America’s Last Gleaming :: By Terry James

NOTE FROM TERRY: The article below was first posted on July 19, 2018. At that time, America was indeed in a state of degeneration. That is, the culture and society were moving away from God’s governance. The drift had become a swift flow in that direction apart from its founding principles.

Despite the Trump presidential administration—which I’m convinced was put in place to slow the flow of wickedness perpetrated within the government—the proof could not be missed. The society and culture nonetheless became coarser, more debauched, by the day. This is despite many steps being taken by the government to make things better through positive actions.

Five years hence, it has become more than obvious to me that liberty’s light is being quenched by the human and demonic minions of Ephesians 6:12, who are determined to forever darken the nation Ronald Reagan called “the shining city on the hill.”

We are perhaps now seeing America’s last gleaming. But while that seems true in every respect, the glorious light from above calls all to repentance. At any moment, you can be made a citizen of that heavenly, shining city, New Jerusalem. Here is how:

“That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Romans 10: 9-10).

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God Bless America Again

A country song from way back in the 1960s and 1970s, during the Vietnam War era, plays through my mind these days. The chorus goes: “God bless America again. You must know the trouble that she’s in. Wash her pretty face, dry her eyes, and then, God bless America again.”

The war was raging while Walter Cronkite read the mainstream view of the news to us at dinnertime. Film of bloodied American GIs and corpses of black-pajamaed Vietcong projected from our TV screens while we downed our evening meals.

B-52s dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives, carpet-bombing an unseen enemy many thousands of feet below. Rolling Thunder, as it was called, churned up killing fields of earth mixed with flesh and blood night after night, day after day.

More than fifty thousand American soldiers and airmen went through the horrific, grinding process of becoming casualties of war their country’s leaders, it turned out, never intended to bring to total victory—giving their last measure of devotion for America the beautiful. At the same time, the ugliness of political warfare was being uncovered and displayed in a news media orgy of, in my view, pro-Communist glee.

A US president of the United States was turned out of office in disgrace—and rightfully so. The term “Watergate” became forever ingrained within the American-English lexicon.

Would America ever recover? Would the curse that had descended since the time of Korea, with America’s young men and women dying in a “police action” purposely fought to stalemate rather than to complete victory, ever lift from our nation?

There have been moments of seemingly possible national egress from the plunge into the abyss of political corrosiveness. It looked like the nation might pull away from the cultural rot that began in earnest during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the legitimization of murdering babies in their mother’s wombs.

The Moral Majority appeared for a brief, shining moment to be making headway in engendering movement toward moral sanity. Somehow, however, a national, cultural darkness began descending following the Reagan years. An almost tangible veil separating America’s formerly flawed but Judeo-Christian-governed morality from a new immoral malignity fell with the Clinton years, the White House intern’s stained blue dress, and all the rest.

Jeremiah Wright, Barack Hussein Obama’s black-liberation theology pastor, from his Chicago pulpit, spewed a venomous rant that America’s chickens had come home to roost and implied that the Lord of Heaven should damn America—using God’s name in vain with the invective. Wright was, I infer, talking about the Islamist attacks on the World Trade Center Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC.

As much as I detested Wright’s hate speech against the United States, I must admit that, indeed, America’s chickens appeared to have come home to roost, suffering on that September 11, 2001, Tuesday at least some degree of God’s judgment. In my view, the eight years of Wright’s best-known parishioner’s time in the Oval Office brought an intensification of that judgment.

The year 2016 truly was a pivotal year for this nation and the world. It was proper, I believe, to wonder whether God’s judgment was on track to preclude that of the corrective sort, such as in the past. I’m thinking of times like the Great Depression of the 1930s following the debauched era of the Roaring Twenties.

It was within reason to consider that God’s judgment might be entering a destructive phrase rather than another corrective one. Was America entering a time such as when Sodom and Gomorrah came to their end—i.e., was it possible that God would never again bless America?

Like that country song tells throughout its lyrics, I, too, love America and don’t want to ever let it fall because I haven’t done my part in helping keep it upright in every sense.

All of this said, spiritually enlightened Bible students know that neither the leaders of this nation nor of any other will rectify the rapidly mounting problems. Only Jesus Christ will solve the otherwise unsolvable, sinister evil at humanity’s core.

There are within the community of Bible prophecy observers those who wonder whether America is the most likely candidate for being the Babylon of the eighteenth chapter of Revelation. That’s the country that will be the most materially accomplished of all nations of earth’s history.

I’m one of those who pondered this possibility more seriously with each passing news headline involving the Obama administration and State Department dealing with Israel.

God, it is abundantly clear, has more than lived up to His promise to bless those who bless the progeny that would come from Abraham through Isaac. America, acting as midwife in the rebirth of the Jewish state in 1948, has been the recipient of bountiful material blessings beyond measure. God has truly blessed America.

Conversely, God has promised to curse those who curse His chosen nation, Israel. The cultural war is observably causing the loss of America’s former striving to promote Judeo-Christian values the Founding Fathers infused into the Constitution. Just as troubling was the obvious disdain Obama and those around him had for Israel, even choosing to champion Israel’s enemies at every diplomatic opportunity, it seems.

Such continued folly would not perhaps, but certainly, bring national disaster the likes of which our previously blessed nation has never experienced.

If indeed forgiveness of our national sins is possible, given the lateness of the prophetic hour, let us who name the matchless name that is above every name implore God to bless America again. This must be done, however, not with vain repetition in the idle words “God bless America” often used by presidents and politicians when ending their meaningless speeches.

There is but one heavenly prescription for obtaining an answer to such a prayer:

“If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14).

God does not change. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. That call to repentance is still in effect—and it is for Church Age saints, just as it was for His chosen people of ancient Israel. But, time is swiftly fleeting.

“We will make America great again!” [was Trump’s] presidential politics proclamation. No, “we” won’t. We have proven, through our actions and lack thereof, that, as a people, we want to take America in the other direction. “We” didn’t make America great in the first place, and “we” certainly can’t make it great in the future.

“God bless America again,” when offered in genuine spiritual, obedient humility—not in politically prideful demand—before the throne of Almighty God is the only petition that has a prayer of a chance to save our nation.

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