America in the hands of an angry God
Their foot shall slide in due time: For the day of their calamity is at hand, And the things that shall come upon them make haste. Deuteronomy 32:35
This article is not a call for political action and advocates no specific policies. America’s deepest problems are spiritual, and cannot be solved by this or that leader.
Neither is it a hate-America rant, as if some sort of ideal earthly utopia were possible, or as if evils of many different sorts did not exist in every country all over the world.
It is rather a scriptural discourse, according to the Bible as I understand it. It asserts God’s rule over the nations of the earth, including the United States of America, and asserts that our present difficulties are due to the express will and higher purposes of God.
O thou (you) that dwellest (dwells) upon many waters, abundant in treasures, thine (your) end is come, and the measure of thy (your) covetousness.
The LORD of hosts hath (has) sworn by himself, saying, Surely I will fill thee (you) with men, as with caterpillers; and they shall lift up a shout against thee (you). Jeremiah 51
Could it be that all of Trump’s sincere, diligent and sensible efforts to build a border wall came to nothing because God himself was against it? What if the Lord is replacing all of the children lost to abortion with someone else? What if we do not want our own children so we get this instead? What if, since we as a nation have rejected God, we get Islam, transgender ideology, Woke-ism, DEI, newly minted American versions of Communism and socialism, and steadily increasing authoritarianism instead?
Speaking through his servant the prophet Isaiah, God says:
I also will choose their delusions, and will bring their fears upon them; because when I called, none did answer; when I spake, they did not hear: but they did evil before mine eyes, and chose that in which I delighted not. (Isaiah 66)
I believe that these and other similar verses apply to America, and we are beginning to reap what we have sown over a century and more of modern secular progressivism in its many forms. Is the process irreversible? I do not claim to know. In connection with this, next week I would like to look at 2 Chronicles 7:14:
If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
Parenthetically, the phrase “my people” does not refer to the American people as a whole. It refers to those who are self-identified as followers of God, as we Christians claim to be. This means it is those who claim to be Christians who have to repent and turn from their wicked ways, and I do not see a great deal of that in the nominally Bible-believing churches today.
In 1741, a Congregationalist minister named Jonathan Edwards preached his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” It is considered a notable example of colonial literature, and is a remarkable example of the preaching that contributed to the First Great Awakening that was so influential in Britain and the colonies in the 1730s and 40s.
The sermon does not speak of nations, but of individuals. It reminded the hearers of the brevity and the fragility of life; of the certainty of judgment in the world to come; and of seriousness of God’s judgments on the ungodly. Hence, it is in many ways different from this article, which is not in any sense an attempt to imitate Jonathan Edwards. However, the title is very relevant, as is the concept of a God who is not only and always gracious and merciful, but who also judges, and condemns.
I had some hesitations about using this title. Not many people today are interested in that sort of thing. Even many people in the Evangelical camp today feel somewhat uncomfortable with the God of wrath as Edwards presents him. I could have a chose a less confrontational title – but I chose to keep it for the sole reason that it accurately describes the content of this article.
God’s rule over the earth
Much of the Old Testament is the story of God’s dealings with the Jewish people, and many biblical prophecies and narratives pertain specifically to the nation of Israel. Yet, God’s providence extends to the rest of the world as well, and no serious student of Scripture has ever argued that God’s regulation of human affairs applied only to Israel, or was active only in Bible times.
In Isaiah chapter 14 we read “This is the purpose that is purposed upon the whole earth: and this is the hand that is stretched out upon all the nations.”
God’s hand is over all of the nations.
There are many other verses to this effect:
. . . the most High ruleth (rules) in the kingdom of men, and giveth (gives) it to whomsoever he will (Daniel 4).
And they shall go into the holes of the rocks, and into the caves of the earth, for fear of the LORD, and for the glory of his majesty, when he ariseth (arises) to shake terribly the earth (Isaiah 2).
In connection with this, it is necessary to point out that God’s rule over the earth includes blessing, goodness, and mercy. We read in Acts 14:
Nevertheless he [God] left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.
And we should be thankful to God for our existence, and all of the things he has provided for us that pertain to life. “Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun” (Ecclesiastes 11).
