In Daniel 9:11, Daniel pleads for his people’s discipline to be completed. Previous to this, in vs. 5, he also confessed that they had sinned and deserved God’s chastisement, “We have sinned and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and have rebelled even by departing from Thy precepts and from Thy judgments.”
What had Daniel’s people done? From the time they entered into the promised land, they had assimilated into the culture of the surrounding peoples. These were the peoples that God had warned them to utterly destroy. Deuteronomy 7:2 ” And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them.” They did not obey the Lord. They left the people in the land and they assimilated into their cultures. Why had God told them to destroy their neighbors? Continuing in verse 6, we read, “For thou art a holy people unto the Lord thy God; the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto Himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.”
But, God also had warned them against pride and disobedience. Deuteronomy 8:11-20, “Beware that thou forget not the Lord thy God in not keeping His commandments, and His statutes, which I commanded thee this day…(17) and thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth…(19) and it shall be that if thou do at all forget the Lord thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish….”
So, having been warned by God that failure to follow His commands would result in their demise, they chose to disobey Him repeatedly over the next several hundred years. God sent judges and He sent prophets. Still the people rejected God’s laws. Finally, just before the time of Daniel, God started to execute judgement against the people. They had split into two kingdoms prior to Daniel’s day, with the Kingdom of Israel falling from grace faster than the Kingdom of Judah. However, eventually both kingdoms fell to the power of assimilation into the wickedness and idolatry surrounding them. When Judah saw the punishment that Israel received, they could have chosen to change their ways but they followed the same path and eventually were also subject to punishment.
God had said they would “surely perish.” However, He also loved them and is a God of tremendous mercy. He repeatedly tried to get the people to turn back to Him. When they would not, he warned them through the prophets that they would be removed from the land and dwell with the foreigners and pagans. But, they did not heed the warnings. So, both kingdoms were sent out of the Land of Promise to the lands around them, but they were not in the same place. They were sent to different lands. We find Daniel in the book that bears his name, in the land of Babylon. In chapter 9, he has determined from reading the prophecies of Jeremiah (25:11-13 and 29:10 “For thus saith the Lord, that after seventy years have been accomplished at Babylon, I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place.”) that the exile of his people was almost completed.
But, Daniel knew that the sins of his people had been very grave and repentance was essential for the prophecy to be fulfilled. Therefore, he dawned sackcloth and ashes, fasted, and prayed. He confessed to his merciful God that their sins had been great and he prayed that they had fulfilled their punishment for the wrath of God toward them. The people would soon be returned to the Land of Promise, but their trials were far from over!
Fast-forward a few hundred years and we find that the people still had not learned the lesson they were supposed to have learned from the exile. In fact, the Word given in the wilderness to Moses had been corrupted and the religious leaders were not following it. God had a new plan, but one that had been previously mentioned multiple times throughout the Old Testament. God would make a new covenant by coming to the earth Himself in the form of a man. He was going to restore His command by bringing new revelations and new ways of obedience. He came via a lowly birth to a virgin woman as a small babe, named Jesus.
This Jesus is the new covenant. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and He explained that His covenant is open to all mankind and is not burdensome, as the old covenant had been. He repeated many of the teachings already discussed above. For this discussion, we will focus on two on the teachings of Jesus:
1) we must follow His commandments – John 7: 16 “My doctrine is not mine, but His that sent me.” John 14:15 “If you love me, keep my commandments.” vs 21 “He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him.” John 15:10 “If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love, even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in His love.”;
2) if we don’t keep His commandments we shall surely perish! – John 12:48 “He that rejecteth me and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day.” John 15:6 “If a man abide not in Me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.” We will burn in everlasting fire!
How does all this apply to America and such a time as this?
The people that were under the old covenant repeatedly disobeyed the commandments of God. Even after the exile to Babylon, the ones that returned to Israel still lived in rebellion, as they do to this day. But, for those of us in the new covenant, we are commanded to follow the teachings of Jesus. These teachings call for loving our neighbors, treating all people as children of God, and not distinguishing between races, socioeconomic classes, or other worldly divisions devised by man to make some people seem better/worse than others, and we must fulfill the great commission of telling all the world about the new covenant of the Gospel of Christ!
