Over one million Americans have died in combat to preserve the United States of America. How does a nation produce such men and women, willing to give up everything in life for a cause, in many cases for those living in other nations who are oppressed by forces that they alone cannot withstand?

To learn this, we must remember something which few Americans know and fewer care about.  We must remember the Covenant that the first national government of the United States made with God.

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On April 30, 1789, the members of the United States federal government met together for the first time in St. Paul’s Cathedral in New York City to dedicate to God the newly formed nation under the just-ratified U.S. Constitution.  The new House of Representatives and Senate, along with the Supreme Court, declared in unison that this nation would be governed by God and the people would worship Him in the affairs of state and in their own lives.  No record of what was said exists – the occasion was too solemn for anyone to take notes.  But the event was known to all.

Within 50 years of making that Covenant with God, the United States of America was the envy of the world.  In commerce, in war, in the peace and tranquility of the lives of her citizens, The United States was unique.  The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville came here in the 1830’s and marveled at what he saw and heard.  He wrote a book called “Democracy in America” cataloguing those wonders, and gave God a significant place in his understanding of why this country above all others on the earth at the time was so blessed.

We made a Covenant with God.  We were blessed.  And then we broke it.

The United States of America made a Covenant with God, only the second nation in history to do so.  The first was ancient Israel, when the son of King David, Solomon, reputed by many to be the wisest man who ever lived, built the First Temple in Jerusalem in roughly the year 1008 B.C. and publicly dedicated it with a prayer recorded in the Bible in I Kings chapter 8, and again in II Chronicles 6:13 to 7:9.  In it, he caused the people to realize that they had responsibilities to God that they were commanded to carry out if they expected God’s favor to be upon them.  For many years they did, to the best of their ability, and they were blessed.  And then they broke it, and at length were carried away captive into Babylon.

God judges people individually, but He judges nations by the character of their leaders.  As Dr. D. James Kennedy said some years ago, “Ungodly leaders make ungodly decisions, and discourage a conscience toward God.”  Individuals receive grace only because of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, on the cross; nations receive grace in accordance with the conduct of their leaders and by extension, the conduct of the people they lead.  The United States had the first government in history that gave the common people permission to choose for themselves their leaders.  As we have seen, those choices have had history-changing consequences.

How does a nation break its Covenant with God?  The people of the United States kept it for almost two hundred years. How could a people so blessed by God suddenly decide to break the Covenant that was the source of their blessing?  What did they think could be gained by such a foolish act?  Did they know that they were doing such a deliberate and catastrophic deed?  The hard thing about law is that ignorance is no excuse.  God’s law is the same, it is in fact the source of man’s good laws; the bad ones men come up with themselves.  What those who broke the Covenant knew is irrelevant.  The fact that they broke it is the only thing that matters to God.

The concept of covenant is as old as man’s time on earth.  When two unfriendly tribes mutually decided to stop killing each other, the chiefs would slaughter a significant number of valuable animals, cut them in half and spread the bloody remains apart to create what was called “the walk of blood.”  The chiefs would then walk together through this path between the pieces pronouncing curses upon themselves and their children should they break the terms of the covenant.  This walk was repeated over and over again. They could hear each other and the more horrible and violent the curses each chief spoke against himself, his family, and his tribe – the more serious the other party listening would believe the covenant to be.  A covenant with God is as serious as anything on earth gets.

There is only one remedy for covenant-breaking; that is – repentance.  The offended party must be entreated to forgive the breach, to restore the good relationship that existed before the offense was given, to set aside what forms of retribution the offense must bring forth in the absence of heartfelt contrition.  Without repentance, contrition, humility, shame, and abject beseeching of the offended party to again honor the covenant, there can be no healing.

A tribe that broke covenant with a neighboring one could expect swift retribution from them – usually in the form of that tribe coming against the offenders and slaughtering every one of them, with particular attention to their chief.  The offended parties prevailed because, in a way, notwithstanding the violence of their acts, they had justice on their side and they somehow knew that they would prevail and they made war in the strength of that knowledge.

It is the same with God.  Hear the thunder of His Word – “In flaming fire taking vengeance upon them that know not God, and obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power.” (2 Thess 1:8).  This is the ultimate violence, yet God commands it because those who come before Him in their sins have rejected the New Covenant that is in Christ.

Repentance on behalf of our nation must be on a scale commensurate with the offense.  Scholars and archaeologists have estimated that there were at least 10,000 residents of the cities Sodom and Gomorrah.  God sought 10 righteous people out of that group and could not find them.  The result is recorded in Genesis 19:24-28.  All 10,000 or more, with the exception of Lot and his two daughters, perished for the lack of 10 who were faithful to God.  For a nation of 325 million such as ours, the same scale would call for no less than 325,000 Christians in this country to repent for our covenant-breaking and the tsunami of sin and depravity that have followed.  The strong suggestion of Scripture is that unless at least that many faithful Christians can be found who will take this critical step – to set aside a season of prayer, fasting, and weeping before the Lord for our arrogance and wickedness as a nation – His justice may demand that He do to us as he did to Sodom.

