The American Republic is falling apart, and no one seems to care. Even though it’s the greatest Republic ever to exist because of Christ. We just handed socialists power over virtually every sector of U.S. society, and apathy is the predominant response. What is the world coming to?
I normally don’t dabble into politics on Allegiant Faith unless they tie into the Gospel of Christ Jesus in some way, but this is one of those moments.
Some Christians have been tossing around the quote from John Calivn, “When God wants to judge a nation, He gives them wicked rulers.” Haphazardly, as if to wield a sword of vindictive spite against Trump or against depravity at large. It’s a true quote. No denying that, but I don’t think we’ve grasped the enormity of what it means.
A great deal of suffering has the potential to invade the West now, and our neighbors are likely to blame Christians because many either did not vote or voted for the outspoken Democratic Socialists, many of whom are also radical Islamists. And they will go out of their way to snuff out Christianity and stifle acceptance of the Gospel for so many souls.
Yet you have some Christians celebrating this enormous defeat.
I puzzled over why so many are blind. Fasted. Prayed. Took time away from writing articles. Because I wanted to know how such a dumb decision could become actual.
And you know what I realized? The church has forgotten how to mourn well. How to properly lament in the face of tragedy. We’ve become indistinguishable from the world because when faced with grievances we follow along like chattel with the rest of modern society.
I get it. There are plenty of grievances. Trump didn’t live up to his promises and neither did Republicans, like so many politicians, and I can promise you none of the Democrats who were just elected will make life any better. In fact, the Democratic Socialists are obsessed with unlimited sexual expression, abortion, transing kids, going easy on criminals, and replacing actual citizens with unvetted Third World foreigners, and they will make you agree with them or subject you to cancellation or far worse.
Never should’ve gained power.
But they did because instead of voting rationally and thinking long term, people voted with their emotions and chose the worst evil.
Emotions took charge because we’ve learned to submit them to the wrong sources, the wrong gods. And it’s not like we were never warned this could happen. The prophet Jeremiah wrote an entire letter about how to respond to grievances and face tragedy with a clear heart and mind. Titled his letter Lamentations to leave no doubt he wanted you to know he was about to unleash his own grief, lament, at the destruction of his own country when they rebelled against God Most High.
He’s far from apathetic. With every word, Jeremiah shows it tears him apart to see Israel and Judah demolished and dragged into exile. Though he knows Babylon’s invasion is a judgment from God, that doesn’t once stop his honesty about the problem, disapproval of the judging nation, visceral horrification at the bloodshed and violence, or his relentless pleas for mercy. He paints a clear picture that it is honorable to love both God and country, especially when calamity threatens to undo everything. You’d do well to listen.
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Honesty about the problem
Since the reign of Jeroboam, God Most High was forgotten in Israel and Judah. Replaced by other gods worshipped at the high places throughout the land via depraved orgies and child sacrifice. Bloodshed accompanied “sexual freedom,” as it always does. They were no different than America now, with every twisted sexual perversion imaginable and abortion on demand.
Finally, God had enough and brought about the judgment He kept promising to unleash upon Israel and Judah. Foreign peoples from nations who disrespected Him and His children came to take over, and He withdrew His presence from amongst the Israelites because they didn’t repent and follow Him. First the North Kingdom fell to the Assyrians and then the Southern Kingdom to the Babylonians.
Jeremiah writes Lamentations after witnessing with his own eyes the destruction and devastation of Jerusalem by Babylonian troops.
Though horrified, he never deflects blame. He pinpoints the ultimate problem as human sin.
None in the city are righteous. The Temple itself is consumed with the worship of foreign gods and with Gentiles, the priests willfully participate, everyone spits in the face of God Most High, and no method of utmost depravity is forbidden. They live as if all is permissible and are unashamed.
Israel brought about this demise upon themselves and 100% deserves every bit, Jeremiah says. Though he wants to defend them, he can’t and won’t. They chose to listen to false prophecies and advice that tickled their ears and aligned with their own selfish desires until they perverted the whole land.
Now, they’re to be dragged kicking and screaming into exile and watch everything they once held dear burn to ash, ripe pickings for their nearby neighbor, Edom, descendents of Jacob’s brother Esau (4:21). And every ounce of the judgment is justified.
Even so, the Babylonians are just as depraved as the Canaanites and Assyrians who led the people of Israel into abomination. Why should they escape judgment?
Disapproval of the Judging Nation
They shan’t. That’s what Jeremiah says. The invading nation will reap the same judgment in due time.