These United States of America were founded on principles from the Bible. Our constitution and our laws were taken from the Word of God. This nation was dedicated to Jesus by the founding fathers and they were dependent on the church to maintain and strengthen the godliness of the nation and it’s government. God raised this nation to be a world-power, the most powerful nation on the planet, because we followed Jesus openly and called ourselves a “Christian Nation.” The church was strong and persistent in standing for Jesus and keeping the nation Christian.
But, of course, Satan never rests, especially when he has a godly target! America was a godly target that Satan could not resist! Very slowly, but persistently, he has worn down the Christian fabric of the USA. Slowly, painstakingly, adamantly, he has added and subtracted from our society. He has attacked our schools, infiltrating them with propaganda and gradually removing the Bible (which was taught in all schools in the earlier days of this nation) and any vestige of faith from its curriculum, while adding evolution and other false-teaching. He has attacked our constitution and our government, removing our right to life and substituting a death culture, that promotes abortion and war. He is tearing families apart, with legislation to promote homosexual marriage and abortion, along with a larger than ever generation gap, out-of-control addictions and domestic violence. All of these work together to make the family unit less stable and move it toward extinction. He has infiltrated our churches and religious institutions. Not only is the “one true church” split into hundreds of denominations (which can’t all be right!), even within the denominations there is division and more and more strife, along with false teaching. Even the Word, which God has promised that Satan cannot prevail against, he has attacked by making so many different translations and interpretations that vary slightly in one way or another, that it becomes difficult to know what is the true Word. He has also attacked our hearts and minds, so that we have become lazy and have stopped studying the Word. Most “Christians” today don’t even read the Word of God. They may or may not go to church, but they “hear” the “word” by listening to the opinions of others about what the Bible says and never open it to see for themselves, while reducing prayer to an “I’ll do it if I have time” menial chore. All this makes it easy for Satan to spread the deception in the USA!
The end product of all this is that we are a nation of pagans. Even those who still cling to some semblance of the Christian faith are often biblically illiterate, deceiving themselves by learning second hand teachings from someone else, who is often steeped in deception. Is this not what happened to the people of the old covenant? Did they not stop following the Word of God and start listening to the pagans around them or, possibly, to those who claimed to know the Word but had corrupted it? Did they not assimilate into the cultures of the people around them? I’m betting that it happened very gradually for them, just as it has for us. Satan likes to make small changes that we don’t notice or, if we do notice, we underestimate the significance of such a minor change. They became complacent and lazy. They depended on others to do the studying of the Word for them and to tell them what God expected of them. That is, if they were inclined at all to care! As time went on, it became less and less clear where the lines should be drawn and how or when they had been crossed.
How the Mighty Have Fallen!
Where are we now? We call ourselves a “Post-Christian nation.” We have legalized abortion and homosexual marriages. History, which is no longer taught truthfully in our schools, has been re-written to demonize our forefathers, making them very dishonorable characters and stripping them of their faith convictions. We call them deists now. These learned men, who could quote large portions of the Bible by memory, have been reduced to being regarded as having no convictions in regard to the Word. Our news media openly gives us false news and placates us with cooking and other special interest sections of the newscast, and not saying anything to us when the nations of the world are about to go to war against us. They just don’t bother to tell us! They don’t want to wake us up from the apathetic slumber they have lulled us into. We have allowed our Christian memorials to be torn down and we have erected pagan altars to Baal and other gods. We are pushing ourselves to be “politically correct” and not to offend anyone, especially not by mentioning the name of Jesus! We have accepted that the name of our precious Lord is “hate-speech!” We can’t even say “Merry Christmas” because that hateful name is contained within that wonderful holiday greeting that used to be widely used and accepted by everyone.
And, what are the consequences of our assimilation into the cultures around us? We are no longer a powerful nation. Militarily, we are not even ready for war if our careless leaders who keep calling for war actually get one started. We are involved in several battles all over the world already, which go on and on and have no apparent purpose and no apparent end. Do we even know what we are fighting for or against???