A Faithful Remnant

Posted by Larry Miller on August 24, 2010 under How | Read the First Comment

In the book of Jeremiah, the prophet talks about God asking why His people turned away from him to idols made of wood and stone who could neither hear, answer nor even care about the people The comparison is made between the times when the people sought after Him and when they went off in other directions. At one time, the people lived in the land of prosperity and then the land of captivity. The people of Judah, not content with the God of Abraham, that had led them out of Egypt into the promised land, left their heritage and pursued the gods of the surrounding neighbors, who, being only pieces of stone or wood, had no power to help them at all… and finally they were led as captives to a foreign land.

While this is a sad tale, is there something we can learn from their experience? Human nature is such that we tend to quickly become discontented with whatever it is we have. After the reign of King Solomon, the people of Israel could not even get along amongst themselves. The northern tribes split from the kingdom and quickly added worship of pagan gods to their religious practices. The “more righteous” southern kingdom of Judah held on longer, but eventually succumbed to the lure of being like the surrounding peoples and adopted their multiplicity of deities.

The effect was not adding power to their practices, instead it moved them out from under the protective wing of their creator. We, in the United States, emerged from World War II as the premier superpower of the world. Our industrial capacity was intact, and our land was unscathed by the horrors of war. We were the arsenal of democracy and the leader of the free world. Our country was not perfect as the work and sacrifice of leaders like Martin Luther King Jr, Medgar Evers and a whole host of other lesser known martyrs for the cause of civil rights would attest.

Yet, in an imperfect world, we were a most blessed people. We were a nation of hard workers who could accomplish almost anything. We are still the only country that has had our astronauts walk on the moon. We were proud of our country and confident in its future. We believed in the American Dream and the promise that if we worked hard, we could be successful. This was the USA I grew up in.

Even as we enjoyed the good times there were those among us who didn’t like our individualistic and, essentially moral, culture that made our nation great. They saw European socialist countries where people did not have to extend themselves to find a living wage. The fact that they traded various freedoms for this did not bother those who heard this humanistic siren call. Sure the state had a greater presence in their lives, but to those who rejected the Judeo-Christian morality that served us so well as our country grew to greatness, this presence was far less onerous than the code of conduct that kept us on the straight and narrow.

They found the Darwinian teaching that we were simply the product of random events and that there really are no transcendent values of right or wrong liberating. At first it was a disaffected “intellectuals”. Then they infected the halls of academia, and from there generations of students and teachers. They led many in the country to give up on the values and ethics that made it great. They took away the internal guides that kept most people headed down the virtuous path.

They substituted gods of self, materialism and personal achievement for the God of the Bible and the fruit of the spirit. Greed became not only acceptable, but admired. The momentum of our economic engine kept us going for a while, but inevitably, the piper presented his bill… to which the Federal Reserve responded by printing more and more money, only digging us into a deeper hole.

Like the people of Jeremiah’s day, we have rejected the behavior that helped us succeed in the past. Like them, also, we thought we knew better. We followed the lead of less functional nations and when the blind lead the blind, we all fall in the ditch. We also have forgotten the old maxim that tells us that when we are in a hole, STOP DIGGING!

It’s natural to want to progress and to look around for new methods and ideas. Yet it is madness to go down a path that has always led to failure and disaster. This is exactly what we are doing. We may not be physically carried off to another land, but we are quickly placing ourselves in bondage to foreign lenders. Lenders who do not have our best interest at heart.

Just like the people of Judah suffered when they rejected the wisdom of their forefathers, we too will and are suffering because we, as a nation, have rejected the wisdom of founding fathers. Still there is hope. No matter what punishment the Israelites received, defeat, dispersion or genocide, God always preserved a remnant that was faithful to Him and formed the basis of restoration. Today, there is a remnant of Americans to understand and appreciate the values of our founders and the documents they passed down to us.

And what were those values? Patrick Henry told us. “It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ! For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.” If we do not lose heart, we too shall form the basis of the restoration of our country to the shining city on a hill, and once again be the beacon of freedom.