A Call to National Righteousness

Our little systems have their day
They have their day and cease to be.
They are but broken lights of thee
And thou, oh Lord, art more than they.
(Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “In Memorium”)[1]

In our generation, we have said goodbye to dozens of nations. They have dropped into the dust bin of history.

This now common expression is more and more often used to refer to well-known nations of the past and present. They were once prosperous, influential, happy and apparently moving without serious problems through the untroubled course of their history. These nations are now gone. Many never sensed the turning of THE HINGE OF FATE which brought them down.

Order this classic book, “7 Men Who Rule the World from the Grave,” written by the late Dr. Dave Breese.

Mighty empires have been formed under the leadership of vaunted, self-assertive personalities. These empires and these personalities have now been swept away, leaving hardly a trace. Formerly proud emperors are now but statues, trunkless legs of stone standing in the desert, from which pedestal the lone and level sands stretch far away.

Certainly, the minimal lesson in this is that nations live and nations die.

As a standard variant, some retain their names but are devastated by invasion or revolution so that they are the same nation of yesterday in name only. So it sadly now is with scores of countries in our time. Frequently nations, overwhelmed by new powers, become the scene of unspeakable carnage where vast areas are laid waste, turned into graveyards and crematoriums. It is apparent that no nation of our world is safe from these dreadful possibilities, as many from Korea to Kampuchea would testify. The death of a nation is a sad thing to behold.

We do well, therefore, to consider the question of the fate of a nation. Nations live and nations die. What really makes the difference? What can be known that will give us better authority than mere theory on this important matter of the fate of nations? Every person who lives in any nation in our time is wise to pay attention to such questions as if his life depends on it—because it does.

How It All Began

In order to understand what it is that produces national survival and viability, we must first face the question of the essence of a nation. What, after all, is a nation? To discover the answer, we must look back to the pages of earth’s most reliable history book. It is the Bible!

The Bible is really the only dependable source book available, given to man to explain the origin of things such as the universe, the earth, life, peoples, nations and humanity itself. No person, unfamiliar with the Bible, could spend time in a more valuable way than to examine the writing which tells us of these origins—the book of Genesis. In these opening pages of Scripture, we are told of the origin of all created things, especially man. Man, the Bible says, was made “in the image of God” (Gen. 1:26-27). Man and woman, male and female, were created by God (what an inspiring thing to know about ourselves!) and were placed in a beautiful garden called Eden.

Adam and Eve, the father and mother of us all, were created in perfection, albeit in innocence. They were given a commission to “subdue” the earth, to become its masters (Gen. 1:28). They were beings of Divine destiny, made to fulfill a great purpose. They chose, however, to turn from that purpose. They took to designing their own lives, rejecting the path which God had clearly set out for them. They believed the Satanically inspired proposition that destiny was resident in themselves, not in the God who made them. This was the mistake which led to all others.

The result is well-known to us all. “Sin entered the world” (Rom. 5:12)! Beginning with Adam, the race of men became affected in each successive generation by the continued and progressive infection of sin. This awful malignancy all too quickly grew in the hearts of men (and women, we speak generically) to the place where the Lord Himself made AN AWESOME DECISION. . . .

Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. So the LORD said, “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” (Gen. 6:5-7)

To the pure eyes of God, the sight of depraved humanity must have been an awful scene to behold. The Bible says,

The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. So God looked upon the earth, and indeed it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth. (Gen. 6:11-12)

Here, God in His infinite wisdom, made a decision. The earth, for the sake of future generations, must be cleansed. So a flood was sent upon the Earth for the destruction of the corrupt majority of humanity. One man was the exception to that corruption!

Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD. (Gen. 6:8)

The result was that he and his family, because they were faithful to God and obeyed Him in the building of an ark, were spared the watery grave which came upon their vile, violent and unrepentant neighbors. After the flood, the day came when Noah and his family looked out upon THE SECOND DAWN OF HUMAN HISTORY. As God had previously commanded Adam and Eve, He now commissioned Noah’s family to, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth” (Gen. 9:1; cf. 9:7). Here God chose to restart history (a popular new age concept) with the generations of Noah.

Along with that regeneration of humankind, God instituted a plan to retard, to frustrate the rapid growth of sin. He made it much more difficult for evil to be so quickly propagated across the world. Until the flood, mankind had been a single human unity. The world was “unitized” until the day of Noah.

(Read Part 2)

Dr. Dave Breese (1926-2002) was an internationally known speaker, teacher and author. He founded the ministry of Christian Destiny in 1963, and through it proclaimed the gospel on weekly radio and television programs and in numerous books and booklets. In 1987, he also became the president and Bible teacher on The King Is Coming telecast, a role that he filled until his death in 2002. Other organizations that Dr. Breese served during his distinguished ministry career included Youth For Christ, Awana, Back to the Bible, National Religious Broadcasters and National Association of Evangelicals. A frequent conference speaker and a master at explaining the relevance of Bible prophecy, he was also known for his wisdom and wit. It is a great honor to include him as part of the inaugural class of Revived Classics authors for Dispensational Publishing House.

This article originally appeared in the July 2007 issue of Destiny Newsletter.
Copyright © 2007 Christian Destiny, Inc. All rights reserved.
The article is reprinted here by permission of Christian Destiny.
For more information regarding Christian Destiny, go to www.ChristianDestiny.org.

[1] This poem is in the public domain.