The Next Voice You Hear is a black and white film released in June of 1950. It starred James Whitmore and Nancy Davis (who would become Mrs. Ronald Reagan some years later). It was sometime in the 1970s, probably, when I watched it as a late night movie on television.

The movie portrayed Whitmore’s and Nancy Davis’s characters as a typical American couple residing in suburbia near Los Angeles, I believe. The husband worked in a factory─building aircraft, I think. He stormed out of his home early one workday headed for the factory. He was ticked-off because he was late, thus in a rush. He was quite irritable as he backed in a rage from his driveway.

A motorcycle policeman pulled him over and gave him a ticket. Whitmore’s character was even angrier, now. He stuffed the ticket between his teeth, put the car in gear, and took off as fast as the old sedan would move when the cop was finished with him. The policeman chased him down, as I remember, and gave him another ticket. The entirety of the stage setting of the film involved how angry people were with each other and how they treated each other in their hectic rush to do their own thing. Everyone was “mad at each other” it seemed.

Suddenly, during a radio broadcast, all broadcasts were interrupted. A voice spoke to the whole world at that moment through radios wherever they could be heard. Whitmore’s character heard it and called his wife to hear the voice. Although we, the moviegoers, didn’t hear the voice, we could see on the puzzled, shocked countenance of our hero that he had just heard something profound. He informed us that the voice said, “The next voice you hear will be God, and He will be with you for the next few days.”

Over those days, the voice (we learn from the Whitmore character and his wife) was that of the Lord giving warning that people must change their ways and begin treating each other better. Judgment was coming, if this didn’t happen. Rain began falling as it hadn’t since the flood of Noah’s time, but then stopped. It was a warning.

How simple was that storyline! Compared to the world and its sins today, the Whitmore character and his family were living in Utopia!

When the film was released, America was a society and culture coming out of being on a war footing. The emphasis was on building families from a moral perspective based upon Judeo-Christian principles as conceived and perceived by the nation’s founding fathers and the U.S. Constitution.

The Next Voice You Hear was produced from a book of the same name─a volume whose theme was that America should move forward as a good, moral people. French philosopher, Alexis de Tocqueville put it this way:

I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers─and it was not there . . . in her fertile fields and boundless forests and it was not there . . . in her rich mines and her vast world commerce─and it was not there . . . in her democratic Congress and her matchless Constitution─and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.

The rabid, voracious, anti-God, anti-America as founded detractor-revisionists are working every day to convince us that de Tocqueville never said or wrote this. When looking on google.com, I found that this is the viewpoint, that search engine seems to harbor. That everything “good” about America must be debunked seems to be at the heart of the revisionist-efforts.

But, de Tocqueville did write it, and it is true: Anything “good” about America is because of what the Lord of heaven has done, and continues to do. Good is found only in Jesus Christ, the Bible tells us. There should be little argument, in Christian circles at least, that in 1950, when The Next Voice You Hear was released, America was more morally in alignment then with its Constitution─which is based upon biblical principles, than it is now. As a matter-of-fact there is little comparison, then to now. The morality deconstructionists (I’m being facetiously polite in calling them such, here) have done their work. America is no longer “good” under de Tocqueville’s definition of the term.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s extrapolation was correct. Each and every day the headlines presenting all of the subterfuge, scandals, profligate mismanagement and spending of this nation’s wealth─every debauched, debased activity chronicled by entertainment and news media─prove that we are no longer a great nation. That a major Hollywood studio would in these times present such a morality tale under a biblical world view is unthinkable.

A prospective film’s depiction of the God of heaven giving warning through reminder of a biblical flood that once “corrected things” would likely never enter the minds of Hollywood producers these days. Or, if the thought of a god giving such warnings ever did percolate in the minds of the entertainment industry geniuses; it would never include thoughts of the true Creator of all that is.

Especially troubling in all of this is that most within the church today─all who are born-again─likely wouldn’t think to consider that such a message as God warning this generation was even relevant to them, should such a movie be made. The church has been so desensitized to what is going on around them, and so caught up in living snuggly within their own comfort zones as to prefer to not think about the dangers of being caught-up in the pleasures of worldly pursuit.

The messages these get from the pulpits are sugar coated. They learn how to go through life ignoring the Holy Spirit-engendered conviction of living like the world during these final days of the age. They are all too comfortable in their blissful ignorance of Christ’s call for repentance. Bible prophecy never enters their thinking; they never hear about it for the most part, and that, it seems, is fine with them. Strive to be among those of Christ’s Bride who are longing for His coming for them. The next voice you hear just might be the one that shouts: “Come up hither!” (Revelation 4:1)