ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, July 31, 1996 TAG: 9607310084
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Cal Thomas
SOURCE: CAL THOMAS
ON THE Sunday-morning talk shows, sophisticated political leaders speak of sophisticated ways to stop sophisticated terrorists from killing and maiming innocent Americans.
On the same Sunday morning in Kalispell, in northwestern Montana, an unsophisticated preacher in an unsophisticated church speaks of an unsophisticated reason for the growing turmoil in our country.
The talk-show guests propose solutions rooted in legislation and better metal-detection devices to make us feel safer. The preacher thinks the explanation is simpler and the remedy more profound. He thinks we're beginning to see the judgment of God.
Take your choice, but before dismissing the preacher, consider this. If God is, and if he is holy and just and punishes the disobedient while rewarding those who obey him, what is there about America that offers us a special dispensation not given the ancient Israelites, with whom he dealt harshly when they were disobedient?
When most people think about judgment (if they think about it at all), it is all fire and brimstone, earthquakes and falling stars and apocalypse later. But haven't there also been short-term, less cataclysmic judgments that prod people to consider that we might be moving in the wrong direction?
After the abortion of 34 million babies, the mocking of God in our public culture and private lives, the flaunting of those things he calls abominations, the preacher thinks we are fooling ourselves if we take for granted that the protective hand that guided us safely through our nation's founding and through wars and economic downturns will remain unconditionally in place.
More than six score years ago, another unsophisticated man, from Kentucky, suggested a link between the Civil War and the judgment of God. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation for a day of national humility, fasting and prayer.
In trying to rally his countrymen to appeal to a power greater than the Army of the Potomac, the 16th president wrote, ``It is the duty of nations, as well as of men, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance leads to mercy and pardon, and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.''
Lincoln, in his simple way, said that nations, like individuals ``are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world,'' adding that the ``awful calamity of civil war ... may be but a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people.''
And then he added: ``We have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand that preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.''
We've tried everything else. Why not try Lincoln's way? Perhaps technology and good police work will catch whoever or whatever caused TWA Flight 800 to fall from the sky and a pipe bomb to explode at the Olympic Games in Atlanta. But arrests, prosecution, even the death penalty for those involved will not get to the source of our problem if Lincoln and the Montana preacher are right.
One thing to remember. When the early warnings were ignored, God turned up the heat. The Montana preacher said that a nation that remains silent about God soon hears the voice of violence. Sophisticates will dismiss such things as rantings of the ignorant. But the more they fail in their attempts to protect us and the worse things get, the more empty their explanations will seem.
Los Angeles Times Syndicate
LENGTH: Medium: 80 linesby CNB