. Genesis 6:5 describes the pre-Flood society: “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”

God is disgusted with our sexually-charged, teen-dominated culture just as He was with the pre-Flood society—and the way He was with Sodom and Gomorrah. Read 2 Peter 2:4-6 and see what pervasive sin ultimately led to in the case of those two societies.

It will happen again. God assures us of that in Bible prophecy.

Seven years after Mr. Armstrong first published God Speaks Out on “The New Morality,” he revised and updated the text under a new title: The Missing Dimension in Sex. In 1981, five years before he died, Mr. Armstrong updated the book one final time. He wrote in that final version, “Since it is a basic truism that a solid family structure is the foundational bulwark of any stable and permanent society, this fact means only one thing—civilization as we know it is on the way downand out—unless that great ‘Unseen Strong Hand from Someplace’ soon intervenes and saves today’s sick society.”

In fact, God will intervene to save humanity, but not until we teeter on the brink of total disaster.

We have been freely distributing The Missing Dimension in Sex for the past eight years now. If you don’t have a copy, please request one. It was inspired by that “Unseen Strong Hand”—and it reveals the only safe passage out of our sin-sick youth culture.