DIVINE LOVE / DIVINE INTOLERANCE
A Biblical, Historical, and Sociological Perspective on Tolerance, The Corruption Of Its Meaning Today, And The Corrosive Effects On Church, Nation And Culture.
DARRELL J. AHRENS
Copyright © 2009 Darrell J. Ahrens
Smashwords Edition
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Contents
Introduction
Section I—Purpose
Chapter 1 Warnings and Examples
Chapter 2 God’s Purpose for Israe
Chapter 3 God’s Purpose for America
Chapter 4 The Founding Fathers’ Vision for America
Section II—The Moral Law
Chapter 5 The Moral Law and Israel.
Chapter 6 The Moral Law and America
Chapter 7 The Founders on Religion and Morality
Chapter 8 Morality, Ethics, Theology and their Demands
Section III—Government
Chapter 9 Israel’s Government—People’s Choice vs. God’s
Chapter 10 American Government and Politics
Chapter 11 To Compromise or Not to Compromise
Chapter 12 A Judiciary Gone Awry
Chapter 13 A Few Worthy Role Models
Section IV—Religion and Worship
Chapter 14 Israel’s Sacrificial System as Prophecy
Chapter 15 Liberalism’s Tolerance and its Danger to America
Chapter 16 The Absolute Truth of Truth
Chapter 17 The Bible as Absolute Truth
Chapter 18 Truth Regarding Human Nature
Chapter 19 Truth Regarding Love
Chapter 20 Truth Regarding Jesus Christ and Salvation
Chapter 21 The Church as the Repository of the Truth
Section V—Education
Chapter 22 Israel’s System of Education
Chapter 23 Education in America Today
Chapter 24 Christian Heritage of Education in America
Chapter 25 Vision of the Founders and Others on Education
Chapter 26 What Happened to the Vision?
Section VI—Society and Culture
Chapter 27 Old Testament Israel’s Society and Culture
Chapter 28 Culture and Society in America Today
Chapter 29 Critical Warning Signs
Section VII—Action and Hope
Chapter 30 What Are We to Do?
Chapter 31 Hope!
To my wife Louise, son John, and daughter Linda, who over the years have blessed me with a love and intolerance that reflects the divine. I pray that, despite my many failures, I have for the most part done the same.
INTRODUCTION
“What to tolerate; what not to tolerate?” This is perhaps the most important question our nation, as well as other Western nations, must consider today. What gives this question its crucial importance is the fact that how it is answered will determine the moral and ethical character of a nation and its people. It will determine the integrity and virtue, or lack thereof, of a nation’s religious, political, educational, and sociological institutions and their policies, laws, beliefs, and practices. Concerning Western nations and societies, it will determine either faithfulness or unfaithfulness to their underlying religious, political, and historical foundations and heritage. In short, it will determine the very identity of a nation and people.
Western civilization is at a crossroads today. The religious, political, economic, educational, sociological, and scientific achievements of Western civilization has brought status, power, wealth, and worldwide influence unequalled by any other civilization. These achievements were enabled for the most part by the promotion of the natural rights of man given by God, and adherence to the Judeo-Christian morals, ethics, and principles which comprises Western civilization’s very foundation.
As regards the United States of America, our Founding Fathers, while refusing to establish a national church, emphasized time and time again that the nation and government they established was founded upon the Judeo-Christian teachings contained in the Holy Bible, and that adherence to these founding principles was essential to the future security and prosperity of the nation and the common welfare of its citizens.
Over the past five decades or more, we have seen an ever-increasing departure from these Judeo-Christian standards. This has been accompanied by a corresponding decline in our nation’s religious, political, educational, and cultural standards. The primary cause for this departure and decline, in the author’s opinion, is the tolerance promoted by secular-progressive liberalism.
Recognizing and tolerating the right to differing opinions and practices, insofar as those practices do not constitute a threat to the nation’s moral, ethical, and sociological foundations and its citizens’ welfare, is integral to the freedoms we enjoy. Secular-progressive liberalism and its ideologues, however, promotes a tolerance that not just accepts differing values and lifestyles, but demands that their fellow citizens condone, approve, support, and avoid being judgmental of those values and lifestyles, even though they violate one’s deeply held religious, moral, ethical, and social beliefs. Failure to accept and support liberalism’s definition of tolerance results in one being accused of bigotry, homophobia, and being denounced as a fundamentalist or worse. Tolerance has come to be considered by secular-progressive liberals as the first commandment of love, and intolerance as the greatest sin. Moreover, even if they acknowledge the existence of God, they claim that since God is a loving God, God must also be tolerant and nonjudgmental. This assumption is arrogance in the extreme in that it rejects the sovereignty of God and insists that God tailor His justice and moral standards to human demands.
God is not tolerant! God is patient; God is merciful; God is compassionate; God is gracious; God is forgiving; God is loving. But God is not tolerant, at least not in the way in which tolerance has come to be defined and practiced today by secular-progressive liberalism.
