The End Time Church: From the Cathedrals to the Catacombs

By Dan L. White

Copyright 2020 by Dan L. White, all rights reserved.

Scripture quotations are from the World English Bible (WEB) which is in the public domain.

Chapter 81

Rejecting the King of Glory

Yahweh was Israel’s only king. For several centuries in the time of the judges, there were no human kings. Yahweh purposely designed Israel’s first government that way. He was their King.

However, the people didn’t follow their King and disobeyed His Commandments. That meant continuing troubles and constant wars. They could have just followed Yahweh and avoided their constant battles. Instead, they decided to keep the battles and dump the King. They wanted to replace Him with some guy down the road, who would lead them in their constant battles.

The United States of America followed a somewhat similar path.

The fledging USA also designed their government not to have a human king. The nation was filled with individually Christian citizens, to whatever degree. Without a human king, that left God as their King.

As Laura Ingalls wrote in Little Town on the Prairie:

“God is America’s king.

She thought: Americans won’t obey any king on earth. Americans are free. That means they have to obey their own consciences. No king bosses Pa; he has to boss himself…

This is what it means to be free. It means, you have to be good…The laws of Nature and of Nature’s God endow you with a right to life and liberty. Then you have to keep the laws of God, for God’s law is the only thing that gives you a right to be free.”

After several centuries, though, the United States of America, like Israel, rejected their King, the King of glory.

The Pilgrims sailed away from King James and onto Plymouth Rock in 1620. About three centuries later, in 1925, America tried to make a monkey out of God in the Scopes trial. The rejection process was underway.

Israel had rejected their King with a dramatic demand – “now make us a king to judge us like all the nations,” 1 Samuel 8:5. Instead of a sudden, dramatic declaration, America rejected their King in a stealthier manner, right under the Christian’s noses, without most of them smelling the stench.

As this is written, the streets of America’s major cities seethe with raging rioters, and their thoroughfares bear scars from the “protests.” Bibles are burned, churches are burned, Christians are attacked, city blocks are burned. These rioters are not conservative Christians. They are “secular” in religion, a euphemism for being anti-Christ. People of the US majority political party openly reject the “white Jesus.”

Definitely, God is not America’s King today.

What was this subversive process that led from Little Town on the Prairie to big riots in Chicago?

How did this happen? How did America reject its King and become just another Godless nation?

1) mass media.

Mass media began with the printing press and the Bible. Martin Luther’s and other Bible translations were mass produced and distributed, letting people own and read the Bible for the first time in their lives. That was the first mass media.

Today the mass media is not known for distributing Bibles.

On the contrary, there is no degeneracy that the mass media does not promote. There is no goodness that they do promote. This media muck in all its electronic forms is so pervasive that even most of those who call themselves Christian continually drink from its fetid fountains.

Until electronic media appeared in the late twentieth century, printing was still the only mass media — newspapers, magazines and books. The mass media attacks against America’s King in newspapers and magazines began with the Scopes Trial in 1925.

Tennessee had passed a law outlawing the teaching of evolution. A part time public school biology teacher was recruited by anti-Christ forces to teach evolution and then to be tried for breaking the law. During that trial, newspapers and magazines had a heyday supporting evolution and mocking God, so much so that that trial today, in continuing mockery, is referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial. The media made a monkey out of the King.

The basic premise of that media attack, and of all modern mass media in America, is evolution’s teaching that God is not real. They simply deny that God is. Whatever they do doesn’t matter, because there is no God.

They think.

2) A second prime force of rejecting the King was the Supreme Court.

Evolution was forced into government schools by the educational elites who had been put in charge of the schools, replacing parents who, for three hundred years, had been in charge of what their children learned. American parents overwhelmingly disagreed with evolution, but when evolution was wormed into the government schools, the Christians did not remove their children. They believed evolution was evil, but then accepted that evil.

Evolution is not just a variant biological teaching. Evolution attacks the most fundamental belief of Christians, that their God isn’t. Logically then, breaking His Commandments is not wrong. If God does not exist, then humans are the highest beings in existence and they can set their own moral law.

Evolution rejects the King directly, by saying He is nonexistent –

Dead.

