The history of the United States always amazes me. Ever since I can remember, the story and the images of this nation’s past have never ceased to inspire me. As a child, my older brother and I started our elementary education at a Christian school where every day we had to say the Pledge of Allegiance to the American Flag and also to the Christian Flag, and lastly to the Bible. During the month of May, the celebration of the United States would commence at the school (all the schools were closed for the summer by the end of May) and the whole place would be decorated in the red, white, and blue. Next to Christmas, it was my favorite time of the year!
I always appreciated the fact that America’s age and my own was separated by 200 years. It made it easy to remember how old this country was, if anyone should ask! Some friends I grew up with were born on July 4th, and their birthday celebrations took on an added value like those who are born on Christmas Day.
I am 49 years old, and regrettably I have not traveled the whole of this nation yet. I have gone to New York and California. My family and I went to Washington D.C. twice, and several times to Oklahoma and Louisiana; a few times to Florida. As brief as those trips were, it impressed upon me what President Ronald Reagan said in a speech in 1988: “A man wrote me and said: ‘You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.’” Having traveled the world several times, I can attest beyond the shadow of a doubt that this sentiment is completely true. This country truly is beautiful and great, and I am thankful that I was born here and am part of these great people. I have lived through nine presidential administrations beginning with President Jimmy Carter. Sometimes it scares me when I think of the past five decades and the history that we have seen. But I never lost that admiration which began in my youth for this nation.
As I read the Bible, a particular point grabbed me. It occurred to me that if there was a country that would be as close to the idea of the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis, it would be the United States. Please do not take any offence if you are reading this as the patriot of another nation. The fact is that more people attempt to migrate to this nation (legally and/or illegally) than any other in the world. The numbers are staggering. For a nation so young (only 250 years) it has achieved a level of greatness not seen in any other nation or in any other civilization before it. It took Rome almost 900 years to go from its founding to reach the summit of its greatness during the time of the Emperor Trajan. For Britain it took almost 1,000 years from the first recorded English monarch to time after World War 1.
No matter which rubric anyone uses, America has reached a level that no other nation can emulate. Some would think that we speak only in terms of material blessings and industrial developments. No, that is not true. We live in a time of the “globalized economy”. And while the United States is still the great industrial power, nations such as China and India are rapidly developing their economies. Nations such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Israel, and the UAE (among many others) have technological advancements in daily life that almost stagger the mind. But none of those countries have gigantic masses of people attempting to make dangerous, life-threatening treks, to enter those nations. And that is not just because they speak different languages. Just about every nation in the world has incorporated English into their daily life. Everything from newspapers to the local grocery advertisement appear bilingually.
Some would say America’s media industry (in all its aspects) is bigger and more powerful than any other nations. This is a fact. But to use India as a counterpoint, it has the Bollywood film industry. Sorry. The next generation of India, and Indian expatriates do not feel any impulse to stay in that nation or migrate there. Rather, they are doing everything possible to leave!
What draws people to this nation? Before any materialistic factor, it’s the idea of this nation, an idea that goes back to more than just the “City on a Hill”, but to the Garden of Eden. Does it sound too farfetched? Let me explain.
Eden is more than just a place from where Adam and Eve were cast out in the Book of Genesis. It’s the idea to which every civilization strived, every government experiment tried to emulate, every social experiment attempted to imitate. In seven days, God created the whole universe and world with His spoken Word and Power. The Bible says in Genesis 2 that God created Adam from the dust of the ground and breathed into the Breath of Life. He became a living soul. After that, God brought Adam into the Garden of Eden (“toward the East”) and placed him there. In that Garden, God put Adam to sleep and took one of his ribs to create the first human female, the first woman, the woman who would be known as the “mother of the living”. She was the only one of God’s creations created in the Garden. God brought her to Adam and he declared, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” In that Garden, God instituted Marriage, between a Man and a Woman. This was BEFORE any idea about Government.