Tolerance is defined in the dictionary as “respecting the nature, beliefs or behavior of others,” as the “leeway for variation from a standard,” as “the permissible deviation from a specified value of a structural dimension,” “to allow without prohibiting or opposing.” However, if we take God’s Word (and by that I mean the Holy Scripture, the Bible) seriously, we find that God does not respect, give leeway to, accept as permissible, or give allowance to beliefs or behavior which are contrary to the beliefs and behavior which He has established as the criteria for a relationship with Him and with others. In Leviticus 19:2 and elsewhere in Scripture, God tells the people, “Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy.” There is no escape clause in this command, no ambiguity, no wiggle room. God decides what is holy and righteous, not man, and God has clearly revealed His standards for holiness in His Word. He does not provide any leeway for variation or deviation from the values—moral and ethical—which reflect His own nature and to which He calls humankind to aspire. On the contrary, God prohibits and opposes any such variation and deviation. God tolerates the sinner (and we are all sinners) in order to bring the sinner to repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation, but God does not and cannot tolerate the sinner’s sin. To do so would be a violation of His own holy nature, and God as God cannot violate His nature.
Lest one despair over the impossibility of any human meeting these standards God calls us to, the good news is that God understands our weaknesses, our sinful nature, and the fact that we are dust. In His love for us, He has provided us a Savior Who met those standards for us, Who paid the price for our sins, and through Whom we can be forgiven, cleansed, restored to holiness, and clothed in His righteousness. And this forgiveness, cleansing, restoration, and clothing continues on throughout life for the believing and repentant sinner because Scripture assures us that the blood of Jesus Christ just keeps on cleansing us.
Society and culture today are heavily influenced by the ideologies of postmodernism and moral relativism—postmodernism which rejects any notion of absolute truth, and moral relativism which claims that whether an action or behavior is moral, immoral, or amoral can be determined only in relation to the circumstances, conditions, and motivating factors leading to the action or behavior. The Church today—and I am referring to the true Church which acknowledges the Holy Scriptures as the revealed and authoritative Word of God for faith and life and Jesus Christ as the only Source of salvation—is fighting a rearguard action to combat the ideology of full-blown secularism which denies the sovereignty and absolute truth and authority of God’s Word, which worships at the twin altars of diversity and tolerance and which, to an alarming extent, has infected the Church.
The objective of this book is to show the foolishness (Scripture’s word, not mine) and folly of secular-progressive liberalism and moral relativism and how they have corrupted the true meaning of words like tolerance, diversity, and love, and how this, in turn, has led to moral, spiritual, educational, and cultural decline and decay in our nation. The critical need today for our religious, government, and educational leaders, as well as for all citizens of this great land which has been blessed so mightily by a generous and patient God, is the need for discernment—that is, the ability to see clearly and understand fully, even when others can’t or refuse to do so, the logical, eventual outcome of today’s decline in morals and ethical behavior—and with courage, steadfastness and perseverance to stand firm and provide stability in the midst of confusion and instability.
Saint Augustine said, “A person speaks more or less wisely to the extent that he has become more or less proficient in the Holy Scriptures.” Wisdom is becoming more and more rare today in many churches, as well as in government, in our educational institutions and in society overall, for the fundamental reason that Biblical illiteracy has become more and more widespread. Martin Luther said, “Peace if possible, but truth at any rate.” I see no prospect of peace between the forces of radical secular-progressivism and postmodernism and the true Church, for compromise on the part of the Church would in effect relegate God’s revealed Truth to mere philosophy or ideology.
In fact, the Church has, over the past four or more decades, made the grave mistake of compromising too much with secularism as regards Holy Scripture. This has, to a great extent, led to the moral and ethical confusion and chaos existing today, a situation for which the Church bears a heavy share of responsibility. Athanasius, one of the most renowned of the early church fathers, maintained that one must think of God in accordance with what God has actually done and revealed in His Word. God cannot be subjected to creaturely categories or limited by man’s finite intellect and understanding, a common practice throughout the ages and which today is widespread.
True theology has its center in God and is governed and controlled by all He has done in creation, redemption, and revelation. In other words, God does not give man the right or the option to determine his own truth about God’s nature and acts. To do so leads to confusion, heresy, a scholarship that lacks integrity, an intellectual dishonesty and a logic that lacks coherency. Connection with God in one’s faith, thoughts and actions, to be a real and true connection, must be grounded in and reflect the inner connections with God’s being and actions revealed to us in His Word of Truth as given to us by the Holy Spirit through the prophets, apostles, and the Living Word—Christ Himself.
The world is at odds with this Truth, always has been and always will be, and insists that the Church dilute, change, or to use a contemporary buzzword, put a spin to His Truth to make it more acceptable, tolerant to modern society’s mores, values, ethics, and worldview. The hypocrisy of those who hold to this viewpoint, who consider tolerance to be a primary virtue, and who demand not only tolerance, but approval, of things which God’s Word prohibits, is clearly demonstrated by their vehement intolerance of anyone or anything that contradicts their ideology and worldview, their intolerance of good, sound Biblical teaching and preaching which identifies the fatal flaws in their ideology and worldview. In fact, such intolerance of sound Biblical doctrine is identified in Holy Scripture, 2 Timothy 4, as one of the signs of the approaching end times.
Truth, if it is truth in its full and complete sense, is unchanging, just as God’s nature is unchanging. Understanding this, Athanasius, whom I mentioned before, said, “If the world goes against the Truth, then Athanasius goes against the world.” If only all authorities and leaders in the Church, government, and education had the wise discernment which only this Truth gives, along with the courage of Athanasius to stand firm in that Truth, how quickly the decline and decay of society could be reversed.
Isaiah 1:18 says, “Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord.” This book is an invitation to reason together, to consider God’s Truth versus man’s truth, to consider the true meaning and right expression of words like love and tolerance. Let us put aside feelings and emotions, which although can be precursors of truth, also too often mislead, confuse, and blind one to the truth. Let us consider these profound questions of truth, love, and tolerance using the yardsticks of scholarly integrity, intellectual honesty, and logical coherency.
