America: A Beautiful Idea

Last week I alluded to The Law of Nature and Of Nature's God in my discussion of the Supreme Court and their decisions affecting our culture.  The idea of The Law Of Nature and Of Nature's God is a philosophy born of the Reformation, and borrowed by the Founders of the United States.  You see it referenced in the Prologue to the Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved. . . .  And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

This week on the radio I heard a re-telling of a message by Tommy Nelson, pastor of Denton Bible Church. It was originally preached Memorial Day weekend, 2002.  I would encourage you to look up Denton Bible Church online, and listen to the entire message.  Here is the part that was excerpted on Focus on the Family Radio yesterday:

America is the greatest idea that was ever concocted.  Isn’t the Bible?  No the Bible is not an idea, it is a Revelation of God to us.  As far as the light and salt effects of Christianity, I believe that America is the greatest idea that anyone ever conceived.

From the late 1500’s through the 1600’s, countries determined their religions.  Except in the case of England:  England went back and forth.  They were Anglican, then Protestant, then Catholic.  ; and it caused a great deal of strife among English Reformers, those who had the idea of the Sovereignty of God, in Salvation, in the Authority of His Word. And many of them wanted a Protestant Government.  Some English reformers stayed there—we all know this story, it is precious to us—they stayed there, and sought to purify the system from within.  They were called Puritans.  Others left, and we know who they were, they were called Pilgrims.  They boarded a boat, and they came over here.  They came for the freedom from the hindrances of government, and the establishment of the ancient medieval idea of Augustine, of the City of God, to have, not a Church-State separation, but a state that was the church, and to have a Christian country.  That was their idea.  They sought a Theocracy—not a Democracy or a Republic.  They wanted a Theo-Kratos, the rule of Jesus Christ through the State.  And it was noble.

By the late 1600’s, to make a long story short, it had failed.  The reason it failed—and I’m not being facetious right here—was that they had teenagers.  And the faith of the parents did not show up in the teenagers.  I know you’re amazed that it can happen, but it can.  And by the late 1600s there was what was called the Salem Witch Trials, the Mania of ’92, and the Puritan dream became socially discredited.  And the Puritan Ideal faded.  But they did leave us with something: they left us with a Christian Biblical perspective of God as outside of government, to whom government is subservient; of God in a Biblical sense—not just a G-O-D idea, but the God of the Jew, the infinite, personal God who has made Himself known, and redeemed man through Jesus Christ.  And the biblical idea of Man as having “mannishness”, the glory of God in man as distinct from nature, and having what they would call rights that were taken from Nature’s God, of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, that were germane to every man in the Image of God.

What they came up with was not just a Constitution; it was a Constitution that reflected Sinai.  I don’t know if you’ve thought about it, but that’s the brilliance of the American concept.  We were governed by a Constitution as Israel was governed by a Decalogue.  And it was a government that reflected the Biblical idea of the Fallen-ness of Man.  We had a saying that came out of that time: Absolute power corrupts absolutely.  We would not give absolute power to humans because they were fallen.   And so we had a government that was Legislative, Judicial and Executive, that checked the others.  Nobody was sovereign, all were checked by the Constitution, that was a reflection of Right as coming from God.  We would elect officials based upon what we perceived Right in them, and that unholy men could not get in.  And if they did badly, we could depose them in four years, and we could put others in their place.  And that is why I think it is a right statement that America was a unique country.  It wasn’t just a locale, or a race of people; it was an idea that sprang out of the Protestant Reformation concerning God and Man, and how we should live and be governed.  A country that had problems, and our problems did not come from the inherent flaws in our system.  Our problems came because of a national lack of courage to live out our Constitution.  The idea of racism and the Jim  Crow laws were unconstitutional—they existed, not because of our belief system, but because of our lack of national courage to get rid of them.  Some of the ways that traditionally women were treated were not right, and that’s why our landmark decisions have been literally acts of Constitutional repentance, to make right what should have been right.  In other words, our problems were that we were just not American enough.  We are the one country that has had great problems with immigration.  Everybody wanted to come to America, and we would greet them in the harbor with a Lady of Light bestowed upon us as a present by France, a country that attempted fraternity and brotherhood and liberty, but you could not find that in Voltaire’s humanism.  You find it in the infinite person of God.  And they bestowed upon us a gift: that Lady of Light and glory that awaits you in the harbor.  How many of you know the words on the Statue of Liberty?  “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.  Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed, to me.  I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”  I’ve always been amazed that the woman who wrote that was named Emma Lazarus, whose name comes from the Hebrew derivation of the name Eliazar that means “God is my help.”  That’s why the fellow in the New Testament who knew the grace of God as no other was the man that had been dead for four days named Lazarus.  And so here this woman whose name is the very idea of life from the dead, greets the masses come to us. 

