Our Lord God and Our Nation - By Joe Southerland - http://www.raptureready.com/soap2/southerland5.html
"Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure" (Isaiah 46:9-10).
Our nation's founding documents were forged under the concept that the Lord God of the Bible reigns sovereign over the nations of Man.
However, within my generation this biblically-based worldview once held by the vast majority in this nation is now an unmentionable topic in our schools and is rarely even preached from the pulpits of our modern churches. Instead our nation drowns under a flood of government sanctioned secular humanism, Darwinian despotism, and political correctness as our once blessed country sadly fades into a pagan, godless, and lawless nation.
For those with discernment watching, it is clear that dark powers are working within the highest levels of the United States government in conjunction with broader world evil in an attempt to sweep away the presence of our Lord God the Father of the Trinity, and His Son Jesus Christ. Our nation's ongoing moral decay, disintegration of the family, and mob rioting in the streets are all signs of our country's demise brought about by the denial of the Lord God in our national life.
Our nation desperately needs to re-discover the Lord God, and then re-assess our nation's past, present and future in the light of His sovereignty.
While Bible-believing Christians grieve over what seems to be an unrelenting assault of our nation upon God, we rest assured knowing that the Biblical truths our Christian founders saw fit to build this nation upon remain unchanged.
Our Lord God is God!
Our God reigns!
Our God endures forever!
Our Lord God - is God! The name Lord God is a title that reveres and acknowledges God as the sole ruling, reigning, and supreme creator of all things in the heavens and the earth. It is a title the patriarchs, prophets and apostles used in awe and in respect of the one true God. The title itself declares all others gods are but the false creations of fallen man under the influence of the worldly powers of darkness. All the other manufactured gods of man, be it Amon Ra, Marduk, Dagon, Baal, Zeus, Jupiter, Odin, Krishna, Vishnu, or Allah, or any recent, cultic extra-Biblical gods like the Mormon god, are all an abomination before our Lord God.
The Holy Spirit linked the words Lord with God in the ancient Biblical manuscripts to convey God's exclusive divine power. In the KJV translation you find it used 532 times, primarily in the Old Testament. In the KJV New Testament you will find 9 of its 13 occurrences in Revelation where Lord God is used to emphatically emphasize God's culminating redemptive plan for mankind in the End of Days. At that time the Lord God declares to the nations that he alone reigns supreme as he gives His conquering Son the title, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS (Revelation 19:6; Zechariah 14:9).
Our Lord God Reigns! Our Lord God is active, not passive! As born-again members of the Church, we know first-hand of God's personal plan for our redemption, but on a grander scale God is continually and actively executing his plan for the redemption of mankind among the nations of the earth.
However, our nation has now become self-enlightened to the point we dismiss the Lord God of our forefathers and aligned him with pagan myths and fables. Nationally, we no longer acknowledge the existence of a supreme omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent Lord God.
Our nation has all but forgotten three critical points concerning how our Lord God deals with nations.
1. Our Lord God fixes the borders of all nations and determines the birth, rise and fall of every nation on the earth (Acts 17:26). All the once mighty empires across the span of history, be it Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, Roman, Mongol, Spanish, French, and in the last century alone British Empire, Nazi Germany, the Empire of Japan, the Soviet Union, have fallen. None have endured.
2. Our God has the sovereign right to remove nation's kings/leaders/judges, and set up nation's kings/leaders/judges in accordance with his divine will (Daniel 2:21; 5:21, Psalm 47:8 and 99:1-2, Proverbs 8:15, Isaiah 40:23). And as God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, he will continue to place rulers to govern nations in order to achieve His higher purposes (Malachi 3:6).
3. Our Lord God holds individual ruler's hearts in his hand and can directs them wherever he pleases (Proverbs 21:1). That does not mean that God always sanctions the actions of any current or past leaders, or that they have received a special blessing or mandate from God. To the contrary, we find that the Lord God at times specifically allows nations to be ruled by the vilest of men to shape the future to his will (Daniel 4:17).
Why does God deal with the nations? "God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us" (Acts 17:27).
Our Lord God's Endures Forever! Man will wither; nations will crumble, but our Lord God will endure forever! In the beginning, the Lord God established his rule over creation to include all the nations of the earth, and he has never given up his position of overall authority, nor will he ever (Exodus 15:18; Revelation 1:8).
So Christians rejoice that our Lord God is God! And He reigns! And He endures forever!
Now given these biblical truths on how God deals with nations, what can we derive concerning the state of the United States of America's relationship with God from our past, our present and what is coming in our future?
Our Past Relationship. Since man's fall in the garden, God's plan gives each person one of two choices to make: sin against God in rebellion, or supplication to God in faith. The Nations leaders make similar choices between the things which align their people to this world, or things which align them with God. A nation's vitality and existence is greatly dependent upon the relationship of their people and leaders with the Lord God, and upon God's providence as he executes his grander plan for mankind amongst the nations.
