What our suicide problem says about our society.

Why are young men in Britain killing themselves at the rate of 17 every day? It is a national scandal that has rattled the Government, hence the announcement this week of the appointment of a Minister for Suicide Prevention.

Prime Minister Theresa May said the appointment of Health Minister Jackie Doyle-Price to the new role will help tackle the stigma surrounding suicide. She was speaking on what has been designated World Mental Health Day, and she also announced increased funding for the Samaritans and for schools’ mental health work among children.

Mental health is a worldwide issue of immense proportions, especially in Western nations. In the USA nearly 45,000 people killed themselves in 2016 – more than double the homicide rate. In Britain severe mental illness has been rising steadily since the beginning of the 1990s and has become the biggest problem area for the NHS. Women are now more prone to severe mental disorder than men, but men under the age of 49 are more likely to take their own lives.

It is this particular problem of suicide among young men that is troubling mental health experts. The train I was due to take to London last week was cancelled due to “an incident on the line”. Yet another young man had jumped from a railway bridge in front of a train. I did not know this one but I did know a young man who did the same thing recently. I knew his wife and two young children. He had become unemployed and introverted so no one could communicate with him. He was just 36.

The particular problem of suicide among young men is troubling mental health experts.

We probably all know similar tragedies that are happening in families throughout the land, creating untold misery, hardship and poverty. It is, of course, those left behind who suffer most – regret and self-recrimination are hard to live with when tragedy has hit a family. The first suicide funeral I had to conduct is still a vivid memory when I too suffered personal blame. She was a beautiful young woman in my church congregation and I had deep regret that I had not been aware of her problems. But is there something as a society that we can do?

Understanding the Symptoms

We all need to become more aware of the symptoms of mental health problems – stress, anxiety and depression are all signs that should alert us to the difficulties that someone is facing. It’s when we ignore these signs that we blame ourselves later on. Being more alert and more caring for others would undoubtedly save lives. But we are all too busy, too self-centred on our own little world to bother with other people.

The number of young people you see today walking the streets with their eyes glued to their smartphone and unaware of what is going on around them is a vivid expression of the level of individualism and unreality that now afflicts a whole generation. Many young people live in a virtual world where they have hundreds of contacts but very little personal interaction – a situation exacerbated by social media, which has been linked to numerous mental health problems.

Many social studies show that loneliness is suffered by millions in the population, even when they are living in densely populated cities. Of course, much of this is due to the breakdown of family life: once, large families cared for each other and interacted with other similar families, providing plentiful opportunity for friendships to flourish. Today, we lack community and live in a virtual world.

Individualism and unreality now afflicts a whole generation, with many people living in a virtual world.

Another big culture change that has particularly hit young men is a loss of masculine identity in a world where women demand equality and sameness. Men were once proud to be the breadwinners and take care of their young wives while they were nursing children. Today, career women employ nannies and childminders so that they can become the breadwinner, pursuing their ambitions to make it to the top in their professions.

Lack of Peace with God

Human beings have immense adaptability and no doubt men will adjust to their new status in society, but we are clearly in a transition period which places extra strains, anxieties and insecurities upon individuals. The social changes we have been experiencing in the past two generations have coincided with the loss of faith in God and the abandonment of our Judeo-Christian heritage that provided fundamental security in the lives of individuals and whole communities.

It is the lack of this sense of being at peace with the God of Creation who made us in his own image that is the most serious absence in our modern culture. If we really want to understand the problems in our society we need to read the first chapter of Romans, where the Apostle Paul offers a penetrating analysis of social change. He says that once we suppress truth, we are driven by the powers of darkness that lead from one degree of corruption to the next.

Jesus taught his disciples the cure for anxiety. He said “If you love me, you will obey what I command. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counsellor to be with you forever – the Spirit of truth.” He also said “My command is this: love each other as I have loved you” (John 14:15 and 15:12).

The combination of family breakdown, bringing the loss of fatherhood to millions, together with the loss of the Fatherhood of God, is the devastating product of our postmodern, atheistic, humanistic world.

If we really want to understand the problems in our society, we need to read the first chapter of Romans.

The only cure for all the ailments in society, especially the anxieties and insecurities that lead to black despair and suicide, is the rediscovery of the Gospel, biblical truth and the Fatherly love of God for each of us his children. The Bible tells us that “The fruit of righteousness will be peace; the effect of righteousness will be quietness and confidence for ever” (Isa 32:17). In the New Testament Paul tells us that “The peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus” (Phil 4:7).

It is being at peace with God that transforms our whole worldview and our interaction with other human beings. Paul urged the Christians in Rome “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom 12:2). This is the message that the new Minister for Suicide Prevention needs to understand if she is to make any real progress in her work of transforming society.

