An Agony of Soul On Thanksgiving

Parades and football games and turkey and pumpkin pie. A national celebration – to write or not to write?

Here is a Biblical text for today, speaking of Abraham’s nephew Lot, Peter writes, “…and if He [God] rescued righteous Lot, oppressed by the sensual conduct of unprincipled men (for by what he saw and heard that righteous man, while living among them, felt his righteous soul tormented day after day by their lawless deeds)…” 2 Peter 2:7 – 8.

If we are disciples of Jesus Christ, if we are living in union with the Trinity, then while as individual sons and daughters of God, and as families and churches within the Kingdom of God, we ought to be giving thanks to God for His mercy and goodness and kindness toward us – but how can we possibly do anything but sorrowfully repent on behalf of our nation when we think of this day, Thanksgiving Day, as a national holiday?

We live in a nation which, along with the rest of the West, has codified the rejection of the image of God. The attack against God’s image extends from the highest levels of academia to primary education; to government, to business, to the arts, to science, to sports – there is no area of our society that is not under coercion and ever-increasing pressure. The Scriptures begin with the image of God, we then see the image of God desecrated, then we see the Image of God come to earth to restore God’s image in mankind, then the Scriptures reach their crescendo with the image of God restored in and through Jesus Christ.

If we have not become a nation worshipping the beast then what have we become?

We live in a nation that now makes no pretense of morality and justice. When money is the overt determining factor in our foreign relations then our leaders have sold our collective soul.

Make no mistake, we, as all peoples, have always had much to repent of and it has been in the best interests of our leaders to perpetuate one-sided ideals and myths to maintain our social fabric. Let us not deceive ourselves in this, as with individuals, so with nations, there is “none righteous, no not one.” However, a fair reading of the Bible teaches us that nations are nevertheless weighted in the inscrutable Divine scales of justice and that God’s mercies and blessings are worked out in history, as are His judgments. Our nation has been both a blessing and a curse in the world – this is the state of human affairs.

I think the distinction between today and yesterday lies in the stripping away of pretense and the overt attack on the image of God, morality, justice, and righteousness. It has always really been “America First”, but at least there was typically some acknowledgment of America’s duty to maintain morality and to help others – again, let us not deceive ourselves, we often cloaked our appetite for power and economic growth with manipulative myth – our sins have been many, but those who sought a better way were usually given room to speak and serve within “reason”.

But now pretense has been stripped away; Administration after recent Administration, with the cooperation of our elected representatives, and the support and fiat of our judiciary, along with the concurrence of our citizenry, has frankly made a policy of pulling down the image of God, economically and otherwise destroying those who resist, offering our children on the altar of pornographic demons in the guise of curriculum, and making the dollar the arbiter of foreign and domestic policy without apology.

Give us parades, give us sports, give us food, give us drink and weed, give us electronic cocaine – and we’ll give you our children, we’ll give you our vote, we’ll give you our hearts and minds…we’ll give you our souls to mold them as you will.

This ought to be a National Day of Mourning.