Forgetting How We Got Where We Are

Seen on a friend's post on Facebook:

We’ve all heard the old football tale about the coach who gathers his new recruits together in the locker room, holds up a pigskin, and declares: “Men, this is a football.”

Sometimes, in any endeavor, it’s necessary to start at the very beginning. Sometimes it’s essential to relearn and reaffirm the most basic fundamentals. Sometimes, whether it’s building a marriage, constructing a skyscraper, or founding a nation, it is imperative to remember and re-embrace the bedrock truths on which those things must be solidly based if they are to stand secure.

The consequences of ignoring this simple principle was once sadly expressed in the words on a hand-written sign taped on the front window of a company that was closing its doors forever. The sign read:

“WE HAVE GONE OUT OF BUSINESS BECAUSE WE FORGOT WHAT OUR BUSINESS WAS.”

Why was America founded? What purpose was it intended to fulfill? Why does it still exist today? What if it no longer fulfills its original purpose? What if it’s now an enemy of that purpose? What if it is now a destructive force against the very reasons for which it was created? What if it no longer deserves to exist?

Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn was once asked to explain the core reason for the triumph of the Communist revolution that left his beloved homeland in ruins. In answer to that question, Solzhenitsyn said he had interviewed thousands of people, read hundreds of books, and written seven books of his own on that very subject. But he said he could think of no words that more accurately and succinctly answered that question than simply to say:

“Men forgot God.”

In their day, Sodom and Gomorrah were important city states. They were located on a broad and beautiful plain. But over time, they became the ancient versions of “Sin City.” The sheer stench of the moral wickedness within their walls brought down upon them the righteous wrath of a holy God. By their own choices and conduct, they lost the right to exist. They were literally wiped off the face of the earth.

Jesus once cursed a fig tree that had ceased to bear the seasonal harvest of fine figs for which it had been planted. It ceased to be of any positive benefit to anyone. His curse caused the useless tree to dry up, wither, and die.

America is dangerously close to becoming exactly like that fruitless fig tree. We are perilously close to being exactly like the wicked cities of the plain. Indeed, we may be very near that immoral, unfruitful point of forfeiting our very right to exist.

Why does America exist? Upon what essential principles was it founded? What sovereign purpose was it created to fulfill?

The most simple and concise answer to those vital questions is: We are meant to be, “One nation, under God.”

The great Boston revolutionary Sam Adams, on that historic day in 1776 when our Founders signed our Declaration of Independence, fervently declared:

“We have this day restored the Sovereign to Whom all men ought to be obedient. He reigns in Heaven and from the rising to the setting of the sun, let His kingdom come.”

Our third president, John Adams, one of the most brilliant men ever to occupy that office, said of America’s founding:

“I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and awe, as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”

Adams also wisely warned:

“Religion and Morality alone can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure virtue. If this cannot be inspired into our people…they may change their Rulers and alter their forms of government, but they will not obtain a lasting liberty.”

Adams further wrote that the Republic the Founders created could only stand secure if it remained on a foundation of pure religion, austere morals, and public and private virtue.

Adams, in fact, posed to our new nation the very question we are asking here. He asked: “Upon what kind of general principles did our Founders achieve our independence and form our government?” Then he answered his own question. Adams declared it was upon what he and his fellow Founders called “the general principles of Christianity and of English and American liberty.” Those principles, Adams said, are “as eternal, as immutable, and as unalienable as the very existence, attributes, and character of God Himself.”

Adams’ equally brilliant son, John Quincy Adams, also an early president, declared:

“The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: It connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of government with the principles of Christianity.”

He further declared that most of the Americans of his day freely acknowledged themselves to be voluntarily bound by the laws of God and by the principles of the Gospel as the rightful rules to govern their conduct.

In America today, those principles are regarded as laughable. That original foundation is cracked and crumbling. The demolition is being done by misguided, misinformed, and misled new generations of Americans.

Adams once challenged Thomas Jefferson to cite one example in all of human history when a people that had become “thoroughly corrupted morally” ever returned to the path of virtue and Christianity.

Let us say it frankly.

America today has become “thoroughly corrupted morally.” The forces that shape our lives and guide our behavior no longer come from the Holy Bible or the Ten Commandments or even from godly parents and praying grandparents. They come from a sex-saturated, violence-soaked, anger-filled media and from a powerful entertainment industry that promotes sin as the new virtue, that exalts perversity as the new normal, that deviously describes black as white and white as black, that declares virtue to be vice and vice to be virtue, and that hails villains as heroes and heroes as villains. We are a land turned morally upside down.

Watch any segment of “Sex and the City.” Pick up any edition of “Cosmopolitan” magazine. See for yourself how far the American woman has fallen from the pure path of sexual virtue. Scan any of the hundreds of pornography channels. See with your own eyes the filth to which many American men and boys are now addicted. Listen to the waves of titillating laughter from female audiences when any host of any TV talk show hints approvingly about the supposed benefits of adultery.

In the early days of ancient Israel, a false prophet-for-hire named Balaam cunningly corrupted God’s chosen nation by teaching the people there was nothing wrong with sexual sin. In our own day, the late Hugh Hefner and others like him have successfully promoted that same corrupting falsehood.

We hailed that falsehood as the great “Sexual Revolution.” We were certain it would bring in a golden age of “Sexual Liberation.” But countless divorces, diseases, deaths, broken homes, shattered families, abandoned children, abortions by the millions, health complications, emotional depressions, spiritual emptiness, and sad sexual dysfunctions, disappointments, and disillusionments later, those willing to face the facts now admit it was all a lie. God’s ways, though rejected, remained the best ways all that time.

The tragic truth is, we still haven’t learned our lesson. We still are no longer a nation committed to virtuous liberty. We are a people devoted to unrestrained licentiousness. We are no longer a nation guided by Judeo-Christian morality. We are, in fact, a nation that despises and rejects that morality.

So what say you? What fate does a land like the one ours has become deserve? What can be done to avert that fate?

As the leader of our land, John Adam’s answer was to declare a national day of solemn fasting, repentance, and prayer. Adams called on all Americans to lay aside their daily pursuits and humbly bring to mind their many offenses against the Most High God. He called on his countrymen to confess their sins to God with sincere penitence and to implore His pardon for all their transgressions. He asked the refining power of the Holy Spirit to dispose and enable the American people to render unto God “a more suitable obedience to His righteous moral requirements.” He asked God to arrest the spread of the licentiousness that is so offensive to Him and so ruinous to mankind. Finally, Adams asked God to make all Americans deeply aware that “righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.”

Many presidents after Adams have felt the need to declare many similar days, including some in our own lifetimes.

The Bible has its own solution to America’s fallen condition. In it, God graciously promises:

“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 sins and I will heal their land.”

Let all who truly love this land become part of God’s solution---before it’s too late.

See you next blog,

Ted