The Times, They are a-Changing

R.C. Sproul


Everything in creation is subject to time. Everything in creation is mutable. Everything in creation goes through the process of generation and decay. God and God alone is eternal and immutable. God and God alone escapes the relentless onslaught of time.

We not only measure moments in time, but we measure periods that take place in terms of ages, eras, and epochs. In our own generation, we have seen various transitions of the human cultures in which we find ourselves situated, hurled against the backdrop of time (as Martin Heidegger indicated in his epic book Being and Time). We say that times are changing. That doesn’t mean that time itself changes. There are still sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours in a day. But cultures are constantly shifting in their patterns, in their values, and in their commitments.

The decade of the 1960s — in which the United States of America went through an unbloody revolution that changed the culture so dramatically that people who lived before that decade feel like aliens in a culture dominated by a post-1960s worldview. The revolution of the ’60s spelled the end of idealism and ushered in several radical changes in the culture, including the sexual revolution. The sanctity of marriage was more explicitly undermined. Clean, wholesome speech in the public sphere became increasingly rare. The sanctity of life with respect to the unborn underwent attack legislatively, and moral relativism became the norm in our culture.

With this moral relativism came technological advances that also altered our daily lives. The knowledge explosion rocked by the advent and proliferation of the use of the computer has brought a new culture of people who live more or less “online.” This relativisitic culture brought with it a culture of eros and heightened addiction to pornography, as well as a culture of drugs with the subsequent invasion of addiction and suicide.

The times in which we live are times that are exceedingly challenging to the church of Jesus Christ. The great tragedy of the church in the post-1960s revolution is that the face of the church has changed along with the face of the secular culture. In a fatal pursuit of relevance, the church has often become merely an echo of the secular culture in which it lives, having a desperate desire to be “with it” and acceptable to the contemporary world. The church itself has adopted the very relativism it seeks to overcome. What is demanded by times such as ours is a church that addresses the temporal while at the same time remaining tethered to the eternal — a church that speaks, comforts, and heals all things mortal and secular without itself abandoning the eternal and the holy. The church must always face the question of whether its commitment is to sanctity or profanity.

We need churches filled with Christians who are not enslaved by the culture, churches that seek more than anything to please God and His only begotten Son, rather than to attract the applause of dying men and women. Where is that church? That is the church Christ established. That is the church whose mission is to minister redemption to a dying world, and that is the church we are called to be. God help us and our culture if our ears become deaf to that call.