The wise seers in the past considered theology to be the queen of all the sciences and that, apart from theology, there are no true ethics. The rationale behind this statement is that all science and ethics are established and developed on a belief system, and belief systems are inherently theological in nature.
The argument of this book is based upon the premise that there is such a thing as divine intolerance that applies to individuals, societies, and nations. What is the driving force behind this divine intolerance? It is love, the love of God for you and for me, for His human and material creation, a love that motivated God to create us and redeem us, a love that desires the closest fellowship with us, a love that has as its purpose His glory and our highest good, a love that will not tolerate anything that would draw us away from Him, a covenantal love of sacrifice, commitment and compassion. Love is the divine intolerance! The purpose of this book is to show, from both theological and historical standpoints, the relationship between this love and intolerance, its workings in the past, its vitally important application to the lives of people, societies, and nations today and the consequences of either heeding or ignoring this divine intolerance.
Reference Notes
The Biblical passages referenced herein are from The Holy Bible, New International Version Study Bible, Zondervan Corporation, 1985.
Quotations from the Founding Fathers and other distinguished national and religious leaders are mainly taken from the following two sources:
Federer, William J., America’s God and Country, Encyclopedia of Quotations, AMERISEARCH, INC., St. Louis, Mo., 2000.
Hutson, James H., Editor, The Founders on Religion, A Book of Quotations, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2005.
Quotations from the above two sources include the author’s/editor’s name and page number in parenthesis after each quotation.
The author has complied with the 10,000 word limit contained in Federer’s America’s God and Country.
The source of other quotations, where known, are identified in the narrative.
SECTION I
PURPOSE
Chapter 1
Warnings and Examples
You come to the help of those who gladly do right,
who remember your ways. But when we continued
to sin against your ways, You were angry. How
then can we be saved?
—Isaiah 64:5.
Sin is not a popular subject today. People resent being told they are sinners and can become downright hostile when the subject is brought up. After all, isn’t the church and its preachers there to encourage, comfort, and build up one’s self-esteem (a term which is thoroughly unbiblical) and not to convict, judge, or rebuke. Yet, without a proper understanding of sin, its disastrous effects, and the way to be freed from its bondage, one cannot understand or grasp the central message of Holy Scripture—the Bible.
The Old Testament history books and the books of the prophets give us a clear picture of the catastrophic effects of sin on a people and a nation. The history of Israel was one of progression and regression, obedience and disobedience, blessing and curse. During periods of obedience to the covenant God had established with the Israelites and during their faithfulness to the spiritual, moral, and ethical standards God had commanded for holiness, they progressed and were blessed abundantly, prospered mightily, and were victorious over all enemies. Conversely, during periods of disobedience to the covenant, unfaithfulness to God’s standards for holiness and failure to repent of their sins, they regressed into appalling wickedness and lost the blessings of God. They no longer prospered under His mighty hand and they suffered defeat at the hands of their enemies.
Unfortunately, the periods of unfaithfulness, rampant sin, and wickedness far outnumbered the periods of faithfulness and obedience. Finally, the wickedness, corruption and rebellion against God reached the point where only three options were available to God—one, to overlook and tolerate the sin and wickedness of His people; two, to renounce the covenant He had made with them, destroy them, and create a new people and nation through whom He could continue to work out His redemptive purpose for humankind, the purpose for which He had created Israel in the first place; and three, to perform radical surgery on the patient Israel, figuratively speaking, in order to reverse the downslide into total depravity, defilement and apostasy.
God chose the third option, which in itself was an act of grace and love, even though the surgery involved immense suffering on the part of the people, the destruction of Israel’s cities, including Jerusalem and its magnificent temple, the Assyrian captivity of the ten northern tribes who then disappeared from the historical record and became known as the lost tribes of Israel, and the Babylonian captivity of the two southern tribes which lasted seventy years, after which time they were allowed to return to their homeland and rebuild when God moved the heart of Cyrus, King of the Persians who had defeated the Babylonians, to release the Israelites from captivity. 1 Corinthians 10:6, 11–12 tells us: “Now these things occurred as examples to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did. These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come. So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall.” Now, since God’s Word gives us examples and warnings, would it not be wise, reasonable, and logical to pay heed to those examples and warnings?
The following chapters describe the corrosive, corruptive, and devastating effects that a tolerance of sin has on a nation and its society. This is done by carefully considering six crucial aspects of Old Testament Israel’s history and applying the examples and warnings contained there to our own nation’s history, government, culture, and society, as well as to the Church. There are striking parallels between Old Testament Israel and America, as well as other Western nations today. The six aspects, parallels, or categories are (1) purpose—God’s purpose for Israel and His purpose for America as expressed by our Founders; (2) the moral law—Israel’s treatment of it and America’s treatment of it today; (3) government—tolerance corrupted Israel’s government and courts and it corrupts America’s institutions today; (4) religion and worship—Israel corrupted the pure religion and worship given them by God, and the pure Gospel of Christ given us by Christ Himself and the Holy Spirit through the Apostles is being corrupted today by a liberal and secular gospel; (5) education—just as Israel’s failure to follow the educational principles given them by God through Moses brought disaster, so the failure of our educational institutions to follow the principles and priorities given in God’s Word and emphasized by our Founders and their successors has brought serious educational decline and decay; and (6) society and culture—the corrosive effects tolerance had on Israel’s society and culture are paralleled today in America.