What underlies the BBC's efforts to re-shape British culture?

Last week we commented on the BBC’s deliberate promotion of the transgender element of the LGBT agenda. This week, Dr Clifford Hill offers a biblical-sociological framework for understanding just why the BBC is trying to reshape society to fit these values.

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The Apostle Paul was way ahead of his time in teaching principles that are in accord with the modern discipline of Sociology, whose founding fathers (such as Durkheim and Weber) were early 20^th Century scholars. Paul perceptively outlined a five-stage theory of social change in his letter to the Romans, written from prison in Caesarea, around the year AD 60.

Paul had travelled widely across the Roman Empire and was a keen observer of human nature. He had lived for several years in the city of Ephesus with its fertility cults and sex symbols in full view of the public – the relics of which can still be seen by visitors today. He had experienced an incredible amount of hardship and suffering through pursuing his missionary zeal. He described some of his travel experiences:

I have worked much harder, been in prison more frequently, been flogged more severely, and been exposed to death again and again. Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea…I have laboured and toiled and often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and often gone without food; I have been cold and naked. (2 Cor 11:23-27)

But whilst being an intrepid traveller, Paul was also no mean scholar who ably debated with the Greek philosophers in Athen’s famous Areopagus. Paul brought his vast resources of knowledge and experience to focus upon the forces of social change that he perceived to be at work in the Roman Empire, that would inevitably lead to the decline and fall of that great empire.

He wrote about this in the opening chapter of his weighty theological treatise to the Christians in Rome. Luther, when a professor in the University of Wittenberg, declared Romans to be the greatest book in the Bible. It sets out Paul’s mature thinking about the current condition of humanity in the context of God’s eternal purposes.

Romans 1 sets out Paul’s mature thinking about the condition of humanity in the context of God’s eternal purposes.

Paul’s Analysis of the Forces of Social Change (Romans 1:18-32)

Stage 1 (verses 18-21): Paul begins with a statement that human beings in rebellion against God deliberately become involved in the leading of society astray from fundamental truth rooted in God’s principles and good design. Paul says that when people suppress the truth about Creation, they are at beginning of a slippery slope towards the degradation of hearts and minds. In other words, once you deny the central truth of the existence of the God of Creation (which can be understood clearly by all human beings), you open the way to the whole gamut of forces of social and moral corruption. Every true perspective on life becomes warped. Paul’s teaching is that once you reject the truth you automatically come under the sway of the forces of darkness.

Stage 2 (verses 22-23, 25): The second stage in the degradation of society comes when human beings pass from the denial of the God of Creation into idolatry. Paul recognises that all human beings have an innate tendency to worship something or someone. Once the basic truths of Creation are denied, people seek alternatives and find them in bits of wood and stone or anything created by human hands – which they worship.

Modern forms of this idolatry include worship of wealth and property (just consider the preponderance of TV programmes about finding the perfect house – e.g. seeking A Place in the Sun or Location, Location, Location - plus our worship of cars which we fondly clean and polish, the jewellery we wear, the fashions we parade and the wealth we own). They also include worship of people – including celebrity cults or the adoration of self. In our era, the individual is now god.

Stage 3 (verse 24): The third stage in this social change is the relaxation of personal and corporate morality, when we begin to cheat on our partners. In Romans 1 the emphasis is on sexual desire, but cheating can extend to every area of life (e.g. finances, relationships, legal responsibilities). We abandon standards of truth and integrity and we worship our bodies and our “sinful desires”.

Stage 4 (verses 26-27): The fourth stage is where human beings are no longer content with simply indulging their God-given sexual desires but “[exchange] natural relations for unnatural ones”. Paul describes this delicately: “men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another”.

Stage 5 (verses 28-32): The fifth and final stage in the corruption of society, Paul says, is God giving people over to “a depraved mind”. This is a vital stage and a tipping point – a point at which society has deliberately refused and rejected God’s efforts to rescue them to such an extent that God gives them over to their chosen course of rebellion, allowing them to become completely enslaved and deceived by it. He does not necessarily abandon them to this forever – but it is by far the more painful road for humans to walk, and many can be lost forever as a result.

Human beings in rebellion against God deliberately become involved in the leading of society astray from fundamental truth.

Brainwashing and Reversal of Truth

In national terms, this means the whole mindset of society becoming warped through being brainwashed with false teaching. This includes the deliberate injection of false values into our children – the calculated, strategic changing of society by social engineering to make everyone conform to a false ideology. This is what happened in Germany in the 1930s, when the majority of the population accepted the Nazis’ ideology of a super race, and acquiesced to the murder of 6 million Jews.