Our nation's rapid rise, unparalleled achievements, and past victories point to the fact that in the last few centuries we were blessed by God perhaps more than any other nation on earth. During that time we unashamedly declared ourselves a Christian nation, and led the world in helping secure freedom to the masses and by sending the greatest number of missionaries to the nations. So why were we blessed among the nations?
Any blessing this nation received from God was because a very large, devout number of faithful Christians in this nation honored God, and through God's divine providence in the last century He elected to elevate this nation to superpower status to help mold mankind into the path of his choosing (Isa 46:9-10).
Our Current Relationship. In the time of the Prophet Jeremiah, three times God told Jeremiah do not pray for this people, because Israel's rebellion had reached the point where God knew that Israel, the apple of his eye, would not turn from their evil (Jeremiah 7:16; 11:14; 14:11). God then used the Babylonian Empire to destroy Israel's nation, capitol, and temple and to bring its people into captivity in order to humble them into seeking, finding, and knowing God.
And that was how God dealt with Israel, a nation He uniquely called out for specific blessing.
This will come as a shock to many Americans, but despite what some authors claim there is no special relationship between the United States of America and God to be found in the Bible. None! Our nation is not Israel. Nor has America replaced Israel, but instead our nation is just one in a very long line of Gentile nations.
If we step back, and examine modern America in the light of the Bible, do our national norms, the behavior of our leaders and judges, or our recent laws or court rulings honor the Lord God? Or is our nation's behavior rebellious against God's will?
As previously stated, nations which do not honor God are often allowed by God to be led by vile people who are in open rebellion and opposition to God's Biblical will. Considering our current national leadership in both parties, I believe America has reached the state that God is giving rebellious America over to our sinful desires (Romans 1:27).
Like in the past, if America is receiving any current blessing from God it is because devote believer's prayers and actions still stand in the gap (Ezekiel 22:30), but unlike the past, our nation now appears to be in open rebellion against God. Will our Christian prayers be enough to turn this rebellious nation towards repentance?
Can our nation, declared by our current national leader a non-Christian nation, with its politically-correct, many-paths-to-god national persona be able to return to the Lord God of our Founding Fathers? Or as in Jeremiah's day, has our nation reached the point where God will refuse to hear prayers for this people?
Our Future Relationship. But now our nation's leadership has taken an even more dangerous, confrontational path which places us in a position of not only losing God's future blessing, but instead receiving God's curse (Genesis 12:3). The Lord God has made specific promises to Israel, and God's redemptive plan specifically includes Israel's restoration, defense and spiritual reawakening (Ezekiel 38 & 39), and that one day all the nations on earth will be judged on their relationship with Israel (Matthew 25:32-33).
Now for the first time the United States of America is aligning with the spiritually dark nations of this earth who are openly hostile against his chosen people, Israel (as well those who are saved through Jesus Christ).
The Bible clearly states that though all the people of the earth shall be gathered together against Jerusalem, all shall be cut in pieces (Zechariah 12:3). If our nation continues down this path, our nation's fate is sealed.
While our nation will never again thrive without God's blessing, it will never survive under God's curse.
The Resultant Path. In consideration of God's prophetic Word, if our nation continues to conspire and plot with other nations against our Lord God and his Anointed One (Psalm 2:1-2), soon the fullness of the Gentiles will come in (Romans 11:25), and then Christ will take his Bride home (1Thess. 4:16-17).
Then the great restrainer, the Holy Spirit in-dwelt in the Church, will be removed (2 Thess. 2:7) and full darkness shall descend upon those in the nations that did not like to retain God in their knowledge, and God will give them over completely to their reprobate minds (Romans 1:28).
In the ensuing unbridled rebellion of Daniel's Seventieth Week (Daniel 9:27), God will then make his final appeals to Israel in specific, and to mankind in general, so all may seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him (Acts 17:27).
What's a Christian to Do? Pray ceaselessly and love abundantly. As Believers though it often seems fruitless we must continue to pray that our nation's leaders and people will humble themselves, and pray, and seek God's face, and turn from their wicked ways (2 Chronicles 7:14).
Perhaps even more critical we must also continue to love abundantly by working the harvest, and encouraging fellow believers as we wait upon the Lord.
We must also remember: through all the insanity and evil that is coming at us, our Lord God reigns forever and alone can provide the peace that surpasses all understanding.
Come Lord Jesus!
P.S. One last item: As Christ's kingdom is not of this world, our citizenship is not of this world, nor of any specific nation. It is to His kingdom we belong, and whom Jesus told us to pray, Thy kingdom come.
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