- Public reading of Scripture is a worthy endeavor. But we also need leadership to give sober assessment to the moral direction of our nation and the consequences that await without a course correction.
The “America Reads the Bible” event took place in late April, with hundreds of Christian leaders, entertainers, and politicians participating in reading Scripture aloud, cover-to-cover. President Trump was assigned 2 Chronicles 7:11-22.
Why those verses? No real mystery here; in recent decades, that passage has served as a call to national remembrance of God and corporate repentance. “If 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 and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
Perhaps we are blessed to have a President unashamedly read those verses in front of a watching nation. We would be far more blessed to have a President and nation and religious leadership in the U.S. take those verses seriously. Very seriously, indeed.
The context is this: As Solomon is dedicating the recently-completed Temple, God speaks. Prior to the verses cited above, God describes the situation when such prayer is warranted… “when I shut up the heavens and command locust to devour or send pestilence.” Then “if my people…will pray and seek my face.” A few sentences later the Lord warns that if the people “turn aside and forsake my laws and serve other gods” and worship them they can expect to be plucked up cast out, made a byword such that that those who pass by will say “Why?” And it will be clear – “because they abandoned the Lord…. worshiped other gods, served them.”
A word in the final verse sums up the end result – “disaster.”
America is not ancient Israel, but if the President of the United States and prominent evangelicals want to embrace these verses, they should embrace them all. And primarily, these words constitute a warning from the Almighty.
We live in a land whose government unabashedly spends $1.33 for every dollar collected and is among the leaders in the world in abortion, divorce, gun deaths, homicide, incarceration, numerous addictions, single-parent households, child poverty, maternal mortality, obesity, among other things. I know of no one today who thinks, like one of our presidents used to proclaim, that it is “morning in America.”
The next chapter of 2 Chronicles details Solomon’s stunning accomplishments. However, other parts of the Bible disclose the idolatrous mess he made of things and the civil war that ensued. True to God’s promises, the northern and southern kingdoms were destroyed, exiled, and only one of them was brought back to humbly rebuild what they had, through their own wickedness in the eyes of their covenant God, destroyed.
Public reading of Scripture is a worthy endeavor. But we also need leadership to affirm that if we truly intend embrace the Bible and worldview that made this country great, we would be wise to give sober assessment to the moral direction of our nation and the consequences that await without a course correction.
The hope in all of this? It is as true today as it was then: “Humble ourselves…seek His face.”
If we do, goodness shall follow. It always has.
And if we don’t? Disaster lies in store. It always has.
This isn’t merely a lesson for the President and our political class, first. It is first of all for you and for me, our families and local churches. Those are the places where we have agency…and responsibility.
Matt Friedeman
