CAN’T TURN BACK NOW…CAN WE?

When I turned 16, the year was 1968.

It was turbulent. Change was all around. A new kind of music hit the charts. My city suddenly got full of ‘beat groups’ with guys and girls sporting shaggy hair tied with headbands, psychedelic clothes and carrying guitars. The music was different! Jim Reeves and Nat King Cole were shoved in the corner and the Beatles came into prominence. But this was not just music my friends…

This was accompanied by an underlying philosophy and idealism that sparked a thing called ‘freedom’. And so, all kinds of drugs hit the streets. All kinds of ‘gurus’ hit the scenes. We savored ‘charas’ and ‘ganja’ and ‘other things’ I cannot mention. While Camel gum was being sniffed in schools, Elvis the Pelvis, was okay for the ‘bigger’ guys but not for us. The drug scene was ‘cool’. Hippies and Rastafarians stormed my city. And suddenly the term ‘free love’ had a different understanding. Blonde-haired girls in skimpy attire sat around in Colaba, smoked ‘pot’ and smelled of stale sweat and dirt in the heat.

Whatever you may say…the 1960s was a time of revolutionary change all across the globe. It can be argued that the revolutionary changes that occurred in next 10-year period were greater than all the changes that occurred in the hundred years before that time.

The drug revolution of the 1960s was brought about by a ‘cultural change’ in which the use of illicit drugs spread from the fringes of society into the mainstream of the suburban middle class. Drugs such as marijuana, LSD and heroin became commonplace on our college campuses and in other segments of society.

This was accompanied by a more sinister one…the sexual revolution!

This is probably the revolution that has had the greatest impact of all the revolutions. This was brought about by many factors. I remember the seminal 1963 book ‘The Feminine Mystique’ by Betty Friedan and other books and articles by so many feminist authors.

Then they launched The Women’s Liberation Movement which championed equality in education and career opportunity but also, unfortunately, legalization of abortion. Feminism was given much momentum. Especially in the US and in Europe.   

And in my city the term, “come on ma shed your bra” became a kind of ‘freedom’ thing. And then came the next one…

The homosexual revolution! Here in my country, we all knew about it. This whole thing was woven into the fabric of our culture. But now it was in the open. All camouflages thrown off. The Lesbian movement got and bolder stronger than before. There was no stop to all this now.

The philosophical revolution came next.

Changed our thinking from modern to post-modern. All this suddenly began to have a profound effect on politics and culture everywhere. The ‘do your own thing’ phrase is a defiance against God and His Bible for sure.

Let me say this…Postmodernism is a philosophical system where each person essentially makes up his or her own morals and rejects God’s absolute truth. By this time the ‘free love’ philosophy actually gave its stamp of approval on gross sexual immorality and fornication.

The modern worldview claims that moral absolutes can be discovered by human reason alone without the aid of divine revelation. Modernism, since it arose in post-renaissance Christian Europe, was nevertheless influenced by Christian concepts of justice and morality.

Modernism is also dependent on Natural Law as a starting point for its reasoning. Modernists looked to nature rather than the Bible, but they still believed in moral absolutes. The absolutes were manmade principles derived from rationalism, empiricism and pragmatism.

The postmodern worldview claims that no moral absolutes exist.

Morals are simply made up by the will of each person. This is radical existentialism and moral relativism. It begins to affect culture and education, especially the universities, their ‘learned’ professors made the shift from modern to postmodern during the 1960s. Anti-intellectualism is really the postmodern rejection of modernist dogma and absolutes.

The Judeo-Christian worldview maintains that there are moral absolutes, and these absolute truths are given to us by God by revelation and are written in the Bible.

Biblical morals include the Ten Commandments, the teachings of Jesus and the sacredness of human life. God’s commandments apply to all people at all times in all cultures.

God’s standards do not change. God gave us moral absolutes by revelation.

The mass murder of the unborn by abortion is serious sin. This postmodern culture accepts many practices that God abhors. All humankind is accountable to God and will be judged by God in the afterlife.

In the 1960s, the social turmoil and radical overthrow of traditional values had a way of waking people up and causing them to take a new look at their lives and their future destiny. Many of these people began to look to Jesus. This helped cause the launch of The Jesus Movement of the late 1960s and early 70s.

There is a new revival that is happening again today. Society is so chaotic now and people are so unmoored that they are taking a fresh look at Christianity.

People are looking to Jesus. They’re seeing the timeless wisdom of the Bible, its family values, its moral stability and its moral order. They’re also looking at the miracles. God gave us miracles. Jesus worked miracles and they proved that He is the Son of God.

Jesus came in fulfillment of over 300 prophecies written in the Old testament hundreds of years before his birth. No other person in all of world history can make this claim. Jesus worked healing miracles in front of eyewitnesses. The apostles and others who followed Jesus also worked miracles. Down through history, even to our own time, there are miracles of healing and other types of miracles that occur in answer to Christian prayer.

Furthermore, the Old Testament prophets foretold that there would be a coming Messiah. “Christ” is another word for “Messiah.” The Hebrew prophets foretold that Christ would come to die for the sins of the people. The LORD has laid on him [Christ] the iniquity of us all…Isaiah 53:6.

Jesus suffered and died, taking the penalty of our sins upon Himself and then He rose from the dead to offer forgiveness of sins to all who turn to Him in repentance.

By the time I was 26. It was 1978. The world had solidified into a different and dangerous place. We were hurtling down at such a high speed…it was now impossible to stop, forget about turning around!

Jesus, the Bible the Church are the only answers we have.

I invite you to turn to Christ today to receive forgiveness of sins

(…with help from my friend…William Nugent)