After the end of America

By Dan Popp

If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do? (Psalm 11:3 NAS95)

The question is not whether judgment is coming. God has judged, is judging, and will judge America. Judgment is like that: it can come in waves, giving a nation the opportunity to repent before worse calamity comes.

For those like Dr. Laurie Roth who believe that happy days are (very nearly) here again, I have two questions. Question 1: Is America currently under divine judgment? And Question 2: What will change?

If you believe that God's wrath isn't bearing down on us (although in a restrained way) at present, then we have no common ground on which to communicate. Nothing could be more obvious. Our society is bankrupt – financially as well as morally. We're a nation as divided as we are deluded, reveling in sin and railing not only at Deity, but even at physical reality. A holocaust of 57 million children and a system of entrenched legal robbery are our most prominent accomplishments. We are corrupt internally and under attack externally. Our system of law and order is breaking down, partly because the mob is demanding it. Our churches are mostly coffee clubs offering a weekly talent show.

So if God's sentence against us is being executed now, what change will occur in us to bring on the blessing instead? Will Donald Trump lead our nation to humility and brokenness over our sin? If not, on what basis can God pardon us?

If we confess our sins – so goes the promise – He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9)

Will the Lord forgive if we don't confess – if we insist that our national sins are "rights" while He says they're wrongs? He would be unrighteous to do such a thing! He would be rewarding sin. That's the capricious straw god of the atheists, not the God of the Bible.

The same principle applies to national decline and punishment:

If I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or if I command the locust to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among My people, and My people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin and will heal their land. (2 Chronicles 7:13, 14, NAS95)

The promise is conditioned on the "If."

No, America will not be forgiven and cleansed unless she repents, and she will not repent without a drastic shaking in the church. What we call "revival" – some effects inside the walls of the church building – isn't going to cut it. We need an Awakening stronger than the first two Great Awakenings combined.

And we need it like 40 years ago.

I don't pretend to be a prophet. I don't come with a "Thus saith the Lord." I just read my Bible and watch the news and say, "Huh." I could be wrong. My flesh certainly hopes I am. But we know that some prophets will give a message of "peace and safety" when God is warning of tears and trouble. We should be careful about that.

No, I think the question is not whether we're watching the end of America, but what will happen after the end. After the crash, the fall, the collapse, the just and merciful and inevitable conclusion of this tragedy, what next? How can we rebuild?

America was founded on certain assumptions that were almost universal among the population. These grew out of a worldview centered on an all-powerful Creator who had made humans in His image, had granted them certain unalienable rights, and with those rights, responsibilities.

Unless the morally insane are driven from the public square in tar and feathers, and unless Christians stop buying into their demonic conception of "good," America 2.0 will be built on an anti-God, anti-humanity, and anti-reason foundation. What do you get when you believe that the government creates rights? You get a kind of national gulag where life and property are not owned by the individual, but by bureaucrats acting in the name of "the people." Your children will be the property of the "village." Government will truly be "the one thing we all belong to."

I see only one hope of avoiding this nightmare-after-next, and that is for Christians to shine as lights in the darkness.

We must take back schools from the government. We must take back our invention, hospitals. We must get our own hands out of the community cookie jar of coercion. We must realize that this is our fault. All of this. The desire to "do good" with government force is not born of God, but of the devil. And conversely the refusal to use government force to punish evil is Satanic in origin, too.

When – or if – we emerge from the coming meltdown, will there be anyone left to explain and defend the principles that once worked? Or will believers continue to be corrupted by the lies that ended America?

© Dan Popp