Daily Meditation

Awaiting the City of God

Ligonier Ministries

Evangelical Christians love America. Some see in her the last hope of creating a Christian nation. But it is not a Christian nation. It is pagan to the core. It is in danger of becoming, if it is not already, the new “Evil Empire.” The Mayflower Compact is a museum piece, a relic of a forgotten era. “In God We Trust” is now a lie.

Yes, we must always work for social reform. Yes, we must be “profane” in Martin Luther’s sense of going out of the temple and into the world. We do not despise the country of our birth. But in what do we invest our hope? The state is not God. The nation is not the Promised Land. The president is not our King. The Congress is not our Savior. Our welfare can never be found in the city of man. The federal government is not sovereign. We live—in every age and in every generation—by the rivers of Babylon. We need to understand that clearly. We must learn how to sing the Lord’s song in a strange and foreign land.

America will fall. The United States will inevitably disintegrate. The Stars and Stripes will bleed. The White House will turn to rubble. That is certain. We stand like Augustine before the sea. We pray that God will spare our nation. If He chooses not to, we ask for the grace to accept its demise. In either case, we look to Him who is our King and to heaven, which is our home. We await the city of God, the heavenly Jerusalem, whose builder and maker is God.

Coram Deo

Are you looking to your King and to your eternal destiny, despite the circumstances around you? Keep your focus on the heavenly Jerusalem, whose builder and maker is God.

Passages for Further Study

1 Corinthians 15:50
John 3:5
2 Peter 1:11

Fateful Choices, Bitter Outcomes

All Shall Love Me and Despair

In 1872 Benjamin Disraeli gave a speech at the Crystal Palace.  It was a call for England to decide upon its place in the world.

England will have to decide between national and cosmopolitan principles.  The issue is not a mean one.  It is whether you will be content to be a comfortable England . . . or whether you will be a great country--an imperial country--[and] command the respect of the world.  [Quoted by Robert Tombs, in The English and Their History (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2015), p.419.]

There are many complaints these days, particularly amongst faithful Christians, against what has come to be called American Manifest Destiny.  This pagan doctrine is actually a recrudescence of the spirit of the pagan Roman Empire.  The doctrine of American Manifest Destiny has got murky though, because it also represents a deliberate attempt to "plagiarize" the manifest destiny and glory of the Kingdom of God upon earth.  The tap root of American Manifest Destiny is the belief that the United States has a god-given role and duty to save the world from itself.

If we consider Disraeli's speech in 1872, we can see that this doctrine of over weening arrogance had modern precursors.

Letter From America (About Obama's Messianic Pretensions)

Obama’s Unforced Errors on Foreign Policy

In Syria and Libya, human nature has proven to Obama that ‘history’ does not have a mind of its own.

By George Will
National Review Online


When Barack Obama moves two miles from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to 2446 Belmont Road in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood, he will live half a mile from 2340 S Street, where Woodrow Wilson spent his three post-presidential years. Wilson’s embittering foreign policy failure was the Senate’s rejection of the U.S. participation in the embodiment of Wilsonian aspirations, the League of Nations. Obama leaves office serene because “almost every country on Earth sees America as stronger and more respected today than they did eight years ago.”

Two seemingly unimpressed nations are Russia, which is dismembering a European nation (Ukraine) and China, which is shredding international law by turning the world’s most important waterway, the South China Sea, into militarized Chinese territory.

Obama’s policies that brought America to a pinnacle of admiration, as he sees it, were an amalgam of Wilsonian and anti-Wilsonian elements. Wilson’s grand ambition for America was to reorder the world in a way that would make it unnecessary for America to have grand ambitions. He thought America could lead a restful life after strenuous diplomacy had written rules for the game of nations.