We are a country whose chief export and commodity has been freedom.  You can be and aspire and dream, hypothetically, for anything that you would like to be,  You want to be a Senator? You want to be anything.  Maybe you will make it and maybe you won’t, but our system will give you a shot.  Anything you want to be, you’re free.  We are a country that because of the freedoms that we’ve granted to Christianity, allowed it to proliferate.  And the greatest number of literature, Bibles, seminaries, churches and missionaries in the history of man have come out of this country.  It has literally been a fountain of truth.

Our country, from the outset, had a biblical framework of Nature.  And our view of Nature was that man should subdue Nature, he was to harness it, and to gain dominion over it.  And that gave rise to study, because we saw it coming as from the very creativity of God, but there were logical answers to physics and chemistry.  There was trigonometry; there was geometry that we could gain because it came from a Mind, that minds could discover it.  So science, the subduing of nature, and technology, the learning of it, education became proliferated throughout our culture.  And we became a technologically advanced people.  Our view of history is not that it was just “winter, spring, summer, fall, winter, spring, summer, fall”—cyclical, life and death.  No, we felt that we had a view of history from the Bible’s idea of what is called Chiliasm, that history is moving to an Omega point.  And we even became arrogant, in a sense, and called it our Manifest Destiny, and we felt that we were in a sense the redeemer. But nonetheless, we had a great sense of progress, that the Jew had; that we could take bad to make good, and good to make better, and better to make best.  And we had a sense of progress.  And the idea of American ingenuity came out of that theology.  Our view of evil was that bad is bad, because God is good, and He doesn’t like that, and that’s why it’s bad.   And those are things that came out of the womb of the Reformation.  And we became the most advanced, educated, healthy, technologically advanced people by the late 1800s that had ever lived.  And it all came as endemic and instinctive to the Judeo Christian roots.

So when I say that America is not merely a people or a locale, I mean that.  That’s not a romantic concept. I say that historically. America was an idea, a great idea of the reformers.

Well, you’re thinking to yourself, what happened?  What happened is that we forgot the words of our National Hymn, America the Beautiful where we sing, “Confirm Thy soul with self control, and Thy liberty in law.”  Moral creatures cannot have liberty without law, or you have anarchy.  Intelligent creatures know that you cannot have law without an absolute, and that is God.  We rid ourselves of God, then we rid ourselves of law, until where law and right and morality became semantically mystic terms with no logical basis.  And we have imploded.  Here’s how it happened. The Achilles Heel of atheism was always Creation.  No effect is greater than the cause.  There was something that was there with order and morality. Hence, an eternal Cause:  God.  Evolution offered a hypothesis that we embraced as a fact, and now atheism had credibility (so it was thought).  And so science removed from us the notion of the necessary existence of the Prime Mover, the Uncaused Cause; of God.  The Bible, that was the basis of our knowing God, that we felt was supernaturally revealed, that it was this document that talked about science, history, and archeology and historical events, but in its viscera was the supernatural of the infinite personal God who made Himself known in Divine, Inerrant Revelation, with the Virgin-born Divine Person of His Son who died upon the cross as a substitute, and rose from the dead.  And the Holy Spirit of God converted and maintained us.  And He would return and bring about the interposing of His will upon history and His Kingdom.  Well, that supernatural viscera of the Bible was removed by the late 1800s by what was called Higher Criticism that, to make a long story short, de-mythologized the Bible. Not because they proved it, but because they came at it with that rationalistic premise, and they literarily would find what they felt were things that showed that Moses didn’t write this, and the Gospels weren’t written here, and Paul was this, and we basically did a taxidermist’s job on the Bible, and we took out all of the guts.  And it became a dead shell of a guy named Jesus that said good things, that you could be better off doing them than not.  And that’s all that we became. 