Scripture clearly states that nations, like individuals, will eventually reap what they sow. When they tolerate what God calls evil, they forfeit God’s fullest blessings. Just as Israel sowed corruption and wickedness, so they reaped terrible judgment. If we as a people acknowledge a higher power, a transcendent authority, who governs the affairs of people and nations, as our Founding Fathers most certainly did, then we must ask ourselves if it is reasonable for us to assume that we will escape judgment if we ignore the laws and commands given by that transcendent authority and blithely continue our slide into decadence. Then, too, it would be well for us to remember that corruption and immorality were major causes for the downfall of nearly every powerful civilization in the past.
Divine love and divine intolerance are inseparable. Intolerance is often genuine love in action. The perfect confluence of the divine love and the divine intolerance is shown by Christ on the cross—God’s amazing love and grace for us sinners in Christ’s sacrifice for our sin, and God’s utter intolerance of our sin which made that atoning sacrifice necessary so we can be forgiven and restored into right relationship with God.
Chapter 2
God’s Purpose for Israel
God’s purpose for the establishment of Israel as a nation goes back to the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve sinned through their disobedience to God’s command and in doing so corrupted their entire progeny, the human race, with a sinful nature which has plagued humankind ever since. A person can ignore sin, refuse to take it seriously, even joke about it, but only those willfully blind and divorced from reality would deny its existence, evil nature, and disastrous consequences. But God, in His mercy and grace, in His love for His human creation, promised Adam and Eve that He would one day send a Savior, the Messiah, Who would free His human creation from the slavery and bondage to sin.
Genesis 12:1–3 tells us of God’s call to Abram, whose name He later changed to Abraham, and the purpose of His call—namely, to make of him a great nation, a chosen people set apart to God, and through him all peoples (nations) on earth would be blessed by God. How would all peoples on earth be blessed through Abraham? It would be through Abraham’s seed, the nation of Israel, that God in His time would send His Son to take on human flesh as the GODMAN, fully divine and fully human (except without sin) to be conceived by the Holy Spirit and, as we are told in Galatians 4:4, to be “born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those under law,” that is, those under the condemnation of sin, the entire human race. God made this covenant with Abraham and his descendants; however, with the coming of Jesus Christ, the Messiah, His suffering and death on the cross for the sins of humanity, past, present and future, and His resurrection from the dead, the blessings of the covenant extend to peoples of all races, nationalities, ethnicities and cultures. As we are told in Galatians 3:29, “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” Truly, God fulfilled His covenant promise to Abraham that through him all nations on earth would be blessed. People, wherever they are located on this earth who have through faith received Jesus Christ as their only Lord and Savior are Abraham’s true, spiritual descendants.
One final note concerning God’s call to Abraham and God’s promise in His call. It is interesting that instead of selecting one of the existing nations through which to send His Son into this world, God established an entirely new nation through this one man Abraham for this purpose. To attempt to understand why God did this is a matter of conjecture since the mind of God is far above and beyond human intellect. God tells us in Isaiah 55:8–9, “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.”
Scripture indicates, however, that the existing nations, steeped in idolatry, injustice and wickedness had become so corrupt that God, knowing the hearts of people, knew that He could not work through them to accomplish His divine and cosmic plan for the redemption of humanity and the reconciliation with His human creation He so desired.
But then one might ask, “Didn’t God, being omniscient (all-knowing), know that Israel too would fall into idolatry and wickedness? Of course He did! Nevertheless, God in His wisdom decided to create an entirely new nation, set apart to Him, and despite their recurring times of sin and unfaithfulness, interspersed with times of repentance and faithfulness, use this nation as an instrument of His amazing grace and the earthly stage for the incarnation of His Son, His ministry, and the fulfillment of His redemptive purpose for humankind. Why He did this remains a profound and divine mystery of amazing grace.
We humans tend to always ask “Why?” “Why did God do this or that or why is He allowing this to happen?” God honors our questioning (as apart from our unbelief) for He created in us the ability to reason, and the desire for wisdom, knowledge, and understanding. It is part of our being created in His image. Scripture also tells us in Deuteronomy 29:29 that “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever.” In other words, God has revealed in His Word all that we need to know about His nature, His dealings with His human and material creation, His redemptive work, the culmination of this present age, and the final destiny of those who have received, through faith, His grace and adoption as sons and daughters in Christ, as well as those who have rejected His grace in Christ.
Still, there are secret things God has chosen not to reveal to us until we are in His presence. In 1Corinthians 13:12 we read: “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” God is Sovereign Lord of the heavens and the earth and all they contain, and as such, He does not owe us an explanation of why He does or does not do this or that, even though in His Word He frequently does explain His actions in order to help us grow in wisdom, knowledge, and understanding.
God tells us in Romans 8:28, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose.” If we love God and are in Christ through faith, then we know we are called according to His purpose. Many times the best answer, the only answer, to our “Why?” is that God in His sovereignty decided it so, and that He has promised that He will work it out for our highest good. If I don’t see that highest good in this lifetime, I most certainly will see it in the next when I see Him face-to-face and know fully all the answers to my questions. Abraham didn’t see the fulfillment of God’s promises to him in this lifetime, but he certainly saw it afterward and no doubt was profoundly amazed and overwhelmed to discover Who that seed was that God had promised him, the redemptive work that seed accomplished, and the indescribable blessing brought to the nations by that seed, a blessing that continues today and for eternity.
