Shall we be on the Lord's side?
I happened to catch Pat Buchanan on Hardball yesterday evening and something he said really struck me."What neither side [conservative or liberal] seems to understand is that America is in a state of moral decline."
We now hear the President speak openly yet again about a Constitutional Amendment forever defining marriage in the United States as existing between one man and one woman. It is a testimony that what Buchanan is saying is true when we suddenly see a need to define in the context of the Constitution of the United States that which had previously been known for 2,000 years to be reality. For much of those two millenia, marriage was not defined by civil law at all, but by the Church, and it was the Church that set the "one man, one woman" standard, because this is not man's law, it is the Law of God.
I cannot speak to President Bush's faith. He says that he is a Christian, and I am compelled to believe him. I am also, however, forced to believe that the issue of defending the marital standard in law is not an issue that is truly important to him. We do not hear of it or votes in Congress on the question except during election cycles (2004, 2006) when the President has a real need to shore up his base.
What I am about to say may anger some conservatives, but I firmly believe in my heart that it is true: We as a movement have lost our moorings and our way. We are concerned about taxes and immigration and spending-we should be. We have failed to see that the ultimate root of every one of these problems which have plagued our nation and our movement (largely because so-called "conservative Republicans" are helping to perpetuate the problems) is the moral decline of our nation. We cannot expect to have good government when the people who elect that government are living in and perpetuating by their lives a culture of sin and of death. We cannot have righteous leaders when the people who elect the leaders are not righteous. God gives us the leadership we have chosen by our actions-He gives us what we want and what we deserve.
Contemplate with me for a moment the first verse of the 127th Psalm:
Unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. Unless the Lord keep the city, he watcheth in vain that keepeth it.
We as conservatives are railing against sodomite "marriage," and railing against aborticide. We are decrying unfair immigration policies and oppressive taxation. Speaking out against these things is a wonderful thing, if we are doing so with the right motives in mind. Many within our movement speak on these matters out of conviction, true enough, but do so only with the intent to gain power as their end. Neither their lives nor their governance is given over into the hands of Almighty God.
Friends, the Lord will not prosper us if all we do is rail about conservative ideas and give no credence to the God that made us. If we cannot first by our lives be a witness for what is morally right and spiritually true, it does us little good to promote an amendment to the Constitution defining Holy Matrimony. If we cannot live an example of proper marriages in our own lives, it will do us little good to define marriage if we cannot live marriage in the way Almighty God expects it of us.
We are hypocrits to protest the amnesty of illegal aliens when we are doing little to populate our own nation with our own people: The heathens promote aborticide, and many "Christians" contracept themselves out of the children God intends them to have. After contracepting the natural-born population down, we then complain about the influx of foreigners who then do what we as a people will not do-bear children. In the Bible, to be barren was seen as a curse, now we scoff at people with large families (who are doing as God asks) and wonder why they would have so many children, as if children are a curse. And we wonder why there are so many aborticides in this country?
The wicked and evil things that are happening to our nation, and the moral and spiritual decline that we see before us are a punishment from a just God because His people have forgotten him. As conservatives, we love to invoke His blessing on our councils, conventions, congresses, unions and societies. How many of us are reciprocating the blessings we are asking of God? Do we bless the Lord by the lives we lead? As we fight for ideas and principles that are right and true, do we live by the Laws of the God who is Truth?
Upon seeing the wickedness of the Children of Israel, before breaking the tablets of the law and (by the power and authority of God) slaying 23,000 idolaters, Moses asked the people in Exodus 32:26:
If any man be on the Lord's side let him join with me.
Before the conservative movement can again be successful, we must be fully on the Lord's side. If we are on the Lord's side, the Lord will be on our side, and we shall always win the battle and the day. If we want the Lord on our side, we must live after the nature described by the Psalmist in Psalm 1:1-2:
Blessed is the man who hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the chair of pestilence. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on His law he shall meditate day and night.
We shall win the battle of ideas only by walking in the truth, and not in the counsel of the wicked and in the way of the sinful. Let us not only advocate for righteous law but live in a righteous way. In so doing, we can live that which we proclaim is good for the society we so desperately seek to reform.
posted by Deacon David Oatney @ 7:28 AM
1 Comments:
I am not angry with you, Dave. Sad and concerned that what you shared is true on the whole.
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