Exod 3:14-15
14) God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM,” and he said, “You shall tell the children of Israel this: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”
15) God said moreover to Moses, “You shall tell the children of Israel this, ‘Yahweh, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and this is my memorial to all generations.

The name Yahweh, God’s “memorial to all generations,” means existence. As God explained there, it means I AM!

God is. Everybody else ain’t. All others depend on being sustained by the One who is self-existent. But evolution denies His existence. Nothing is more basic than that.

A parent may allow government schools to teach his child to dishonor father and mother, or to indulge in filthy sexual sins, or to hate Christians. Yet none of those are as bad as allowing the child to be taught evolution, which denies the God who sustains those all those commandments.

Matt 23:16-17
16) Woe to you, you blind guides, which say, Whoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor!
17) You fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gold, or the temple that sanctifies the gold?

Pharisees said that if someone swore by God’s Temple, that didn’t count, but if he swore by the gold of the Temple, then that counted and he was held to that oath.

“You fools and blind,” Christ told them.

In the same way Christian parents who support the anti-God schools would balk at allowing their children to be taught deviant sexual practices in those schools, but willingly allow them to be taught that the God who gave the seventh Commandment against sex sins doesn’t exist. How can they complain about sex sins when they accept the teaching that God doesn’t even exist? Which is worse, going against the Commandment, or going against the God who wrote that Commandment?

“You fools and blind.”

The teaching of evolution breaks the first Commandment – “You shall have no other gods” – and it breaks the first great Commandment – ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is going beyond attacking the Commandments to directly attacking the Commandment giver.

When there was no law commanding evolution in the public schools, Americans meekly accepted evolution in their schools. After all, the educational authorities said it was right.

Once people voluntarily accepted evolution, then it did become law. Not by an act of Congress, but by a decree of the highest court in the land. Thus the US Supreme Court joined in the campaign to reject the King.

In 1947, the Supremes ruled that there was a wall of separation between church and state, with church meaning the Christian religion in all its forms. Before then, the Bible and Christian beliefs had been the basis of the government, and there were no anti-Christ government schools. After the Supremes 1947 decision, the American government became the enemy of the Bible and Christian beliefs. The prime battlefield for their attack was the government schools, and the Supreme Court was the prime attacker.

In 1962, the Court ruled that schools could not lead students in prayer. The next year they ruled that schools could not read the Bible to students. In 2000 they prohibited prayers to open football games. More recently lower courts have required public school students to be taught anti-Christian material, such as explicit sex education, and to share restrooms, showers and field trip beds with “transgender” students. The courts also issued decrees allowing abortions, deviant sex practices, and a long chain of other rejections of basic decency.

In 1968, the Supremes ruled that states could not forbid the teaching of evolution and in 1980 specifically outlawed the teaching of God as Creator. So the highest court in the land, presumably including the wisest people in the land, forcibly changed the government schools from teaching God and the Bible to rejecting God and the Bible.

Quite a switch. Most conservative Christians said that was evil, but still went along with it.

Ironically, the building that the Supreme Court meets in has several carvings of the Ten Commandments, that artwork remaining from a time when America’s Supreme Court did have wisdom.

Today’s Court decisions are never based on what God says. They are always based on human reason, purposely excluding what God says. They think it makes no difference if they exclude God from their decisions, and from the nation’s schools.

It did make a difference.

3) So the mass media acts as if God does not exist. The Supreme Court rules as if God does not exist. And the third great instrument of rejecting America’s King teaches that God does not exist.

A nation of personally dedicated Christians taught the Bible to their children. America itself was based on the Bible, in its government, in its beliefs, and in Who it sought in time of trouble. The schools that parents established were also Bible based and customarily began the school day with Bible reading and prayer. In early schools in America, students were taught how to read and how to live by the McGuffey Readers. For example, book 6, lesson 36 is “Paul’s Speech on Mars Hill.”

I just ran an internet search on that topic and no, government schools don’t have a lesson on that.

Yes, the media and the courts were a vital part of the movement to reject God as King. However, this gradual, subversive process had a central base, a foundational platform, one center of attack that led the people to their perversity. That central base of subversion of America and the rejection of her King was the centralized government schools.