The Old Testament history of Israel continues with the accounts of Isaac, Jacob and his twelve sons, including Joseph who was sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers. Through miraculous intervention, God gave Joseph the interpretation of a dream Pharaoh had which forecast a terrible famine to come over the entire region and revealed to Joseph the actions to be taken that would allow Egypt not only to survive but to prosper during the famine. Pharaoh made Joseph governor of all Egypt and the second most powerful man in all the land.
Meanwhile, when the famine swept over the land of Canaan, where Jacob and his other sons dwelt, Jacob sent his sons to Egypt to buy grain. In a dramatic meeting, Joseph identified himself to his brothers who begged his forgiveness for their crime against him. He told them to bring their father Jacob to him and they would be well provided for and protected under his authority. The history continues with the death of Jacob and Joseph, with the increase of the Hebrew people into a multitude and with the rise of a cruel Pharaoh who, because he feared the Hebrews and their growing numbers, subjugated them into slavery.
Exodus 12:40 tells us that the Israelite people lived in Egypt for 430 years. Apparently, four hundred years of this time was spent in slavery. God Himself informed Abraham that this would happen to his descendants. In Genesis 15:13–14, we are told, “Then the Lord said to him [Abraham], ‘Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions.’”
The question arises: “Why would God allow His chosen people to be enslaved for four hundred years in a foreign land before He brought them out to inherit the land He had promised them through His covenant with Abraham?” The answer is given in Genesis 15:16 and reflects both God’s patience with the sinner and His intolerance toward sin. God told Abraham, “In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.”
The Amorites, or Canaanites, lived in the land of Canaan, the land which God promised to Abraham and his descendants. The extent of their sin and wickedness is not only known from Scripture, but also from their own writings and artifacts discovered through archaeology conducted at Ras Shamra in northern Syria beginning in 1929. Concerning their religious practices, they were polytheistic and their worship involved child sacrifice, idolatry, religious prostitution, and divination (sorcery and the occult), all of which was abomination to God and strictly prohibited by Him.
The profound, supreme, and indescribable patience and mercy of God toward the sinner is clearly shown by the fact that, although in His all-knowing omniscience God knew that these people would never repent and turn from their sin and wickedness, He nevertheless gave them four hundred years to repent and turn from their evil ways. Additionally, His intolerance toward sin is shown by the fact that when their sin had reached its full measure, a time and measurement determined by God alone, He brought destruction on them and gave their land to Israel as He had promised Abraham.
God’s purpose for Israel was, in human terms, put on hold for four hundred years because of His mercy and unwillingness to bring destruction on the heathen people of Canaan. But God’s purpose will be fulfilled, and no power or powers on earth or the power of hell itself will defeat that purpose. In God’s time, the heathen peoples of Canaan were defeated and destroyed or driven from their land.
We delude ourselves by thinking that we can continue to sin with impunity, refusing to repent and feeling no sorrow for our sin, and thinking that God, because of His surpassing love for us, will condone our sin, ignore it, or overlook it. Why God cannot do this was touched on before and will be further explained in subsequent discussion dealing with the application of God’s Word to our lives, our worship, our government, and our society today.
The history of Old Testament Israel continues with God’s call to Moses to go to Egypt and demand that Pharaoh release the Hebrew people from slavery so that God, through Moses, could lead them to the Promised Land. Pharaoh, of course, refused, and only through the awesome miraculous display of God’s power through the plagues which brought utter devastation to Egypt, did Pharaoh relent and release the Hebrew people. We are told that the Egyptians were so anxious to be rid of the Israelites that they gave them silver and gold and other articles of great value before they left. This was a fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham that his descendants would “come out with great possessions,” as well as His promise to Moses in Exodus 3:21 that “I will make the Egyptians favorably disposed toward this people so that when you leave you will not go empty-handed.”
After being freed from slavery in Egypt, the Israelites spent eleven months in the region of Mt. Sinai where God renewed His covenant with them; reaffirmed His purpose for them; gave them the Moral Law, their religion and worship ceremonies, rituals and festivals, their government, their system of education; and identified the unique characteristics of their society and culture which were to set them apart from the other nations. After this time, God instructed Moses to have the people break camp and set out for the Promised Land, the land of Canaan. God’s presence and leading was symbolized by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire at night.
From Mt. Sinai, Moses led them to Kadesh-barnea, a distance of approximately 150 miles. Here, Moses selected twelve men, one from each tribe, to go explore, reconnoiter and spy out the land of Canaan prior to the Israelites entering it and beginning their conquest of the land and its peoples. His instructions to them, given in the Book of Numbers, chapter 13, verses 17–20 were: “Go up through the Negev (desert) and on into the hill country. See what the land is like and whether the people who live there are strong or weak, few or many. What kind of land do they live in? Is it good or bad? What kind of towns do they live in? Are they unwalled or fortified? How is the soil? Is it fertile or poor? Are there trees on it or not? Do your best to bring back some of the fruit of the land.”
The spies explored the land until they eventually came to Hebron, a city to the south of Jerusalem which today has a population somewhere around thirty-eight thousand. There the Anakites lived, men of great stature whose physical size struck fear in the hearts of the people around them. The spies returned and reported back to Moses and the whole assembly and showed them the rich and abundant fruit of the land they had brought back with them. Then they gave Moses and the people this account: “We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey! Here is its fruit. But the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. We even saw descendants of Anak there” (Numbers 13:27–28).
