Excerpt, Personal Update, July 2010

I grew up in the '40s during the war. There was a special significance in the air--a recognized threat was aimed at our liberty and freedom. Being "an American" was more than just provincial nationalism. It had a moral quality to it.

During my college years, I spent my Wednesday afternoons with the Brigade Midshipmen on Worden Field. I can still hear the sound of the Drum and Bugle Corps in my ears as our regiment passed in review before whatever dignitaries happened to be visiting Washington that week. I can still hear the reverberations of "Eternal Father Strong to Save" in the Naval Academ,y Chapel.

My exchange weekends at West Point also gave me a glimpse of "the Long Gray Line" of the Corps of Cadets. Some traditions reveal the very soul of a nation. It gets into your blood. It also instills in you a deep sense of our unique SPIRITUAL heritage.

There is a time to get angry. There's a time when anger takes on righteous indignation. It's time to see if there is any manhood in our bones. Have you noticed what has become of our beloved country?

SCHOOL PROBLEMS

In the 1940s [and in my case, in the 1950's in junior high and high school--Ed.], our top school discipline problems were, essentially, talking in class, chewing gum, making noise, running in the halls, getting out of turn in line, and failing to put litter in waste baskets. Look at our schools now: daily reports of rape, robbery, assault, burglary, arson, bombings, murder, suicide, absenteeism, vandalism [I once had a prayer partner, whose problem stepson was a world-class vandal, for with a vandal friend he trashed the beautiful elementery school in his community, destroying the kids' hard work on their various projects and the classrooms and equipment too, and he had a loving Christian mom! A smiling, handsome, but somewhat lazy and passively rebellious fellow from a broken home, he didn't look like a mean, malicious vandal, and he went to court and got a relatively light-gloved slap on the wrist, but no jail time which he richly deserved though a minor, and did he ever really change in his dark heart? I hope so, since the grace of God was given richly him to change when he was still relatively tender at heart. Time will tell!--Ed.], extortion, drug abuse, gang warfare, pregnancies, abortion, and venereal disease.

SYMPTOMS OF OUR SOCIETY'S SICKNESS

Let's take a "brief" look at our nation's headlines: child abuse and molestations; rape by stealth, date, or gang; premarital teenage sex [encouraged by the tax-funded and bloated octopus of the abortion industry--Planned Parenthood, schools' sex education, and even parents who neglect church and moral training for their children--Ed.], vandalism and property damage; the drug scene--sales, use, and violence; robbery, burglary, and murder (withy its progressing casualness and viciousness); violence, explicit, and adulterous sex as part of the entertainment fare offered on movies, stage, gtelevision, videotapes and magazines; racism--organized and vicious; scandals in high places, e.g., Congress, financial institutions, and the highest offices in the land [which are bought and sold for favors by our Congressmen, led by Obama himself as a Senator leaving his post for the White House and the resultant scandal of a low-browed Chicago thug making some kind of shady deal for it--Ed], trial marriages, family breakdown, the scattering of children; gang warfare in our cities; and, pornography, involving both adult and child.

Man has created, for his own pleasure, an immoral society. But it is for God, not man, to decide what is moral [this needs to be told to the State Legislatures, who are busy legislating secularism, moral relativism, and outright immorality, in place of Biblical morality!--Ed.]. God hates wickedness, and He hasn't changed His mind.

John Adams said:

"We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, greed, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."

When will we get angry enough to take this seriously? It's only when we can honestly address the problem, logically analyze it (in depth) and admit that IMMORALITY is the basic cause of all these symptoms that we can begin dealing with the problems in restoring a civilized society. We have lost the roots of our heritage. We need to rediscover the source of our freedoms, our safety, and our opportunities. Can we recapture our inheritance? Only if we take it seriously enough. Our Constitution says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise gthereof." Yet we now have enforced paganism--federally supported--in our schools. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are based on Judeo-Christian teachings. Thirty-four percent of the writings of our founding fathers are direct quotes from the Bible [34%, and we are "not a a Christian nation"? O thou wretched Obama--forget your lying, false Marxist training, go study our recorded, written documented history, and you must apologize to America for all you have maligned this country since you were first campaigning to be president!--Ed.]!

To know the Christian basis of our country is to learn what every schoolboy and girl learned two generations ago about the writings and early documents of those who built the greatest nation in all history. [Anyone who contends that America is less than that, betrays his or her gross ignorance of history. It doesn't matter how many degrees a person has been granted, he or she can be blind to certain facts and he sees things through a lens of prejudice and bias that prevents reality from coming through. I have studied world history and cultures intensively all my life, read hundreds and thousands of books about most every period and most all cultures and nations from the dawn of civilization to today, and there is no country like America, none, it is truly exceptional and God-blessed, which is not to say that it hasn't had serious flaws in the execution of protecting basic inalienable rights of free and equal human beings in this country, including the Indians who suffered perhaps the most, though the blacks come close to that too in what they initially suffered right up to the 1960's from slavery, then later segregation--Ed.]

REEXAMINING THE BASICS

Let's re-examine our Christian roots. Warning! For those of you educated by our publie school system after 1962, this information may be new to you!

In 1620 The Mayflower Compact, written by the Pilgrims before they got off the ship said:

"In the presence of God,Amen. We...doby these present solemnly and mutually in ye presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves into a civil body politic."

In 1638, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (often called the first American Constitution) said:

"We...enter into a combination and confederation together to maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ which we now profess."

