Posts are in reverse chronological order.
Memorial Day
Everyday, from here and throughout eternity, is a memorial to Christ’s amazing sacrificial death for the sake of hell deserving sinners.
On this day, however, it is also good and proper to pause and remember others who died for us. Unlike Christ they did not live perfect lives. Unlike Christ, their motives were no doubt influenced by human corruption.
That, however, is an unfair standard. Died for us they did—not so that we could enjoy eternal life, but that we could enjoy liberty in this temporary earthly existence. Among those freedoms they protected is the freedom to worship without fear of persecution, a freedom that most of us took advantage of yesterday without giving it much thought.
By any human measure, they were extraordinary heroes.
Let us also remember those that even now are fighting in our newest war. Keep them in your prayers.
Abraham Lincoln Proclamation – Can You Imagine This was Once Possible?
Yesterday our pastor read this proclamation by Lincoln:
March 30, 1863
Whereas, the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing the Supreme Authority and just Government of Almighty God, in all the affairs of men and of nations, has, by a resolution, requested the President to designate and set apart a day for National prayer and humiliation:
And whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead 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:
And, insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. 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 which 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.
Now, therefore, in compliance with the request, and fully concurring in the views of the Senate, I do, by this my proclamation, designate and set apart Thursday, the 30th. day of April, 1863, as a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer. And I do hereby request all the People to abstain, on that day, from their ordinary secular pursuits, and to unite, at their several places of public worship and their respective homes, in keeping the day holy to the Lord, and devoted to the humble discharge of the religious duties proper to that solemn occasion.
All this being done, in sincerity and truth, let us then rest humbly in the hope authorized by the Divine teachings, that the united cry of the Nation will be heard on high, and answered with blessings, no less than the pardon of our national sins, and the restoration of our now divided and suffering Country, to its former happy condition of unity and peace.
By the President: ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Can you imagine any modern president making such a statement? And doing so at the request of the senate? Unthinkable!
Useful Idiots
It also reminds me of something I wrote about in an earlier post. Secular conservatives (and the Republican Party) enjoy our support for their causes, yet they not only denied Lincoln’s arguments, when applied to 9/11, they treated such views with contempt. Since 9/11 I now read Buckley, Goldberg and their minions with a great deal of suspicion. I personally believe that they look at evangelicals as “useful idiots.”
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