Great Is Diana of the Americans!

This morning I had the book Wise Counsel with me as I sat down at my computer to write this posting. I intended to quote John Newton on page 85, “When I hear the cry about liberty I think of the old cry, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” Newton is quoting from Acts 19:28, 34.

When I turned my computer on, I saw my friend Michael Daily’s comment on the previous post, in which I also quote from this collection of Newton’s letters. And just what does Michael write? “In this same vein I appreciated Newton's comment in one of his letters that the Americans were shouting "Liberty, Liberty" the way the Ephesians shouted "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!"” This is from the same letter as the quote used a few days ago.

In this letter, as Newton surveys the attitudes of England and the American colonies, especially the attitudes of professing Christians, he also writes, “It seems to me one of the darkest signs of the times, that so many of the Lord’s professing people act as if they thought he was withdrawn from the earth…” Newton then writes of Christians railing against those with whom they disagree and indulging in “unsanctified passions instead of taking that part which is assigned them Ezek. 9:4.”

“And the Lord said to him, “Pass through the city, through Jerusalem, and put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in it.”” (Ezekiel 9:4).

It doesn’t appear to me that we, in this nation, and especially we in the professing church in this nation, are “sighing and groaning” over the abominations in the professing church and in our nation. We may shout. We may engage in vitriol, or bow down before the talking heads that do – letting them be our proxies. We may wield sarcasm and intimidation. But we do not sigh and groan over our personal and familial sins and the sins of the church and the nation.

We talk of liberty but we mean rebellion; we mean that we insist on doing what we want how we want both in the professing church and in general society.  The Bible is nothing more than a useful tool to further my own enjoyment, it is not God’s Authority in my life. Let us manipulate the Bible to further our political, economic, and social agendas; but let us not submit to the Scriptures. Let us form the Bible into our own image, let us not submit to the Bible so that God through His Word may form us, by His mercy and grace, into the image of His Son, Jesus Christ.

Look around you, if you live in the United States you are living in a nation that is repudiating the image of God; you are living in a nation that is forcibly imposing this repudiation upon its citizens, on its children, in its education system, on its businesses, and on its churches. Western civilization and the Western church is committing an incredible spiritual, moral, political suicide – one that I think is without precedent. We are eradicating humanity from humanity and are giving ourselves over to the demonic – the Tower of Babel looks fairly innocent when compared to us; Sodom and Gomorrah [Mathew 10:15; 11:20 – 24] will perhaps stand and accuse us, you and me and our leaders and our neighbors and the leaders of our churches on the Day of Judgment – for we had the Gospel, we had the Light of Christ, we had some understanding of the image of God – and we not only rejected it ourselves, we forced others to reject it.

But as long as we have our LIBERTY, as long as “I can do it my way,” as long as we can shout, “Great is Diana of the Americans!” – we really don’t care do we?