The ideological and culture conflict that has raged in the USA from the 1950s on has now found its political expression with its most anti-God administration seizing power.
Two thirds of Americans believe there was wide scale voter fraud, so much so that most Trump supports believe that the looser of the vote is now due to form an administration.
Wild accusations flow from Democrat leaders, charging that yesterday’s protest in Washington was an attempted coup by President Trump, despite the fact that he urged his supporters to be peaceful, orderly, law-abiding and to go home. Twitter saw fit to delete Trump’s tweets urging this.
To many outside observers, it seems the party who staged the real coup are accusing their adversaries of the treasonable crime they themselves have committed. I suspect we will never fully the truth.
Ashli Babbit, an air force veteran who had served four tours of duty for her country, was shot dead by a plain clothes policeman, yet it was Capitol Police who had removed barricades and opened doors into the building. It does seem like the Democrats wanted this ‘storming’. President Biden called the protestors ‘domestic terrorists.’ Many of them came just to pray.
The message: yes, you may have served four tours of duty for your country but protest our power and we will shoot you like a dog.
Anyway, it seems a good moment to look back to the beginning of the experiment that is the USA, not to the Declaration of Independence, significant though it is, nor to the ridiculous 1613 Project’s assertion the USA started when the first slave landed in America, supposedly making the USA the most wicked slave owning colony ever in perpetuity, but to the Pilgrim Fathers.
These English Puritans, as they were called, for they sought a pure church untainted by non-Biblical traditions and practices, escaped persecution in England (in the end the later government of James II would throw every Puritan in gaol) and sailed for the new world.
While creatures of their time, they were strongly influenced by a profound knowledge of the Scriptures.
Two founding documents are worth a read in full at this time, the covenant the Pilgrim Fathers made with God and each other, and the sermon one of their leaders John Winthrop preached shortly before landing in the New World.
The Covenant
“In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God of Great Britain, France, and Ireland King, Defender of the Faith, etc. Having undertaken for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith and Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the First Colony in the Northern Parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one of another, Covenant and Combine ourselves together in a Civil Body Politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute and frame such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. In witness whereof we have hereunder subscribed our names at Cape Cod, the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France and Ireland the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth. Anno Domini 1620.”
One manifestation of the ideological battle in the USA today is the people can no longer agree on what these ‘just and equal Laws’ should be, because the laws desired by Christians are different from the laws required by materialists and hedonists, since (as they see it) there is no God, all our lives consist of are the experiences of pleasure or pain. So, make laws to maximise pleasure and get rid of inconveniences such as pregnancies, old people, and perhaps later on infants, restrictions on paedophilia and the family as a social construct.
To put it another way, the half of the country to have chosen to break this covenant have now seized power.
John Winthrop’s Sermon
“A Modell Hereof
God Almighty in his most holy and wise providence hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in subjection.
The Reason hereof:
1st Reason.
First to hold conformity with the rest of His world, being delighted to show forth the glory of his wisdom in the variety and difference of the creatures, and the glory of His power in ordering all these differences for the preservation and good of the whole, and the glory of His greatness, that as it is the glory of princes to have many officers, so this great king will have many stewards, counting himself more honored in dispensing his gifts to man by man, than if he did it by his own immediate hands.
2nd Reason.
Secondly, that He might have the more occasion to manifest the work of his Spirit: first upon the wicked in moderating and restraining them, so that the rich and mighty should not eat up the poor, nor the poor and despised rise up against and shake off their yoke. Secondly, in the regenerate, in exercising His graces in them, as in the great ones, their love, mercy, gentleness, temperance etc., and in the poor and inferior sort, their faith, patience, obedience etc.
3rd Reason.
Thirdly, that every man might have need of others, and from hence they might be all knit more nearly together in the bonds of brotherly affection. From hence it appears plainly that no man is made more honorable than another or more wealthy etc., out of any particular and singular respect to himself, but for the glory of his Creator and the common good of the creature, Man. Therefore God still reserves the property of these gifts to Himself as Ezek. 16:17, He there calls wealth, His gold and His silver, and Prov. 3:9, He claims their service as His due, “Honor the Lord with thy riches,” etc. — All men being thus (by divine providence) ranked into two sorts, rich and poor; under the first are comprehended all such as are able to live comfortably by their own means duly improved; and all others are poor according to the former distribution….
Question: What rule must we observe and walk by in cause of community of peril?
Answer:
The same as before, but with more enlargement towards others and less respect towards ourselves and our own right. Hence it was that in the primitive Church they sold all, had all things in common, neither did any man say that which he possessed was his own. Likewise in their return out of the captivity, because the work was great for the restoring of the church and the danger of enemies was common to all, Nehemiah directs the Jews to liberality and readiness in remitting their debts to their brethren, and disposing liberally to such as wanted, and stand not upon their own dues which they might have demanded of them. Thus did some of our forefathers in times of persecution in England, and so did many of the faithful of other churches, whereof we keep an honorable remembrance of them; and it is to be observed that both in Scriptures and latter stories of the churches that such as have been most bountiful to the poor saints, especially in those extraordinary times and occasions, God hath left them highly commended to posterity…
Thus stands the cause between God and us. We are entered into covenant with Him for this work. We have taken out a commission. The Lord hath given us leave to draw our own articles. We have professed to enterprise these and those accounts, upon these and those ends. We have hereupon besought Him of favor and blessing. Now if the Lord shall please to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath He ratified this covenant and sealed our commission, and will expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it; but if we shall neglect the observation of these articles which are the ends we have propounded, and, dissembling with our God, shall fall to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us, and be revenged of such a people, and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.
Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “may the Lord make it like that of New England.” For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.
And to shut this discourse with that exhortation of Moses, that faithful servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israel, Deut. 30. “Beloved, there is now set before us life and death, good and evil,” in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep his Commandments and his ordinance and his laws, and the articles of our Covenant with Him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it. But if our hearts shall turn away, so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worship other Gods, our pleasure and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.
Therefore let us choose life, that we and our seed may live,
by obeying His voice and cleaving to Him, for He is our life and our prosperity.”
John Winthrop recognises that as the community grows the people will become different in wealth and power. The answer to this inequality is not forced rebellious redistribution (what we know today as communism) but the relationships of Christian love between the members of the community. He goes on to show that without this love, they will ‘perish out of the land’, consciously echoing this same phrase Moses used in his sermon to the Israelites, the Book of Deuteronomy.
What we have seen in the USA is what Jesus warned us all about, a time when ‘Because of the multiplication of wickedness, the love of many will grow cold’. [Matthew 24:12]
These lines of John Winthrop seem especially prescient:
‘For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.’
The USA is indeed a city upon a hill. The eyes of the world are upon them, literally, through the power of television. Has the USA dealt falsely with God? By the measure of John Winthrop’s sermon, the answer has to be yes.
The rest of the unfolding story we shall see with our own eyes.
For many the USA has been a last beacon of hope for freedom, freedom from religious or political persecution and freedom from poverty, freedom to say what you think. It seems the flame of that hope as sputtered out.
Watch now as they try to ban Bible believing Christianity in that country and crush its power for good, and indeed across the West, so that wickedness can multiply all the more. For the best soil in which wickedness can grow is one where wickedness is called good, and good wickedness, and no one is allowed to say any different.
The challenge for Christians is not so much how to survive, but how to stay true to our God and ourselves, and how to not lose our love. The answer is to be found in drawing ever closer to Christ, who has gone on before, and drawing closer to one another, fulfilling the New Commandment – to love one another as He has loved us. The Lord bless you and keep you,
Graham Ford
President – Jesus Christ for Muslims