We Have Forgotten God

Isaiah 17:10, Psalm 106:21

You have forgotten God your Savior...

Abraham Lincoln's March 30, 1863 proclamation establishing a National Day of Fasting and Prayer

It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, and 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 Holy Scripture, 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 chastisement 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 has 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.

William Booth, English Methodist and Founder of the Salvation Army, in the late 1800s

The chief danger that confronts the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, heaven without hell. 

Sidney Norton and Iain Murry, in the first issue of The Banner of Truth magazine, September 1955

In our land today, although true believers remain scattered in differ­ent denominations, the visible church as a whole has departed from the truth - ‘They that handle the Law knew me not.’ (Jeremiah 2:8) God will reject those who reject his truth, - ‘because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee.’ (Hosea 4:6) The fall of the church is being followed, of necessity, by the fall of the nation, and there is but one hope, but one remedy: that is, that before the day of God’s patience becomes the day of his wrath, he will in mercy revive his truth.

If a land will not glorify God by the revealed truth - the Bible - God has another man­ner of making his truth known and acknowledged. ‘The Lord is known by the judgments which he executeth.’ (Psalm 9:16) That is, he will pour out his wrath, and make a land feel that he wrote not in vain, ‘The nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish.’ (Isaiah 60:1).

Today one thing is certain: God will have his truth glorified, either actively by our acknowledgement of it, or passively by declaring his truth through our destruction. One hope stands between our land and ruin, the hope that he will in mercy revive his truth.