You also had the phenomena of philosophy.  Up until the early 1900s philosophy was an optimistic science whereby taking reason, that you sought to find a rationalistic system that gave a basis for existence:  Man, right, dignity, and all of those things.   That ended in Nihilism.  Nihilism means nil, nothing.  And the conclusions of what began with Rationalism by the end of the 1800s was that Man was merely a part of Nature, and as such his mind was acted upon by Natural forces; therefore you could not trust his mind to stand outside of data, and come up with an absolute truth, because his mind was merely part of data.  Thus he didn’t even know that he existed.   You didn’t know whether, as they would say in Philosophy, that you were there, or that you were the daydream in the mind of an iguana.  That was Nihilism.  And it brought such despair, it brought such horror to the thinking man that out of it came the idea that no, we are the animal that can choose.  Thus there is no absolute, but I as an intelligent ape, I can come up with decisions and I exist.  And thus Existentialism came.  That I determine truth, subjectively upon what I think I want to do.  That I am the master of my fate.  And that became the pop psychology that runs totally counter-purpose to the idea of Man in the image of God with reason standing outside of Nature, drawing rational conclusions and moral critiques.  It ran counter-culture.  The arts always are the pulpit of philosophy, and they became the pulpit of this, both in music and in art and in the phenomena of the 20^th century known as the movie.  And they perpetrated reality.  And when you put those together, I mean it was a philosophic earthquake.

Where was the Church? Here’s what the Church did in the 1900s: we put our finger to the wind.  Science feels, Higher Criticism feels, therefore we will change our belief system to fit.  And we made the golden calf of Christianity.  It was a secular, social gospel at best.  And Christianity basically became a liberally tainted thing at the seminary denominational level, of using Christ because it simply was a hygienic, safe way to live.  The 60’s hit.  And in the 60s a generation arose, and they saw problems.  They just didn’t have solutions.  There were seemingly in the 50s rules that had no philosophic, theological base, and the 60s challenged them.  Why should I do this?  Why should I not have sex whenever I want it?  And that’s where we had—morals can’t stand where you have no theological base, and you have that phenomenon of the 60s revolution.  Because they lived out what they were taught about philosophy, evolution and the like, and the literary dissecting of the Bible. The 60s kids lived it out.   The problem was the 60s had no form to reform to.  They had no vive whereby they could be revived.

The Renaissance made it in Europe when it broke away from some of the stuff of the Middle Ages, because the Renaissance was followed by the Reformation that picked it up with a theological base.  Freedom could be met with responsibility, law and truth.  The 60s was a renaissance with no theological base.  And into that vacuum we saw immorality, we saw drugs, we saw despair and hypocrisy, and the spiritual needs of a generation, we looked to the East.   And eastern mysticism, reincarnation, transcendental meditation, astral projection, even some of the residual stuff of that—yoga, and the martial arts became commonplace.  We looked to the East.  Were we free? What we ended up with was the despair that came in the 70s—the breakdown, continually, of society.  The home, institutions—the church, the home, government, military, police, teachers—had no theological and logical base, and they broke down.  Rebellion became the logical response: uneducated kids, lack of morality, abortion, venereal disease, divorce.  We’ve gotten this reaping of our theological sowing.

Here’s where we’ve arrived to.  When you shake it down, here’s the logical place that we’ve come to.  The only wrong in our country is to be right.  And the greatest Right is the assent that there is none.  Intelligence is ignorance.  Ignorance is wisdom.  Is there a devil, or what?  Only a devil could bring that about.  Our country got philosophically hi-jacked in this century.  And it happened so slowly, so smoothly, so slickly that I mean we took of the fruit and ate and gave to the husband and he ate.  And we saw that we were naked and we hid, frightened.  And we were cast east of Eden.  That’s this century.  Not just in our country; I think Europe arrived at it a little bit earlier.  But that’s where we are.

