Psalm 34:12 Blessed is the Nation whose God is the Lord

Everybody has a worldview.  It’s what you believe about life, and why.  What is good, what is bad, what is right, what is wrong, what is true, and what is false.  What are the rules, are there any rules?  Everyone has a unique worldview in all its details, but many people share a common worldview.

For example, if you are a Christian, you believe that God created the world.  So you also believe in an afterlife and that you will give an account to God for your life when it is over.  And that fact affects how you live your life.  You know that you are never alone, that God knows the very intents of your heart.  You accept the Ten Commandments as basic rules for life, because they come from God.  You may not even be a Christian and believe all this.

If you are an atheist, you believe that life ends at death.  There is no higher power to whom you must give an account, who can and will tell you how to live.  You may choose to be moral, however you define that, but there is no compelling reason why you would need to do so. 

Nations have worldviews too.  A core set of beliefs about life that shape their policies and laws.  And throughout history, they have been religious ones.  Now today for the first time, we have nations with atheistic worldviews, the communist countries.  China has millions of Christians, but its worldview is atheistic.  We have about 50 Muslim countries in the world today.  India is primarily Hindu.  Europe was Christian, but then two world wars fought on European soil between Christian nations made Europe reject much of their past, particularly their religious and national sentiments. 

In the United States, we were founded as a Christian nation with a Christian worldview.  God, our creator, gave rights to human beings, which defined what liberty and freedom meant. 

Some today will argue that point.  They say that we were always a secular nation, and that is what the Founders intended. 

The problem is that a secular nation cannot have inalienable rights, because in a secular country, there is no higher power than the government.

But these rights are not the natural rights that philosophers figured out.  Our nation didn’t go to war with the world’s leading super-power over the musings of philosophers.  And this wasn’t the doing of deist gods either, as people often say that our Founders were deists.  A deist god wouldn’t get involved.  This was a belief based on the Bible and Christianity.

For almost 200 years, the Bible and God were a part of our public education.  Everybody knew and respected the Ten Commandments.  We honored the Sabbath.  Businesses were closed on Sundays.

And our nation was blessed.

But then we had several Supreme Court rulings that removed God from our public life and education, and we became a secular nation, though our rights, our liberties, and our freedom were still based on Christianity.

Psalm 34:12 says that:  Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.  A friend of mine who has been to seminary told me that this verse only applies to the nation of Israel.

Well, yes, God had a special relationship with Israel at that time.  He said He would bless them if they followed Him, and He would curse them if they didn’t.  By curse, He meant that He would not bless them in all the ways that He had been and that they would experience things like disease, plagues, poverty, oppression, drought, famines, and the like as a result.

But God didn’t ignore other nations.  He judged them as well for their moral conduct, even though they did not have a covenant with Him like Israel did.

But if another nation turned to the Lord, what, God wasn’t going to bless them?  Would a nation turning to the Lord mean that the nation must be full of dedicated Christians or that its government is based on the Bible?

No.

Our nation was based on a belief in God, and it was the Christian God.  And we taught that in our schools and acknowledged that publicly.

In a few months, we as a nation are going to have a referendum on whether we will be a nation whose God is the Lord or whether God will continue to be set aside for other gods. 

They’re calling it an election, but it’s more than that.  It’s a referendum.  It’s not really about the particular people who will run our country, but about the direction our country will go. 

Our nation has a Christian past.  We have moved away from that in the last 50 years, but there is still so much further that some want to take us.  Or we can move back toward our founding principles.  Because of our Christian past, change must come slowly, like the proverbial frog in the boiling water, so nobody objects too much as the country slowly moves further away from God.  Every generation grows up with a new normal, and they don’t see how far the boundaries have moved.

The Bible says that we must teach our children “diligently” about the ways of the Lord, “when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.”  (Deuteronomy 6:7)   We teach our kids in our schools that they are animals that wear clothes and who can talk.  Life isn’t special.  You are not special.  Life is an accident of nature.  Life is cheap.

The Bible says that God forms our “inward parts” and that He “wove” us in our “mother’s womb.”  We were “made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth.”  And in God’s “book were written the days that were ordained for [us] when as yet there was not one of them.”  Psalm 139:13-16   We kill a million babies a year before they even live out one of those days that God had ordained for them.

The Bible says that “God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them, for they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.”  Therefore,  “God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error. and just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper.”  Romans 1:25-28

We have been trying to normalize what God calls impurity, dishonor, degrading, unnatural, indecent, error, and depravity.

The Bible says that “from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female.”  Mark 10:6  We say it doesn’t matter what God made us, and we don’t care.  We’ll decide for ourselves what we want to be.

The Bible says that “righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people.” Proverbs 14:34   We have come to the point that we expect that our political leaders are corrupt.  To speak of a corrupt politician today is to repeat ourselves. 

We no longer recognize a standard of right and wrong based on the Bible but a new value system of correct behavior for which even a hint of offense brings sure and unforgiving punishment.

I am not going to name names here, because many of you will not see the forest for the trees. 

The referendum is about the direction of our country.  There are dozens or hundreds of individual issues that no two of us will agree on in everything. 

But one side says that our worldview of God gave us a country that God blessed and that brought incredible good to the world.  The other side says that our past is wrong, all of it, and it must be erased and replaced.  They have already removed God from the pledge of allegiance and the oaths we use to testify. 

The Bible teaches a worldview that is at odds with the correct view of today.  For now, you are allowed to hold your beliefs as long as you keep them to yourselves.  At some point, those beliefs themselves can and will be considered hateful to those who disagree, and this is why Christians are persecuted in a hundred countries throughout the world.  It can and will happen here too if not enough of God’s people choose the direction of our nation.

Many Christians believe it is inevitable that Christians will be persecuted in this country.  That would be shameful, because no other nation in the history of the world had more of a Christian foundation than ours. 

Many Christians believe it would be good for the Church to be persecuted, because they believe persecution makes the church stronger.  Except that in many parts of the world today, the Church is being destroyed by persecution.  Millions of them have fled their country, but once persecution were to start here, there would be nowhere else to go, because most other countries would follow suit.

We forget that countries that have great persecution were taken generally taken over through violent revolutions.  If persecution were to come to our country, it would be because Christians let evil take over through indifference.  We don’t have dictators in our country; we have representatives.  If our representatives don’t represent our interests, then we are responsible to get ones that do.  If you can’t find any, that means you need to do it yourself, like Nehemiah building the walls of Jerusalem.