Jeremiah wants said judgment soon, to see God make them suffer for their own crimes, though he knows it will come later. Right now is the time for Israel to face the consequences of her crimes.
Yet these wicked rulers are in a tough predicament because though God withdraws His hand, He still watches and accounts for every one of their evil deeds. Their raping, their pillaging, their plundering, their slaughtering. As the streets run red, so does the cup of His wrath. Delaying.
A time of grace may be upon them, but without the same repentance expected from the Israelites, they too will face punishment for their crimes. Every nation will.
The only righteous one is he who follows the Lord. Jeremiah says that explicitly in 3:22-23: “The Lord’s lovingkindnesses indeed never cease, For His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; Great is Your faithfulness.”
No one around him follows the Lord, though, and all seems lost. The horrors of nightmares.
Visceral Horrification at the Bloodshed and Violence
It’s either God or chaos and death. That much is sure. But that doesn’t make Jeremiah celebrate.
Never once does he say, “Ha, you’re getting what you deserve, Israel. Good riddance.”
No.
The sight of the slaughter, the annihilation, rips Jeremiah open from the inside out. His heart is crushed beneath the weight because he loves his home just as much as he loves God, and there is no conflict there. He loves his home and his neighbors because he loves God.
And make no mistake, what he witnesses are absolute terrors. Here are only a few examples:
1:19: “I called to my lovers, but they deceived me; My priests and my elders perished in the city While they sought food to restore their strength themselves.”
1:20: “See, O Lord, for I am in distress; My spirit is greatly troubled; My heart is overturned within me, For I have been very rebellious. In the street the sword slays; In the house it is like death.”
2:6-7: “And He has violently treated His tabernacle like a garden booth; He has destroyed His appointed meeting place. The Lord has caused to be forgotten The appointed feast and sabbath in Zion, And He has despised king and priest In the indignation of His anger. The Lord has rejected His altar, He has abandoned His sanctuary; He has delivered into the hand of the enemy The walls of her palaces. They have made a noise in the house of the Lord As in the day of an appointed feast.”
2:9: “Her gates have sunk into the ground, He has destroyed and broken her bars. Her king and her princes are among the nations; The law is no more. Also, her prophets find No vision from the Lord.”
2:11-12: “My eyes fail because of tears, My spirit is greatly troubled; My heart is poured out on the earth Because of the destruction of the daughter of my people, When little ones and infants faint In the streets of the city. They say to their mothers, “Where is grain and wine?” As they faint like a wounded man In the streets of the city, As their life is poured out On their mothers’ bosom.”
2:20: “See, O Lord, and look! With whom have You dealt thus? Should women eat their offspring, The little ones who were born healthy? Should priest and prophet be slain In the sanctuary of the Lord?”
4:4-5: “The tongue of the infant cleaves To the roof of its mouth because of thirst; The little ones ask for bread, But no one breaks it for them. Those who ate delicacies Are desolate in the streets; Those reared in purple Embrace ash pits.”
4:7-8: “Her consecrated ones were purer than snow, They were whiter than milk; They were more ruddy in body than corals, Their polishing was like lapis lazuli. Their appearance is blacker than soot, They are not recognized in the streets; Their skin is shriveled on their bones, It is withered, it has become like wood.”
4:10: “The hands of compassionate women Boiled their own children; They became food for them Because of the destruction of the daughter of my people.”
Yes, women ate their children because Babylon cut off Jerusalem from their farmlands. Out of selfish desperation. In their moment of torment they were so evil, they refused to sacrifice themselves and instead shed innocent blood. Kept up the abominations that brought about their judgment to begin with.
Read Jeremiah’s words again and again and again until they sink through your skull. Would you be happy to see such gore and devastation happen to your family and friends?
If yes, then you’re as evil as the mothers who cooked their babies. As the cowardly priests who committed suicide and abandoned their people (“perished” in v. 19 is better translated “took their own lives”). God crushed “the chosen men” in Judea (1:15), and left spineless weaklings who could give no defense. Too much tragedy for any man to bear, yet Jeremiah bore it all.
Everyone wants judgment overcome the other guy, but once it’s there, visible in the streets, you’re begging for mercy. And you should.
Relentless Pleas for Mercy
Jeremiah makes no secret of the situation. Israel deserves their punishment. But the Lord is also a merciful God who wants no one to perish, and the prophet knows this too.
Though justice must be served, for His children and their enemies (1:22: “Let all their wickedness come before You; And deal with them as You have dealt with me For all my transgressions; For my groans are many and my heart is faint.”), God’s compassion and love may still cause Him to relent if He so wills. As long as that eternal compassion and love exist, hope remains.
