"Will God bless America? Can God bless America? Should God bless America? And if God did bless America, what would He be saying about His holiness? If God did bless America, what would He be saying about our morality? About our spiritual condition? Could God bless America and protect His reputation as holy God?
Now, of course, God can always do whatever He wants, whenever He wants. But when it comes to blessing, He has clearly and repeatedly set down conditions. I've listened carefully to that song, "God Bless America," there is no verse in there that identifies the conditions. Nor do Americans seem to be opening their Bibles to try to find out what the conditions are. I don't hear anybody say, "God, what do we need to do to be blessed?" So I'm going to answer the question nobody's asking.
In fact, I think this is a serious intrusion. I don't think they want to know the conditions. It's sort of like don't ask, just bless. We'll ask, don't ask anything of us. We just want blessing. Don't impose any conditions. Don't ask for anything from us. Give us protection. Give us safety. Give us freedom. Give us prosperity. But don't meddle with our morality. I don't hear any national cries of repentance, do you? I don't hear any national affirmations of the law of God, the Word of God. I don't hear any cries for virtue and forgiveness. I don't even hear preachers preaching like that.
We're in, frankly, no position at all to be blessed. It seems to me that this prayer is futile. We're actually in a better place to be unblessed...cursed, if you can handle that word, because blessing has always had its conditions...always. And the conditions are not hard to find, you just need to go to Scripture. So let's do that....
Israel knew there was no mystery to the standards for blessing. Israel knew that even though they were a covenant people that possessed the covenant that was eternal, they had been given everlasting promises that God will fulfill eternally, they knew that God is a faithful God but they also knew that God was just to punish them because He is a holy God. Blessing begins when you admit your sin and you admit your violation of the law of God. Israel had to start there and they were a covenant people with everlasting promises. We're not. America is not a covenant nation. We are not an elect nation. We're just another nation like many nations that have come and gone through human history. We bear no eternal covenant with God as a nation. America is not a Christian nation, as such. We have no covenant to protect us. We have no eternal promises nationally that God somehow must keep.
And so, if Israel who has those covenants and those promises cannot be blessed unless they obey the law of God and repent for their disobedience, why would we assume that the standard for us would be any different?
You say, "Yeah, but that's the...that's the Old Testament standard." No, that's the universal standard. God said, "I am the Lord, I change not." It is pointless really, no matter how well intentioned to keep on saying "God bless America, God bless America, when it is crystal-clear that America is not interested in meeting the conditions of that blessing. God bring America back to the truth of Scripture. God bring America to true penitence. Pray that.
....our country has always had the Word of God. Our problem is, when we knew God, we glorified Him not as God. We have taken God out, forced Him out in the name of political correctness, in the name of conventional wisdom, in the name of tolerance, in the name of not offending somebody we have blasphemed God, the creator. We don't honor Him, verse 21. We don't give Him thanks. And we are empty in our ideas, our foolish hearts are darkened...
Every once in a while I hear a suppose a well-intentioned and hopeful preacher say, "We're on the brink of a great revival in America." I don't know what they're looking at. I don't know why they would ever come to that conclusion. I believe America is currently experiencing the wrath of God. The wrath of God is the general reality in our nation....
The wrath of God, [Romans 1] verse 18, is revealed, and then it tells against what it's revealed. But down in verse 24, you go to the therefore. Therefore, let's go back to the wrath. Here is the definition, "God gave them over." Verse 26, "God gave them over." Verse 28, the middle of the verse, "God gave them over."
That's an interesting phrase. God gave them over, or God gave them up. God abandoned them. That's a fascinating statement....
We're not talking about eternal wrath here. We're not talking about eschatological wrath, cataclysmic wrath or natural wrath...there's a fifth kind of wrath, it's the wrath of abandonment...the wrath of abandonment.
This is such a frightening thing. This is when God gives you up, steps back, let them go...let them go. No more restraining grace. Turn them over. They want their sin, let them go. We know this is going to happen in its consummate sense in the time of Tribulation when the restrainer is removed, remember? The Holy Spirit and hell belches forth the previously bound demons and all the demons of the universe come down to earth and aid the Antichrist in his satanic efforts to finally conquer the world and the Kingdom of God.
But we get a foretaste of that, previews of that as nations turn against God and He gives them up. This is the wrath of abandonment that is true in the Old Testament. Judges 16, Samson found a Philistine woman by the name of Delilah. I never met anybody who named their daughter Delilah, such an infamous person. Well, you remember the story. She seduced Samson and so he told her that his strength was connected to his Nazarite vow which had to do with his hair. And she made him, according to Judges 16:19, sleep on her knees. She called for a man and had him shave off the seven locks of his hair, then she began to afflict him somehow, not in some severe sense, but to jostle him and his strength left him.
And she said, "The Philistines are upon you, Samson," and he awoke from his sleep and said, "I will go out as at other times and shake myself free." He had defeated the Philistines on many occasions and by the thousands. He had defeated them single- handedly, so he said, "I will go out as at other times." Verse 20, "But he didn't know that the Lord had departed from him." Wow. So when the Philistines came, they seized him, they gouged out his eyes, they brought him down to Gaza, bound him with bronze chains and he was like a mule, grinding in a prison." God left. Turned Samson over to the consequence of his choices. Judges chapter 10 verses 13 and 14, it says, speaking of Israel, "Yet you have forsaken Me and served other gods, therefore I will deliver you no more." I'm done with you. I'm not going to rescue you, I'm not going to protect you. So verse 14 says, "Go and cry out to the gods which you've chosen." You've chosen your gods, let them deliver you in the time of your distress. You leave Me, I leave you.