However, the alternation of blessing and mercy on the one hand with wrath and punishment on the other is a consistent theme of the whole Bible, from the first book to the last. This is a concept of God that is anathema to the modern mind – however, the point currently at issue is not the vindication of God’s justice. It is that God’s anger is a biblical teaching, and that it is significant for us as a nation today.
There are many words of encouragement in the Bible for those who look to Jesus Christ for forgiveness of sin and the blessed gift of eternal life. Yet, if we want to be true to Scripture, we must also consider the God who rained fire on Sodom and Gomorrah; who destroyed nearly the entire population of the world in a cataclysmic flood; and who waited until the iniquity of the Canaanites was filled, and then removed them from the land in the violence of the conquest, in which the armies of Israel were ordained by God as instruments of destruction.
Much is said about God’s anger in inflicting punishments on the disobedient children of Israel and the surrounding nations. In Ezekiel 5 we read:
Wherefore, as I live, saith the Lord GOD; Surely, because thou hast (you have) defiled my sanctuary with all thy (your) detestable things, and with all thine (your) abominations, therefore will I also diminish thee (you); neither shall mine eye spare, neither will I have any pity.
A third part of thee (you) shall die with the pestilence, and with famine shall they be consumed in the midst of thee (you): and a third part shall fall by the sword round about thee; and I will scatter a third part into all the winds, and I will draw out a sword after them.
Here God says directly that pestilence, famine, war and exile are from him.
This is more directly stated in the 14th chapter of Ezekiel, where we read
For thus saith (says) the Lord GOD; How much more when I send my four sore judgments upon Jerusalem, the sword, and the famine, and the noisome beast, and the pestilence, to cut off from it man and beast (v. 21)?
There are passages in Jeremiah, Zechariah, Lamentations and Isaiah where God’s punishments are straightforwardly declared. We read in Jeremiah that when he sends anger on Judah and Jerusalem that he will have no pity or mercy but will destroy them (13:14); in Zechariah that when people are suffering under his wrath he will not hear their cries (7:13); and in Isaiah that he will sweep the land with the besom [broom] of destruction (Isaiah 14:23).
What does this have to do with the United States of America?
Once again, the USA is not biblical Israel, but that would be a poor sort of Christianity which taught that God was only interested in saving individuals but had no hand in the affairs of nations.
America has in many ways been a great country – and this has nothing to do with MAGA. The last thing we need now is to be boasting about how great America is, or maybe I should say “was.” It is rather a simple historical description of some of the things that made America great in the past: not great according to the standards of an idealized and misinformed patriotism, but factually great in size; in wealth; in military power; in cultural influence; and in its role on the world stage.
There is no guarantee, however, that this will last forever. Germany was a great and powerful country in 1913. After a mere thirty-two years and three completely unpredictable disasters – two world wars and a serious economic depression – Germany ended up a smoking pile of rubble, shattered and occupied by conquering armies.
Nobody knows what sort of changes might happen to the United States of America in the next few decades – but what few will consider is that the rise and the fall of nations is determined by the hand of God. This means, that the same God who gave America the blessings of peace, prosperity and liberty in the past has the right and the ability to take them away. Moreover, he has already begun to do so, and the current descent of America may be only the beginning.
We may experience in our lifetimes the evils other nations in all parts of the world have suffered – war, poverty, famine, chaos, tyranny. We are not special because we are Americans. We are not guaranteed easy lives forever because we are Americans. Biblical Israel under David and Solomon was greatly blessed by the presence and wisdom of God, yet he destroyed it when its iniquity became too great.
America’s future is now hanging by frayed and weakening threads, and those threads are in the hand of God. America’s future will be determined by the will of that same God whom we as a nation have rejected - and if at some point God wants to bring America to its knees, and even lower than that, it will not be a difficult thing for him to do.
This does not mean anyone needs to be afraid of Christians or of people who believe in the Bible. It is not people who believe in the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ and sincerely seek to follow his teachings that are a threat to America today.
It is not people who protest peacefully in front of abortion clinics that will be the downfall of America, and neither is it owners of bake shops that are glad to sell homosexuals any product, but do not want to participate directly in rebellion against God by placing sinful messages on their products.
The greatest threats to America today, apart from the will of that God whom we as a nation have offended, are our own stupidity, vice, corruption and godlessness.