But to repent with knowledge and understanding, we as Americans must take to heart the event that caused us to break God’s Covenant. What could we as a people have done to cause such a catastrophic breach?  How, after all the nearly 200 years of blessing that a loving God had showered upon us, could we pour contempt upon His Name and by extension upon His Person?  If we cannot understand this, then we cannot repent as God would have us do if we are to be saved as a nation and again be what we once were, “a shining city on a hill.”

Exactly how did the United States of America break its nearly two century old Covenant with God?

Over fifty years ago this country, in the persons of eight Supreme Court justices, told God to leave our public schools.  Jesus said “bring the children to me” (Mk. 10:14, Luke 16:18) and these men said “No, the government will have them for itself and You can get out.”  God, His divine Majesty grievously offended, withdrew and now three generations of young Americans have spent roughly 30 hours a week for twelve years of their lives in a place where there is no truth, because the Truth has left.  There are subjects useful to the state, but almost nothing about character or morals.  The result of this is evident in our streets and the manifest corruption of virtually every aspect of American popular culture.

In 1960 Madalyn Murray O’Hair, founder of American Atheists, sued the Baltimore Public School System for requiring students to read from the Bible and to recite the Lord’s Prayer at school exercises. In a case titled Murray v. Curlett, she argued that such a requirement violated the First Amendment of the US Constitution in that it had the effect of establishing a religion.  Prior to this in 1955,  a man named Steven Engel, who was a founding member of the New York Civil Liberties Union, sued the New York Board of Regents for composing (but not requiring) a prayer to be said in its schools.   Ultimately the case was referred to the US Supreme Court and in 1962 in Engel v. Vitale, the court ruled 8-1 that recitation of prayer in public schools shall be unlawful, the first time God was ever ordered out of a government institution in the United States.

This obscenity against God’s majesty was repeated when O’Hair’s case was combined with others in Abington v. Schempp and on June 7, 1963 the Supreme Court decided, by the same 8-1 majority, that the corporate reading of the Bible and recitation of the Lord’s Prayer shall be unlawful in public schools as well.

Ruling to order God out in both cases were Chief Justice Earl Warren, John Harlan and William Brennan (all appointed by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower); Hugo Black and William Douglas (both appointed by Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt); Tom Clark who was appointed by Democratic President Harry Truman, and Byron White and Arthur Goldberg (both appointed by Democratic President John Kennedy).  The sole dissenting voice was Potter Stewart, appointed by Eisenhower.

Since these two blasphemous decisions, America has experienced one tragedy after another over the succeeding years.  Just five months after the second decision, John F. Kennedy was assassinated; in 1964 the Beatles came to America with sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll; in the early 1960’s also Feminism, the institutionalized hatred of men, spread in the United States; in 1968 The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated; in 1969 with the Stonewall Riots the homosexual movement became a nationwide demand for equal rights; on January 22, 1973 in Roe v. Wade the US Supreme Court, by a vote of 7-2,  legalized abortion in all 50 states, leading to the murder, so far, of about 60 million unborn children; two months later, on March 29, 1973 the United States withdrew in defeat from South Viet Nam; in 1981 the AIDS epidemic began; in 1987 the world came within ½ hour of total financial collapse; in 1993 the World Trade Center was bombed and on September 11, 2001 it was brought down.

The institution of matrimony has become so perverted that it is a direct slap in God’s face.  An activist US Supreme Court has again done its work.  Most egregiously, strong forces in this culture say that there are not the two genders that God created, but many, and people can be whatever gender they like and will make them feel good.  Moreover, society must accept these aberrations and anyone who objects is un-American.

There are other things as well, too numerous to mention.  But it seems clear that since our formal rejection of God, the name of this country is no longer “America the Beautiful” but “Ichabod.”  John Adams, our second president, said this: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In modern America, the man proves himself a prophet a million times a day.

Until there is a massive outpouring of repentance on the part of a sizable portion of the American Christian population over these and other affronts to God’s majesty, it is likely there will be more to come.  Read Isaiah 59:1-15, Isaiah 3:1-5, Amos 4:6-13, Hosea 4:6 – every one of these passages describes America today and if God be no respecter of persons, who is so bold as to say that these things may not fall upon us?

There is a remedy coming.  What remains to be seen is who will be serious enough to receive it.  For information on this, please visit https://thereturn.org/

Author Jim Kohlmann has a long history with Intercessors for America and serves as volunteer Florida State Director. Photo by Eleonora Patricola on Unsplash.