The republic was established on the principle of preventing centralization of power. Horace Mann is known as the father of the public schools. That is, he worked to centralize government power in the public schools.

Oddly enough, he did it to save the republic!

Mann feared that the republic would not remain unified if the government did not control the people. So he successfully fought to have state control of education in his home state of Massachusetts, other states then followed suit, and later that control moved to the national level. This meant that control of what children learned moved from Christian parents to anti-Christ government bureaucrats. Freedom of choice in education shifted to socialist monopoly education.

Before Mann, schools taught Christian values, in whatever variety. After Mann, schools were ultimately used to teach anti-Christ values. Mann was a Unitarian. His goal in setting up government schools was to prevent America’s children being taught Biblical Christian values, and to instead teach them humanist values.

…Unitarianism and Universalism. As early as the 1830s, both groups were studying and promulgating texts from world religions other than Christianity. By the beginning of the twentieth century, humanists within both traditions advocated that people could be religious without believing in God.
Unitarian Universalist Origins: Our Historic Faith by Mark W. Harris.
https://americanhumanist.org/paths/unitarianism/

Unitarian Universalism has evolved to be a non-creedal religion that welcomes people of all beliefs. Humanism itself became an influential part of the religion in the early 20th century and remains strong to this day.

….Our history has carried us from liberal Christian views about Jesus and human nature to a rich pluralism that includes theist and atheist, agnostic and humanist, pagan, Christian, Jew, and Buddhist.”

You will recognize there the old Roman religion, everybody in, everything accepted.

Whose schools did the public school people copy?

The Germans. You know, those schools that produced willing soldiers for Kaiser Wilhelm in WWI and Adolf Hitler in WWII.

The Prussian system of state-controlled education extended from the lower grades through the university levels. Schools were established, supported, and administered by a central authority: The state supervised the training of teachers, attendance was compulsory, parents were punished for withholding their children from school, and efforts were made to make curricula and instruction uniform.” Supporters “believed that this system was both efficient and effective and used it as “a prime example of the superiority of centralized authority.”
School Choice in Michigan: A Primer for Freedom in Education, by Matthew J. Brouillette

“The superiority of centralized authority”: Wilhelm believed it, Hitler believed it, and the public school creators believed it. If everybody believed the same thing — what the government told them to believe — there would be unity in the republic. And the ten Roman emperors who put Christians to death also believed that, as did Constantine.

Many Americans of that time did not believe in centralized authority, in government or in government schools.

Many also disagreed with Mann about the role of government in schooling—centralized control of schooling was seen as antithetical to republican traditions; in particular, the freedom of parents to pass on their own beliefs and traditions to their children. Ibid.

But almost all those Americans who disagreed with the centralized government school concept did nothing about it, and went ahead and accepted it.

Mann believed that government of the people, by the people and for the people would fail unless the government controlled the people. He did not believe that people should control the government. He believed that government should control the people. The government could control the people by taking control of their children.

To try to save the republic, where people controlled the government, by government controlling the people is lunacy. Horace Mann tried to save the republic by centralizing government power in its schools. Thus he tried to save the republic by ending it.

That end is now coming to pass.

The public schools were begun to take the place of Christian schools. They were explicitly religious in their purpose, to replace Christian values with humanist values, to replace the God of the Bible with the belief that humans are the highest beings in creation.

The Constitution split power into the three branches of executive, legislative and judicial. The Constitution did not mention schools at all. It did not establish government schools, nor did it prohibit government schools. And that’s where Mann and the educational elites attacked the republic, in that unmentioned area, by centralizing power in the government schools. These socialist institutions control the children in every town in America. They have continually expanded the school year and the school day. Ironically, those who advocate abortions and post-partum butchery now run preschools and even day care centers, they feed many children, and even send food home during the summer. Their reach is incredible and they have no intention of stopping.

And every day, everywhere, in every public school, they always teach that God isn’t.

More than anything else, that has destroyed the republic. The mass media can spread its muck only because people think that God doesn’t matter. The court decisions are accepted only because people believe that God doesn’t matter. Because every day, in every school, those people, generations of America’s youth, were taught that God doesn’t matter, because He is not real.

