What You Can Do - If You Will
By Al Cronkrite The Covenant News ~ October 13, 2009
“Alas, sinful nation, people weighed down with iniquity, offspring of evildoers, sons who act corruptly! They have abandoned the Lord, they have despised the Holy One of Israel, they have turned away from Him.” Isaiah 1:4
Prior to the rejection of His chosen nation God described the people as lacking in counsel and understanding. He lamented the fact that they were not wise and able to discern their future. (See Deut. 32:28) Could He not have been addressing Western civilization, the cradle of Christianity? Are we not weighed down with iniquity and were not our forefathers also culpable? Have we not abandoned the Lord; even in our theologically correct Reformed institutions?
Before we attempt to do anything; before we seek to block the New World Order, secure obedience to the Constitution, end abortion, condemn sodomy, counter the tsunami of pornography, reform our police force, bring justice to our courts, or Godliness to our Federal Government; before any of these missions shouldn’t we repent of the ugly sin that has caused our Sovereign God to bring these disasters upon us? Isn’t it just another humanistic endeavor for us to attempt to stem disasters that God, Himself, has brought about because of our blatant sin – sin that we have failed to discern and acknowledge?
Christians are so badly deluded that most are unable to understand what is happening in the Western world and why it is happening. We are busily condemning the evil Democrats but not wise enough to see the evil in Republicans and Conservatives. We are busily affirming the righteousness of our nation in response to a perceived need for patriotism when the actions of our nation need to be repented for and from. We revere our Founders but we fail to understand that they too were sinners and their sinful actions need to be condemned and repented from.
We play at religion. We mouth religious phrases and pose themselves as righteous while in our innermost being we neither trust nor are we willing to obey God. We pick and choose from His Word and find reason to ignore those portions we do not understand or that do not coincide with our cherished beliefs. We seek to rise above God making Him our servant rather than being His servant. We seek healing prosperity and gifts overlaying humanism with a Christian veneer and calling it Christianity.
While the One True God has put Westerners under judgment for failing to obey His Law and for failure to approach His Word as seekers rather than judges, we condemn Muslims and brand them fanatics for following their cultic religion in a manner that should put us to shame. Muslims make an effort to obey Shiria law while Christians ignore their Law. Muslims believe their law is righteous and pleasing to God while Christians not realizing the similarity between the two legal systems condemn Shiria law and inadvertently the Law God gave to Mose.
In an approach typical of our day Parade Magazine had done a survey of United States Christians entitled “How Spiritual Are We”. Author Christine Wicker writes at the beginning of the article, “Parade’s survey reveals a nation looking heavenward – but with its feet firmly planted on the ground of modern life. Spiritually speaking, Americans are a very practical people, moderate and tolerant in ways that would have astonished our grandparents.”
Parade provides its readers with an interesting array of facts concerning “spirituality” in America. Though it will go over the heads of most readers the word “spirituality” is designed to replace the word “Christianity” which is the current target of the humanistic juggernaut – it is propaganda, subtle, but still propaganda. Even less recognized is the emphasis on the creature rather than the creator. God and His Law is ignored by most American Christians and their leaders. Instead, the emphasis is on how God will bless His created beings. Completely forgotten is the solid Biblical doctrine that obedience must precede blessing.
Mostly we are unteachable; divided, opinionated, conceited, unwilling to accept the counsel we so badly need, thinking ourselves wise when in God’s eyes we are astonishingly stupid. We have no respect for the saints whose prodigious efforts bequeathed us a sound theological base for the Christian religion. In our arrogance we become our own theologians and devise our own interpretation of Scripture. The years of work that went into the Westminster Confessions by the best Christian minds of that age are ignored by our pusillanimous leaders who prefer to grow their churches with an effete conformity rather than a strong, full orbed message from God’s Word.
Christian resistance to God’s judgment has been going on for several decades. The Jerry Falwells, D. James Kennedys, Pat Robertsons and their millions of minions have battered away at symptoms of the coming tyranny without success. Still I am urged to contact congressmen and senators in spite of the fact that that procedure has had no effect on the progress of God’s judgment, nor will it.
We lack wisdom! We cannot comprehend that God is not honored by our feeble attempts to thwart His judgment. It has not yet penetrated our bulging egos that we are sinners in need of repentance. We are still patriotic and self righteous. We still think we have a right to rule the world with murder and mayhem. We are still vulnerable to maudlin sentimentality and allow it to override reality. We don’t want to acknowledge our sins and the sins of our fathers. Our relationship to the Creator of The World is so gossamer that we believe He will accept our demands, allow us to bring our own form of righteousness to the world and beat our chests in arrogance when we are finished. We are so sick with humanism that the obedience God requires is alien to us.
Recently, someone sent me an article written by an officer that was tortured as a prisoner during the Vietnam War. He wrote a detailed account of the horrors inflicted on his body during his captivity using them as a mockery of the comparatively mild tortures reported from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. That officer’s endurance may have been heroic but his attempt to legitimatize milder forms of torture was evil. Christians are deluded with the idea that criticism of our nation is unpatriotic and detrimental. The idea that we will support our country right or wrong is anti-Biblical. The Bible supports the death penalty but it does not support torture. How can Christians who support armies that murder millions of innocent civilians and torture those they capture expect the Blessings of a righteous God?
On February 17, 1950 speaking before the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Paul Warbur made the following declaration, “We will have a world government whether you like it or not. The only question is whether that government will be achieved by conquest or consent.” President Woodrow Wilson, a Reformed Christian, was a proponent of world government. As president of Princeton University Woodrow Wilson was a brilliant man. The son of a Reformed Presbyterian minister his erudition seriously distorted his theology. Wilson’s quest for world government and Warburg’s prescient declaration were never seriously challenged by our somnambulistic Christian leaders most of whom have never preached a sermon on the universal sin that makes centralizing power sinfully dangerous.
Christians have long ignored sinister sin and now that those accepted evils have grown to full stature we want to put up a fight. It is too late to fight. The Christian church should have repented two centuries ago when the fledgling nation endorsed a Constitution that forbade a Christian oath for government service and allowed heretical religions free access to our nation. That blatant secularism should have been denounced by every pulpit and the Christian oath required by every state should have been incorporated into our national document. God has been patient but we have been stubborn.
“Who among you will give ear to this? Who will give heed and listen hereafter? Who gave Jacob up for spoil, and Israel to plunderers? Was it not the Lord against whom we have sinned, and in whose ways we are not willing to walk, and whose law they did not obey?” Isaiah 42: 23-24
Few, I fear.
Al Cronkrite is a free-lance writer from Florida. He can be reached at fmsinfla@hotmail.com