Abraham Lincoln was not a genius (a life-long student of him said); he was a man who had natural powers and abilities, but raised some of them to genius levels. That is his ultimate gift to the remainder of us “normal” people: do the common things at the highest level possible. Don’t give up!

1. DISCOVER WHAT IT IS THAT YOU WILL DIE FOR IF NECESSARY. Something matters ultimately.

2. PREPARE FOR PEOPLE TO HATE YOU.  No president was ever hated as viciously as Lincoln; over three hundred direct threats were made against his life. Millions of southerners wanted him dead. (a) Nobody was ever loved by everybody, and you won’t be. (b) Criticism is often the death-gurgle of the non-achiever.

3. DON’T TRY TO “BUILD A LEGACY;” GET ON WITH WHAT IS AT HAND. Don’t try to be spectacular, but faithful.

4. FIND LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE TO WORK WITH.  Leave others behind, kindly. Like Lincoln, you may be forced, to work with your haters.

5. GET READY TO FAIL. No baseballer ever batted 1000. Lincoln was famous for failing, but he never left the battle.

6. READ, BECAUSE “LEADERS ARE READERS.” (a) Lincoln had ONE year of “formal” education, but read voraciously. (b) His favorites: the Bible, Aesop, Parson Weems, Gibbons, Voltaire, Shakespeare.  (c) And MUCH more, including the daily newspapers. He read aloud!

7. DO THAT WHICH IS AT HAND EVEN IF IT SEEMS MILES FROM YOUR GOAL.

8. BELIEVE THAT GOD HAS A SPECIAL, PARTICULAR CALLING ON YOUR LIFE. (a) God never created any human for whom He had no agenda! (b) Lincoln was ambitious, specifically, “to so something before I die to earnthe esteem of my fellow man.” (He said that at twenty-three. He, apparently, NEVER thought of becoming President until perhaps a year, maybe two, before he did.)

9. WHEN THE BATTLE IS OVER, PUT YOUR WEAPONS DOWN AND GO HOME WITH “MALICE TOWARD NONE AND CHARITY FOR ALL.”

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not hold a slave.”
“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”
“I do the very best I can. I mean to keep on going. If the end brings me out all right, then what is said against me won’t matter. If I’m wrong, ten angels swearing I was right won’t make a difference.”
“No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.”

An earthquake, of truly seismic proportions, is coming to America, and to all of western civilization. It is going to shake us as nothing has in modern history since, say, the sixties, where its roots were already spreading throughout the world and are now culture-wide. There is now no place to hide.

The issue has to do with the very way we think of humanity, of social forces of every kind, of all (all!) human relations, in fact, of what it actually means to be human.

My focus here is that all this has invaded the church. Often subtly, sometimes openly, it is pervasive among believers, even evangelical ones, those who have historically held (purportedly) a high view of the biblical witness. Sadly, most of it (some would say all of it) is, at its base, provably anti-biblical.

A leading figure in American evangelicalism has spoken, and what he says demands our attention. Voddie Baucham, Jr., has written “Fault Lines” (Salem Books, 2021), in which he addresses, from a biblical perspective (a) what these movements are, (b) what they affirm and deny, (c) their baleful influence, (d) the measure to which they influence the church, (d) the inevitable (in his view) monstrous cultural earthquake which is upon us because of the influence of such movements, (e) how Christians can best save ourselves, our children, our churches, and our culture in the light of the impending rift, and (f) much else!

My entire purpose here is to simply encourage you to purchase, read, and study, the book immediately, and to encourage others to do so as well, if the book helps you. It could well serve as a bedrock primer for discussions of such issues in the culture, and, specifically, in the church.

Voddie Baucham brings to the task a keen mind, a passionate heart, brilliant logic, serious historical research, a thoroughgoing biblical worldview, and an exceptional life-long track record as a pastor/educator/author.

This is the one book, outside the Bible, that you need to study this year.