The American republic was destroyed using mass media, the courts, and the public schools. In all those cases, the people accepted evil, even though they initially disagreed with it. They filled their minds with media filth, they accepted Court decreed infanticide, and they allowed their children to be religiously indoctrinated by humanists.

Those three channels of destruction are all based on forgetting God. The media is extremely filthy and Godless, the modern Courts made their decisions without considering God at all, and the government schools are based on the principle of purposely excluding God. All their students learn by years of example that it is all right to exclude God.

In reality, God must never be left out.

Deut 6:6-7
6) These words, which I command you this day, shall be on your heart;
7) and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up.

When you sit. When you walk. When you lie. When you rise.

God must never be left out.

Ps 78:5-7
5) For he established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed a teaching in Israel, which he commanded our fathers, that they should make them known to their children;
6) that the generation to come might know, even the children who should be born; who should arise and tell their children,
7) that they might set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments,

America’s generations have now forgotten God, and that does matter. The streets are torn with riots, Bibles are burned, churches are attacked, violence has spread across the amber fields, and the Democratic Party recites the Pledge of Allegiance by leaving out “one nation under God.”

Israel had judges instead of human kings but after several centuries, they rejected their King, Yahweh God Almighty. To whatever degree, America had the same King and after several centuries, followed the same pattern. The nation that was the second most unique nation in world history, and the most individualistic Christian nation ever, became like so many others. And this is only the beginning of their depravity.

Job 8:11-13
11) “Can the papyrus grow up without mire? Can the rushes grow without water?
12) While it is yet in its greenness, not cut down, it withers before any other reed.
13) So are the paths of all who forget God. The hope of the godless man shall perish…

This is one of the saddest stories in human history. The nation that President Reagan called the “shining city set on a hill” has become Solomon’s Mount of Corruption. The nation that was unique is now run of the mill. That nation full of individual Christians is now full of secularists, who detest conservative Christians, including George Washington and all the Founding Fathers.

President Trump said at a rally in Tulsa, Okla. “Two days ago, leftist radicals in Portland, Oregon, ripped down a statue of George Washington and wrapped it in an American flag and set the American flag on fire.”

George Washington could have been king of America, but after two terms as president, he stepped down, because he did not want America to have a human king. Now America rejects that fine man as a Founding Father of the United States. And they reject the God that all those Founding Fathers tried to follow, the King of glory.

And that is what they learned in America’s public schools.

The End Time Church: From the Cathedrals to the Catacombs

By Dan L. White

Copyright 2020 by Dan L. White, all rights reserved.

Scripture quotations are from the World English Bible (WEB) which is in the public domain.

Chapter 80

From King George to the King of Glory

The King of glory was Israel’s king.

Ps 24
7) Lift up your heads, you gates! Be lifted up, you everlasting doors, and the King of glory will come in.
8) Who is the King of glory? Yahweh strong and mighty, Yahweh mighty in battle.
9) Lift up your heads, you gates; yes, lift them up, you everlasting doors, and the King of glory will come in.
10) Who is this King of glory? Yahweh of Armies is the King of glory! Selah.

All other nations had kings, pharaohs, emperors, sheiks, chiefs, or whatever the locals called the biggest head-knocker. But when Israel first lived in the Holy Land, Yahweh God was their king. How glorious, to have the King of Glory as your King!

In the fledgling United States of America, by design of the Founding Fathers, there was no king.

Or was there?

After Martin Luther unintentionally sparked the Protestant Reformation, Britain wasn’t really very Protestant. Henry VIII began his own church, the Church of England, so they were considered Protestant, but they kept most of the Roman Church practices. The big difference was that Henry replaced the Pope.

King James came along almost a century after Henry, but he took just as seriously his position as head of the Church. He even authorized his own BIble, the King James Authorized Version. God wrote it, the king approved it, so what more could you want?

But the Pilgrims didn’t want it. They used the Geneva Version, very similar to the KJV since both copied Tyndale, but with marginal notes critical of ecclesiastical authorities, such as King James. And that’s why the Pilgrims left England, first to go to the Netherlands, then in 1620, to travel to the New World.

