See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil, in that I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commandments, His statutes, and His judgments, that you may live and multiply; and the Lord your God will bless you in the land which you go to possess. But if your heart turns away so that you do not hear, and are drawn away, and worship other gods and serve them, I announce to you today that you shall surely perish; you shall not prolong your days in the land which you cross over the Jordan to go in and possess.
—Moses to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 30:15-18—
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
—John Adams—
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.
—Ronald Reagan—
You can access all the articles in this series of posts here.
Key point: In the short period of only a few decades, America has stepped into a pit of evil and is now in a free fall. As a nation, we are certain to hit rock bottom unless we have a change of heart with regard to our perspective on the value of human life. Moreover, this change must be genuine; it must compel us to cry out to God for mercy and forgiveness.
In part 1 and part 2 of this series we already have highlighted six reasons God will bring judgment on New York and the United States of America. Why are Americans in trouble? We have permitted a great evil—the slaughter of our children through abortion; and the passage of New York’s new, permissive abortion law, the Reproductive Health Act (RHA), represents a shameful new low for us.
We have only one hope. We must become heartsick over our actions and indifference and return to the God we have abandoned. Further, we must repent of the evil of abortion and seek God’s mercy and forgiveness. If we do these things, we may yet be spared divine judgment. The church must lead the way.
Looking at God’s past dealings with people gives us some encouragement. The people of Nineveh were very wicked, and God was planning to judge them; but he sent Jonah to challenge them to repent, and they did.
“Then God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God relented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it (Jonah 3:10).
Let’s briefly review the six reasons we already have cited as we have made the case for God’s certain judgment. Then, in the remainder of this post, we will consider a seventh, critically important reason. May God help us to respond as we should.
Inconsistencies, Hypocrisy, and Lies
First, capital punishment for convicted murders is illegal in New York State, but killing third trimester babies inside the womb, and now even after they’ve emerged from it, is fully legal. As we said in part 1,
[T]he [new] law states, “‘Person,’ When referring to the victim of a homicide, means a human being who has been born and is alive.” Really? One has to be born? What about an unborn child at 39½ weeks? What about a baby who has been aborted and is alive? He or she is not a person in New York’s eyes.
Second, the RHA is built on the same racist and genocidal philosophy that compelled Margaret Sanger to found Planned Parenthood.
Third, Americans know intuitively that preborn babies are human beings of infinite worth. This understanding compelled us to list the preborn victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing next to their mothers’ names at the 9/11 memorial.
Fourth, the law refuses to recognize overwhelming scientific and medical evidence that the preborn baby is not a “part of its mother’s body,” but a separate human being who should be accorded basic human rights.
Fifth, the RHA puts women at very great risk physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Sixth, abortion advocates once claimed abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,” but they now celebrate a law that permits the outright killing of full-term babies.
Why else will God judge America? A Seventh reason is that Americans, including New Yorkers, know better than to snub their noses in God’s face by allowing the killing of full term babies through abortion and infanticide. Contrary to any and all denials, we know what God expects of us in the moral realm.
Not that Long Ago, America Was a Different Place
I want to take you back in time 62 years. On Wednesday, May 15, 1957, Rev. Billy Graham began preaching a series of evangelistic meetings in New York City that would become historic. The
meetings began in Madison Square Garden and continued for an unprecedented 16 weeks. On what was planned to be the final night of the Crusade (July 20, 1957), 100,000 people jammed Yankee Stadium to hear Billy Graham preach. At that time, it was the largest crowd in the stadium’s history.
Yet this service wasn’t the last. The evangelistic meetings were extended because the response was so overwhelming. As we have affirmed, from start to finish, the Crusade lasted 16 weeks. An estimated 2.4 million people attended, and over 61,000 people responded to Rev. Graham’s call to follow Christ. The final meeting was a rally held in Times Square on the evening of Sunday, September 1.
Ruby Reisdorph and her husband, both of whom later would become missionaries to the Philippines, attended the event at Times Square. In a radio interview in 1979, Ruby recalled the remarkable scenes she had her husband witnessed.
We went out early because my husband wanted to see the effect of a service like that on the throngs. We hardly were prepared for what we saw. Everything was geared with excitement which reigned all over in that area. Where it seemed like all New York City had come. I know there came bold headlines out in the paper: “Coney Island Deserted.” Many, many people flocked to that meeting. It looked like a sea of people in every direction.
Hear a 2-minute clip from the message that Rev. Graham delivered to the thousands who came out to hear him that night. The entire message is available here.
Only a Few Decades Ago, New York Acknowledged God
On October 9, 1960, Rev. Billy Graham made an appearance on What’s My Line? a television game show that was telecast from New York City from 1950 to 1967. You can watch the entire segment here.
An important highlight of the show that evening was the conversation between host John Charles Daly and Rev. Graham. A week earlier, Graham had spoken to a crowd of 100,000 in Berlin, and Daly asked Graham about his trip. These words from Mr. Daly speak volumes: “I’m sure that there’s nothing quite as heartening to us, even, as far away as we are, that when you go to Berlin there is this outpouring and this rededication to the principles of a God and man’s responsibility to God.” The following one-minute clip includes this statement from Mr. Daly.
I’m sure that there’s nothing quite as heartening to us, even, as far away as we are, that when you go to Berlin there is this outpouring and this rededication to the principles of a God and man’s responsibility to God.
—John Charles Daly to Billy Graham during Graham’s appearance on What’s My Line? on October 9, 1960—
A City Acknowledges God
One year prior to Billy Graham’s New York Crusade, on Easter weekend in 1956 (Easter was on April 1), this was what the New York City Skyline looked like in the financial district of Manhattan.