This was Paradise. There was no war, pain, or sickness. But there was responsibility. God brought Adam to that Garden to “dress it and keep it.” (Genesis 2:15) And there was Choice; the focal point was in the center of that Garden: two Trees – the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
“And the Lord commanded the man saying, “of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. But of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, thou shalt not eat of it for on the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.” (Genesis 2:17 KJV)
The very makeup of the Garden of Eden in the Old Testament is enclosed in these passages. A beautiful place. A Sacred/Holy place created by God. A place not contaminated by Sin or threatened with the shadow of Death. But there is an unexplainable detail. Into this Paradise, came the Tempter. Satan. He came in the form of the snake. People tend to focus on that particular detail and write off the whole account as a myth. They should pay greater attention to that words that came out of the snake’s mouth; “Hath God said…”
Everyone who has been to church or read the Bible knows the rest of the story but tend to miss the point that Adam and Eve could have said “No” to the snake. They could have said, “Let’s wait for God. He’s about to come into the Garden.” But they did not. And hence Paradise was Lost while the world’s proverbial “Pandora’s Box” was opened. From the nature of humankind, Sin would dominate the life of humanity. The Lust of the Flesh, the Lust of the Eyes, and the Boastful Pride of Life would forever dominate the lives of every single person (1 John 2:15-16). The consequences would be increasingly severe in the passing of time, but by God’s righteousness, those consequences would not be allowed in Eden. (A Truth that needs to be appreciated more than it is in our time.)
Let’s skip over to the world of the New Testament, and to our time. I know what I am about to say is limited because of space. This article is too small to cover 2,000 years of time since the Advent of Jesus Christ up to the present day. The History of the Bible, Ancient and Present-Day Church History, the development of the modern-day Republic (particularly the United States) – all of these are not only important subjects of study but also connected subjects to study systemically.
Most Christians do not take time to understand the great mystery of the tearing of the veil in front of the Holy of Holies the moment that the Lord Jesus died on the Cross of Calvary. The Holy of Holies was a type of the original sanctuary of God on Earth, the Garden of Eden. (When God sent Adam and Eve out of the Garden, it was through the East entrance, and the Tabernacle and Temple entrances faced that direction – a reminder of what was truly lost in Fall.) When the Blood of Jesus fell, the price of Sin was paid! The Entrance into the Presence of the Almighty God was thrown wide open again. The writer of the book of Hebrews said it best, “Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God”. The one who tore open the Veil, that was His own Body. The way is open where we can boldly enter the Throne of Grace and find mercy in the time of need! Amen! Halleluiah!
The United States is a country whose history is unique from every other nation in the world. There are no groups of people who are native to this land, or for that matter the continents in this western hemisphere. The native tribes who came to these lands were just as savage, pagan, and powerful as those nations and peoples mentioned in the Old Testament. Some could build cities and civilizations. Some were capable of mining massive amounts of gold and other treasures. But all were bathed in savagery and blood and were not the kind to lift the souls of mankind. All of them practiced such things as slavery, human sacrifice, their own brands of colonization which were just as vile as the nations of Europe, Asia, and Africa.
People of color (like myself) should appreciate that white Christian people from Europe came to colonize this nation! One should look at the First Charter of the Colony of Virginia and/or the Mayflower Compact. It was the beginning of giving the world a chance to see a land where all the hopes and dreams that were present and represented in the Garden of Eden could be realized as much as possible. The people like the Pilgrims in Massachusetts came to worship and “advance the Christian faith” – not by the sword but by the preaching and teaching of the Word of God.
No, this was not an idealistic endeavor. To quote Robert Charles Winthrop (former Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1847-1849): “Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled, either by a power within them, or by a power without them; either by the word of God, or by the strong arm of man; either by the Bible, or by the bayonet.” Which was why in addition to the Bibles, the early colonists had their guns and swords with them. It was the last resort if all other chances at reasoning failed. But that was no failure to them. (One only needs to read Genesis 3, the end of the Garden of Eden story to see why!)
As this nation celebrates its 250th birthday, one should read not only the Declaration of Independence, but also the Constitution, and in particular the First Amendment of the Bill of Right. The hopes, dreams, and expectations, all coming from the Foundation of this nation, pointed in one direction; the making of a new version of the Garden of Eden.
I want to make it clear, there will not be another, literal Paradise on Earth until Jesus Christ returns. But until then, the closest thing would be the United States. I acknowledge that this nation (like every other) has its problems and evils. Still this nation has, at least spiritually speaking, something that was in the Garden of Eden that is in no other nation. This nation has something in place of the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; it has the Cross of Calvary.
In the New Testament, God has made it possible for anyone, any family, any country, to experience the blessings of the Garden of Eden (as much as possible in this life) through the message of Jesus Christ, but by personal choice. Or as Dr. Peter Marshall put in in his famous sermon about Elijah and the Prophets of Baal, a “Declaration of Dependence.”