Social engineering produces human minds so corrupted that they completely abandon the whole concept of ‘truth’– in fact they reverse truth. In the words of the Prophet Isaiah:

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. (Isa 5:20)

Paul says that at this stage in the corruption of society, the mindset of humanity is so degraded that people can no longer recognise the truth and are no longer aware of the forces of evil that are driving them towards destruction. He says:

They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice…They invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

Paul sees this as the final degradation of humanity leading to what we would describe today as a ‘dysfunctional society’ – or the end of civilisation.

Paul’s analysis is sociologically sound, though written c.2000 years ago. It is a timeless way of understanding any society – no matter what culture, geographical location or place in history. It would be interesting to take a poll of a cross-section of the population in Britain today asking which stage in this framework of social change we have reached.

What is your assessment?

Author: Dr Clifford Hill

Photo Credits: Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0

In the week where scientists reported discovery of gravitational waves (previously predicted by Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity), we start a new series of Bible studies with the timely reminder that God is Creator and wants to be worshipped as such.

How important is it to God that we know him as Creator and Sustainer of the Universe? It is the first thing that we read in the Bible and it is a recurring theme through every part of Scripture. Every person in the entire world can know, through the evidence all around, that there is a Creator - and this can be the beginning of reaching out to him and knowing him in other ways. Ultimately, it puts us on a path of discovery which leads us to understand that the entire Creation came through Jesus the Messiah. We will also discover that those who deny that God is Creator put themselves on a road that leads to greater and greater depths of sin.

The First Statement in the Bible

It may seem an outrageous claim, but the only reliable account of the world's beginning in all the books in all the libraries in the entire world is in the first chapter of Genesis! Because it is the first thing we read in the Bible we can assume that it is of foundational importance. Thereafter, like for all main biblical themes, a thread weaves its way through all Scripture. If we follow the thread verse by verse through all the books, we gain a sense of its importance and we come to the conclusion that it is important to God that we know him as Creator.

It is important to God that we know him as Creator. Ultimately, this puts us on a path to knowing Jesus the Messiah.

"Bereshit Bara Elohim..."

Turning to a little Hebrew, the first three Hebrew words of the Bible are "Bereshit Bara Elohim", translated "In the beginning, God created". The first name given for God is Elohim. When a Hebrew word ends in im it is usually plural - yet we know that God is one. The Hebrew word Echad is used in Deuteronomy 6:4 to express this oneness of God, and means a unity with many parts, many facets and many expressions.

Do we see this principle of oneness in a plural form in the verses of the Bible, when we consider the Creation? The Holy Spirit "hovered over the face of the waters" (Gen 1:2). Jesus was there in his pre-incarnate form (John 1:1-3). God the Father, through his Son, by the power of his Spirit, spoke - making himself known as Creator.

The Hebrew word bara, which we translate as 'created', is a word that is only used in the Bible to express what God himself has done. It is not a word that is related to what others can do within Creation. As such, only God can know just what this word means - just what he did and how he did it. We can take something from God's Creation and re-model it to something else - wood from trees to build furniture, coloured pigments to paint pictures, clay and stone to build houses and so on. The Hebrew word for re-modelling, building within the Creation, is not bara: it is banah. Only God can create something from outside our universe. We can merely reform what comes to our hands.

Only God can create something from outside the created order – we can only remodel what already exists within it.

The word bara is associated with God's creation of the entire universe: the stars, the earth, the plants, the animals and mankind. That explosive moment when everything that we know in Creation came to be is beyond our imagination. From within the created order we can investigate what we find by observation and measurement, but we cannot get outside of it to find out how God did it. There is no human logic that applies to this.

What God wants us to know is in the Bible, within the limits he himself has set. We can ask questions but we may not get complete answers, so belief in God as Creator remains a matter of faith, faith that is ultimately a gift from him. This is an important matter as we follow the thread of revelation through all the scriptures.

Following the Thread

The thread of truth that God is Creator remains of fundamental and deepening importance right through the Bible. God watches over his Creation and intervenes in it. Consider:

• how he sustains his Creation and provides for his people according to his covenant with Noah (Gen 8:21-22)
• how he intervenes at times to send signs (e.g. the physical judgments on the earth, Amos 4)
• how he intervenes with miracles (e.g. the healing of a leper in 2 Kings 5, the lengthening of a day for Joshua (Josh 10:12-13) and Hezekiah (Isa 38), the many miracles which authenticated Jesus as Messiah (e.g. Matt 8, 14:13-21; John 4-5))

Furthermore, knowing God as Creator is a fundamental part of being in relationship with him:

• God first makes himself known to his people as the Creator (e.g. Gen 14:19-20)
• God will remind us of his greatness through his work of Creation when he calls us to repentance (Deut 32:6)
• When we consider God's Creation we should remember who we are, created beings, in contrast to who he is, the Creator (Isa 40)

Trusting in God as Creator: Job's Testimony

The account of Job shows that however much we know about God, there are aspects of both his character and our own characters that will always reach beyond our understanding. Job retained his faith through hard times, even though his suffering prompted questions that could not be answered through human logic. When God finally spoke, he reminded Job of who he is by first asking Job to consider the wonder of his creative deeds: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding..." (Job 38-42).

