Cyber-Discipleship

Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, The people whom He has chosen for His own inheritance.-Psalm 33:12

We all want God to bless America. This is the land that we love and we want to see it prosper. But I fear her days of prosperity are behind her. As we draw near these last days, I am reminded that people have mentioned that America does not appear to have a significant role. When I first heard this twenty years ago, I thought maybe they were misinterpreting something. Now as I look at the moral and fiscal decline of our nation I can understand why we will have no significant role in the world’s future evolution.

A few days ago a friend of mine remarked about how the fiscal decline of our nation is paralleling its moral and spiritual decline. How true it is. There are many places in the Bible where God states that obedience brings blessings and disobedience brings a curse. In fact, one of my favorite passages in the Bible is Exodus 32 where God promises to bless Israel so that all the nations of the world would be provoked to jealousy. Through this, He would win the nations back to Himself. However, because Israel refused to comply, God also told them in the Book of Deuteronomy of the calamities that would come upon them. Deuteronomy 28:15-69, in part reads:

“But it shall come about, if you do not ^[o]obey the Lord your God, to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes with which I charge you today, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you:

¹⁶ “Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the ^[p]country.

¹⁷ “Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl.

¹⁸ “Cursed shall be the ^[q]offspring of your ^[r]body and the ^[s]produce of your ground, the increase of your herd and the young of your flock.

¹⁹ “Cursed shall you be when you come in, and cursed shall you be when you go out.

²⁰ “The Lord will send upon you curses, confusion, and rebuke, in all ^[t]you undertake to do, until you are destroyed and until you perish quickly, on account of the evil of your deeds, because you have forsaken Me.

****************

⁴³The alien who is among you shall rise above you higher and higher, but you will go down lower and lower. ⁴⁴ He shall lend to you, but you will not lend to him; he shall be the head, and you will be the tail.

I believe there are a couple of reasons why this happens. First, because we remove God from our society, we also remove godly principles that make for a productive, operating nation. When we lose sight of God, we lose sight of fiscal responsibility and personal accountability. We are borrowing millions of dollars a day to keep our nation operational and sending millions of dollars in relief to other nations, yet our schools are in shambles, our roadway infrastructure is in need of an overhaul, our military is nearly depleted, and we have millions living at or below the poverty line. Our prisons are overcrowded. We are spending millions in earmarked projects studying things that have no value, essentially building thousands of bridges to nowhere. Why? We are doing this for the second reason: because we have, in effect, evicted God from this nation, He has evicted reasoned thinking from this nation.

Wisdom is gone. As Romans 1 tells us that because we ‘refused to honor God or be thankful to Him, He has allowed our thinking to become empty and our hearts became darkened (). We profess to have wisdom but in reality it is foolishness.’ If we look at our society we have put many Band-Aids on serious wounds thinking we are solving the problem. Like Israel and King Saul, we have elected officials based on their outward appearance but not on their character. We gave people fishes instead of teaching them to fish (entitlement programs). We pay our teachers little and tie their hands on discipline and wonder why our education system is lacking. We treat the people whom we call upon to serve and protect our nation worse than we treat convicted felons. Through entertainment media, we indoctrinate people against sin with videos of violence and programs of promiscuity and vulgarity. We curtail parents’ ability to discipline and teachers’ ability to discipline and wonder why they fight the police. And the list goes on.

Though Psalm 33:12 was original written to the Jews, it is applicable to us. If a nation honors the Lord and keeps His commands, it will be blessed. Our own history has shown that to be true. But once God came under attack with Engel v Vitale (which ended prayer in school), Abington School District v Schlemp and Murray v Curlett (which ended mandatory Bible reading), and later misinterpretations of “separation of church and state” policy, this nation has begun to go downhill fiscally and morally with the Vietnam War; entitlement programs; the free love movement; strike down of DOMA and the rise and “protection” of the sexual issues like homosexuality, pansexuality, and transgender identification; Obamacare; and the like.

God bless America? How about America bless God?