Watching the nations, it hardly needs mentioning that we live in disturbing times. The ground is shifting beneath our feet. Headlines reveal the fast pace and multi-dimensional nature of this change.

• The Arab world is being radicalized by Jihadi violence in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America.
• The world economy is languishing; wealthy European nations crouch at the edge of bankruptcy.
• Europe roils with violence, some of it anti-Semitic, some local, some home-grown Jihadi, and some from the rise of neo-Nazis.

If this were not enough we are witnessing an expansion of global slave trade for both economic and sexual purposes. Gendercide has bereft the world of 200,000,000 women. They are gone. The strength of their maternal hearts and creative spirits are lost to their societies.

In China, after a generation of the one-child policy and parental preference for boys, 35,000,000  men of marital age have no prospects of marriage. What are the social implications for the nation? India is killing 1,000,000  females every year. What consequences, social and economic, will ensue?

Moral and cultural relativism have robbed whole societies of their national identity. What reason do they have for continued existence? Indeed, anti-natal movements in 80 nations have reaped a dark harvest: their birthrates have fallen below 2.1 children per women, the threshold for maintaining a population. Eighty nations are committing cultural suicide. Of these, 18 are below 1.3 children per women. No nation has survived such a low birth rate.

Here’s another global concern: the spread of corruption. On the Corruption Perceptions Index compiled by Transparency International, the number of nations with high scores (low corruption) has never been large, and it continues to diminish. Growing injustice breeds mounting lawlessness, both personal and governmental. The United States, for example, is multiplying prisons, hiring more and more policemen and lawyers trying to cope with the growing culture of lawlessness. And this lawlessness is now modeled in the highest places of the US federal government.

We are witnessing the natural conclusion of Nietzsche’s proclamation of the Death of God. His declaration in the nineteenth century, combined with the rise of Darwinian natural and social science, promoted a Culture of Death in the twentieth century. This has led to the Death of Man in the twenty-first century. Western societies celebrate the growing number of abortions, 40-50,000,000 globally each year. We tolerate infanticide; unwanted children are being killed after being born alive. At the other end of life pressure is growing to eliminate older citizens who have no hope of  making any further economic contribution to society. Some are arguing for regulating the birth rates of families if not actually eliminating human beings from the planet.

There is growing disorder in our societies across the spectrum of the human community.  At one end of the scale, both the notion of family and the very formation of families are suffering from neglect and attack. At the other end, actual nation states such as Somalia and Afghanistan are imploding.

Order is the first need of any society. Where will the order come from?

Over the next few weeks we will see how Psalm 19 answers that question.

–          Darrow Miller

This post is first in a series of ten on Psalm 19.

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