National Tragedy

SCRIPTURE: If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayer that is made in this place. 2 Chronicles 7:14-15 ESV

THOUGHT: There’s so much tragedy going on in the United States of America right now I hardly know how to write about it. Among many last week was the revelation of our federal government casting a net for purchasers of “religious texts” in their hunt for extremists.

How I long to open the online newspaper and see some good news, but day after day, it doesn’t happen. It’s big pharma ignoring the pain and suffering caused by drugs that harm. It’s big medicine ignoring their promise to do no harm. It’s big government trampling constitutional rights and failing at their mandate to protect and defend our republic. It’s big tech and big media spinning their webs and colluding around lies that bury the truth further. It’s big business colluding with big government to get around law. It’s big bureaucracy with power to make laws though not elected to do so. It’s big education pushing propaganda that harms children and families. It’s a big “justice” system that is out of control, drunk on its own power and upside down in its creed. It’s world systems encroaching on national sovereignty with impunity.

It’s a national tragedy.

And as I watch, I can’t help but remember President John Adams prescient statement in 1798 to a group of military officers, “we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

So we can argue about it all, expose the evil, point the finger at this one and that one, try to outwit and otherwise overpower the darkness, but in the end, if God’s people among the 336 million Americans (and untold millions of migrants who moved here in the last few years) don’t bow a knee, humble themselves, and pour out their hearts to God, adopting his commandments as their own, we won’t experience the forgiveness and healing he has promised, and there we’ll be, watching the strong chords of our Constitution snap as the whale goes through the net.

SONG: Hear Us From Heaven https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-GTJ3i2xtw

PRAYER: Oh God, how we need you, your truth, your ideas for human flourishing, your amazing and miraculous ways of turning things around for a people who seek and love you wholeheartedly.