Idols for Destruction
“So each of the people likewise cut down his own bough and followed Abimelech, put them against the stronghold, and set the stronghold on fire above them, so that all the people of the tower of Shechem died, about a thousand men and women.” Judges 9:49
“The tower of Shechem must have been a massive structure to hold a thousand people. But it was a worthless refuge for those who trusted in idols.” . . . so concludes the journal entry of Ligonier Ministries’ daily devotional TableTalk for Tuesday, September 11, 2001. This chillingly prescient article deals with a nation founded upon God’s law that exchanged the “glory of Israel” for graven images made by the hand of man. In a surreal twist of the storyline, God’s judgment fell upon His unfaithful people by the hand of an evil man. Table Talk concludes with a quote from Matthew Henry, “Thus, when God makes use of men as instruments in His hand to do His work, He means one thing and they another. (Isa. 10:6-7)”
When God’s judgment falls upon a nation He first humiliates and then destroys that nation’s gods. Egypt worshiped and gave sacred oblations to the gods of the Nile River, to the sun and to ox-headed deities. At God’s command the Nile was turned to blood, the sun was blackened and the oxen were struck with plague and boils and hail. The statue of Dagon, powerful god of the Philistines, fell on his face when the captured ark of the Lord was placed before the vile fertility image. Not once but twice it did obeisance to the Almighty, prompting their Philistine theologians to declare,
“. . . you shall give glory to the God of Israel; perhaps He will ease His hand from you, your gods, and your land.” 1 Samuel 6:5
George Mason, a founding father of our nation prophetically proclaimed, “As nations can not be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, providence punishes national sins, by national calamities!” A short distance from the Pentagon, inscribed with an iron stylus on blocks of granite, the walls of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington proclaim the words of our third President,
“And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure, when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice can not sleep forever.”
I am immensely comforted by the fact, that President Bush has publicly stated that he uses The One Year Bible for his personal daily devotions. Providentially his reading for the morning of September 11 reads, “By the wrath of the Lord Almighty the land will be scorched and the people will be fuel for the fire;”3
On Tuesday, September 11th, the World Trade Towers, worldwide symbol of the god Mammon and the Pentagon our invincible god of power were struck by the hand of an offended God. Tragically many thousands of Americans lost their lives, as must invariably happen, when God strikes a nation for its national sins.
Regrettably for our generation, God’s justice has awakened! We, as a nation, have replaced the worship of the true God with a Pantheon of gods in a heavenly realm known as “Secular Humanism”.
Long has Mammon, the god of wealth and profit, been venerated in the hearts of our people. A main tenet of its worship is “. . . egocentric covetousness which claims man’s heart and thereby estranges him from God (Mt. 6:19ff.)”4 Our nation has been alienated from the God of our fathers in its sin and enslaved to serve this unforgiving god through the belief that debt is “good” and that to squander our children’s inheritance by mortgaging the future is no great sin. Mammon’s most popular doctrine among our people is the Doctrine of Convenience. In the practice of this belief, we willingly approve the sacrifice of our children and our elderly on its altar. Children, whom God calls a “reward”5 or blessing, are viewed as cardinal sin because they disrupt our cash flow and do despite to our net worth. Can we really explain the difference between worshipping Molech, the vile god of the Canaanites whose worship demanded that live children be burned in a roaring fire and mothers of our generation who aborted their offspring by burning the skin off their baby by the means of a saline injection or ripping it to pieces moments before birth?
Ashtoreth demands that sodomy and other sexual perversion be used in her worship to assure the fertility of the nation. Today her “worship” floods our living room altars (TV) displaying acts that invoke the spirit of a sordid Canaanite fertility rite.
The Pentagon the symbol of our power has been enshrined as a temple of our invincibility as a nation. Proverbs, 18:10a states, “The name of the LORD is a strong tower; the righteous run to it and are safe.6 We have substituted the Living Lord with “laser guided techno-bombs” and “special ops”. Our safety comes at a cost in the service of this deity. We will be asked and we will be eager to grant a sacrifice of personal freedom in exchange for the promise of security.
Our media reports that our just response to an “act of war” is a call to arms. I believe that this is biblically appropriate when the sovereignty of a nation is so grievously violated, as ours was in this heinous way. Yet military doctrine demands that we must avoid fighting a war on TWO fronts. If God wars against us and chooses to use an evil power to be the “rod of reproof upon our backs” then we must first sue for peace from our offended Sovereign before engaging an enemy on a second front.
‘Thus says the LORD God of Israel: “Behold, I will turn back the weapons of war that are in your hands, with which you fight against the king of Babylon (Saddam Hussein)7 and the Chaldeans (Iraq)7 who besiege you outside the walls; and I will assemble them in the midst of this city. 5“I Myself will fight against you with an outstretched hand and with a strong arm, even in anger and fury and great wrath. 6“I will strike the inhabitants of this city, both man and beast; they shall die …“5 Jeremiah 21:4-6
If we are serious about commencing a war against terrorism," said Rep. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., Senate Governmental Affairs Committee chairman, "we have to understand it’s going to be a different kind of war."9 Is it militarily prudent to wage a war against God, a war that we, most certainly won’t win, while engaging in a “different kind of war”? Have we succeeded in forgetting the “act of God” that thwarted our elite special forces in the 1980 rescue of the Iranian hostages? 8 If we are to avoid the deadly cycle seen in modern day Israel of terrorist attack, just reprisal, innocents harmed in the reprisal thereby spawning new acts of terror, then we must wage a war in which God’s supernatural help and intervention is manifest to the world. Better to proclaim with the prophet Isaiah as the Sept 11th reading declares,
“Raise the war cry, you nations, and be shattered!
Listen, all you distant lands. Prepare for battle, and be shattered!
Prepare for battle, and be shattered!
Devise your strategy, but it will be thwarted;
propose your plan, but it will not stand, for God is with us.” Isaiah 8:9,10
What should our response be on this a national day of mourning and prayer? To echo the words of our 16th President10,
“It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord.
We know that by His divine law, nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world. May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people?
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 produced by some superior wisdom and 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.”
“National reformation” is the need. Confessing our idolatry and pride is the means to ending God’s war against our nation.
President Bush, as our corporate head and in keeping with those who have gone before you, you must call this nation to repentance if we are to expect a favorable response to our prayer of “God Bless America”. . . this is my prayer.
