The following was written at the beginning of the year as Barack Obama was giving his latest State Of The Union Address.
I had published posts for the last few years imploring the reader to
demand of Republicans in Congress not to attend this annual farce, and
this year not to even invite this man to give a speech, for our
Constitution does not require it. It all fell on deaf ears of course.
What is not certain is that we even make it to another speech but what
is certain, in my mind anyway, is that Donald Trump would be the only
candidate to demand an end to what Thomas Jefferson referred to as the Speech From The Throne from the tradition of European monarchies, he himself refusing to even give one while president.
"...Your Shepherds Are Asleep, Your Nobles Slumber."
How did we come to this point? It was only twenty-six years ago that one of America's greatest presidents, upon looking over the Oval Office for the last time as president, reached into his desk drawer and grabbed a handful of peanuts and walked over as was his daily custom and threw them on the patio for the squirrels, only this time he left a hand written note....."Beware, the new guy has a dog!" We could trust this man. I think that we loved him. We would stand behind him in any situation for we knew that he loved this country and its traditions, and honored its heritage. The country was as religious as it had been in quite some time, full of this new, albeit theologically frail, breed of evangelical. How did we squander it all in less than three decades?
The first verse that came to my mind in answering my own question was Judges 17:6... "In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did whatever he wanted." Scottish Presbyterian minister Samuel Rutherford wrote Lex, Rex in the mid-seventeenth century and his meaning in this title was that the King was not supreme but rather the law, specifically God's law. Here is where we failed.....God's law is ignored in America and therefore we have no 'king.' Indeed...today...everyone does whatever they want.
May God have mercy upon us and see us as Nineveh in Jonah's time where He asked of Jonah "Should I not care about the great city of Nineveh, which has more than 120,000 people who cannot distinguish between their right hand and their left....." and may it not be the Nineveh of Nahum's day with the proclamation in chapter 3 verses 18 and 19....."Your shepherd's are asleep, O King of Assyria, your nobles slumber. Your people are scattered on the mountains with none to gather them. There is no easing your hurt; your wound is grievous. All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you...." (ESV)
Note: the anecdote about Ronald Reagan came from a former Secret Service agent guarding President Reagan... Joseph Petro, and the book was Standing Next To History: An Agent's Life Inside the Secret Service.
"...Your Shepherds Are Asleep, Your Nobles Slumber."
How did we come to this point? It was only twenty-six years ago that one of America's greatest presidents, upon looking over the Oval Office for the last time as president, reached into his desk drawer and grabbed a handful of peanuts and walked over as was his daily custom and threw them on the patio for the squirrels, only this time he left a hand written note....."Beware, the new guy has a dog!" We could trust this man. I think that we loved him. We would stand behind him in any situation for we knew that he loved this country and its traditions, and honored its heritage. The country was as religious as it had been in quite some time, full of this new, albeit theologically frail, breed of evangelical. How did we squander it all in less than three decades?
The first verse that came to my mind in answering my own question was Judges 17:6... "In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did whatever he wanted." Scottish Presbyterian minister Samuel Rutherford wrote Lex, Rex in the mid-seventeenth century and his meaning in this title was that the King was not supreme but rather the law, specifically God's law. Here is where we failed.....God's law is ignored in America and therefore we have no 'king.' Indeed...today...everyone does whatever they want.
May God have mercy upon us and see us as Nineveh in Jonah's time where He asked of Jonah "Should I not care about the great city of Nineveh, which has more than 120,000 people who cannot distinguish between their right hand and their left....." and may it not be the Nineveh of Nahum's day with the proclamation in chapter 3 verses 18 and 19....."Your shepherd's are asleep, O King of Assyria, your nobles slumber. Your people are scattered on the mountains with none to gather them. There is no easing your hurt; your wound is grievous. All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you...." (ESV)
Note: the anecdote about Ronald Reagan came from a former Secret Service agent guarding President Reagan... Joseph Petro, and the book was Standing Next To History: An Agent's Life Inside the Secret Service.