Their plan called for them to sail to Virginia. The Jamestown colony had been established in 1607, close to the James River, by profit seeking adventurers who were loyal to King James and his church, as shown by the place names. The Pilgrims’ purpose in going to the New World was to avoid King James’ Church, so whether by human or divine design, they wound up in what became Massachusetts, far away from King James’ town or King James’ river.

The Pilgrims did not travel to what became America to establish religious freedom. They made the treacherous ocean voyage to establish Christian freedom, by escaping King James’ church. Once established, the Pilgrims did not try to give the Indians ecumenicalism, or the old Roman practice of accepting all religions. Instead the Pilgrims gave the Indians Christ. They labored to convert the Indian tribes from their primitive pagan religions to Christ.

From those beginnings at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock came the United States of America, a nation of Christians who were of different sects, but who were personally dedicated. Unlike England, there was no national church. And when a later king of England, King George III, strongly asserted his royal rule over the American colonies, this was their reaction in 1776.

The King is a tyrant, because he keeps standing armies in the colonies during a time of peace, makes the military power superior to the civil government, and forces the colonists to support the military presence through increased taxes.
Declaration of Independence

In 1787, the Constitutional Convention was having trouble agreeing on a Constitution for the new United States. Ben Franklin said this to the Christian men of varying denominations, reminding them how, before their Declaration of Independence, they had prayed together every day.

“In this situation of this Assembly groping as it were in the dark to find political truth, and scarce able to distinguish it when presented to us, how has it happened, Sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings? In the beginning of the contest with G. Britain, when we were sensible of danger we had daily prayer in this room for the Divine Protection. Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a Superintending providence in our favor. To that kind providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? Or do we imagine that we no longer need His assistance.
Redlandsdailyfacts.com, 2019/07/04, Professing Faith: The religious foundations that bolstered the Declaration of Independence

And they did pray, and they did agree on a Constitution.

King George, the tyrant who triggered the revolution against Britain, had a clever plan.

1) Keep armies in the colonies to control the colonists.
2) Tell the colonists that the troops are there for their own protection.
3) Make the colonists pay to support the soldiers who were controlling them.

His plan backfired, and led the colonies to reject him as king and as head of the Church. The United States government was established with no human king and no national church. The American government was divided into three branches, the presidency, the Congress, and the courts. It is said that James Madison took that principle from Isaiah 33:22, For the LORD is our judge, the LORD is our lawgiver, the LORD is our king; he will save us, KJV.

When the government was split into three parts that limited the power of each branch. All of this was carefully planned to prevent any person or group from centralizing power. The Founders knew that history shows that powerful people are usually corrupted by their power, because of this —

Rom 7
18) For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwells no good thing. For desire is present with me, but I don’t find it doing that which is good.
19) For the good which I desire, I don’t do; but the evil which I don’t desire, that I practice.
20) But if what I don’t desire, that I do, it is no more I that do it, but sin which dwells in me.
21) I find then the law, that, to me, while I desire to do good, evil is present.

Based on that Bible truth, the truth of evil human nature, the United States was designed to prevent would-be kings of any kind from accumulating power.

Lincoln said this was a government of the people, by the people, for the people, and others had made similar statements before him. But such a government means that people have to be able to govern themselves. Again, we return to the question —

How do you control the people?

By the might of a Romish army or by God leading people?

America was the most individually Christian nation ever to exist. France and Spain had the Roman Church, England had the king’s Church of England, Russia had the Orthodox Church, but people born or coerced into churches usually lack individual faith in God. Americans were not forced into any church, but they had a historically amazing belief in God and the Bible. There was no national American church, but Americans were in a lot of churches. Baptists, Episcopalians spreading from Anglican Jamestown, Catholics in Maryland, Quakers in Pennsylvania, and in Providence, Rhode Island, a Seventh Day Baptist church was perhaps the largest single church congregation in the coloniesat that time.

When the pioneers went west, one of the first things they did was build a church building. The church building did not give them food to eat or shelter in winter, but they always took the time to build church buildings. Tocqueville said the American pioneer “penetrates into the wilds of the New World with the Bible, an axe, and a file of newspapers.”

