LCG Scribe

This excellent article (from the Tomorrow’s World Web site) on America’s alleged status as a Christian nation (past or present) is relevant to many, many things that are happening in our society now, not least our current crises in health care, economics, governmental ethics and religious freedom. That article raised a question in my mind: is there something we can learn from the American Experience — something that most Americans seem to be missing, from our political and religious leadership on down to the citizenry?

I’ve long maintained that our Founding Generation’s fundamental mistake lay in attempting to found a nation on essentially Christian ethics apart from either genuinely Christian government or genuinely Christian religion. Even its ethical foundation was flawed (as the above article notes also), in that it never took into account all of the Ten Commandments and the statutes and judgments that depend on them.  Moreover, its republican form of government with its separation of church and state (and I mean in the Jeffersonian sense as expressed in his Bill for Religious Freedom in Virginia, not in the modern revisionist sense) has nothing to do with the principles of God’s government as summarized in the Ark of the Covenant. The Bible demands obedience to (and prophesies the coming of) a genuine theocratic monarchy, not some other form of government.

To their credit, the American Founding Generation recognized that they couldn’t bring about a genuine theocratic monarchy of themselves and saw that no one else had ever done so of their own power either. But somehow, they remained blind to the fact that a genuine theocratic monarchy did exist — in ancient Israel — and that when people submitted fully to its authority, people prospered tremendously in every way. The only weakness of perfect human government is imperfect human nature, and that’s what Israel’s and Judah’s overall experience proved for all time; yet the American experience teaches a corollary lesson. That lesson is that no degree or kind of merely human, political checks and balances will substitute for human nature being subject to God’s sovereign will, nor will it create that subjection.

Another corollary is something that Americans as a whole find all but impossible to face. Thomas Jefferson was wrong, dead wrong: truth will not win out over error simply because truth is given a free voice in public debate. In a world ruled invisibly by Satan, without God working through human individuals and human authority to establish His will, evil will impose its will by force or by subtlety or both, every time. That too history proves over and over again.

Peace in Jesus Christ (שלום בישוע המשיח),
John Wheeler (יוחנן רכב)