It further stated that men's rights come fromGod, as was later stated in the Declaration of Independence.

In 1772 Samuel Adams wrote:

The rights to freedom being the gift of God Almighty...The rights of the colonists as Christians may best understood by reading and carefully studying the institutes of the great Law Giver which are to found clearly written and promulgated in the New Testament."

In 1977 the First Continental Congress appropriated funds to import for the people 20,000 Holy Bibles as "the great political textbook of the patriots."

Written in 1776, the Declaration of Independence says:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed BY THEIR CREATOR (emphasis by Personal Update) with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men...."

Thus:

1) There is such a thing as truth, not "relative values";

2) Men's rights come from God, their Creator

3) Government exists to protect these God-given rights. This is the essence of Americanism.

These rights are under a powerful attack by the forces which have been unleased in our country. God will HOLD US ACCOUNTABLE for our stewardship (1 Corinthians 4:2). "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty" (2 Corinthians 3:17).

In 1787, at an impasse of several weeks (at which the delegates were arguing, disagreeing, objecting with every speaker or motion, each man intent on his own idea, with no consideration of the others, and the arguments intense and hot, distroying all thoughts of unifying in order to created a new union for Americans to preserve their freedom for themselves and their descendants--Ed.) at the Continental Convention, Benjamin Franklin (who was no Deist as he is portrayed by many liberal historians and revisionists; in fact, he was a close, admiring friend of the great evangelical British revivalist in America, George Whitefield!) rose and said:

"I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth: that God governs in the affairs. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings [the Holy Bible] that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. I firmly believe this..."

Then he moved that they resort to prayer and thus their problems (of bitter disagreement and desire even to quit the assembly altogether and go home without a Constitution and Government being formulated--Ed.] were soon solved.

Patrick Henry:

"It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded not by religionists but by Christians, not on religions but on the gospel of Jesus Christ."

John Quincy Adams:

The first and almost only Book deserving of universal attention is the Bible. The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of Civil Government with the principles of Christianity."

And in 1861 Abraham Lincoln wrote:

"It is the duty of all nations, and well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God and to recognize the sublime truth announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord."

Did God have a special plan for America? Was Columbus' discovery accidental?

[Presently, our "tolerant", multicultural, diverse liberal culture hates, despises, maligns Christopher Columbus, and casts scorn on Columbus Day in America, yet his achievesments were world-changing: he introducted Europe and the rest of the world to the Americas, though he thought he had found the East Indies and maybe part of Japan. His mistake in geography does not discredit his epic achievements. He is especially downplayed and heaped with odium by liberals because of the mistreatment, enslavement, and even the massive die-off of Indian tribes in the Carribean and wherever else the Spanish explorers penetrated--such as Cortez did in the Aztec empire of Mexico, or Pizarro in the Incan empire of Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. But he was following the practices of his day, even if they were cruel they were accepted by most people then. Some clerics brought along protested the mistreatment and enslavement of Indians, just for the sake of getting their gold, so this treatment did not go without protest by some of the Spanish. Now what would have happened if Japan discovered the America's first? By their treatment of Filipinos, Chinese, and other peoples they conquered before and during the 1930's and 1940's, it would have been equally horrific, and this was in the 20th century! Columbus operated in the late 15th century! So how can Columbus be singled out like this for hatred, when so many nations today are doing as badly and even worse toward suject peoples under their rule? The Soviet Union was responsible for enslavement of tens of millions of many races and cultures, and not just enslavement but outright genocide. Tens of millions of Ukrainians perished from starvation due to Soviet policies that were deliberately aimed at wiping them off the map. Lenin and later Stalin carried out these genocidal policies. We may well add the slave labor camps, the infamous Gulags, to the list of crimes of humanity committed by the Soviets during their 70 years in power. Does Columbus stand along Stalin, Lenin, and Hitler, or even Idi Amin, Pol Pot, the heads of Sudan and of the Congo? No, obviously not. He inadvertently opened the door to the wicked suppression of Indians in the New World, but he really aimed at bringing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the darkened cultures and peoples he found in the "East Indies." If history is to be twisted and warped with the biases of liberalism, then the views that turn Columbus into a monster of inhumanity will prevail, but I think they will not: the truth will come out and give him the honor he is due for opening the New World to the new values, beliefs, compassion and mercy found in the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Christian faith.--Ed.]. Does God deal with nations as corporate individuals (Deut. 7:6-9)?

Throughout Israel's history, as long as they kept their end of the covenant, God blessed them. Yet scarcely as He began to do so, they would turn away from Him, often in less than a generation. They would grow so hard of heart that they would stone the prophets that He sent to persuade them to humble themselves, seek His forgiveness, and by His grace change their ways--that is, to repent [isn't this just how we Americans have reacted to the call of God to repent and change our wicked ways?--Ed.].

Yet because He did love them, He would not wash His hands of them, no matter how sorely they tried Him. All too often, however, they left Him no choice but to lift His grace and allow drought, flood, pestilence, war, or bondage to turn His people back to Him. Does this just apply to Israel alone? Why did God send Jonah to Nineveh? Could it be that America was meant to be a "light to lighten the Gentiles" (Luke 2:32)?

In our vast divergence from this promising beginning the reason why we are now heading into a new dark age? Does 2 Chronicles 7:14 apply only (denotatively) to Israel? Or does it embody a principle of an immutable God? Can we humbled ourselves, pray, seek His face, and turn from our wicked ways?

The answer lies within ourselves."--Chuck Missler.

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