Last week we began exploring one of the "minor" prophets at Word Fellowship. His name was Micah which means, "Who is like Yahweh?" The book is a microcosm, I believe, of all the prophets that wrote warning Israel to "Shape up or ship out!" Sadly, the Jews did not comply and were ravaged by the Assyrians in the North and Babylonia in the South. Judgment fell, and the country was reduced to rubble.
Israel, as a nation, tends to frustrate me. What was their problem? Why were they so rebellious against their gracious benefactor? How could a country so blessed by God, so favored, consistently betray the God of their fathers? What we learn is that the mutiny didn't happen overnight. The contemporary Christian group Casting Crowns says, "It is a slow fade when you give your heart away." Israel fell into apostasy one step at a time.
As I sought to apply my lesson, I couldn't help but observe the incremental slide of my own country. The United States has been blessed beyond our wildest imagination. We were founded upon many Christian virtues, and such values were embraced by most. There was a church on virtually every corner, and although everyone was not necessarily a believer, the ethos was deeply engrained in our fabric. It seems like those days have rapidly come to a close, and it looks like it happened incrementally. Few can deny the cultural shift that has transpired in the past decade. We have gone from a country that was intensely patriotic, religious (at least to some degree), and traditionally moral to one that is woke, skeptical, and morally relative. To which I conclude we are much like Israel.
Alexander Tytler was a Scottish jurist who wrote during the 18th and 19th centuries. He served as a professor of the History of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the University of Edinburgh. Some of his thought seemed to encapsulate much of what happens when an empire fades into history. He wrote,
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage."
As George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." I pray that our estate does not fall prey to the "slow fade."
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