All 50 states acknowledged God in their constitutions. They did not acknowledge any one church, but they did uniformly acknowledge the God of the Bible. The first colleges in America, such as Harvard and Yale, were founded to train Christian ministers. American pre-Revolution literature included Christian works by ministers.

In the 1730’s and 40’s, the young nation even had a national Christian revival, the Great Awakening. Ministers had the renown of modern music stars and a national hit was Jonathan Edwards’ sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” It’s hard to imagine an America where young people got together to discuss the latest hit sermon!

Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted above, was a young Frenchman who visited young America in 1831. He came from a land of kings like –

-the extravagant Louis XIV with his Versailles palace;
-Louis VI who was beheaded in the savage French Revolution;
-emperor Napoleon, who actually wanted to be emperor of the whole world;
-and the Bourbon kings who came after Napoleon.

After all that instability, there was another revolution in 1830!

With that French history behind him, this is what Alexis observed in the new American republic, which had avoided the French debacles.

First of all, he observed that liberty must be accompanied by personal morality. An immoral people cannot govern themselves, else they would not be immoral.

“Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.”

Consequently, liberty is endangered by the loss of morals.

“Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.”

Most of all, Tocqueville observed that America was moral because of its individual Christian beliefs.

“Christianity has therefore retained a strong hold on the public mind in America… In the United States… Christianity itself is a fact so irresistibly established, that no one undertakes either to attack or to defend it.”

“Religion in America . . . Must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions for that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of it . . . I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religion – for who can search the human heart? – But I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society.”

“Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

America did not have a King George. It could have, with the first president George Washington. But after being elected to two terms, he declined a third, when he would certainly have been elected. George did not want America to have a king, or a perpetually ruling president. But America did not have a king George, nor any other human king or emperor or dictator. That fact alone emblazes America on the first page of history.

Rush Limbaugh, July 31, 2009 radio show transcript:

The history of the world is tyranny. Human beings are viciously mean to each other. The history of humanity is tyranny, torture, dungeons, dictatorship, fear. The exception has been the United States of America. That’s the whole thing behind American exceptionalism. The exception to human nature and world human history is the United States of America. The people that want to control others so that they have more power, the people that want to limit liberty around the world, they’re all over the place. They’ve always been all over the place. They surround us. That’s why we’re despised and feared. We represent the only opposition to them, and they’re everywhere. They’re in the Middle East. They’re in Europe. They’re in Asia. They’re in South America, Central America. They’re all over. We are surrounded. And now we have a president [Obama] who’s sympathetic to those people and is engaging in policies that will replicate the same kind of loss of freedom and liberty that has been the traditional lot in life for the average human being since the beginning of time.

Laura Ingalls wrote the famous Little House books, along with her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, one of three founding mothers of libertarianism in America. They were descended from one of those early Mayflower Pilgrims and the Ingalls were part of the Congregational Church in America. The widespread Congregational Church did not believe in a super-ruler over multiple congregations. They believed that each local congregation should rule itself. Laura lived the last six decades of her life in Missouri, where there was no Congregational Church. She attended but never joined one of the other local churches, which had hierarchical rulers over local congregations.

In other words, the Ingalls believed in a church government that was similar to the American government, by limiting human power. They did not accept popes, arch-bishops or ecclesiastical big-wigs. They did not accept religious kings.

In the fledgling United States of America, by design of the Founding Fathers, there was no king.

Or was there?

In the book Little Town on the Prairie, Laura spoke of America’s King.

During a July 4^th celebration at the new little town of DeSmet, [South Dakota], they read the Declaration of Independence. Laura knew the Declaration by heart. Even so, Laura found the oral reading of the Declaration moving, and when the reading was finished, she recognized America’s King.

“No one cheered. It was more like a moment to say, “Amen.” But no one quite knew what to do. Then Pa began to sing. All at once everyone was singing:

“My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing. . . .

“Long may our land be bright
With Freedom’s holy light,
Protect us by Thy might,

Great God, our King!”

The crowd was scattering away then, but Laura stood stock still. Suddenly she had a completely new thought. The Declaration and the song came together in her mind, and she thought: God is America’s king.

