Presidential Wisdom

By Ron Bartanen

 
“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven: we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity: we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown.  But we have forgotten God.  We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were provided by some superior wisdom ad virtue of our own.  Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.”     --Abraham Lincoln
    While President Lincoln decried the spiritual deadness of his time, attributing the horrors of the Civil War to the nation as it was forgetting the God who had blessed its birth and growth, he would, no doubt, be even more anguished today if he could view the nation as having denied its roots.  Our culture has gone from Judeo-Christian values, based on the Bible, to being “no longer a Christian nation,” where amorality prevails, and even to welcome with open arms those who are eager to replace our Constitution with Islamic shariah-law, while, at the same time, attacking Biblical guidelines, becoming totally secular.  It surely does not require a great depth of foresight to realize that as a nation our liberties and blessings are in peril.   Let us heed the Biblical warning: “The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God” (Psalm 9:7), but “Blessed be the nation whose God is the LORD” (Psa. 33:12a).

 - Ronald Bartanen preaches for Arthur Church of Christ, Arthur, IL.  He may be contacted through the congregation's website: http://www.arthurchurchofchrist.com