Last time we saw that some of America’s key founding events, this nation was dedicated to the God of the Bible. This happened at Jamestown in 1607, at Plymouth in 1620 and at President Washington’s first inauguration in New York City, where a dedicatory prayer turned into a prayer meeting lasting several hours. Yet now we have drifted far from our beginnings. President Obama in fact declared that we were no longer a Christian nation – and on another occasion, described us as a Muslim one. Our borders have been opened to people from around the world that have no intention of assimilating into the American culture. Sharia enclaves now dot the American landscape. We find them in Michigan and Buffalo, NY, Minnesota and Texas. There are camps where ‘Islamic training’ goes on – and even ISIS was training in their own camps in northern Mexico, just across the border from Texas. We are facing an identity crisis.
We have turned from the God of the Bible in so many ways. By culturally embracing abortion and the LGBTQ Woke Agenda, we have thumbed our nose at God’s Laws found in Scripture. We have dedicated a month to celebrating the Sin of Pride – and reveling in practices that date back to pagan times. Spirits once exorcised from Western Civilization have come once again to occupy the cultural zeitgeist. We are a nation in need of repentance. In a similar time of national crisis, perhaps it was Lincoln who expressed it best. In an 1863 address calling for America to fast and repent – (of all things) – he called a nation rent by civil war into the very mode of repentance which closely mirrored that famous passage on national contrition and national restoration found in 2Chronicles 7. His words are today worth detailed study. “It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord. We know that by His divine law, nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world. May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people? But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.”[i] Lincoln’s words from long ago, pronounced the indictment on today’s America.
Yet many will still insist that we were never a Christian nation. That the Founders were Deists. But we need only look to the State Constitutions, back when they considered themselves to be sovereign entities to see the truth. Nine of the thirteen original colonies / states, required you to be a Bible believing Christian to serve in public office. All 13 required a declaration of faith. Nine required you to be a Protestant. Maryland was Catholic, also required a declaration of faith. In just about every single state constitution, required that you confess Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. There were 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence. Fifty five of them where “Bible believing, Church attending Christians.” Now some say that the American experiment was derived out of British Common Law. But even this had its’ origins in Scripture. There are three major principles of Common Law: Presumption of innocence, due process and jury of your peers. These are all principles found in the Bible. Blind justice, is another biblical principle. And you can read the last paragraph of the Declaration as a prayer to the Judge of the Universe. Our Founders were “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world.”[ii]
John Adams wrote: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” And that defines the problem we face today. The government put in place by the Founders was designed for a Christian nation, one that was composed of probably 95% Bible believing Christians. And now we have this form of Christian government – ruling over a people that is no longer predominately Christian in any real sense. President Obama declared that we are no longer a Christian nation. And in a sense he was right. Still today, almost 2/3 of Americans identify as Christians. But that doesn’t paint the real picture. According to various surveys, somewhere between 4% – 6% of Americans have a biblical worldview. Even only about 11% of evangelical Christians sport a biblical worldview.[iii]
We are a divided land today. And it was much the same in the time of the Revolution. It was John Adams, I believe, who thought that America was composed of three equal parts of one-third each: Patriots, Loyalists, and Neutrals. Historians now see the numbers somewhat differently. Perhaps, 40% to 45% favoring the revolutionary cause, about 20% Loyalists (those who supported the British cause – and the rest just trying to survive the war. That was political division. Religiously though we were predominately a Christian people, who had just come through the Great Awakening.
Jump to the present, and we now have come to the cusp of the End of the Age and the culmination of the War between Good and Evil. And one phrase from Lincoln’s words plays true over and over again in light of today’s culture. “But we have forgotten God.” All of Western thought has changed. We have moved from basing our culture on the Judeo-Christian Worldview to embracing a Humanistic Worldview; and it makes all the difference. We have moved from the realization that the ultimate reality rested in an Infinite Creator God – and replaced that notion with the silly idea that Man is the measure of all things. You see, America was birthed in the notion of freedom; an idea that was nurtured and grown in the climate of the Judeo-Christian Worldview. That view took hold during the Reformation. Prior to that period, Ultimate Authority was shared by the Church, the State and the Scriptures. The Reformation wrested that control out of the hands of men – (the Church & the State) – and theoretically at least, placed it back where it belonged – in Scripture alone – (Sola Scriptura). And because there was a Creator God / Lawgiver at the top – and because that God created Man in His own image – the rights of Man were….inalienable. No government could bestow those rights….and none could take it away. That’s why the Declaration of Independence reads: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And from that lofty sentiment flows the understanding that has acted as the glue of our body politic for 250 years. That statement has stood as the basis for the Bill of Rights, our property rights, our freedom to worship and assemble and speak on things political.
Like Israel we began as a nation that – however imperfectly – sought to serve the purposes of Almighty God. It was Joshua who pioneered the Promised Land for the Israelites. After wandering for 40 years in the desert under Moses, Joshua led a generation of Israelites that established a proper relationship with Jehovah God as they conquered the Land given them by the Almighty. Judges 2:7 tells us: “So the people served the LORD all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great works of the LORD which He had done for Israel.” America too, amid many stumbles, had its period of at least seeking to loyally serve the Lord God. In case of both Israel and of the US, generations passed and the Divine connection waned. The ‘originals’ died off and the new generations slipped into apathy, forgetting their faith. “When all that generation had been gathered to their fathers, another generation arose after them who did not know the LORD nor the work which He had done for Israel.” (Judges 2:10) They had lost their sense of history; – their connection to the reality of God. And what does a people do that does not know God? “Then the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the LORD, and served the Baals; and they forsook the LORD God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt; and they followed other gods from among the gods of the people who were all around them, and they bowed down to them; and they provoked the LORD to anger. They forsook the LORD and served Baal and the Ashtoreths.” (Judges 2:11-13) They embraced gods of their own making. There is no darkness so deep as that! We have lost our POINT of AUTHORITY. We think we can make laws for ourselves without the guidance of the God who created us. We think ourselves wiser than our Creator. We have bought into the lie of the Serpent. We imagine that because we have tasted of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil……that we can be as gods. But the Apostle Paul details the result of such unsound thinking. “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness… Professing to be wise, they became fools.”
….And yet even now, we see pockets of REVIVAL breaking out across the land. And in that there is HOPE. LORD ALMIGHTY, we pray that you will send your HOLY SPIRIT to water those seeds of REPENTANCE and REVIVAL, that we may once again, become a nation dedicated to YOU, our CREATOR and RULER OF THE UNIVERSE….And to the purposes which you have ordained for us from before the creation of the world. We ask this in the mighty Name of JESUS. AMEN!
[i] Abraham Lincoln, Proclamation Appointing a National Fast Day, March 30, 2013
[ii] Charlie Kirk, Q&A, viewed April 21026
[iii] Survey Exposes America’s Biblical Worldview Collapse, American Faith, March 5, 2026
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