She thought: Americans won’t obey any king on earth. Americans are free. That means they have to obey their own consciences. No king bosses Pa; he has to boss himself. Why (she thought), when I am a little older, Pa and Ma will stop telling me what to do, and there isn’t anyone else who has a right to give me orders. I will have to make myself be good.

Her whole mind seemed to be lighted up by that thought. This is what it means to be free. It means, you have to be good. “Our father’s God, author of liberty.” The laws of Nature and of Nature’s God endow you with a right to life and liberty. Then you have to keep the laws of God, for God’s law is the only thing that gives you a right to be free.”

God is America’s King, she said.

America was the most individually Christian nation in history. People did not believe just whatever their church believed. They believed that God was their personal ruler, the Bible was His Word, and they had to live their lives with that in mind. A people who govern themselves must have the power to control themselves, and that power over human nature comes only from Yahweh God Almighty, as we individually seek it.

Admittedly, that America was a far cry from the Pentecost Christians in Acts. The Pilgrims did abhor the Roman holiday Christmas and worked on their first Christmas Day in the New World. Some early settlers even thought like Carlstadt and kept the seventh day Sabbath instead of the Roman Sunday. But most still followed many traditions of Constantine’s Church, and what were considered popish holidays gradually came to be considered Christian holidays in America.

Yet how merciful is God?

Ahab was the most evil king of the ten tribes of Israel, and they never had any good kings. Yet when Ahab showed a pinch of repentance after Elijah told him that he and his whole family would be wiped out, this is what Yahweh did.

1Kgs 21
25) But there was none like Ahab, who sold himself to do that which was evil in the sight of Yahweh, whom Jezebel his wife stirred up.
26) He did very abominably in following idols, according to all that the Amorites did, whom Yahweh cast out before the children of Israel.
27) It happened, when Ahab heard those words, that he tore his clothes, and put sackcloth on his flesh, and fasted, and lay in sackcloth, and went softly.
28) The word of Yahweh came to Elijah the Tishbite, saying,
29) “See how Ahab humbles himself before me? Because he humbles himself before me, I will not bring the evil in his days; but in his son’s days will I bring the evil on his house.”

Again, Christian America fell far short of the first flock. That being said, they were still head and shoulders above every other nation in individual Christian responsibility. A merciful God saw their obedience, imperfect as it was, and still bestowed bountiful blessings on this people. And one of the greatest blessings this people had was the opportunity to be an unpersecuted Christian.

How rare in history that is!

With government of the people, for the people and by the people, the people largely governed themselves. Instead of being controlled by a Roman type government, they controlled the government; at least more than any other people did.

How do you control the people?

By the might of a Romish army or by God leading people?

The King of Glory was Israel’s King. No other nation had such an honor. But honorable mention goes to the United States of America, which for over three centuries acted as if God was their king. No other nation after Israel has done that.

Ps 107
31) Let them praise Yahweh for his loving kindness, for his wonderful works for the children of men!
32) Let them exalt him also in the assembly of the people, and praise him in the seat of the elders.
33) He turns rivers into a desert, water springs into a thirsty ground,
34) and a fruitful land into a salt waste, for the wickedness of those who dwell in it.
35) He turns a desert into a pool of water, and a dry land into water springs.
36) There he makes the hungry live, that they may prepare a city to live in,
37) sow fields, plant vineyards, and reap the fruits of increase.
38) He blesses them also, so that they are multiplied greatly. He doesn’t allow their livestock to decrease.
39) Again, they are diminished and bowed down through oppression, trouble, and sorrow.
40) He pours contempt on princes, and causes them to wander in a trackless waste.
41) Yet he lifts the needy out of their affliction, and increases their families like a flock.
42) The upright will see it, and be glad. All the wicked will shut their mouths.
43) Whoever is wise will pay attention to these things. They will consider the loving kindnesses of Yahweh.

That Psalm shows the principle of blessing and cursing. With Yahweh’s blessing, He turns a desert into a pool of water. With His cursing, He turns rivers into a desert.

America had enormous blessings of all kinds, as an individually Christian nation.

So what happens now?

“And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? Or do we imagine that we no longer need His assistance,” Ben Franklin.