For What Are We Waiting?

For What Are We Waiting?

By Craig M. Szwed

 

English historian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) wrote "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". You guessed it. Rome fell apart. However, the average citizen and the average politician pay little heed to the lessons of why Rome decayed and fell. 

Based on Gibbon's original work, during World War II (1943), Wise & Co. published an abbreviated version, compiled by Willson Whitman, in the hopes of learning, from the failures of the Roman Empire, lessons that might be applied to better the world situation during and after WWII. In the compiler's Introduction, he states:

"And what a wood it is – that dark forest from which the barbarians came, into which the Roman ruins lapsed, which waits still for any empire unable to escape. Gibbon has told the story of the last imperial cycle before our own. Our best chance to break the cycle may be... [ed.]...to profit by the mistakes of the Romans." 

I'll not belabor the rest of the works of Gibbon, or of Whitman. One can read those volumes anytime. Never mind the moral, spiritual, social, and political chaos in the rest of the world. Forget those who attack us. As Rome decayed from within, here in the United States of America, we have already been destroying, and continue to destroy, ourselves at an increasingly rapid rate, and in a manner consistent with the decline and the fall of Rome. 

Jihadists don’t even need to attack us, except to satisfy their own impatience, for many of the politicians and citizens of the USA have long been fulfilling Soviet Chairman Khrushchev’s 1956 political prophecy against our Nation. The U.S.S.R. may have fallen apart, but their ideology lives on here! We have socialized ourselves, instead of remaining what used to aspire to be a free nation. We have embraced abortion, and now freely murder our children and dispose of them through our increasingly socialized medical services. In biblical terms, as prophesied, now, we mislabel as good many things that God hates, and we hate many things that God calls good. Our hearts and minds are cold to God's truth.

In biblical and historical terms, the scourge of evil external actions intended against the USA seem now to be more as whips, goads, or prospective cleansing agents, such as those of which God forewarned the Jews so many times, in the Bible. Thorns in our flesh, and attacks on our lustful living, may be God's way of needling us and wakening us to repent and return to Him and to His Word, to repent of the evils that we do to our own citizens and against our Nation itself. Throughout their biblical history, whenever the Jews chose to reject or neglect God and His ways, He would often allow them to get what they thought they wanted, and then He would follow their lustful acquisitions with a strong dose of castigation via sickness or earthly political invasions, often enforced by nations with evil intents against the Jews. The Bible says that the Jews are an example to all the nations of the world, that we might learn to love God and avoid the mistakes that the Jews have made. Do we want to be sick, living with our sin, or healthy, and embrace the Living God.

Too many in our society worship self and worldly stuff, including power. As I look at our self-centeredness, our sin and decadence, in the U.S., I see the influx and attacks of jihadists, cartels, apathetic citizens, and ungodly politicians as various forms of bacteria that are able to attack us because of our ongoing excesses and our lack of repentence, our neglect of harmony with God's Christ. Our sins have separated us from God's blessings. Our sins have suppressed our spiritual and political immune systems. In our self-indulgence, we have trashed our respect for God, ourselves, and those holy things that would insulate and uplift us beyond the reach of destructive influences. On the bright side, IF we repent, there is always the peace of God, promised in Isaiah 26:3, when we put our faith and trust in The Right One, Jesus Christ.

Are there, yet, any among us who wish to repent and change the face and direction of self, and of our States and Nation; to restore what God wants for us all?