The importance of this nation being a ‘Christian Country’, founded not necessarily by high born nobility, but rather people who were believers in Jesus Christ is not a mere conservative talking point. These were the second and third generations of persecuted Protestant believers in Europe. For instance, the ancestors of the Revolutionary Patriot, Paul Revere, were French Huguenots, Protestants who were brutally persecuted by Roman Catholic King Charles IX of France. And he was not the only one.
Whether they traced their lineage through the Pilgrims in Massachusetts, the Quakers or Moravians in Pennsylvania, Baptists in Rhode Island, Methodist, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Jewish or any people group, all of them were heirs to people who had suffered bloody persecution. The Protestant and Evangelical Bible believing churches whose parishioners were responsible for coming to the original 13 colonies made it possible to form a country which could become a land as close to the Garden of Eden as is possible. Hence, when the Constitution was framed, several of the founding fathers (George Mason in particular among them) insisted on the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments.
The First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
To quote Dr. Erwin Lutzer (pastor emeritus of Moody Church in Chicago), the greatest outcome of Martin Luther’s Reformation was that it “set the Word of God free”- meaning, the chain that bound the Bible to the pulpit of the Roman Catholic Church, and then other state churches later, the chain the kept the Bible in languages which the commoners could not read – that chain was forever broken. As John Wycliffe said 120 years before Martin Luther nailed his 95 Thesis on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg, Germany, after he printed the first English Bible, “Government of the People, By the People, For the People is now possible.” He said this 500 years before President Abraham Lincoln made this phrase famous in his Gettysburg Address. And for these last 250 years this country has proved that Truth to the world!
250 years… has the Devil and his “seed” been active in causing death and destruction? Yes.
In contrast, one only has to look at the nation of France which went through Revolution in the same period of time as this nation came into existence. When secular humanism was being peddled in France during its Revolution to such an extent where the French Directory turned the Cathedral of Notre Dame into the “Temple of Reason” and then later under Robespierre to the deistic “Temple of the Supreme Being”, “enlightened” figures thought they could form a utopian state but instead turned France into hell on earth. The French Revolution devolved into a horrible mess and produced 15 major changes in government from 1799 to post-World War 2. Its poison continued into the age of Communism, most notably the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia. (Pol Pot emulated almost exactly what happened in France during the French Revolution.) And while America’s history is not perfect, for 250 years, God has had mercy on the United States because the majority of its people throughout time chose to be influenced by the Gospel message of the Bible.
The secular humanists have been trying to divorce this country from the Bible for the last 250 years. They wanted the idea of Separation of Church and State to achieve (to use the words of Dr. Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church Dallas) “freedom from God.” In other words, instead of the motto “In God We Trust”, they wanted, “We are God” – the lie of the snake in the Garden of Eden.
Some would ask about slavery – what some claim is the original sin of the United States. Slavery was a bloody part of this nation’s history, but before this nation, it was part of the tragedy of mankind from the Fall in the Book of Genesis, the Original Sin of the world. And it was not the only evil in this nation. There were abuses in politics and economics. And as much as there is division in opinion about welfare, social security, and other government entitlements, there was a time when the issue of having any assistance at all, in any part of society, was debated in this nation.
What changed this nation? It certainly was not that people were suddenly enlightened! But rather gradual enlightenment… from the Bible and from preachers on church pulpits. Something that was a gift given to the world from the Protestant Reformation. A chance to have the Garden of Eden. That is what makes this nation different from every other country in the world. I remember the late Charlie Kirk saying that America was a Christian nation with a Christian form of Government, but currently it is not so Christian but still with a Christian form of Government. And therein lies its vulnerability. Increasingly people of other religious leanings as well as cultural backgrounds that are influenced from the non-Christian parts of the world have taken residence in this nation and are involved with the government of this nation. Charlie went on to say the two are not compatible. People come to this nation and experience “Eden”, but their ideas and tendencies are all at odds with the very Truth that makes the Garden of Eden a possibility in the New Testament era. We must take the warning. It is not just the landscape of America that will change, but the virtue that makes this country Good; what makes the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution something that is a blessing and not a curse.
With all its problems, the United States remains the greatest nation in the world. I am grateful for this country as a first generation American. I have said it many times in the last 49 years: the greatest thing to happen to my family is Jesus Christ. And the second thing is the United States of America.
Happy 250th Birthday USA!