This puts Job in his rightful place (and us in ours!). When we have faith in God as Creator we realise that we cannot answer many of the fundamental questions of life with human logic - including the matter of suffering - but faith, beginning with faith in him as Creator, leads to faith in him even in the most difficult of times.

Faith, beginning with faith in God as Creator, leads to faith in him even in the most difficult of times.

Meditating on God as Creator: Psalm 19

Meditating on God as Creator can lead us into amazing revelations about his character and our position before him. Psalm 19 is a wonderful psalm for meditation on the benefits of knowing God as Creator and it deserves a careful and prayerful study so that the Lord can speak to us in the same way that he did to the psalmist.

The psalm is in three main sections. The first section is a meditation on God's perfect creative power and his steadfastness, seen through the things he has made. The second part recognises that if God is so constant and trustworthy in his Creation then he is trustworthy in all his teaching.

The third part comes from a person who has confronted these immense truths and has come to terms with his or her own fragile character, whilst also recognising God's mighty hand over their life. So the psalm moves from wonder at the magnitude of Creation and its testimony of God's character - "the heavens declare the glory of God" (v1) - down to the confession of even hidden sins – "cleanse me from my secret faults" (v12). This is a Gospel message beginning with a meditation on God through his Creation.

Denying God as Creator: Romans 1:18-32

Romans 1 is to be contrasted with Psalm 19. Those who know God as Creator can be led to repentance, but those who deny him as Creator turn their backs on him - and finally he hands them over to the desire of their heart, which manifests itself in all manner of perversions, just as we see growing in the world today.

Horrendous sins can therefore accompany a turning away from the God of Creation. Vain imaginings based on the view that mankind developed by evolutionary accidents have their consequences. Some of these consequences are abortion of babies, tampering with genetics, relative morality, homosexuality, not knowing the difference between sin and holiness in all areas, and attributing wrongdoing to genetic make-up rather than to sin that must be cleansed. It is as serious as that in our day.

Those who accept God as Creator can be led to repentance, but those who deny him as Creator turn their back on him – which leads them into ever-increasing sin.

Other Important Passages

The first statement of faith in Hebrews 11 is in God the Creator. Before we come to the testimonies of faith in this chapter, the foundation is set in the first few verses – "by faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God". This echoes Psalm 19, showing that a close walk with God begins with knowing him as he wants to be known - as the Maker and Sustainer of all things.

John 1 should be the subject of a deep meditation as a consequence of this study. We realise that our Saviour was present before Creation and that Creation was made through and for him. He was united with the Father in the Elohim of Creation and then stooped down into it as the Son of Man who came to save us.

2 Peter 3:1-13 is a meditation on the end times. There will be those who rise up to mock the Creator, while those who are close to him will hold fast to fellowship with him. A severe judgment - not by water, as in the Great Flood, but by fire - will come on those men and women who have refused to come to God the Father through faith in Jesus.

Danger of coming under God's final judgment on this earth can begin by first denying God as the Creator of the universe. If we take lightly what God has done in Creation and dismiss it as a myth, not taking seriously the consequence of sin that led to the Great Flood at the time of Noah, we are likely to be unprepared for the last acts of God on this earth prior to Jesus' return.

If we take lightly what God has done in Creation, as well as the consequences of sin that led to the Great Flood, we are likely to be unprepared for God's last acts on earth prior to Jesus' return.

Conclusion

The Creator will demonstrate once more his creative power and how he has sustained and held his Creation in balance when he acts in a different way at the end of this order of things. At that time, it will be likened to rolling the created order up like a scroll, making way for the new Heaven and new Earth (Isa 34:1-4; Rev 6:12-17; Rev 21). When all things are restored, peace will come to God's creation as the lion lies down with the lamb – something that only God can bring about in his time and in his own way (Isa 65:25).

Surely, if we neglect what the Bible says about Creation and the Creator – what God himself wants us to know and believe - we are in danger of taking all else too lightly.

Interested readers may want to explore the new website of the Biblical Creation Trust, which works in partnership with local churches in Britain to establish Biblical Creation as mainstream in church theology and apologetics.