Ten of the twelve spies who returned told Moses: “We cannot attack those people; they are stronger than we are.” They gave to the people a bad report about the land and their fear was contagious, quickly spreading throughout the entire camp. All the people grumbled against Moses and the Lord and said: “Why did the Lord bring us to this land only to let us fall by the sword? Wouldn’t it be better for us to go back to Egypt? We should choose a leader and go back to Egypt.”
Only two of the spies—Caleb and Joshua—insisted that they would be victorious because the Lord was with them. Caleb silenced the grumbling and said, “We should go up and take possession of the land for we can certainly do it.” He and Joshua told the entire assembly, “The land we passed through and explored is exceedingly good. If the Lord is pleased with us, He will lead us into that land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and will give it to us. Only do not rebel against the Lord. And do not be afraid of the people of the land, because we will swallow them up. Their protection is gone, but the Lord is with us. Do not be afraid of them” (Numbers 14:7–9).
But the assembly would not listen and even talked about stoning Caleb and Joshua. This was only one of many occasions when the people had grumbled and complained against Moses and the Lord since they had left Egypt. After the initial joy and exhilaration of being freed from slavery and experiencing the awesome miracles of God in the plagues and the parting of the waters so they could cross the sea in safety and be saved from Pharaoh and his army, they time and time again found things to complain about—the leadership of Moses, the hardships of the desert, the fact that they didn’t have meat to eat and on and on—despite the fact that God consistently, faithfully and miraculously provided for all their needs. And now this disobedience and rebellion, just as they were about to enter the land God had promised them. It was too much! God had been supremely patient with them. But now they had crossed a line from which there was no return. Here we have a warning, concerning both God’s purpose and God’s intolerance of unrepentant sin and consistent rebellion, which also applies to both individuals and nations today. We read of this in Numbers 14:11–35.
God said to Moses, “How long will these people treat Me with contempt? How long will they refuse to believe in Me, in spite of all the miraculous signs I have performed among them? I will strike them down with a plague and destroy them, but I will make you into a nation greater and stronger than they.” In his response to God, we catch a glimpse of the greatness of Moses. God had appointed Moses not only as the people’s deliverer and their leader, but also as God’s prophet to the people and their intercessor to stand in the breach between God and His people caused by their sin and rebellion and intercede for them. Just as he had done in the past, and would do many times in the future, so he now intercedes for the people. And it is important to understand that this is exactly what God wanted him to do.
Moses intercedes and reasons with the Lord and concludes by saying: “The Lord is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion….In accordance with your great love, forgive the sin of these people, just as You have pardoned them from the time they left Egypt until now.” God’s response to Moses’ intercession is a witness to both His grace toward His people and His intolerance of their rebellion.
We are told that the Lord relented and replied: “I have forgiven them, as you asked. Nevertheless, as surely as I live and as surely as the glory of the Lord fills the whole earth, not one of the men who saw My glory and the miraculous signs I performed in Egypt and in the desert, but who disobeyed Me and tested Me ten times—not one of them will ever see the land I promised on oath to their forefathers. No one who has treated Me with contempt will ever see it.” The Lord instructed Moses to tell the people: “As surely as I live, declares the Lord, I will do to you the very things I heard you say. In this desert your bodies will fall—every one of you twenty years old and more who was counted in the census and who has grumbled against Me. Not one of you will enter the land I swore with uplifted hand to make your home, except Caleb, son of Jephunneh, and Joshua, son of Nun (who have different spirits and follow Me wholeheartedly). As for your children that you said would be taken as plunder, I will bring them in to enjoy the land you have rejected. But you—your bodies will fall in this desert. Your children will be shepherds here for forty years, suffering for your unfaithfulness, until the last of your bodies lies in the desert. For forty years—one year for each of the forty days you explored the land—you will suffer for your sins and know what it is like to have Me against you. I, the Lord, have spoken, and I will surely do these things to this whole wicked community, which has banded together against Me. They will meet their end in this desert; here they will die.”
Note two vitally important lessons in this account: grace and consequence. First, God’s acceptance of Moses’ intercession and His grace toward the people led to His forgiveness of the peoples’ grievous sin and rebellion. Here Moses gives us a picture of the Divine Intercessor—Jesus Christ—Who intercedes for us on the basis of His sacrifice for our sins, and whose intercession the Father honors by forgiving us and reconciling us to Himself. Second, although forgiven, that generation would suffer the consequence of their sin and rebellion by not being allowed to enter the Promised Land. It is important to note that that consequence was not punishment for their sin. God does not forgive our sins and then punish us for them. On the contrary He removes them from us as far as the east is from the west as the Psalmist says. But consequences—either good or bad—naturally flow from what we do or fail to do. The consequence for this generation of Israelites was that they forfeited, through their disobedience and rebellion, God’s purpose for them. God, who knew their hearts, knew that they would not, and could not, fulfill His grand purpose. Therefore, He would accomplish it through the next generation, those twenty years old and younger.
It is also evidence of God’s grace that He didn’t destroy that entire generation at once, which He certainly could have done, but patiently allowed them to live out their life span in the desert. Note too that their children also suffered the consequence of their parents’ sin by wandering in that desert for forty years, which is an important lesson in itself for all parents.
