Chapter Seven: Our Place and Responsibility
Everything until now has looked backward, at what was planted, declared, paid for, and built. The turn now is toward you. A two hundred and fiftieth anniversary is not finally about the dead. It is about the living, who have been handed a country they did not make and a promise they did not write, and who will decide, by how they live, what the next stretch of the story looks like. One question stands at the end of it all, simple and personal. What now is ours to do?
Change starts where you would least expect it
It is tempting, when a person finally sees both the greatness and the drift of a nation, to look for the lever that would fix it. Surely the answer is the right leader, the right law, the right movement. But the whole history we have just walked says otherwise. The founders themselves said it. A free government, Washington warned, cannot stand on machinery alone; it rests on the religion and morality of its people. The trouble with the country, like the trouble with the world, was never finally a shortage of better systems. It was the human heart, and no election reaches that far down.
So real change does not begin in a capital. It begins in a heart, and then in a home, and then in a neighborhood, and only then, slowly, in a nation. This is not a way of dodging the public square. It is the only path that has ever actually changed a public square, because a people is only ever the sum of its persons, and persons are changed one at a time, from the inside. If you want to do something for your country on its anniversary, the most radical thing available to you is also the nearest: to let your own heart be set right, and then to live as one whose heart has been set right, where you are.
Christ first, and why that frees you
Here we have to be honest about where the deepest hope lies. America is one nation among the nations, given a time and a boundary by God like every other, capable of real good and real evil like every other, and certain, like every other, to pass. To pin your ultimate hope on it would be to build your house on sand. The hope that does not disappoint is a Person, not a country, and His kingdom does not rise and fall with any flag.
"And He said to him, 'YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND.' This is the great and foremost commandment." (Matthew 22:37-38).
That is the first thing and the highest thing, and everything else hangs from it. Before you are an American you are a creature made in the image of God, accountable to Him, and offered, through Christ, a reconciliation no government can give and no government can take away. The believer's deepest citizenship is not here at all.
"For our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ," (Philippians 3:20).
Notice that this does not make a person a worse citizen of his country. It makes him a better one. A man whose ultimate hope is secure in heaven is exactly the man who can love his earthly country honestly, without idolizing it and without despairing of it, free to tell the truth about it because his whole world does not depend on it. The Christians who have served their nations best have almost always been those whose first allegiance lay beyond them. First love God. Everything else finds its right size from there.
Then your neighbor, and then your country
The same Lord who named the first commandment named the second in the same breath.
"And the second is like it, 'YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.'" (Matthew 22:39).
This is where a changed heart leaves the church door and walks into the street. The freedom we have been celebrating was never given so that each person could chase his own appetite. That is the counterfeit liberty the founders feared and Scripture forbids.
"For you were called to freedom, brothers; only do not turn your freedom into an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another." (Galatians 5:13).
Love of neighbor is not an abstraction. It is the marriage kept, the child raised, the elderly parent cared for, the word kept, the debt paid, the truth told when a lie would be easier, the help given to the family down the street whose name you finally learned. A nation is healed or ruined in ten thousand such ordinary places long before it is healed or ruined in any famous one. The stone that the founders could not finish carving, a people actually treating one another as equal image-bearers, is still being carved, and the chisel is in your hand every day.
Out of that love, and only out of it, comes the stewardship of the particular gift this anniversary celebrates: liberty, law, and citizenship. The founders planted seeds that wither when no one tends them, and tending them is now your work, not someone else's. Tend the seed that says law answers to a higher authority than the will of the powerful, by being a person who answers to that higher authority yourself. Tend the seed that says those in office are bound under the law and not above it, by refusing to excuse in your own side what you would condemn in the other. Tend the seed that says liberty needs virtuous and watchful citizens, by being one: informed, honest, slow to rage, hard to deceive, and harder to buy. Teach your children what they have been given and what it cost, so that the memory does not die with the generation that still recalls it. Vote as one accountable to God. Pray, genuinely, for the people who hold authority, including the ones you did not choose.
"First of all, then, I exhort that petitions and prayers, requests and thanksgivings, be made for all men, for kings and all who are in authority, so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity." (1 Timothy 2:1-2).
And seek the good of the actual place God has set you, the city or the town or the county whose name is on your mail, as the exiles of old were told to seek the good of the city they lived in, knowing their own peace was bound up with its peace.
"Seek the peace of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to Yahweh on its behalf; for in its peace you will have peace." (Jeremiah 29:7).
The First Prayer in Congress, September 1774. Engraving by Henry S. Sadd after Tompkins H. Matteson, 1848.
Loving the Fourth rightly
So when the fireworks go up this year, love them. Mean it. There is no virtue in a sour heart that cannot rejoice over a genuine gift, and this country, for all its faults, is a genuine gift, paid for in blood and held together by mercy more often than it deserved. Love the Fourth. But love it the way you love anything rightly, with your eyes open, your hope anchored higher, and your hands ready to do the work of keeping it.