The Same City, a Few Decades Later, Spurns Him
On January 22nd, 2019—63 years later—New York Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered the spire of One World Trade Center lit in pink to commemorate the passage of the RHA. Other landmarks, including the Kosciuszko Bridge, the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge, and the Alfred E. Smith Building in Albany, were fitted with special lighting as well. You can images of some of these structures here.
Thus, in less than a lifetime, we Americans have turned our backs on God. To be fair, we readily affirm that not everyone is giving Him the cold shoulder, just as not everyone followed Him in the 1950s. Even so, our national posture toward the Almighty has taken a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn. He will not ignore this! God cares about the preborn, about children, and about life! To disregard our responsibilities to the most helpless among us is tantamount to shaking our fists in God’s face!
In less than a lifetime, we Americans have turned our backs on God.
We Must Humble Ourselves Before God
The words of Abraham Lincoln’s National Day of Prayer Proclamation in 1863 come to mind. Lincoln signed it on March 30. In setting aside Thursday, April 30, as “a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer,” Lincoln declared, in part (emphasis added):
[W]hereas 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 only are blessed whose God is the Lord:
And, insomuch as 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 but 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!
It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.
Americans are in an even more desperate situation than were our ancestors 156 years ago. Why? We haven’t forgotten God—we’ve rejected Him!
We haven’t forgotten God—we’ve rejected Him!
Another Civil War?
Consideration of Lincoln’s Proclamation is appropriate on more than one level. Christians leader and statesman Dr. Michael Brown assesses the situation in our country in this important article. Brown explores the question of whether or not Americans’ differences over abortion will result in another civil war. The only way to avoid such a bitter scenario is for God to intervene. If He graciously does, the church must be available for Him to use in the process. Brown writes the following (emphases are in the original),
Our nation is being torn up by abortion. States are polarizing over it. The political parties are splitting over it. And with every positive, pro-life step that is taken, the militant abortionists are crying for more blood.
How does this end, without divine intervention? Will it mean the fracturing of our union, with some states free of legalized abortion and other states havens of baby-killing? Will the overturning of Roe v. Wade lead to a wholesale rebellion, with violence in the streets?
Speaking more broadly, Buck Jacobs stated that, “There is only one possibility that could turn the tide. It won’t be found through politics or politicians, economics or education. National repentance and the restoration of God and His ways as our moral base in Christ is the only hope for our nation.”
He is absolutely right.
And so, while we continue to fight for life on every front—on the streets and in the homes and in politics and in the media and beyond—we must put first things first.
There must be massive repentance and renewal in the church, coupled with massive, effective evangelism in the society, and with that, the changing of hearts and minds about abortion.
- We must pray for spiritual awakening and for spiritual discernment.
- We must repent of our own indifference and inaction.
- We must share our faith in Christ with others, pointing to Him as the creator and giver of life on earth and life eternal. This doesn’t mean we club people over the head with our pro-life position, but it does mean we refuse to separate our allegiance to Christ from our commitment to protect innocent lives.
- We must lovingly yet firmly uphold the principle of the sanctity of life, especially for the preborn and for those who’ve just exited the womb, since these are the arenas where the battle now rages hottest.
Once Again, Consider How Far We Have Fallen!
On the evening of Monday, February 4, 2019, Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb), encouraged the United States Senate to pass by unanimous consent his Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. This proposed law would protect infants who had survived abortions from being killed or being abandoned to die. If any senator objects to a proposal being considered for unanimous consent, the proposal dies.
Senator Patty Murray (D., Wash.), objected by saying that laws against killing infants already exist. Of course, New York’s new abortion law created a loophole that absolutely does allow infanticide, and this is exactly the kind of abuse that Senator Sasse was trying to counter. Unfortunately, with Senator Murray’s objection, Senator Sasse’s bill stalled. We need to stay informed, however; it likely will be back, and next time it will be up for a floor vote.
Senator Joni Ernst (R., Iowa), lamented, “This is the world’s greatest legislate body. There is nothing great, there is nothing moral or even humane, about the discussion that we have before us today. Somehow this conversation has devolved so completely that a bill prohibiting the murder of children who are born alive, a bill that simply prohibits infanticide, has tonight been blocked on the floor of the Senate.”
Somehow this conversation has devolved so completely that a bill prohibiting the murder of children who are born alive, a bill that simply prohibits infanticide, has tonight been blocked on the floor of the Senate.
—Senator Joni Ernst—
Walk in the Good Way
As we have said, dire as our situation is, we are not without hope. May the Lord help us to respond to His call to repent in the same way the Ninevites responded when Jonah delivered God’s warning to them. Let us turn to God in humble repentance and seek His face.
In Jeremiah 6:16, Jeremiah declared,
16 Thus says the Lord:
“Stand in the ways and see,
And ask for the old paths, where the good way is,
And walk in it;
Then you will find rest for your souls.”
Note that God was calling on His people to follow the “old paths.” Jettison from your mind the idea that these paths were “old-fashioned” in the sense of being outdated. The Lord was pointing His people to the road He originally had paved for them to travel. This is the “good way,” the right way. It is the way that makes liberty possible.
Jeremiah’s audience refused. The people said, “We will not walk in it.”
I pray we will not be so foolish!
Next week, we’ll continue with our list of nine reasons. Keep praying for our nation.
Copyright © 2019 by B. Nathaniel Sullivan. All rights reserved.
top image: Photo by tom coe on Unsplash
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture passages have been taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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