You, Mr. President, cannot save America. Only God can do that.
We—you, Mr. President, and those who vote for you—cannot make America great again. God raises up and exalts nations. As Alexis de Tocqueville expressed in his historic analysis of our country, America has only been great to the extent that it was good: “America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” The measure to which we have sought to honor God, following His commands and decrees, relying on His mercy, seeking His counsel, in like measure God has honored our nation. For He spoke through one of His prophets to Eli the priest, “Those who honor Me, I will honor.” But to those who do not honor God, there can only be a certain fearful expectation of judgment.
If we seek to make America great, if we attempt to exalt our nation, jockeying for lead position among the nations of the world, apart from sincere and humble repentance, we will fail. God will bring us down, and He will use other nations of the world to do it as He has done throughout history. Read the Bible; it’s all documented there.
We have worshiped at the altar of sex, enslaved to the lusts of our flesh; and we have called that freedom—freedom of choice, freedom of expression, freedom of speech. God calls it sin. We have given free rein to our sexual passions and lusts, which has led to every perversion imaginable, even the brutal killing of our children. And we have exported these sins around the world. God calls these things an abomination in His sight.
We have worshiped at the altar of prosperity, forgetting where our prosperity has come from. “The blessing of the Lord makes one rich.” It is God who gives us the power to create wealth. As God warned the Israelites through Moses: “When you live in large and beautiful cities... when you have eaten and are full…when you have built large and beautiful houses and dwell in them, and when your herds and your flocks multiply, and your silver and your gold are multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, beware lest your heart is lifted up and you forget the Lord your God, and you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gained me this wealth.’ You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is He who gives you power to get wealth.”
We have worshiped at the altar of our military strength. We have relied on the might of our own armed forces as the most powerful nation in the world. Reliance on our military is a broken cistern that can’t hold water, or a river reed that will break, to use the words of Jeremiah the prophet. The only sure reliance is God. But God will not be used for our political agendas. God is calling us to repentance. Unless we repent, our nation will perish like all the other nations and empires that have come before us in history.
I cringe every time I see the MAGA slogan: “Make American Great Again.” We are only kidding ourselves. As Thomas Jefferson so famously said, “I tremble for our country when I consider that God is just and that His justice cannot sleep forever.” If he could say that at the dawn of our nation, how much more now when we have committed and propagated every evil God hates.
From our financial systems to our political systems and even to our religious systems, from our entertainment to our education and even into our personal home lives, our entire culture has come to be based on a foundation of lies. We are inundated with propaganda and every technique used by Hitler to convince Germany to follow his lies. We have been lulled into complacent, apathetic slumber through our amusements and advertisements and continuous “news” accounts. Oh, that our eyes and ears and hearts would be opened to Truth!
When I consider just one aspect of our cultural life as a nation—our acceptance of abortion—I tremble for our nation. For 47 years, we have flooded our nation in a blood bath. It has been kept nicely hidden and out of sight as were the ovens of Nazi Germany and the mass graves of Stalin, but the blood of millions of babies cries out from the ground, as Abel’s blood cried out when he was slaughtered by his brother Cain. Their cry will not go unheeded by the God of heaven.
I tremble at the prophetic words of Abraham Lincoln from his second inaugural address, written on that great Lincoln Memorial building in our own Capitol: “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war [God’s judgment on our land that we have not yet seen] may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil [the millions accrued by abortionists in the past 47 years] shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash [spilled at abortion clinics] shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
I have walked the streets of our beautiful capitol city, gazing at the magnificent buildings and wondering if the words of Jesus spoken to His disciples about their own capitol city would not have a secondary fulfillment in our own country: “Not one stone will be left upon another.” How tragic if that should be so. How unnecessary. I pray to God that such disaster will be averted. But His judgment will only be stayed through personal, corporate, and national repentance—a turning from our wickedness to seek the mercy of a just and good God, in full reliance upon Him and wholehearted, committed obedience to His commands.
Mr. President, I urge you to lead the way. Call our nation not to greatness, but to repentance. Call us to fasting and prayer. Let us pray that America will become good again. Perhaps God will spare us as He spared Nineveh during the days of Jonah.