In God We Trust
IT’S WORTH CONSIDERING
When Moses was preparing the Israelites to finally enter the Land of Promise after forty years of wandering in the wilderness, he issued a stern warning saying,
“The Lord will open for you His good storehouse, the heavens, to give rain to your land in its season and to bless all the work of your hand; and you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow” (Deut. 28:12).
Five hundred years later, Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, explained the consequences of borrowing when he wrote:
The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower becomes the lender’s slave (Proverbs 22:7).
God, through Moses and Solomon, was telling the Israelites what would keep them from becoming the people He created them to be-borrowing from other nations. The same holds true for America as well. When our nation was founded, the Word of God (the Bible) was our most important “document.” Our schools taught the Word of God; our government was organized based on the Word of God: our legal system was based on the Word of God, and our government ran its finances according to the Word of God.
Gradually, however, we, in our infinite wisdom and our increasing greed, devised a system whereby we could draw money from the future so we could have now what we knew we really couldn’t afford. As we entered the wonderful world of credit, we established classes of borrowers and lenders. Keep in mind that the concept of borrowing and lending had been around for a long time, but the view had always been that lending was good and borrowing was bad, just as God had said (Deut. 15:6). Our problem was that we came to believe that borrowing was actually good because it allowed us to have the things we wanted.
Fast forward to the present and we see that every strata of our society has become burdened by the debt we have incurred through borrowing. According to “Money Talks,”three new reports show that the average American debt is more than $10,000 and collection abuse is soaring. Our national debt is on its way to 16 trillion dollars.
AS I SEE IT
American voters are desperate for a leader or leaders who will bring the changes necessary to allow us to balance our national budget sometime in the near future. What we fail to realize is that our elected leaders are products of the culture that has learned to embrace credit. We all like to blame the other political party for the financial mess we’re in, but the root of the problem is that Americans, and especially Christians, have abandoned our nation’s motto, which, ironically, is printed on our money. Look at the back side of a dollar bill and think about what is written there: IN GOD WE TRUST.
If the American people, led by the example of Christians, were living according to God’s clearly laid out mandates regarding our finances, we would be producing politicians who also held and lived by those principles. If American churches had been teaching their members to trust God for what He wanted them to have instead of satisfying their cravings at every step, our entire society would have taken notice and made some changes.
It’s sad how far we’ve drifted from the simple financial principles laid out in the Bible and in our national motto. Now that we’ve near the bottom, maybe we’ll start paying attention. We (and our nation) must repent and take some painful steps. We’re hanging on to a lot that needs to go. God is willing to heal what’s broken, but we must be willing to put our trust in Him, no matter what.
ON THE LIGHTER SIDE
The book of incantations was useless. The author had failed to run a spell check.
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