America’s Doom?

“Liberty” is a precious boon, but it must have a supporting moral foundation of sharp definition, for it cannot stand alone, for the wild boars will come and trample down all the hedge if it is not fortified against them. The idol of unqualified liberty for all — liberty for enemies and subverters not less than for loyal friends and defenders; liberty for wreckers, not less than for builders; liberty for the lawless and criminal not less than for the law-abiding and innocent; liberty for the corrupting enemies of morals and blasphemers of God — even more than for the God-fearing and upright; liberty for immorality and vice, not less than for goodness and virtue; liberty for shameless nudity of women with its flood of crime incitement, not less than for decency and modesty, so essential for the oncoming youth of the Land. Oh America! this is thy “glorious liberty” today wherewith thou are destroying thyself!

In a world whose dominant principle is sin, whose position is that of “alienation from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them because of the blindness of their heart,” and whose inevitable trend is ever downward and hellward — even though it be a society “of the people, for the people, and by the people,” is it not plain to see which side shall prevail and triumph by such a liberty — even as we are the involuntary witnesses against ourselves this day, whether we like it or not; and there will be no justice-mocking “fifth amendment” to plead before Almighty God! Oh America! Prepare for thy dissolution unless the lie of thy heart is faced before God in confession and repentance. Are not the signs of the displeasure of His awful majesty sufficiently in evidence everywhere? — Peace taken from the whole earth; convulsions of nature everywhere; the thunderings of oncoming judgment heard on every hand! Who can deny the voice of warning and threatening; yet of ineffable grace and tender pleading in comparison with the woe that awaits us beyond?

So deep and hopeless is the quagmire of moral disorder and contradiction of all principles of truth and contempt for erstwhile moral values, into which we are sunk, that, abjuring all thought of a just appraisal or hope of a disentangling solution, we feel safe only in casting ourselves down before Him and crying night and day to our ever-blessed and merciful God if perchance by our sighing and crying for all the abominations that are being done, His healing Countenance may be entreated to behold our calamity in pity, and look yet with favor on the nation.

Remembering all this in unfeigned thanksgiving before Him and confessing the justice of what has come upon us, let us supplicate His ear of mercy and implore the lifting of the clouds heavy with threatening storm, for the lengthening out yet a little of our fast-fleeting day of tranquility. Let us own that the usurpers and betrayers that have arisen and prevailed among us are only there by reason of our failing His just and most reasonable expectations, yet remembering He is a forgiving God for Christ’s sake to the uttermost.

Verily, “God is not mocked,” and wherefore should He spare a nation only more to corrupt itself, defying all His laws in hateful reprisal for all His goodness, and building up for itself a greater damnation than that which awaited the corruption of Sodom and Gomorrah. Why is the mystery of it so long sustained and unresolved? Because “The Lord is longsuffering to usward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.”

Are Christians, then, above all others, to be the ignorant, gullible, docile, compromising servants of men, however wicked and reprobate, rendering their all — “body, soul and spirit” — to Caesar, and nothing at all, but a physical and spiritual wreck, to God, directly contrary to Christs’s commandment when on earth even before the heavenly position and heritage was made known? Is there to be no room at all for even an intelligent or observing thought, or a pertinent word of truth, as coming from that only true moral perception that resides in the Christian’s heart, as to the crying disgrace, the painful bunglings, and the wanton treason stalking through the land even in the high places of this once-favored nation, leading inevitably up to this present war — almost to be dubbed by the Church as a “holy war,” and thus to be prosecuted first of all by “the Church of the Living God”! No doubt about it, even to the. half open eye, this nation is now in the grip of the consummation of a long-promoted and deep-laid plot of suicidal conspirators, and which is being far more effectually executed by internal enemies than external.

Then the culpability of our eagerly following the Russians — that nation of God’s abhorrence of them, even as they of God — saying “I am against you, O God” — and our even straining to match and even outdo them in their brazen trespass into the heavens and outer space with rockets, satellites and spaceships carrying man’s defilement, wicked designs and destructive engines into God’s heavens: not only so irrational as God’s Word scarcely contemplates it (save as in Gen. 11:1–9 and Psa. 115:16) but even insanely going beyond this in aiming to put a man on the moon, in which we are hell-bound to beat them to it, and out-do them by God-provoking transgressions ; sneering and boasting that they found no evidence of God nor of heaven so far as they have gone. Will we also follow them in the like spirit of this audacious and defiant trespass into spheres where man has no possible business and with them end in attempting to blast God off His throne if they can find Him! Undoubtedly we have been led in this collusion and corrupting friendship with God’s avowed enemies farther than we may first have thought of going, but the idol of “progress” by delving and transgressing “science” into forbidden spheres, has a bewitching fascination that will not let us go, nor back out from a course we know is absolute folly. Thus man’s acquired wisdom through transgression in bartering God for the devil’s lie, has him in a grip that is carrying him on irresistibly to yet further explorations until he reaches the hell, from whence the fatal spell comes, under the just judgment of God.

In the same spirit, and of one piece with the world’s surge to enthrone man in the heavens as on the earth, but now in the ethical and religious sphere instead of the material, the doctrine abroad that declares “God is dead” only coincides perfectly with the contempt for Him in the physical and scientific spheres. Both ways, God must be dethroned. Even when this is not exactly said, He is ruled out of practical recognition by the highest tribunal in the land, and that by the uncanny and immoral wisdom of the day that can find its occasion to do this in the very noble document that protects His honor therein. In striking and unique conformity with this profane spirit is the unprecedented wave of crime covering like an avalanche the land, only to find its way protected by the perverted law and its shackled officers by the same high authority.

