This morning's breakfast consisted of some sort of cereal flakes with almond slivers and Ezekiel 12 which starts out in verse 2, "Son of man, you live in the midst of the rebellious house, who have eyes to see but do not see, ears to hear but do not hear; for they are a rebellious house." Earlier I had noted as I read some devotionals that one hundred forty-eight years ago to the day (thank you, Frodo) in 1860, South Carolina declared its compact with the rest of the States dissolved. In other words, they were in rebellion from the United States of America and were an independent nation.Ezekiel got to enact a Show and Tell that was much better than the Friday phenomenon we 1950s kids got to do every so often in the Philadelphia school system. By order of God, he got to dig his way through a wall and carry out stuff on his shoulders the way Israelites had done in earlier deportations and would do as a result of their sinful behavior again. I noticed, too, that God was taking full credit for the actions that would occur, not just allowing them to happen, as so many Christians want to say about His way of doing things when evil hits His people. Verses 13-15 tell what God would do and why He would do it: "I shall also spread My net over him [the King of Israel], and he will be caught in My snare. And I shall bring him to Babylon in the land of the Chaldeans; yet he will not see it, though he will die there. And I shall scatter to every wind all who are around him, his helpers and all his troops; and I shall draw out a sword after them. So they will know that I am the LORD when I scatter them among the nations, and spread them among the countries." I've emboldened the font to make my point and put God's primary purpose in red as part of the NASB...Newly Annotated Sexton Bible!
Given that this is the day South Carolina lit the tinder for Civil War that blazed up on April 12, 1861, and given the condition of the Church in America and how we've failed to be salt and light in our nation, I wonder what sort of prophet God would send to us and what sort of message He would be conveying for how he would CAUSE us to "humble ourselves and pray, to seek his face and to turn from our wicked ways?" I know that the first part of the sentence in 2 Chronicles 7:13-14 goes like this, "When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people..." So...ugly events to bring about revival after some very hard lessons would be the fare of the century, I'm afraid.
Last night I finished, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America from 1815-1848, by Daniel Howe. He points out how the religious fervor of the age combined with the communication revolution of mass media and the telegraph to drastically transform the land and its people...I would say the preliminaries of how God Caused the Civil War. The Internet is a quantum leap in the communications revolution of our day. Religious fervor, frequently anti-Christian, abounds. I wonder what God's cooking up? After all, April 12, 2011 will be the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.
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