Family and Moral Standards

What about changes in family and moral standards? The effect of such changes can be far more damaging. Current reports of family breakdown, promiscuous sexual behavior, and widespread child abuse appall many and confirm that we live in an age of falling standards. One-parent families, children brought up by “parents” of the same sex, and the horrific sexual abuse of children under the care of local authorities are all results of people turning their backs on accepted standards. More and more, people are becoming “lovers of themselves, . . . having no natural affection, . . . without love of goodness, . . . lovers of pleasures rather than lovers of God,” as the Bible foretold some two thousand years ago.​—2 Timothy 3:1-4.

The decline of moral standards goes hand in hand with a callous betrayal of trust. Recently, blatant lapses from the high standards of the medical profession came to light in Hyde, a town in northern England, where residents confided in their “respected and trusted” family doctors. But their trust was sadly betrayed. How? Trial reports revealed that a medical practitioner actually caused the death of at least 15 of his female patients. Indeed, the police had to reexamine more than 130 other deaths involving the doctor. The extent of the betrayal of trust was underlined when the doctor was convicted and sentenced to prison. Two prison officers whose mother might have been murdered by this doctor were given other duties so that they would not have to care for the infamous prisoner. Little wonder that a report of the case in The Daily Telegraph described the guilty general practitioner as the “‘Devil’ doctor.”

Why Today’s Falling Standards?

The Bible points out the reason for today’s falling standards. The last book of the Bible, Revelation, describes a war in heaven, the outcome of which has affected all humans down to this day. The apostle John wrote: “War broke out in heaven: Michael and his angels battled with the dragon, and the dragon and its angels battled but it did not prevail, neither was a place found for them any longer in heaven. So down the great dragon was hurled, the original serpent, the one called Devil and Satan, who is misleading the entire inhabited earth; he was hurled down to the earth, and his angels were hurled down with him.”​—Revelation 12:7-9.

What was the immediate effect of that war? John continued: “On this account be glad, you heavens and you who reside in them! Woe for the earth and for the sea, because the Devil has come down to you, having great anger, knowing he has a short period of time.”​—Revelation 12:12.

“Woe for the earth” came when World War I broke out in 1914 and brought to an end an era of standards very different from those of today. “The Great War of 1914-18 lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours,” observes historian Barbara Tuchman. “In wiping out so many lives which would have been operative on the years that followed, in destroying beliefs, changing ideas, and leaving incurable wounds of disillusion, it created a physical as well as psychological gulf between two epochs.” Fellow historian Eric Hobsbawm agrees: “There has, since 1914, been a marked regression from the standards then regarded as normal in the developed countries . . . It is not easy to grasp the extent of the, unfortunately accelerating, return to what our nineteenth-century ancestors would have called the standards of barbarism.”

In his book Humanity​—A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, author Jonathan Glover notes: “One feature of our time is the fading of the moral law.” Although he is skeptical of a moral law from an external source because of the decline of religion in the Western world, he cautions: “Those of us who do not believe in a religious moral law should still be troubled by its fading.”

The present-day betrayal of trust​—whether in commerce, politics, or religion or even in personal and family relationships—​and the dire consequences are part of the Devil’s wicked scheme to bring woe on earth’s inhabitants. Satan is bent on waging his war to the finish and on bringing down with him all those who endeavor to live by God’s standards.​—Revelation 12:17.