Blessing & Judgment

Some of my friends may be offended by this message, but when God gives me clear instructions about something He wants me to do, I must follow Him. I truly hope I don’t lose friends and followers over this post, but I must do it. Regardless of your definitions of what’s right and what’s wrong, history is history. What I point out here are not my opinions. They are things that have happened and are happening. The only opinion I venture in this piece is that we’d better take God seriously.

Throughout history, when God’s people have turned away from Him, He has removed His blessing from them. Without His blessing, His people have suffered through conquest, captivity, and all sorts of ills.

God promised Abraham He would make of him a great nation. When famine came to His people, God had Joseph in place to save them through the largesse God had provided Egypt under Joseph’s influence.

During the next 430 years, Abraham’s descendants grew from one family to several million people. God rescued them from slavery in Egypt in a most miraculous way.

As soon as they were safely free from Pharaoh’s despotism, they turned away from God and began worshiping a golden calf. As punishment, God made them wander in the wilderness for forty years before allowing them into the promised land.

God delivered the promised land into their hands and they settled in Israel—a free nation owing allegiance to no one except God. But time and again the people turned away from God, and He allowed them to be ruled by bad kings and conquered by foreign nations, sometimes allowing them to be driven from their land and scattered around the world.

Under the New Covenant, Christians became His special people. He didn’t abandon Israel, even though Israel abandoned His Son. The nation of Israel is still His, and He will never allow it to be destroyed, but the people who accepted His Son as their Savior became His people.

In 1776, for the first time in history, a nation was founded by Christians to protect their right to pursue Christianity without interference from a king or other official. The Pilgrims did not come over here to provide a haven for atheists or Muslims or others who mock God or ignore His Son. They came to provide for themselves the freedom to worship God and His Son.

In return, God blessed this new nation as no nation in history has been blessed. Over the next century and a half, the United States enjoyed both freedom and prosperity unparalleled since the beginning of time.

As we enjoyed that freedom and prosperity, however, we allowed it to change us as a people. God became less important to a growing number of us than the pursuit of our own pleasures. In the 1920′s we wanted nothing more than partying and patronizing speak-easies. After a decade of that, along with other pursuits of the flesh, we suffered a slight withdrawal of God’s favor in the form of a stock market crash and depression.

Rather than turn to God, we turned to the government for our salvation. We began demanding—and receiving—all sorts of social programs run by the government and paid for partially by the taxpayers and partially by levying taxes on the children and grandchildren of those taxpayers through a growing national debt.

Despite our unfaithfulness, God delivered us from one of the most heinous tyrants ever to walk the earth in World War II. To thank Him, we turned more and more away from Him and toward the government to solve all of our problems.

Then, in 1962, we told God He was no longer welcome in the classrooms of our children. The day the Supreme Court declared school prayer unconstitutional was the day we ceased to be a Christian nation. A decade later that same Supreme Court said killing innocent, unborn babies was an acceptable form of birth control.

Despite our unfaithfulness, God gave us chance after chance. He gave us Ronald Reagan to lead us from the brink of disaster. We responded by putting a man in the White House who used the Oval Office as his own private bordello. God replaced him with another Christian, but we never really appreciated this man of faith and character.

Along the way, we have condoned one form of ungodliness after another. In addition to aproving the slaughter of babies as legitimate birth control, we have flaunted God’s plan of marriage, deciding it’s okay for unmarried couples to cohabitate. We have condoned what God clearly calls an abomination in not only saying homosexuality is okay, but that those who practice it should be considered a minority group due the same rights and protections as ~~married~~ heterosexual couples. Had to scratch the word married, since non-married couples now have the same rights as husbands and wives.

God will not be mocked. Oh, sure, we can shake our fists at Him for awhile, but in the long run, He will remove what remains of His blessing. The proof of that resides in the White House right now, while a mortgage on our economy rests in China.

Is it too late for this nation to return to God, repent, and acknowledge His Son? I don’t know. But I do know we can’t continue down this path distancing ourselves from the God who established and blessed this nation and expect Him to ignore our lawless flaunting of right and wrong.

Every week I put the following Biblical quote at the bottom of my Tuesday blog posts: If you abide in Me and My word abides in you, then you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

When we quit abiding in Him, and His truth no longer abides in us, who will then set us free?

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