Today we are going to be looking at the United States of America and verses of the Bible that describe the decline in what can best be described as its prosperity. When I was reading the Psalms, I had my eyes opened by Psalm 85, and several connections were made between it and other scriptures that exist in the Bible as the Holy Spirit tied them together in my mind. In addition to Psalm 85, I had Psalm 14:1, 2nd Chronicles 7:14 with the surrounding context, and John 8:31-36 came to mind as I pondered this subject.
Psalm 85 comes from the post-Babylon Exile Period and is sung by the children of Israel. When I read it, verses 8 through 10 stood out to me.
“I will listen to what God the Lord says; he promises peace to his people, his faithful servants—but let them not turn to folly. Surely his salvation is near those who fear him, that his glory may dwell in our land. Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other.”
Psalm 85:8-10 NIV
In “Prayer and Politics,” I spoke about the fear of the Lord. This is a biblical concept that can be best understood as having the right understanding about who He is. And the fact that this causes us to have respect for God. In the passage I’ve just presented, we see that the people of Israel are starting to regain that holy fear, or respect as I’ve called it, of God and turning back to His ways. They are learning once more that to receive His blessings, obedience is required. Israel had a covenant with God, which held terms and conditions that would allow them to qualify for His divine blessing. And while the USA is not a nation like Israel with our own covenant to ensure we receive the blessings of God, I think a nation can gain or lose His favor based on what has been condoned or condemned in their laws.
I know that many advocate for a form of legalism where laws exist to govern everything in a moralistic manner to ensure citizens behave as is desired according to their understanding of scriptures. I am not going to say that everyone is wrong in how they understand the texts or that they are living in a wrong way if they hold themselves to a higher standard than others hold themselves to. What I am addressing is something that goes far deeper than the actions of people. My focus is on the attitudes of the citizens. God looks at the heart of man and knows when obedience and observance of His decrees are genuine or simply out of obligation. In our society we have the unique freedom to make our own laws. This is done by public consensus, through elected officials who operate on our behalf. Thus, the laws passed can be viewed as a direct reflection of their desires.
In the first sentence of the scripture segment, we see that the writer is declaring they will listen and adhere to the commands of God, for they recognize the end result. But the last part of that sentence is important to notice because it shows recognition of their previous state. That of “folly” or foolishness. Psalm 14:1 clearly states that the fool is one who has declared in their heart, “There is no god.” The result is described as their actions becoming corrupt, wicked, and ceasing to hold any form of good.
These verses stood out to me because of how they encapsulate the entirety of Psalm 85 in one word: repentance. Verse 8 is the change of heart, 9 the promised results, and 10 is how it manifests using poetic language to give us a mental image. “Love and faithfulness meet together” shows that the love of God tends to cause a faithful dedication to Him. If you truly love someone, then you want to know more about them, and through that relationship with them, you have more reason to keep your word to them. That is part of what it means to be faithful to someone. The key word in the adjective faithful is faith. The adjective suffix is “ful,” which describes you having it or being worthy of receiving it. When we look at the word faith, we see that it is synonymous with trust. (Please read “Welcome to the Armory,” where I dig into the ancient Hebrew and Greek words for faith.) Through a deep love of God, we seek to become worthy of His trust and act in such a way as to be counted as capable of being trusted with anything He gives us to steward or accomplish.
The final part about righteousness and peace kissing each other is poetic, but when cultural context is considered, we have something revealed. In some of the cultures we have today, French and Italian being the most well-known, it is not uncommon to exchange a quick kiss on the cheek between close friends or family members as a greeting. We can easily assume it had a similar connotation for them because of the New Testament passage in 2nd Corinthians 13:12, which says to greet each other with a holy kiss. When all of these factors are considered, it reveals the close tie between righteousness and peace.
Righteousness in the Bible always means living in a right standing before God. Because of this, His presence is allowed to “dwell within the land,” and He then grants peace to the people. In 2nd Chronicles chapter 7, King Solomon is officiating the dedication of the temple of God with the priests and Levites. It is after the ceremony has been completed and King Solomon has retired for the day that the Lord appears before Him and gives the following message.
“I have heard your prayer and have chosen this place for myself as a temple for sacrifices.
“When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”
2nd Chronicles 7:12-14 (NIV)
The message continues until the end of the chapter with a warning. While God has chosen this temple to be His resting place, if the people of Israel turn their backs on Him to serve other gods, He shall uproot them and turn the temple into a heap of rubble. When everyone looks at it, they shall ask themselves, “Why?” And the answer will be it is because they forsook their God.
Plagues of locusts are mentioned as part of the things that God will send to the nation. And while most of us understand it means all of their harvests will be consumed, we might not realize this also impacts their economic strength. Grain and sources of food have always been important products. And having an excess of it allows for prosperity in a nation since they can eat well and be merry with festivals and export the excess for a nice financial return.
How this financial return looked would obviously vary from transaction to transaction. However, having an excess of something that is always in demand provides you the opportunity to leverage it for something else you might require. This principle applies both to the individuals and to the nation as a whole. If harvests are constantly successful and provide a surplus, their national storehouses would have plenty to use for trade. Now consider the impact of a plague of locusts and how it would have the exact same inverse reaction.
In this warning, God is making it clear that if enough people in a nation choose to abandon God. He will let tragedy befall the whole nation rather than just the individual. I am not going to be as arrogant as to call myself a prophet who tells the future as they did in the scriptures. At most, I’d say I’m someone who notices similarities and draws parallels between events. Many traps exist that people can fall into when looking at scripture and trying to apply it directly to the current time frame without taking things into account. In writing this, I have identified two key pitfalls that people can suffer from.
