All The Usual Signs

Over the previous seven lessons we’ve examined other nations and civilizations that prospered and were the world superpowers in their time and the road posts along the way to destruction that should have shown them they were in poor shape are the same ones America sees now. Or at least they should see if they are intellectually honest. For whatever reason, whether it be greed or power or pride, she ignores the obvious and embraces the evidence as freedom and liberty like a frog in a slowly boiling pot of water. By themselves, these actions would not be fatal to a society, but like Rome and all the others they simply think they were too big to fail. In the end, they collapsed from within when a strong force from without came calling for them. The United States is no different. When the last other superpower, Russia, takes stands for morality that America promotes you know that something is very, very wrong.

The Cup Of Iniquity

Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. 14 But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. 15 As for yourself, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. 16 And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.” (Gen 15:13-16, ESV)

In these few verses we read what theologians refer to as the cup of iniquity. It is the measure of a people or nation in the eyes of God for how fallen they are at any given moment in time. And according to God, when it is to the brim, judgment comes and His wrath falls. The Amorites were on that list and Abram was told that He would use the nation He was starting with his only son to one day be the agent of that judgment. And sure enough, that is what happened. There are only some things we know about how God knows when these nations or peoples have filled up the cup and there is no more room for changing. We know that sin is the liquid. And we know that time is not known, just that God is watching the level. We know that the cup can only hold so much sin and that when the cup is full, the collapse will come next. We don’t know how much sin and we don’t know how the wrath will come. But there is one thing we also know from reading the Bible and that is somehow the cup can be emptied and judgment forestalled for a time.

God Wants To Heal The Land

When we read of impending judgment, we know that God is looking at that cup, but is He looking with a smile on His face? No, He is looking to see if there is any reason He can stop the process. Before He destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, He made it clear to Abraham that He would if He found enough righteous people. As Abraham lowered the number more and more God said He would not send His wrath if a certain number was still there that followed Him. Implied here is that He was looking constantly and He knew who these people were. He always looks for people on the earth He can make Himself strong in and he knows where they live. These people can keep a nation from destruction just by being believers. And if we reverse the process, if the people living in sin repent and the number of righteous people increase, the timing of the judgment can also be lengthened. What the ratio actually is we aren’t told. But God does and the process to literally buy more time is turning hearts back to Him. It is another example of God’s math.

An Interesting Point

I found an article on why great nations fall by Bible teacher Emery Horvath and in it he makes the argument for where God looks for the level of sin. Let’s read one of the verses on this and it’s found in Leviticus 18:24–28:

Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean, 25 and the land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. 26 But you shall keep my statutes and my rules and do none of these abominations, either the native or the stranger who sojourns among you 27 (for the people of the land, who were before you, did all of these abominations, so that the land became unclean), 28 lest the land vomit you out when you make it unclean, as it vomited out the nation that was before you.(ESV)

Horvath highlighted the portions that mention “the land” for a reason. He also used a familiar passage from Genesis that makes a similar point:

Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord.” 2 And again, she bore his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a worker of the ground. 8 Cain spoke to Abel his brother. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. 9 Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:1–2, 8-9, ESV)

This is actually a murder mystery, and like Columbo, God already knows the answer to the question:

And the Lord said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground. (Gen 4:10, ESV)

It was the ground or the land that testified.

Somehow The Land Knows

Neither Horvath nor I are going to do some deep word study on how land stores the information, but it is interesting that when someone wants to hide the body they bury it under the ground. And still the evidence can be found if you know where to look. Let’s look at another portion of Scripture to further make this point:

For behold, the Lord is coming out from his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity, and the earth will disclose the blood shed on it, and will no more cover its slain. (Isaiah 26:21, ESV)

Horvath then makes these points:

Notice from these three passages in Leviticus 18, Genesis 4, and Isaiah 21, “the land” registers the amount of sexual perversion committed in it and records the amount of innocent blood shed upon it. When those sins are ‘full’ or ‘fulfilled’, when it becomes too much – when there is too much perversion – when there is too much innocent blood shed – when commandments 6 and 7 are not respected, the land rejects its inhabitants – it vomits or evicts the people who live in it.

Why do nations fall? The land ‘evicts them’ because of innocent bloodshed and sexual perversion. This is part of what happened to the great Roman Empire.