When I was in Russia, I heard a great commentary on the United States from a Russian Christian.  He said,  “we are a country in darkness and we are looking for light.  You are a county in the light, and you are searching for the dark.”  That was the commentary or the observations of a Russian Christian.  Jeremiah said in his day, “Your sins have withheld good from you.”  And they have been.  Our sins have been the rod for our back.  Our cities, our violence, our youth, our pregnancy, our divorce, our violence, our corruption, the breakdown of the family.  Well, I know what you’re thinking. “Boy, thanks Tom for the encouragement this morning.  I’m really blessed.”   Is there hope?  Some guys, say “No. There is no hope.”  I know this: if there is hope, I’ll assure you where it’s going to come from, and you don’t have to be this brilliant to figure out.  What we’re going to have to do is to re-form, to have re-vive, to re-turn, and once again sorrow, and that is called re-penitence.  It’s going to start in the church.  Historically, trust me: this always happens. The times get so bad that Christians have to resort to God.  Isn’t that brilliant? That’s a fact. That’s what precipitates repentant people: when they have to resort to God.  We’ve tried our education, our medicine, our government, our technology, and nothing’s worked.  Like Mary and Joseph, they turn to each other and say, “Is Jesus with you?  He’s not with me.  Let’s go back where we left him.”  And you go back to the Temple where you found Him.  That’s what’s got to happen.  And historically, a people, a Church, has to return to the sovereignty of the Bible.    Secondly, there’s got to be the return to the Gospel.  The Gospel in our country is merely the means by which you are successful.  There’s lots of pagans that are more successful than Christians, in a lot if ideas.  The Gospel is not the means to success; it is the means by which sinners are forgiven and declared righteous by a holy God.  There’s got to be a return to the gospel .  Thirdly, there’s got to be a return to the living out of it in true righteousness.  That particularly fathers quit being rogue males.  And the males of our country submit themselves, as Adam, to the one who made them.  Then they know how to respond to creation, to their job, and to Eve.  And Eve recognizes the sovereignty of God and that husband, and there becomes order in the home.  And children then become relatively somewhat to a degree “normal.”  There has to be a return to righteousness, to the seeking of the will of God.  And fourthly, there has to be a return to the purpose of the Church, to herald the knowledge of this: that men and women might be delivered from the darkness into the kingdom of God’s dear Son.  What will happen if we don’t? Romans 1, where you have the recognition of God in Nature, the rejection of it, reasoning within yourself, and the replacement of God by a false system.  The reprobation of God, where He gives us over to our own sins, and the ruination of society.  Romans 1.  And we can, I think, hit a place that our corruptions are so great that we will give up our liberties for government to parent us, not to rule us but to parent us.  And when you have flawed people that take that kind of control, you’re going to have at some point corruptions.  And I think it is possible for God as in the Old Testament to raise up a horn to get our attention.  Can that happen? In a heartbeat that horror hits a nation?  Do you think that we are a breath away from Armageddon?  Don’t think that we can’t be just a breath away from Armageddon.  That’s where our world teeters.  And if it comes to that spot, I’ll tell you what will happen.  There will be another group of Christians that finds so much contradiction in this society and so many hindrances that another group with their Bibles in another day on another Mayflower will leave.  It’s not that they will leave America; it’s America will have left them.  And they will find another shore someplace, and America will live again.  If we drop the ball, somebody on this planet has to be America.  Because America is bigger than a people or a locale—it is an idea.  It is a great idea. And when they do, they may have another name, they may have another flag, but I will assure you if God is the one that is exalted, long will that flag wave over a land of the free and the home of the brave.  Somewhere.  Because that’s what America is.

The references to philosophical changes that have influenced our culture is telling.  Some today follow Eastern Mysticism.  Some hold to Existentialist beliefs, some even to Nihilism.  They don't know that when you ask them what their world view is, but that is how they live.  And his reference to the nanny state was prescient--eleven years ago he foresaw our national call for a government not to rule over us, but to parent us, to see to our every need.  They don't realize that when the government falls, they will be crushed.

But the most important part of his sermon is the reference to Romans 1, when Pastor Nelson summed up Romans 1:18-32 by saying there is Recognition of God in nature, the Rejection of that God, Reasoning withing yourself, Replacing God with a false system, and finally the Reprobation of God, when He gives us over to our own sins, leading to the Ruination of a society.  Six easy steps, and an overview of history.  Every nation has seen it, every empire has known it, every era in history has lived it in their time.  Now that America is in decline, God appears to be moving in Asia as never before.

This is the day that we celebrate our Independence from the tyrannical rule of England.  This also could be the day that we mourn our Independence from the God of our Fathers.