A Christian’s Heart 2-13-2012

America The Fool

America has turned away from God and has become a fool in His eyes.

America used to be a shining city on a hill. She was made so by God because she was formed in His Name. All through our early history we recognized that God was our Father and ultimately the Father of our nation.  Of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence over 50 were men of deep Christian faith. Up until the 1960s we recognized the supremacy of God in our national affairs. And God worked in us and for us to preserve our country and to make it the greatest nation the world has ever known. (See for example, Toby Mac & Michael Tait, Under God, Bethany House, Minneapolis, Mn, 2004.)  Until the 1960s we would have been proud to call ourselves a Christian Nation. But since then we have gradually turned away from God. We can no longer call ourselves a Christian nation, and with good reason.

America is now a pagan nation which celebrates toleration for all forms of evil, even saying that they are good and desirable. Now any person of faith must endure the horror of abortion (murder) on demand, the spread and legitimization of all forms of sexual immorality (including homosexuality), all of which God hates, the awful sense of entitlement which pervades and sickens this society. The government-can-solve-everything mindset, which created the welfare state and the abominable sense of entitlement,  has made us a nation of beggars (panhandlers on every street corner, it seems) and victims (if I fail, it’s someone else’s fault).

It seems to me that the downward slide into the abyss started with a pair of  Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that outlawed the reading of the Bible and praying in schools.  God was taken out of public discourse, and so we have forgotten Him. This had a devastating effect not only on our country but also on the Body of Christ here. As public discourse turned to free love and to the idol of personal gratification (“if it feels good do it”), and rejected personal responsibility and traditional moral values, the Church itself began to be corrupted.

As this 1960s poison seeped into the Body of Christ in America, it gradually forgot how to fear the LORD. Today sexual immorality, divorce, and other sin has infected the Church, and it has become an ineffective witness for Christ and herald of the path to salvation. How, for example, can we stand effectively for the sanctity of marriage when we ourselves do not practice it? Many in the Body support politicians who promote murder on demand, the “rights” of the sexually deviant, even the promotion of deviant behavior. How is this consistent with Christian claims to know and love Jesus as one’s savior?

If we do not reverse this trend, I believe the country is doomed. We can see the results already: the country is full of rage and hatred. America is tearing `itself apart.  We can see this in our public discourse. A sad example of this can be seen in this article where a DJ engages in a racially charged, profanity laced tirade against a politician with whom he disagrees. The language and his behavior during the “interview” is thug-like and completely inappropriate. It shows a man whose spirit is consumed by darkness and despair. Nothing like this should ever happen in a free society where the exchange of ideas fuel the fire of our freedom. It represents the totally unacceptable behavior that we’ve come to accept as normal. How sad! (In fact that this can go on without condemnation from all sides of the political spectrum frightens me.  The America we have known cannot survive this.)

This is the natural result of our increasing moral degradation and sense of entitlement. How do I know this? It’s what God has said would happen through the prophet Isaiah: “If they do not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn.  Distressed and hungry, they will roam through the land; when they are famished, they will become enraged and, looking upward, will curse their king and their God. Then they will look toward the earth and see only distress and darkness and fearful gloom, and they will be thrust into utter darkness.”

The Body of Christ was put here by God to be a shining light. But because of the corruption in the church’s midst, our light has gone dark: we are reviled and are becoming increasingly irrelevant on the political stage. We must repent or I believe that we will be swept away as the country continues down the path of destruction.

Our foolishness as a nation has caused us to allow tyranny and oppression to take hold among us. We are losing our freedom. I will speak more of this in the next installment, February 20.