In my quiet time of the morning, I've been reading about God's establishing His covenant with the Israelites as He frees them from Egyptian bondage and brings them into the promised land of Canaan. There were many laws to be kept with this covenant, with blessings for the keeping of them and cursings for the failure to do so.
Jesus' redemptive sacrifice gave us freedom from the law as our means of salvation and brought us into a new and living relationship with Jehovah God. Nevertheless, all of scripture is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness ( 2 Tim. 3:16), so there's always something to profit me as I read.
I was thinking as I read through Deut. 5, the reiterating of the Ten Commandments to the nation of Israel, that America has certainly fallen far short of God's holiness. With the coming of Mother's Day and Father's Day soon after, verse 16 particularly stood out to me.
Honor your father and your mother, as the LORD your God commanded you, that your days may be long, and that it may go well with you in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.We have this command again in the age of grace, as we see in Eph. 6:2--Honor your father and mother (which is the first commandment with a promise).
It didn't go well with the Israelites for very long. It hasn't gone well for America for very long either. I ran into a friend in the grocery store yesterday who had recently quit her job in a day care after decades of tenderly caring for little children. She says she can't bear any longer to see how children are talking to their parents and disrespecting them, even kicking them and calling them names.
We see all around us the dishonor for parents. The sad thing is that parents allow it when children are young and it takes hold in their very being. Parents often times unknowingly allow their children to be counseled toward that end.
Counseled toward it? Yes. Children are being counseled all the time as to how to think about life, situations, relationships, themselves. Who they listen to--whether face to face teaching or interactive discussion, via the television or movies as voices of untruth subtly influence them, lyrics of music that play on the emotions at the same time, or the reading of the printed page--either explicit philosophies of life or fiction that sets those philosophies in motion--with authors spinning their own systems of belief into the lives of fictional characters who we are led to believe find answers or themselves have the answers to questions and problems of life that our children face --all become their counselors.
I believe that God gave us America and established it as a Christian nation. We are far from that today, with even our current president declaring it not such a nation. His declaration does not make us less of a Christian nation. The people who voted him into office make it less of a Christian nation. A nation is its people.
I commented to my friend in the grocery store that a generation of disrespectful children have grown up to lead our land, and so we find ourselves in a very sorry state of affairs. She commented that she will soon be too senile to care. But I know she does care, for the sake of her own grandchildren she must care. We all must care deeply.
Could America ever return to the faith of our forefathers? Perhaps when America's children are taught to honor their parents, and when those who were not taught are counseled to do so--then it just might go well for us in the land, for there's so very much wrapped up in the heart and mind of those who honor.