The Timing Could Be Seen

I know initially I stated that we don’t know how long things take for the cup of iniquity to fill, but Horvath has a theory on it:

Here is a thought that you might have and so let us preempt that thought by asking the question…Did God just take the land from ‘innocent people’ and give it to Israel (by the Abrahamic Covenant) just because they were Israel and needed a place to stay? No, God knew that these ‘innocent people’ were not so innocent and He knew the land would reject the Canaanites because of their iniquity they were sowing. He knew there was going to be a vacancy. He also knew the exact time that vacancy would occur And so He had Israel positioned there at the right time to move in – the fourth generation. Back at that time because the people had much longer life spans, a Bible generation was 100 years and so 4 generations would be 400 years. This was the approximate time Israel would be in Egypt.

Is the time 400 years or 4 generations? I don’t see this pattern other than maybe when God says the sins go down to the 3rd and 4th generations in Deuteronomy 5:9. Could that be the timeline America has? Are we that close to judgment or the land vomiting us out? I simply don’t know. But there is another factor here and that could explain that we may be living on borrowed time.

Repentance By A Nation

This is the element that should give us hope right now. God has forgiven a land when they actually heeded His warning and turned around. We see it in the book of Jonah when a reluctant Jonah warned the Ninevites that unless they changed, God would judge them:

For when the king of Nineveh heard what Jonah was saying, he stepped down from his throne, laid aside his royal robes, put on sackcloth, and sat in ashes. 7 And the king and his nobles sent this message throughout the city: “Let no one, not even the animals, eat anything at all, nor even drink any water. 8 Everyone must wear sackcloth and cry mightily to God, and let everyone turn from his evil ways, from his violence and robbing. 9 Who can tell? Perhaps even yet God will decide to let us live and will hold back his fierce anger from destroying us.”

10 And when God saw that they had put a stop to their evil ways, he abandoned his plan to destroy them and didn’t carry it through. (Jonah 3:6-10, TLB)

To be honest, they eventually were judged as we see in the book of Nahum, but, if historical dates are accurate, they were spared of that judgment for around 150 years because they repented. And it must be noted that the reason they fell was because the second time around they were too prideful to repent.

If My People

This is but one example of a nation or people repenting when given the chance. It can happen and has happened I believe in our lifetimes. God gave King Solomon the blueprint for turning things around and even told Him how He would get their attention in the previous verse which we rarely quote. Here are those “blueprints:”

When I shut up heaven and there is no rain, or command the locusts to devour the land, or send pestilence among My people, 14 if My people who are called by My name will 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. (2 Chron 7:13-14, NKJV)

Did something stand out to you this time? Notice that part of this repentance is healing their land. It makes a new point for you now that you know how God “hears” about their sin. And if we turn to another verse, this one in Ezekiel 22:30 we see the heart of God in this as well:

And I sought for a man among them who should build up the wall and stand in the breach before me for the land, that I should not destroy it, but I found none. (ESV)

Again, the land is mentioned, but also that God was looking for any way He could spare the nation. But repentance and then revival is most likely what spared America up until now as we see in another quote from Horvath:

Revival resets the ‘iniquity’ gauge! Throughout the history of America, this nation has experienced revival at times when the moral fabric of our nation was so poor it was ready to cause eviction. During revival people get saved, people get recommitted, people repent from sin, people sow righteousness. During Finney’s revivals, whole towns came to God. The bars shut-down – the brothels and houses of prostitution shut down. When saved people start acting saved in massive numbers they sow acts of righteousness and become salt spreaders and that reverses the moral decay already registered by the ground. It is revivals that have kept us in the land not our great Constitution! It is ‘moves of God’ and ‘outpourings of His Spirit’ that have kept us from being vomited out of these 50 states.

The Church Is The Key

In 2 Chron 7:14 God doesn’t look to the government or politicians to repent first or at all. He says He is looking to His people, called by His name. That’s us, the church. We need to repent and turn from our wicked ways. And that’s how it’s always been. If we want our land and the sins it’s been storing to be cleansed, then we need to humble ourselves and realize that it is sin in our midst that is part of the problem. Our pride makes us think we’re doing just fine when it is our prayerlessness and lack of seeking His face that needs to change. A church that boasts of how big our buildings are and how professional our tech is and how good our talent is may be respected by the world around us, but it takes more than big screens, skinny jeans, and fog machines to produce the one thing we truly need and that is God’s forgiveness and subsequent revival. So in these lessons we have diagnosed the patient and know how far the cancer has spread. And we know the cure. Will we do our part? Will we be the person God is looking for to build the wall and stand in the breach? I’m hopeful we will be. I, like others, don't think it will be easy and there may be a severe drought, or natural disasters, or another pandemic to get our attention, but if He does that it is only because He loves us and wants to forestall the impending judgment. He loves us enough to heal our land. Will America die on our watch? That, my friends, is up to us.