Is There a God Who Judges Nations? If so, “We the People” are in Deep Trouble!

“President Abraham Lincoln believed in a God fully capable of inflicting punishment for national sins. In 1863, he declared a national fast, imploring the people with these words:

[a]nd, inso much as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we 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 of the whole People?”

In his Second Inaugural address, Lincoln declared:

Fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of war 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 shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash 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’ (Lincoln, 1865).

In 1820, Thomas Jefferson labeled the division of America over slavery as a “momentous question, [that] like a fireball in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. ” More than 600,000 American soldiers, as well as many civilians, died during the Civil War in what remains the nation’s bloodiest conflict.

Historian Stephen Keillor, who has written about God’s judgment of nations, points out that much of the Old Testament describes God’s judgment of nations, says there is nothing in the New Testament that indicates that God has ended this practice. Among the people destroyed because of their sins were those in Sodom and Gomorrah, Nineveh, Tyre, and Sidon. God stripped the Caananite people of their lands because of their detestable behaviors, which he forbade Israel to emulate.

Keillor raises the possibility that the September 11, 2001, attack that killed nearly 3,000 Americans might be an act of judgment against the United States. It is well established that

Islamic terrorists have given the following reasons for their jihad against America: (1) U.S. support for globalization and free trade, which enriched the West while harming less-developed nations; (2) the exportation from the United States of morally decadent values and perverted notions of sexuality; (3) and America’s foreign policy toward the Middle East, with its long record of supporting Israel. Keillor reasons that if God is holy, he is angered by America’s exploitation of the poor and our promotion of values and behaviors the Bible condemns. When American leaders endorse behaviors condemned by the Judeo-Christian Bible, they stand as representatives of a Christian nation. Members of other nations equate their attitudes with Christianity and with the attitudes of missionaries working around the world to spread the Christian Gospel.

America often appears to thumb its nose at biblical teachings while remaining under the guise of being a Christian nation. This practice seemingly invites God’s judgment. Pagan nations became the instruments of God’s judgment of ancient Israel, therefore Keillor raises the question, “Why wouldn’t God use Islamic terrorists to remind Westerners of the gospel’s high moral standards? In other words, apostasy in Scripture is a communal as well as personal problem and the West, in Christian terms, looks apostate.” ‘ Excerpt from Carol M. Swain’s Be the People: A Call to Reclaim America’s Faith and Promise, Chapter 2, pp. 38-40.