It is not the Christians who are turning some of America’s greatest cities into cesspools of crime and squalor. And what foes, whether foreign or domestic, are lurking in the shadows, to be detected by a wisdom that we do not have, and defeated by courage and resolution which are in desperately short supply?
We have the rulers that God has given us. Has he given us good and wise rulers, for the strengthening of the nation? Or has he given us something different, as an expression of his displeasure?
A lack of leadership on all levels of society is itself the result of God’s judgment on a nation that has forsaken him. As we read in Isaiah chapter 3:
For, behold, the LORD, the LORD of hosts, doth take away from Jerusalem and from Judah the stay and the staff, the whole stay of bread, and the whole stay of water,
The mighty man, and the man of war, the judge, and the prophet, and the prudent, and the ancient,
The captain of fifty, and the honourable man, and the counsellor, and the cunning artificer, and the eloquent orator.
And I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them (vv. 1-4).
Isaiah 19 talks about how God has deliberately corrupted the wisdom of the rulers of Egypt:
The princes of Zoan are become fools, the princes of Noph are deceived; they have also seduced Egypt, even they that are the stay of the tribes thereof.
The LORD hath (has) mingled a perverse spirit in the midst thereof: and they have caused Egypt to err in every work thereof, as a drunken man staggereth in his vomit.
Where are our strong men, our leaders with wisdom to know what to do and strength to do it? Our judges, who honor righteousness and law? Our orators, the eloquent spokesmen for truth who can discern the times and point to a constructive way forward? If they are gone, or fast disappearing, it is because God himself has taken the spirit of judgment for them, and given us a government more suitable to our present national character.
The following passage from Job describes America in detail.
With him [God] is strength and wisdom: the deceived and the deceiver are his.
He leadeth (leads) counsellors away spoiled, and maketh the judges fools . . .
He leadeth princes away spoiled, and overthroweth (overthrows) the mighty.
He removeth (removes) away the speech of the trusty, and taketh away the understanding of the aged.
He poureth contempt upon princes, and weakeneth the strength of the mighty . . .
He increaseth the nations, and destroyeth them: he enlargeth the nations, and straiteneth them again.
He taketh away the heart of the chief of the people of the earth, and causeth them to wander in a wilderness where there is no way.
They grope in the dark without light, and he maketh them to stagger like a drunken man (12:16-17, 19-21, 23-25).
“He taketh away the heart of the chief of the people of the earth, and causeth them to wander in a wilderness where there is no way.” Does that not describe America today?
Does anyone think that America will stand forever? That our society will be intact and our government in place until the end of time?
England in 1913 was the world’s greatest imperial power – it took only a few decades for that power to be broken. Rome fell, Babylon fell, Greece fell – do we think we are special, and that prosperity and freedom will remain ours forever for no other reason than because, as Americans, we deserve it? But there are some who do not even think at all, and only assume that things have always gone well for America and always will.
There are some today who are saying that religion is a threat to the future of civilization, that what we need is a rejection of religion and a reliance on reason alone.
Really? Who is responsible for the epistemological chaos of post-modernism, out of which emerge metaphysically confused people impervious to reason, logic, evidence and even common sense? Is it so hard to understand that belief in a universe created by chaos and blind chance ultimately undermines society as a whole?
How can there be a society of laws and reason in a universe of unreason? Are not current scandals and disgraces in some of America’s finest institutions of higher learning merely the visible fruits of decades of falsehoods and delusions?
It is not Christianity that has permanently destroyed many local economies by selling out national industries to foreign countries for the sake of greater corporate profits, without the slightest regard for the well-being of individual workers or of local communities whose economies they have ruined. This is driven by the love of money, which the Bible explicitly condemns.
It is not the teachings of Christ that have turned the American government into a swamp of corruption and crime, where the rich and the powerful are above the law and are entirely separated from and indifferent to the people for whose welfare they are supposed to be governing.
It is not Christianity that has brought us to a point where all of our most basic rights vanish as soon as some new disease emerges, to be replaced by the rule of government experts, many of whom are callous, corrupt, arrogant and incompetent. Neither was it Christians who mandated disastrous and totally unnecessary lockdowns for a disease that was of minimal danger to healthy young people. Biblical Christianity teaches that there is a certain amount of risk inherent to life, that death can come at any time, and that cowardly and cringing survival at any price is not the meaning of life.