And so it was! Instead of entering the Promised Land within a year or little more after their deliverance from Egypt, Israel spent forty years in the wilderness until the last of that generation—except for Caleb and Joshua—died off. It was their children, the next generation, who were not weakened or made fearful by slavery and the threat posed by the peoples of Canaan, but who were hardened and toughened by those forty years in the desert, who would boldly and courageously under the power of the Lord Almighty and the leadership of Joshua enter the Promised Land, conquer it and receive the inheritance God had promised them and their forefathers. And God honored His promise to Joshua and Caleb for their faithfulness. Both were as strong and vigorous for battle after those forty years as they had been before.
Joshua succeeded Moses as the leader of Israel, commanded the Israelite army throughout the battles of conquest, and received his inheritance in the land. And Caleb received the inheritance Moses had promised him forty years before—the city of Hebron as well as other cities and their surrounding territories—the very region he had spied out forty years previously. And what about the Anakites, those giants of physical size and strength whose very name had struck terror in the hearts of the people? Caleb and his tribe conquered them and drove them out.
I have gone to some length in giving this account for two reasons. First, Caleb and Joshua are two of my favorite Old Testament characters. Their faithfulness, courage, dedication, and aggressiveness for God warms the cockles of this old retired fighter pilot’s heart. Second, and far more paramount, the warnings and lessons contained therein have tremendous application to all of us individually and corporately. How easy it is to be diverted from God’s purpose for us by our fears, personal ambitions, apprehensions, and uncertainties and forfeit that divine purpose just like that generation of Israelites! How easy it is to go our own way, determine our own goals and purpose, rather than seek God’s way, God’s goals for us, God’s purpose for us which is our highest good! Success achieved according to this world’s standards is temporary and passes away; however, success achieved according to God’s standards and terms contained in His Word is true success that often has blessed consequences undreamt of and is everlasting. And that success comes only from seeking, finding, and fulfilling God’s purpose.
God is not capricious, nor does He change His mind, as we are told in 1Samuel 15:29. Being a God of purpose, He has ordained a purpose for all things He created and established. Just as God fulfilled His purpose for Israel with the coming of Christ, Savior and Redeemer, King of kings and Lord of lords, and continues to work out that purpose, so He will work out His purpose for us as a people and a nation if we seek Him and open our hearts and will to His purpose. To rebel against His purpose is sheer folly, as the Canaanites and Egyptians, and yes, as even Israel discovered during their cycles of faithfulness and obedience and unfaithfulness and disobedience. The true meaning of life, a life of true success and fulfillment, is to glorify God, seek His will and purpose, submit to that will and fulfill that purpose, all the while remembering that God’s criteria for success and fulfillment, like His ways and thoughts, are as far above our human criteria for success and fulfillment as the heavens are above the earth.
Commit to the Lord whatever you do,
and your plans will succeed.” (Proverbs 16:3)
Chapter 3
God’s Purpose for America
Does God have a purpose for America? I imagine if you asked that question to people on the street, you would receive many blank stares. Since He is the God of purpose, the answer, of course, is “Yes!” God does not create life or establish nations without purpose. Just as God had, and continues to have, a grand plan and purpose for the Israelites as individuals and a nation, so He has a grand plan and purpose for Americans as individuals and a nation. First, concerning individuals, Ephesians 2:10 tells us: “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” In Jeremiah 1:5 God tells the prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” It is the same for each of us, all of us. Before we were ever conceived, God, Who is all-knowing, knew each one of us, had established His plan and purpose for our lives, had prepared those works He wanted us to do, all to His glory and our highest good.
Second, as far as nations are concerned, Psalm 47:8 tells us that “God reigns over the nations; God is seated on His holy throne.” Psalm 67:4 says, “May the nations be glad and sing for joy, for You [God] rule the peoples justly and guide the nations of the earth.” In Daniel 2:20–21 we are told, “Praise be to the name of God forever and ever; wisdom and power are His. He changes times and seasons; He sets up kings and disposes them. He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to the discerning.” Again, it must be emphasized that God’s purpose for both individuals and nations is for their ultimate good, and their ultimate good can only be achieved by fulfilling God’s purpose.
God’s nature is holy, just, loving, merciful and compassionate. God does not cause evil. To do so would be a violation of His nature, and God cannot violate His nature and remain God. This then begs the question upon many people’s lips: “Why then is there so much evil, sin, corruption, disease and disaster in this world?” The answer is twofold—Satan and our own sinful nature. God created His human creature for fellowship with Him. Thus, He did not create human robots, but flesh and blood humans in His image with a free will, the ability to reason and the freedom to choose, decide and act. Adam and Eve’s disobedience to God was an act of their free will. When they succumbed to Satan’s temptation and fell into sin, the human free will, formerly at one with God’s will, was corrupted and the human nature, formerly pure and holy, became sinful. This corruption of the free will and the human nature infected the entire human race and is the catalyst for all evil.
Satan’s ultimate purpose is to separate us from God, both individually and nationally, have his own way with us, and lead us away from God’ great purpose for us and eventually to our ultimate and final destruction. He will use every means at his disposal to do this, and his primary means is our sinful nature and the human tendency toward sin and evil caused by our corrupted free will. To say that man is essentially good is a naïve and demonstrably wrong statement. Humankind is certainly capable of great good, but history clearly, unambiguously, and starkly reveals that humankind is capable of even greater evil. Martin Luther put it well when he said that the only thing our free will enables us to do is sin because it was totally corrupted by sin, and the good we do we can only do through the leading of God’s Holy Spirit working in us.