The first is not recognizing the differences as well as the similarities. We no longer live under the Old Covenant, which was a placeholder to show how deeply we needed to be saved by Christ. We no longer live in an age where nations make covenants with their proclaimed, or chosen, god or gods. We live in the era of the New Covenant, one that is made between each person and God as an individual.
But the second flaw is the opposite of the spectrum from the first one. Believing there is no application of scripture to our circumstance because it doesn’t match us exactly. It will be very rare to find things that are one hundred percent the same as they were in the verses we read. But some can be close enough for us, or they are conveying some general-purpose wisdom that can be applied for our benefit.
Given that we no longer live under the Old Covenant but under the New Covenant of Christ, we have to accept that things have changed. The temple has changed from being the building to being ourselves as we live our lives. In the same way that Christ rent the dividing curtain in the Holy of Holies in two from the top down, providing access to God’s blessing for all. In some ways, I see this can be applied to nations as well.
First, we have to understand that the word nation can mean several things. While it means a group of people with a unified culture, heritage, and language, we’ve also come to believe it requires they have land. Sociologists have brackets to organize groups of people. When a nation is tied to a location, such as a territory of land, and rules over it, they become classified as a state. States can vary in size and shape, but so long as they fit the two main qualifiers, they count. I first came to consider these things because of Kirk Cameron’s “Campfire Revival” as he went through the book “The American Covenant” by Marshal Foster. Since then I have read the book and given its ideas some more thought.
While the book focused on the Mayflower Compact, which is a legal document the Puritan leaders wrote and signed for how they would govern their new colony. Foster declares it was the first “American Covenant” from which many more covenants in the shape of local constitutions and ordinances for cities would spring. Foster classifies these as covenants because they directly acknowledge the existence of God and His divine governance over all things, including the governments that man establishes. He draws many parallels to how ancient Israel was comparable to a republic before they had a king. Each family governed itself in accordance with the law of God and any other laws that might have existed in their province.
Some people say the USA is a nation chosen by God to be a light to the world. I think they are mistaken. Christians are supposed to be shining examples of humility and submission to God paired with love for others and bringing them the truth of redemption through Christ. I, however, will conjecture that if enough people within a state are in obedience to God and seek to live righteously while working as passive encouragement to others, then He might decide to lavish His blessings on them. Our nation’s history with God is a complicated one due to the fact that we have individuals who are able to act on their own and that we have been established without an official religion even if we had a culture that embraced Christianity.
Because we were founded in a time when many attended church, read their Bibles, prayed often, and had laws reflecting the virtues of the Bible, people say we are a “Christian Nation.” That is historically accurate. But to say we have modeled true Christianity as it was recorded in the Bible for how the early church lived, Acts chapter 2, would be inaccurate and a fallacy. Many who have called themselves Christian were simply those who went to church on Sundays. That’s why we have several who gave Christianity a bad name when interacting with the various native peoples of the continent. Self-proclaimed Christians were part of the slave trade. They have committed atrocities all throughout history, as have those who didn’t call themselves Christian, because all humans have an inherited nature of sin.
Some will say this sudden shift away from Christian morals is a new thing. But it isn’t. If we read the book of Judges, we will see a pattern emerge. Israel believes themselves to be specially protected by God and then abandons their ways until they suffer and turn back to Him when someone chosen by God to rescue them arrives. It only lasts for a generation or two, and then they go back to being in a time of suffering. And the USA has a similar pattern. It would seem that once every century someone would be stirred by the spirit of God to preach a series of messages to the people they are sent to.
I believe that this only shows that humans have a natural inclination to drift away from God. Our spirit is one of evil and will do anything it can to get away from the perceived chains of righteousness because they limit what it’s allowed to do. We sin because we are sinners and find the pleasure of our actions to be more important than any more objections to them. Moral relativism has always been popular and is making a new comeback in our current time in history. But that is only a partial truth. Moral relativism has always been making a comeback, but it’s only now that we are seeing the full momentum it has garnered behind itself.
Our nation is taking pride in the sins we have as a large blot on our record in the eyes of God. Sodomy parades for all to see, exposing children to these things to be normalized in their minds. Transgenderism goes against obvious biological truth, and the advocates of it demonize anyone who doesn’t support it to make them silent if they challenge the lie. Florida’s bill preventing the topic of sexuality and related fields from being brought up in the classroom for ages 3rd grade and below resulted in many teachers leaving out of protest for the law. Something I find indicative of how prevalent the restricted behavior was. Many celebrate abortion, calling it a great thing and a human right to murder the innocent.
I believe that the USA has a history of wanting to do what is right in the eyes of God even if they will fail at times. And that is why we have been allowed to prosper.
Right now, I feel we are, at the very least, losing protection from the consequences of our actions. I do not think we have been cursed yet. But that time of grace to repent will eventually run out. If enough of our people do not pray to intercede for the hearts of our people to change to repentance, we will continue to suffer and maybe receive a curse or two from God because of these behaviors.
As I said in my “Heart for Home” series, we must not hide anything from God in these prayer times! We must admit to each and every sin in our lives, making ourselves clean before the Lord. The ancient priests would first offer sacrifices for their own sins and then enter in to offer sacrifices for the people. It is the same for us when we intercede on behalf of our own nation.
Of the many lies being spread and gaining popularity, the prime one is that we have no chance of being freed from our sinful nature and thus enjoy the pleasures of life while we can. Go back to the beginning of this year and refresh yourself on what I said then in “Personhood of the Son.” We are not unable to be freed, but rather it is the truth of Christ that sets us free and enables us to stay free! This is why we need to continue preaching the message of repentance. If we repent in humility, the nation we live in can be spared and once more allowed to prosper as we draw nearer to Him in our laws and attitude of obedience to His righteous decrees.
Until Next Time,
Courage and Godspeed!