July 4, 1776 - The Declaration of Independence, Repentance, and Civic Duty

Nearly a quarter of a millennium ago, the United States of America came into being with the signing of the Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress. Not flighty or impulsively decided, the reasons for the separation from Great Britain needed to be told to the world. Thus the Founding Fathers did not just say they were an independent country like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy. They put forward the long line of usurpations and abuses by the monarch they were now casting off and unmaking as ruler over them. Not a few cynics today criticize that generation for not having left the condemnations of the slave trade in the final document. But now here we are with so many of our status quo proponents even in the American Church shushing celebrations of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. So we're in no position to talk. But to celebrate the achievement of the War for Independence and its corresponding literature is not the same thing as saying the signatories were perfect. And what of it? Neither are we! Yet we have a country, and that is thanks in large part because they passed it down to us. But if that same country is falling apart now we perhaps do well to look in the mirror and our own hearts and minds to find the causes rather than obsessively quibbling about how much wiser and godlier we are now than our ancestors two-and-a-half centuries ago. Now our historians tell us they think the Declaration of Independence was probably signed on August 2, 1776 instead of July 4. But I want to hear more about July 4, 1779 and how Independence Day fell on a Sunday that year, so was not celebrated until the following Monday. And tell us more, historians, about how the U.S. Congress made this an unpaid holiday for employees of the federal government in 1870, and only changed it to a paid holiday in 1938. However short-sighted or morally callow we think our predecessors were, we are so much more. But we do well to remember when we say or sing 'God bless America' that God promises to oppose the proud and give grace to the humble, and that God always faithfully follows through with His promises. And if we should like God to bless our country - and we should like that very much - the prerequisite condition of our souls before Him must be one of marked and abject humility. But there is no humility in only casting aspersions on our ancestors, but never lauding or appreciating them for anything. We would do well to heed more the admonition in Jeremiah 29, and not follow so much the examples of Balaam, or even Jonah. Or, what? Do some of our prophets promise blessings irrespective our orientation toward righteousness and wickedness, wisdom and folly, and this for their own dishonest gain? They are false prophets, and part of the judgment we're under. Do some of our prophets book passage in the opposite direction when told to preach repentance to Nineveh, then sulk and pout when the city turns from its sin and the subsequent wrath of God? Here again, we have so much to be thankful to God for. But we also have much to repent of and ask God to forgive us for and deliver us from. But the good news is that we can do all of these things, and pray for God's blessing accordingly along these lines, even as we cannot expect the blessings of Heaven on any other terms whatsoever.