Proverbs 1, "Because I called and you refused, I stretched out My hand and no one paid attention, you neglected all My counsel, you didn't want My reproof, I will even laugh at your calamity, I will mock when your dread comes, when your dread comes like a storm, your calamity like a whirlwind, and distress and anguish comes on you, then they will call on Me but I will not answer." Is that America? Are we saying futilely against a vaulted sky, "God bless America" and God is not going to answer? Why? "Because they hated knowledge, did not choose the fear of the Lord. They will seek Me diligently, they will not find Me. They would not accept My counsel, they spurned all My reproof so they shall eat of the fruit of their own way and be satisfied with their own devices. I'm letting them go." They can have the meal they cooked.
Hosea 4:17, the prophet said, "Ephraim is joined to idols, let him alone." Amazing, let him go. Let him go.
Jesus said about the Pharisees, "They're blind leaders of the blind. Let them alone. Let them go. I'm done with them."
That's the frightening wrath that God just steps back and lets sinners go to the consequence of their choices. You say, "How do you know that's going on in America?"
Follow the sequence. Verse 24, you're familiar with this, first thing that happens, "God gave them over to the lust of their hearts to impurity that their bodies might be dishonored among them for they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever, amen." They turned their back on God. God gave them over to...what?...sexual immorality. They operate on lust. They function in impurity. They dishonor their bodies.
You look at America, you look back at 1960, you see the sexual revolution. That's...when God lets a people go, that's the first step down...they become preoccupied with illicit sex. Here we are a few decades later, drowning in a sea of pornography, now pumped into every person on the Internet everywhere. But that's only step one.
Step two is in verse 26, "God also gave them over to degrading passions for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural," that's Lesbianism, "in the same way also the men abandoned the function of the women and burned in their desire for one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own person the due penalty of their error."
First, when God lets a nation go, they sink to immorality. And then they sink to homosexuality. First it's heterosexual sin and then it's homosexual sin. Does anybody question that we're there?
And then in verse 28, the third step, "God gave them over to a depraved mind." What is that? Adokimos, useless mind, the mind is morally incapable of making a right judgment. And when you get to that point, there's no recovery. You can be moral, heterosexually, you can be immoral homosexually, and still somebody can be sane enough to call you back, but when you get to step three and the mind is morally incapable of making a right judgment, there's no way back. And you know a society has reached this when that society will not tolerate anyone making moral judgments.
You want to be an enemy of our culture? Start making moral judgments. Once you don't make any moral judgments, what happens? Verse 29, 'Unrighteousness fills everything, wickedness, greed, evil, envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, gossip, slander, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents with understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful' -- everything breaks loose and the Jerry Springer show becomes funny to the degraded mind....
if you step up and call a halt to the moral insanity and place the law of God in the public eye, believe me, you will be rejected. The same America that keeps saying "God bless America, God bless America, God bless America," is not anyway near ready to hear how God will bless America and that is, first of all, by establishing His law against which every life is measured, and against which an appropriate repentance is required. And even though people, verse 32 says, know that death is the result of these kinds of behaviors, they do them anyway. And they give hearty approval to those who practice them.
That's where we are in this country. So if we're saying "God bless America...God bless America," on the basis of what? We've turned our back on God, we've blasphemed God, we've rejected God. In His place we've made our own idols. And now we're saying "God bless America?" I'm quite sure that if He were to bless America in the way people are now asking, it would be hard for Him to maintain His reputation as a holy God.....
We don't want God in our society, except as a sky-hook, a parachute. And we certainly don't want guilt in our society. Ann Landers wrote, I quote, "Guilt is a pollutant and we don't need any more of it in the world." Really? Charles Dyer in his book Your Erroneous Zones said, quote, "Guilt must be exterminated, spray cleaned and sterilized forever." MTV said, "No sin is as evil as the killjoy attitude of those who think someone's behavior is an offense to some holy God." We want self-esteem, not guilt. Guilt's intolerable. The psychologies of self-esteem and victimization are designed to silence the voice of conscience to remove guilt. That is damning and destructive. Generations are being trained that their consciences are liars and that they're really good and not evil. Psychologists have been the purveyors of that damning anthropology.
John Owen who was Cromwell's chaplain wrote, "If you want to kill sin, load your conscience with the guilt of it. Generations are being trained that conscience is a liar, they shouldn't feel guilty, and you can do whatever you want because you have the freedom to be yourself. And don't let anybody put some guilt trip on you or make you feel bad about it.
This is the depth of the morass of twisted thinking that America is in. We've abandoned God and He's abandoned us. We've plummeted down the path from immorality to homosexuality to degraded thinking. We've slaughtered our conscience. We don't have the Word of God to inform conscience and when conscience tries to speak even weakly, we crush it into silence and tell it it has no right to tell us anything. We're good, the Twinkies made me do it. Your child has ADD, HDP, ODD, or whatever other psychologization of morality....
We have a message for America. 'God bless America,' well He will bless America if the conditions are met. But before we can be concerned about America, we need to be concerned about those who are America, that's us. And the way to blessing is back to the Book, to know the truth of God and the God of the Book, to repent of sin and to come to Him for forgiveness and new life and new capacity for obedience through faith in Jesus Christ. All the promises of God are yes in Christ. All spiritual blessings are ours in Christ.
I wish that all the people saying God bless America were willing to acknowledge God, His Word, their own sin and the Savior Jesus Christ. That's the only way anybody will ever be blessed by God. This is our message, folks, not just mine to you, yours to everybody else."