Soaring Wings of Eagles

The United States of America made a Covenant with God, only the second nation in history to do so.  The first was ancient Israel, when the son of King David, Solomon, reputed by many to be the wisest man who ever lived, built the First Temple in Jerusalem in roughly the year 1008 B.C. and publicly dedicated it with a prayer recorded in the Bible in I Kings chapter 8, and again in II Chronicles 6:13 to 7:9.  In it, he caused the people to realize that they had responsibilities to God that they were commanded to carry out if they expected God’s favor to be upon them.  For many years they did, to the best of their ability, and they were blessed.  And then they broke it, and at length were carried away captive into Babylon.

God judges people individually, but He judges nations by the character of their leaders.  As Dr. D. James Kennedy said some years ago, “Ungodly leaders make ungodly decisions, and discourage a conscience toward God.”  Individuals receive grace only because of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, on the cross; nations receive grace in accordance with the conduct of their leaders and by extension, the conduct of the people they lead.  The United States had the first government in history that gave the common people permission to choose for themselves their leaders.  As we have seen, those choices have had history-changing consequences.

How does a nation break its Covenant with God?  The people of the United States kept it for almost two hundred years. How could a people so blessed by God suddenly decide to break the Covenant that was the source of their blessing?  What did they think could be gained by such a foolish act?  Did they know that they were doing such a deliberate and catastrophic deed?  The hard thing about law is that ignorance is no excuse.  God’s law is the same, it is in fact the source of man’s good laws; the bad ones men come up with themselves.  What those who broke the Covenant knew is irrelevant.  The fact that they broke it is the only thing that matters to God.

The concept of covenant is as old as man’s time on earth.  When two unfriendly tribes mutually decided to stop killing each other, the chiefs would slaughter a significant number of valuable animals, cut them in half and spread the bloody remains apart to create what was called “the walk of blood.”  The chiefs would then walk together through this path between the pieces pronouncing curses upon themselves and their children should they break the terms of the covenant.  This walk was repeated over and over again. They could hear each other and the more horrible and violent the curses each chief spoke against himself, his family, and his tribe – the more serious the other party listening would believe the covenant to be.  A covenant with God is as serious as anything on earth gets.

How did we break a covenant almost as old as the United States Constitution itself?

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