Answers rooted in history
“[…] It is our duty of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for our rulers.”
John Jay, First Chief Justice, U. S Supreme Court.
Once again America is in the throes of yet another mass shooting and finds itself scrambling for explanations amidst the damnation and ruination.
Both America and the modern world broadly deny the existence of the spiritual, desiring only material explanations. As long as the spiritual connection is not made, there will be no peace in the land.
Today, people scoff at the existence of God, and even those who believe in his existence feel that He has no involvement in current events. Others have asked why these attacks keep happening, and many have been praying to God.
Is God answering the prayers? What is the solution to this terrifying problem? Strange but true, America was already forewarned on many occasions of the consequences she will face, and the harvest to be reaped if God is forgotten.
Over two centuries ago, Yale University’s eighth president, Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), warned America about forgetting God: “Without religion, we may possibly retain the freedom of savages, bears, and wolves, but not the freedom of New England. If our religion were gone, our state of society would perish with it and nothing would be left which would be worth defending.”
He further added: “Where there is no religion, there is no morality… With the loss of religion the ultimate foundation of confidence is blown up, and the security of life… liberty and property are buried in ruins.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, a French sociologist and political theorist, came to America in 1831, 55 years after its independence, to study its prisons and assess the new nation.
He wrote his famous observations in 1835 in one of the most influential books of the 19th century, Democracy in America, in which he noted: “It must never be forgotten that religion gave birth to Anglo-American society.”
In 1954, Ira and Charlie Louvin, American gospel singers of the Louvin brothers fame, produced a song titled, “If we forget God,” wherein the nation was made aware of the consequences if God was forgotten.
The final stanzas run thus: If we forget God, His mercy will flee
And sin will cover the land and the sea
If we forget God, Satan will rule
If we forget God, our nation is doomed.
Despite such a foreboding given 65 years ago, America has followed her own path. In the Good Book, Ezekiel is an end-time prophetic book, addressed to the modern descendants of ancient Israel, which includes America.
In addition to the recent mass shootings in Texas and Dayton, Ohio, 46 people were shot in Chicago alone. These were not hate crimes just ordinary folks shooting their friends, neighbors, relatives and strangers.
According to Thomas Jefferson, third U.S. President and author of the Declaration of Independence, in his letter of June 5, 1824, to Major John Cartwright, (Father of English Parliamentary Reform), “The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed.”
Armed they certainly are, but sadly, with the wrong ammunition. Trace it and then face it — let us carefully examine the facts and the accompanying acts.
The United States is the largest consumer of illegal narcotics in the world, spending hundreds of billions of dollars on them each year. In America there are 23 million people incarcerated, about a fifth of whom are in prison on drug-related charges.
Logically stated, there are more people in prisons than in Russia, China or any other country in the world.
Many Americans believe President Donald Trump is trying to destroy the country, and there are others who believe Barack Obama tried to destroy the country when he was president. Then there are the white nationalist supremacists, who strongly postulate that in order to save America, their country, from disaster, they must wage war against all people of color.
Others believe that illegal immigrants are crossing the border, in droves, to take away jobs and lives.
Yet no one believes that America has lost its collective mind. The blame has been put on the movies, video games, music, computers, fake news, the guns, poor gun control; the criminal element, they repeatedly echo, as if the criminal element has nothing to do with the rest of Americans.
Oh say America can’t you see, the truth does not lie among any of these.
The present state, in which America finds itself, was well summed up by John Adams, the second U.S. President, in the 1798: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
One of the greatest American speakers of the 19th century, Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, once declared, “Finally, let us not forget the religious character of our origin. Our fathers were brought hither by their high veneration for the Christian religion.
They journeyed by its light, and labored in its hope. They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society, and to diffuse its influence through all their institutions, civil, political, or literary.”
The famous orator further opined, “We live under the only government that ever existed, which was framed by… deliberate consultations of the people.”
During the dark days of the Civil War, America faced similar, if not worse, challenges. To this end, in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln called for a national day of repentance and prayer, in which he warned Americans to stop forgetting God as a nation and to remember this truth: “those nations only are blessed, whose God is the Lord.”
It is obvious that America’s fate lies in her trait. America, much like Israel, was originally founded on the truths of God’s word. History reveals that during the founding years of America, God was respected and sought by many.
What has happened? Too many changes have been wrought, and God is not respected as He ought.
If the age-old maxim, “seeing is believing,” holds true, then the American people had better believe what they are seeing, and further believe the warnings given, years ago.
America knows all the answers to her present woes. The country may have come a long way, but sadly, it is the wrong way.
