Reading the judgments of God is not something we have to learn how to do in the first place. In the first place, we have to understand what that means and what it does not mean. After that, we must learn to read the judgments of God.
It is not the case that we live in a Deistic-like universe, one in which the God of Scripture occasionally interrupts, but only occasionally, and we have to figure out what that occasional interruption might mean — even though God doesn’t tell us what it means explicitly with a passage of Scripture. When we are seeking to read the judgments of God, we are not playing cosmic charades.
Every person is either where God wants him to be, or he is not. And every person is also one who lives and moves and has his being in God. We live in a God-saturated world — we do not live in a ticking clock with the clockmaker light years away. Now this means that every thing that happens to every person, all day long, is saying (from God) one of two things. It is either saying stay faithful, or it is saying repent, and return. Those are the two possible meanings. This is why the same event can have two different meanings for two different individuals.
The same thing goes for nations. A nation is either doing what it ought to be doing, and providential events encourage that nation to do so, or a nation is not doing what it ought, and the message of the providential events is repent and return to the Lord.
When bad things happen to a nation — 9-11, Katrina, the current floods in the Midwest, our response should not be to try to read the tea leaves. Our response should be to place the behavior of our nation in the balances of Scripture in order to find out which of the two categories we are in. Are we Israel under David or Israel under Ahab? Once we know the category we are in according to Scripture, we know what everything is saying.
When we consider what America is currently willing to approve, and is currently unwilling to say, A scriptural evaluation is not at all hard to come to. Here is how the wealth of the United States stacks up to the wealth of Israel as outlined in Amos 3.
First, in the worship of our churches, very wealthy churches, “altars at Bethel” abound. Our worship is corrupt and wealth won’t fix that. We have adopted, en masse, the idea that worship services are supposed to cater to us as worship-experience-product-consumers. One of the reasons this is so shocking is that it is next to impossible to get Americans to see how shocking it is. We think it’s normal.
Second, like Israel we are ungrateful for our godly heritage. We are a wealthy nation, formerly Christian, that refuses to be a Christian nation again. How does such glaring ingratitude not invite judgment? This is why the work of organizations like American Vision is so important. Suppose the governor of a disaster area asked everyone to pray to God for relief. Most Christians would be pleased — the governor of Georgia did just that a year or so ago with regard to their drought. But suppose further that the hapless political leader asked everyone to make sure they prayed this way in the name of Jesus because that is how we should always pray. There would be a storm of controversy, and many conservative Christians would be in the forefront of those trying to reign in this renegade.
Third, in the Church today we answer all Amos’ rhetorical questions the wrong way. We deny that we can respond intelligently to historical chastisements from God. Hence this series of posts.
Fourth, like Israel we pretend that we are vindicated because others are worse. Yes, they are worse, especially the commies and fellow travelers, and God still invites them to watch and chortle. We need to master the lesson that God gave to Habbakuk.
Fifth, Amos notes the presence of “tumults,” the “oppressed,” “violence,” and “robbery,” and all within Israel’s own midst. We have the same kind of problems in our midst. For just one of many examples, what does inflation of the currency do to a widow on a fixed income?
And last, when wealth becomes a god, men glory in an ostentatious display of that god’s “majesty.” The point is not the mere existence of high-end items, which is inescapable, but rather the vaunting, which is not necessary. And we have many wealthy people today who insist in displaying their plumage.
In short, we must either believe that God is giving us these trials in order to establish our nation in its robust and hearty faith (which is hard to reconcile with abortion-on-demand, sodomite marriage, finish the list on your own), or He is giving us these chastisements in order to bring us to our senses, that we might return to Him. And the only way we are permitted to not return to Him is if we are already there. And anyone who believes that America is “already there” needs to reflect again.