Has America chosen Nebuchadnezzar?
The aphorism, those who do not remember the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them, remains as true today as when it was first uttered.It's ancient history, I'm talking, having taken place between 604-561 B.C. A name that is still known from that era because he was so famous, or monstrous, is Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar conquered all of the Middle East. He brought peace there by making it desolate. He was powerful, power-hungry, and pragmatically cruel to the point of being bloodthirsty. He was, at least for most of his life, what Christians and Jews would call a pagan. He, and his city state of Babylon, was the only true superpower of the day, and he did not use that power benevolently. He took what he wanted, when he wanted it, and the sands of the desert, mountain passes, and walled cities of the Holy Land were littered with corpses, tears and tragedy.
You see, the prophet Jeremiah tells us that the cultural lifestyle Judah and Israel chose and followed in those days (they had rejected the lifestyle God had commanded) was the reason Nebuchadnezzar swept over them, and by extension over the whole Middle East. They brought it on themselves. They chose their own destiny. How they lived had consequences, and the consequences were not good. The nation was crushed, their cities were destroyed, their princes and nobles executed, the king's eyes gouged out, their women were ravished, their people became slaves, the economy was flattened, the people were all equal in their misery, even God's city Jerusalem was put to the torch, and their future was gone.
Those who do not remember that it was the spiritual behavior of Judah and Israel that caused these calamities are likely, even in our modern day, to be doomed to repeat such a lifestyle.
Our leaders tell us it's all good. One set of values is just as good as any other as long as they are not the Judeo-Christian values that the nation has lived by for nearly 250 years. It no longer matters if the nuclear family is the bedrock of our society (children don't need both parents in the home after all), it doesn't matter even if marriage doesn't mean marriage anymore; it doesn't matter if individuals will not take responsibility for their own failures and sins (someone else can always be blamed and made to be responsible instead); it doesn't matter if the nation is spending beyond its capability of paying it's debts, nor if individual members of society do the same; and, of course, it doesn't matter if America no longer trusts in the one living God "... to the intent that the living may know that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will..." (the prophet Daniel 4:17). What more shall I say of drug traffickers, terrorists, gang violence, healthcare collapse? With all that, and more, in place, suppose the many dire predictions of today's prophets, secular and religious, come true? Will America face a future of shocking upheaval of Nebuchadnezzar like proportions?
Like the ancients in Judah and Israel, the people of this nation are making their own cultural choice, and the results are their own responsibility. Some great nations of the past having made wrong choices, have become a desolation and astonishment to the world.