The promise made in 1776 was never finished. It was handed forward, generation to generation, each one receiving it imperfect and passing it on, and now it has reached you. The same providence that bent a treasure-hunter's voyage toward a freedom he never dreamed of, and that let men write a promise nobler than their own conduct, has run quietly through the whole of it, and it has not stopped running. Whether the next stretch of the story bends toward the promise or away from it will be decided, in part, by people doing small faithful things in unremarkable places, which is to say by people exactly like you. The whole sweep of it, from before 1776 to long after we are all gone, rests where it has always rested.
"and He made from one man every nation of mankind to inhabit all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us;" (Acts 17:26-27).
Nations are appointed their times. This one has had two hundred and fifty years of its time. It does not know how many remain, and neither do you. But the God who appoints those times is Himself before them and after them, and He is the one steady thing under a story that is still moving.
"Lord, You have been our dwelling place from generation to generation. Before the mountains were born Or You brought forth the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God." (Psalms 90:1-2).
That is where the hope is. Not in the nation, which is passing, but in the Lord of the nations, who is not. Love your country. Serve your neighbor. Keep the seeds alive. And give your whole heart, first and last, to the One who holds the beginning and the end of every story, this nation's included.
"I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, "who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty." (Revelation 1:8).
For Reflection
"Though God be pleased to lift man out of that dismal abyss of sin and woe into which he was fallen, and exceedingly to exalt him in excellency and honor, and to a high pitch of glory and blessedness, yet the creature hath nothing in any respect to glory of; all the glory evidently belongs to God, all is in a mere and most absolute and divine dependence on the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. And each person of the Trinity is equally glorified in this work: there is an absolute dependence of the creature on every one for all: all is of the Father, all through the Son, and all in the Holy Ghost. Thus God appears in the work of redemption as all in all. It is fit that he that is, and there is none else, should be the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the all, and the only, in this work."
Jonathan Edwards, God Glorified in Man's Dependence1
Edwards preached that at the very start of his ministry, and it is the right last word about a nation. Whatever good has come, in this people's story or any other, came down from God and runs back up to Him. The creature has nothing to boast of before its Maker, and the only fitting posture before such a God, for a person or a people, is gratitude and dependence.
"For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen." (Romans 11:36).
Hymn
O God, Our Help in Ages Past
Isaac Watts (1674-1748) wrote this hymn in 1719 as a paraphrase of the ninetieth psalm, the same psalm quoted in the close above, and a later age gave it the opening "O God" by which it is now best known. It is sung to the tune ST. ANNE, composed by William Croft. A family that has followed the whole story to its end can do little better than to sing, together, the truth it all comes to rest on: that the God who has been the dwelling place of His people from generation to generation is the one unchanging home when nations and ages roll away.2
O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.Under the shadow of Thy throne
Thy saints have dwelt secure;
Sufficient is Thine arm alone,
And our defense is sure.Before the hills in order stood,
Or earth received her frame,
From everlasting Thou art God,
To endless years the same.A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the op'ning day.O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Be Thou our guard while troubles last,
And our eternal home.
A Plea to the Lord of the Nations
Father of nations, before whom kingdoms rise and fall: we come in the name of Your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, King above every king and Lord above every lord. In Him alone is the freedom that lasts; the one the Son sets free is free indeed, and every liberty worth keeping is a faint and passing shadow of His.
For this shadow we thank You. Out of the plans of men who sought gold and glory and crowns, You brought a freedom they never intended, and You raised up a people, flawed and brave, who received it, paid for it in blood, and handed it on to us.
We have not kept it well. We have held a costly gift with careless hands, and spent what we did not buy. Forgive us.
You made us in Your image, answerable to You for all we do; a law can bind the hand, but You alone can turn the heart. Teach us to prize this freedom rightly, and to guard it for our neighbor as for ourselves. Where it has been kept, help us to hold it; where it has slipped away, give us wisdom to know the right way back, and the patience to walk it.
Be strong and courageous, You charged Your servant to keep Your word and never turn aside; go with us also, and be our courage to hold Your truth though it cost us, not for our comfort or our pride, but so that the gospel of Christ may still be offered freely, and hearts be won to Him, not herded by fear of earthly rulers, but drawn by the worth of who He is.
Renew in us the fear of You. Make us honest, watchful, and faithful. We love what is easy and admired; make us glad in the small work that no one sees, and brave for the hard work that no one wants, the labor, quiet or costly, that keeps a free people free. We ask this not for our own name, nor even for this nation's, but for the glory of Jesus Christ, the Savior of mankind, who was before this nation and will reign when it is gone, who holds the beginning and the end.
Amen.