So Jeremiah scatters about his words pleas for mercy. The two most notable are in chapter 5:
5:1-3: “Remember, O Lord, what has befallen us; Look, and see our reproach! Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, Our houses to aliens. We have become orphans without a father, Our mothers are like widows.”
5:19-22: “You, O Lord, rule forever; Your throne is from generation to generation. Why do You forget us forever? Why do You forsake us so long? Restore us to You, O Lord, that we may be restored; Renew our days as of old, Unless You have utterly rejected us And are exceedingly angry with us.”
He hammers on the theme of remembrance. In Deuteronomy, the Israelites were commanded to remember God and His command, to live in accordance to His covenant. They failed, but the Lord always remembered. Never once does He forget His covenant with them. In fact, the very judgment they faced in Jeremiah’s day was a direct result of the consequences spelled out in the covenant. Agreed to at Mount Sinai and 40 years later at the outskirts of Canaan. Consequences God remembered.
But God’s remembrance didn’t begin there. He first remembered the nations by seeking out Abraham to build a nation of His own, then remembered that nation in their suffering in Egypt and rescued them, and then remembered them in their sin, sending first judges and then prophets to rescue them and warn them to turn back to Him before they faced the covenant judgments.
God shows an overwhelming supply of delay and mercy and hears every righteous person (the one who follows Him) when they plea and intercede for their families, friends, nations. And He has a track record of either sparing the nation because of the righteous (the remnant of loyal Israelites) or sparing the righteous in the midst of judgment (Lot and his daughters at Sodom; the Jews in exile in Babylon and Persia).
Jeremiah already knew the latter fell upon Jerusalem. He would later encourage those in exile in the other letter that bears his name to not seek a return home to Israel and instead build families where they are forced to live, resist evil, and live out the image of God before the Babylonians and Persians. To be represent God where they are, as His surviving remnant.
They did. And of course, their obedience eventually brought about the desired mercy. Under first Xerxes and then Darius the Mede, some scattered Jews were allowed to return to Israel and Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple Mount at Zion, which set the stage for Christ Jesus, the coming Messiah, who would not only permanently rescue Israel from sin and death but the entire world.
We’re on the Brink of Jeremiah’s Horrors
Because of our unquenched depravity, like Ancient Israel before us, we’re on the brink of Jeremiah’s horrors. Outspoken evildoers who enact the worst of the worst with glee will soon have the reins of power. In 6 months.
Only difference is, for us, we did this to ourselves more than Israel because we had the chance to stop it and either did nothing or actively opened the doors to the enemy. Israel was invaded by force. We’ve been invaded by blind indifference.
Yes, maybe it’s a just consequence, justice due for all the corruption in America. But that’s nothing to celebrate.
If you live here, like me, your nation, your home, which God loves and you should love, is threatened to be annihilated, and you and your family and your friends will suffer. Without widespread repentance and Christian revival, that’s guaranteed.
You should want that. Yet some of you would rather welcome judgment with open arms than do what it takes to preserve the freedoms our Founders fought and bled for to establish a nation for 250 years which allows the Gospel to be preached to countless souls unrestricted and unchained. Tell me, how does that glorify God?
There’s no First Baptist of Mecca
There’s no Free Methodist of Saudia Arabia
There’s no Calvary Christian of North Korea
There’s no Holy Sepulchre of Beijing
Because Islam and socialism despise Christ and Christians and either slaughter them, force them to pay unrealistic taxes, or drive them underground, making the command to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:18-20) nigh impossible. Muslims are commanded in the Quran to destroy the infidel (any non-Muslims) and Karl Marx once quipped in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, “Communism begins where atheism begins” (paraphrase), and, of course, elsewhere called religion (by which he meant Christianity) the “opiate of the masses.”
Maybe we are in a time where God’s judgment is unstoppable. Maybe not. Either way, we need more Jeremiahs. Men who see the problem, lament the consequences, do not celebrate the invasion, and plead for God to rescue and redeem. Men who refuse to bend to evil or sit out the fight, but instead surrender their emotions to God and live out His wisdom in the culture. Less spineless wimps like the priests who would rather off themselves than tend to and defend their people and more judges, prophets, intercessors.
It’s good and holy to love God and your nation.
We must remember how to mourn with honor and live in covenant with God Most High.
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We have been, again, given the leadership we deserve.
I feel this is a call to all of us to stand up, repent and mourn, take up the armor and fight for our Lord and His truths.
We cannot rest. Ever.