It is not Christianity that indoctrinates little children with bizarre and perverted social delusions in school, instead of preparing them for their future lives imparting such skills as reading, writing, arithmetic, history, and geography. Neither does Christianity teach children and adults that sexual activity is a game, a sport, a source of fun to be pursued outside the safe and loving boundaries of a man and a woman committed to each other in marriage for life. Belief in God is not to blame for the collapse of the family, the most basic cell of a functional society. Neither is it Christianity or belief in God that has produced the sweet poison of modern entertainments.
Naive and simple-minded secular humanists, “progressives,” and atheists have no idea of the evil that lurks in the human heart, and they have no idea of the floods of chaos and misery that they are working so diligently to unleash. It is their false beliefs that are a crutch, and it is denial of God that gives false hope and shallow comfort to those who believe they can live as they like without having to give a full account in the world to come.
Who has seen the hand of the Lord in these things? Do we Christians even believe in the God of Scripture at all?
The nations shall rush like the rushing of many waters: but God shall rebuke them, and they shall flee far off, and shall be chased as the chaff of the mountains before the wind, and like a rolling thing before the whirlwind ( Isaiah)
Does this include the United States of America, the mighty superpower, the hyperpower, rebuked by God, and blown like chaff before the wind? Our nuclear submarines and our rockets and our armed forces and our politicians and our crumbling constitution will not save us.
In the sermon mentioned at the beginning of this article, Edwards said that the wicked and unbelieving Israelites were in an uncertain situation,
liable to fall of themselves, without being thrown down by the hand of another; as he that stands or walks on slippery ground needs nothing but his own weight to throw him down.
Might not this be said of America as well? Are the foundations of America now so decayed, and is the structure of America now so weakened, that we may collapse from our own internal follies?
Speaking still of the rebellious Israelites, Jonathan Edwards writes:
. . . the reason why they are not fallen already, and don’t fall now, is only that God’s appointed time is not come. For it is said that when that due time, or appointed time comes, their foot shall slide. Then they shall be left to fall, as they are inclined by their own weight. God won’t hold them up in these slippery places any longer, but will let them go; and then, at that very instant, they shall fall to destruction; as he that stands in such slippery declining ground on the edge of a pit that he can’t stand alone, when he is let go he immediately falls and is lost.
Who wants to say now that America is a righteous nation, a Christian nation? We read in I John that “the whole world lieth (lies) in wickedness” (5:19). I don’t believe that the United States of America is excluded from that – and how much wickedness is there even in our churches and seminaries? If the truth were known, would it not be evident that some of the most godless and evil places in America are churches and seminaries where the truths of God as revealed to us in his Word are denied, and people are smilingly comforted and reassured on their broad and easy paths leading downward to eternal destruction in the lake of fire?
Whatever the long-term results might be, in the short term, if we continue on our present course, we are headed for serious trouble, of which current conflicts are only the beginning – but in all of these things we should be able to discern the hand of the Lord. As Isaiah says again, “The LORD of hosts hath purposed it, to stain the pride of all glory, and to bring into contempt all the honourable of the earth” (23:9).
The American democratic experiment is failing. Without self-discipline, without morality, without rules, without wisdom and charity, without God, things fall apart. Hatred, greed, love of power, immorality, brainless hedonism, conceited folly, lack of natural human feeling and unjustified pride are becoming the dominant characteristics of our nation. At the end of this process, when we are as a nation are reaping what we have sown, then there will be many who will long for the good old days when America – in spite of all of its obvious sins and injustices – was at least a functioning country and many people were still able to live ordinary lives.
What is our calling as Christians in all of this? The early Christians did not set out to reform or change the Roman Empire. They did not point to this or that injustice or inequity or bad policy of the Roman government and say “If more people were Christians we would not have these problems.” They understood the truth of John’s saying, “And we know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness” (I John 5:19). Their goal was not to reform the Roman political system so that they might have easier, safer and more comfortable lives.
The early Christians understood that they were pilgrims and strangers in the earth, liable to die at any time, after which they would come before God. Then they would either be welcomed into his presence in the new heavens and the new earth, or be rejected and sent to an eternity of punishment under the just condemnation of God. Their goal was eternal life, and they understood this life to be found in Christ, in his teachings, in his Spirit, in his presence, and in his service.
Well said, brother!
Jesus instructed us to, "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."