Although God does not cause evil, He can, and does, use the evil that Satan and our sinful nature cause to work out His good and perfect will, plan, and purpose for humankind, individually, and corporately as nations. Scripture and history are replete with examples of God doing this. A prime example, of course, is that God used the evil of crucifixion to accomplish His redemptive purpose for humankind. And to name just one example in our own history, God used the evil of war to rid the nation of the evil of slavery.
If we acknowledge God’s sovereignty, seek His will, and allow Him to work in our lives individually and as a nation, then we will certainly be the beneficiaries of His good purpose. How do we do this? I refer again to Romans 8:28: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose.” The two questions we must ask ourselves are:
(1) “Do we love Him?” And (2) “What does it mean to love Him?” In John 14:15, and 23–24, Jesus tells us, “If you love Me, you will obey what I command…If anyone loves Me, he will obey My teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” Also, concerning those good works that God prepared in advance for us to do in order for us to fulfill His purpose, Jesus clearly identified the first and foremost work that we are called to do in John 6:28–29 when He was asked by the people, “What must we do to do the works God requires?” and He replied, “The work of God is this: to believe in the One He has sent”—namely, the Christ Who took on our humanity and fulfilled God’s justice for us by taking our sins to the cross and suffering the punishment for them in our stead so that we could be forgiven and freed from slavery to sin, free to accomplish God’s great plan and purpose for our lives.
To love God is to put Him first in our lives. Jesus made this clear in Matthew 10:37–38 when He said: “Anyone who loves his father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me; and anyone who does not take his cross and follow Me is not worthy of Me.” Jesus is not denigrating love of family and others in this passage; on the contrary, throughout His teaching, He emphasized the central role of such love. He is simply telling us that He must come first in our love, commitment, and service. He has every right to such a claim since He redeemed us, bought us with His own Body and Blood and reconciled us to God the Father. We belong to Him.
Jesus essentially tells us that we cannot accept 90 percent or even 99 percent of who He says He is or of what He teaches while reserving the other 10 percent or 1 percent for some other religion or ideology which is contrary to His claims and teachings and still claim to be Christian. We either accept Christ through faith completely or we do not accept Him at all. Jesus will not take second place to anyone or anything. To say “I believe in Christ,” or “Jesus is Lord,” while at the same time rejecting either His incarnation (conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary), His full divinity, His full humanity, His crucifixion, His bodily resurrection, His ascension, His second coming, or His claim that salvation is only through Him is to disqualify oneself as a Christian. Moreover, it is deception and what Scripture describes as heresy and foolishness.
When we as a people and a nation bend our own wills to God’s will, humbly acknowledge His total sovereignty over our lives, and daily take up our cross amidst the wickedness, corruption, and evil that permeates our world and follow our Lord and Savior, then He is free to work out the grand plan, design, and purpose He ordained for us. Therein lie true personal and national success, greatness, fulfillment, and our ultimate and highest good.
Do we want God’s ultimate and highest good for ourselves and our nation? Certainly the vast majority of Americans would answer loud and clear “Yes!” Those Israelites discussed in the previous chapter also wanted God’s ultimate and highest good for themselves and their nation. They left Egypt strong in faith and hope, having seen and experienced God’s awesome power. Yet, when faced with the hardships of the desert, time after time their faith would crumble and give way to doubt, hopelessness, and rebellion. They forgot how God had miraculously met their every need in the past, had brought them through dangerous and seemingly hopeless situations in the past, and so they succumbed to fear.
America today faces perhaps the greatest dangers and challenges in her history—a war on terror that is worldwide and likely to last for generations; potential economic disaster evidenced by astronomical debt and energy dependence on nations and regional powers that wish us ill and worse; decline in public confidence in our religious, government and educational institutions; and an ongoing deterioration in societal and cultural standards and values. Will America, with an iron will and the faith and hope that enabled her to meet and conquer the dangers, threats, and challenges in her past history confront the present dangers and with singleness of purpose, fight and persevere in the battles necessary for victory? Or will she, like that generation of Israelites, shrink out of fear from confronting the dangers and fighting the battles necessary to conquer the paganism, wickedness, and evil powers standing in the way of her achieving God’s purpose for her? Will she, like those Israelites who listened to the ten spies who spread a bad report and infected the entire assembly with their fear, cowardice, and rebellion, listen to the modern-day counterpart of those ten spies who deny such a thing as God’s purpose for America, who deny the Judeo-Christian foundation of our nation, who advocate compromise of our heritage, principles, and values in an effort to placate those who hate us and would destroy us? It is instructive to remember that, whereas the consequence for the Israelites who allowed the ten spies to fill them with fear and doubt and who denied God’s power and promise to give them victory against the formidable, evil forces confronting them was to wander in the desert for forty years, the consequence for those ten spies was immediate. We are told in Numbers 14:37 that they were struck down and died of a plague before the Lord.
God was patient and forbearing with those Israelites, but His tolerance reached its limit when they adamantly refused to submit to Him and fulfill His divine purpose for them. God is patient and forbearing with America. But if we refuse to submit to Him, refuse to acknowledge His divine purpose and refuse to seek to fulfill that purpose, the day will surely come when we also reach the limit of His tolerance. America has been, and continues to be, the recipient of God’s manifold and abundant blessings. America is the strongest, wealthiest, most advanced nation on earth, thanks to God’s favor. But just as that rebellious Israelite generation lost out on the manifold blessings God had planned for them, so America could fall out of God’s favor and lose the blessings He has planned for us if we turn away from Him.