And thus on the social front (where laws for decent dress are never thought of) the vile lust indulging and crime-exciting nakedness of womankind—old mothers as well as giddy unguided youth; the shamelessness of which declares that all conscience, decency, and right feeling has fled the woman’s heart of society, inducing, along with the like rot of television, radio and literature, such a flood of crime, as no amount of law could cope with, outstripping Sodom and Gommorrah, for the degree of light and responsibility they had. Why should men die by the thousands on distant heathen soil to save and preserve such a corrupt society as this? Is it not unreasonable to expect God to approve it? I tremble to think of what God Almighty may justly do to this nation, even for no other major crime than for this alone. It stinks in the face of high heaven and is offensive in the nostrils of God! And well may the heat of this lust sear the parched earth and shut up the heavens against rain under the just reprisal of God.

All this, and much more than my feeble sense can comprehend or pen can set down, both socially, ethically, religiously, educationally and governmentally; tells out the ominous threatening of dark and palpable clouds of God’s displeasure hanging over the nation, and presaging a not distant day of terrible retribution. That we have come down to this, pleasure-crazy, mammon-worshiping, sin-deriding, Bible-hating, and God-banishing system of baseless pride and hollow pretensions, may well signal the near dissolution of the great U. S. A. because her vouchsafed light from the blessed God above other nations of the earth, has not only been turned into darkness, but that darkness has become her boasted guiding light, in the name of a strange god our fathers knew not.

Melancholy and depressing as this picture is, we are reminded of a God whose lingering goodness and astonishing reluctance to leave us, gives yet good reason for hope. Humbling ourselves under His mighty but gracious hand, even to the dust and in brokenhearted repentance supplicating His ear of mercy, may yet, peradventure, stem the fatal tide that is steadily overwhelming us. But truly, it is not alien communists who are burying us — they cannot do it any more than bury God, if He is for us. We are burying ourselves by our own American Communism; our faithlessness, our worthless religion and gainsaving rebellion against His truth and claims, which is just what Communism is, by whatever name you brand such organized systems of God-haters. Wilfully blind to this, we only yet more hopelessly afflict ourselves and deepen our blindness by blaming others; who, after all, are only serving their master well. For when was the devil ever to be expected to do otherwise than attend to his business and take on empty and garnished houses that invite his entrance? (Luke 11:24–36) We both furnish the occasion and help the enemy by our willing consent. It is impossible f or outsiders to prevail if we have a good ease before the Lord. Otherwise what security are we promised against spiritual foes by the arm of flesh? Can mere law help us? Those men of the law need themselves to be saved, and are otherwise as weak and vulnerable as are any, before such powers as we are confronted with. “Chains and fetters” nor noble “Constitutions” of men, can blind men, imbued with the spirit of a yet mightier rebel against God than himself. (Mark 5:1–15) Jesus Christ alone can deliver sinful man, and put him “in his right mind” in tranquil peace, as He did the poor demoniac of Gadara — vivid picture of our self-torturing malady till Jesus comes and heals us by his grace.

Here, then, are the guidelines for the “liberty” and “freedom” we so highly prize and ardently long to preserve. To those things that are essentially inimical, undermining and immorally destructive of the liberty which God grants and His word tends to promote, must we look, without becoming slaves to liberty as our principle of action. Resisting sin and moral impropriety carries with it the principle of liberty, whether outwardly realized or not. This must go before, and there can be no freedom when the moral foundation of freedom is absent. There may be a brief hold-over from its past existence, but it cannot long exist without a moral foundation. And this, if for no other reason than that God does not mean for us to have freedom merely for itself; to do as we like, and much less to misappropriate and us it for our lusts in Satan’s service. It is liberty and freedom so used that has so far destroyed its own foundation and that threatens what remains of it. Cherishing freedom simply for freedom’s sake gives no promise whatever that it will follow, through the instrumental means by which alone it is to be effected. It is a fruit, and not the tree; a result and not the cause; it needs cultivation at its source, or the garden of its flower will be overrun with noxious weeds which choke it out.

We do not pretend to speak of what nations as such may or should do under certain circumstances nor of what nations may justly inflict or properly suffer at the hands of each other under God’s providential direction, but of the due spirit and deportment of the one and only divine institution in which God deigns to dwell and sanctifies by His presence on earth, the church. Let us never forget that when God’s interests goes, ours goes too. If we make a worldly harlot church out of Christ’s heavenly Bride, then we shall have the service of a harlot church, and be left blindly to stumble and fall on Caesar’s bloody battlefields, and from thence go to give our account to our heavenly Head we have not held. (Col.. 2:18, 19)

Old Faith Contender

Many subscribe to the funds of a church as a matter of course but they can be compared to the old-fashioned mill wheel. The water wheel would appear to be accomplishing nothing. It was just going round and round in the one place but it was doing good work, for the wheel was turning a shaft or spindle which kept in motion the machinery that ground down the grain into flour which was used to feed hungry souls. The wheel would not turn without the water and the water was given from above. The Lord gives the people the mind to give of their resources, and the wheel is kept turning not only for the benefit of those at home but also for those abroad.

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