(PS: If you have time, and have further interest on the issue of racism/anti-racism in the world, I suggest a riveting book, almost a pamphlet (99 pages), “Racism and anti-racism since 1945” by Dr. Kathleen Brush (Bowker Publishing, 2020, ISBN 978-092882351) who has spent over thirty years reviewing international statistics on the subject. Brush reviews world-wide racism/anti-racism, from 1945—the date of the founding of the United Nations when all 193 nations signed an agreement to work against racism—and the results of the effort. She concludes by saying, and proving to her satisfaction, that no nation except the US ever took the task seriously, and that America is the least racist of all developed countries on earth. She quotes the well-known Somali-born black woman Ayaan Hirsi Ali from Stanford, agreeing with her: “America is the best place on the planet to be black.” (p.75)

One of the benefits of the book is that the reader can discover where slaves are bought and sold all over the globe. Today.

Recently, John Piper wrote an article entitled “Politics, Persons, and Paths to Ruin” relating to the upcoming presidential election.

His essential argument is that Trump’s character is at least as corruptive of American society (if not actually more so) than any of his policies, however beneficial. 

Piper, appropriately, reminds modern Christian leaders of the various sins of character, specifically as manifested (one assumes) in the president—pride, arrogance, narcissism, factiousness, boastfulness, etc.,—helping us along with the actual New Testament Greek word-meanings—and reminds us that their baleful influence, “if unrepented”, will send men and nations to hell.

Well taken. Which pastor (he was one for many years and is surely focusing on pastoral responsibilities here) does not know all this, and which mature pastor is not busily reminding himself and his congregation of the eternal judgment—not to mention the disastrous effects on his culture—against practitioners of such acts. 

Piper’s problem, he says, is that we all must realize that the power of a leader over a society is not only his policies, but his person. In fact, his personal behavior may well outweigh all the good his policies might produce. All of this has him in a quandary (he is “baffled”) as he faces the voting booth. Does he vote Biden, Trump, or Third Party? Or no one?

(1) When was this not the case, to some extent, in any presidential election? Which candidate, this side of Lincoln (although he was despised by millions, and labeled as an atheist by then-current democrats) lived a Christian life of true biblical distinction? Or at least manifested a commonly-accepted “natural revelational” morality? And which one does so in the coming election? Seriously: if Trump fails the test, which candidate does not?

(2) To state the obvious: We always have a binary choice in such settings. We don’t have six options. Neither St. Thomas Aquinas nor Mother Teresa is on the ballot.  

(3) It could be argued that the moral thing to do is not to vote at all, but that is simply a vote for the (perceived or actual) worst candidate. I repeat: who ever, in any American presidential election, has the choice of biblical worthies on the ballot?

(4) Piper mentions civic duty. When the cost to Americans for the right to vote, and the paucity of countries where such a right actually exists, some sort of idiocy is manifest if we make light of the privilege of voting. Perhaps we’ll feel differently when we lose that right. (I, personally, am little exercised about the morality of those who help America retain the right. I hope someone, a pure pagan if necessary, preserves it for my progeny. I have traveled the world.)

(5) If we “treat as minimal” (his words, his worry) Trump’s personal sins and overlook his (and our) obvious moral faults, and do not keep them before him and us, God help us! And if we have not preached, and lived, against every sin Piper lists, it is high time for distinctions between personal behavior and policies. For the president and for us. And high time for repentance.

But if we vote for another candidate who holds that it is acceptable to murder infants inside their mothers’ bodies—over 60 millions since Roe—we have no right to be labeled rational. Or religious. Maybe sane. 

While reading, at random, last night, I focused on Psalm 83. And was astonished.

It is a prayer OF Israel FOR Israel, which every Christian American will do well to pray for America. Immediately! And often. It is aptly entitled, in one commentary, “Prayer, the Reaction in Crisis.”  

The prayer focuses on deliverance from enemies, foreign and domestic. “No such widespread alliance of adjacent states as is described in vv. 6-8 is mentioned in the Old Testament.”

The purpose of Israel’s enemies:

“They have said, ‘Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation, that the name of Israel may be remembered no more.’”

It calls for God’s immediate action and asks for two results:

“That they (the enemy peoples) may seek your name, O God,”(v.16)
and
“That men may know that you, whose name alone is Jehovah, and the most high over all the earth.” (v.18)

Israel was not (ever!) perfect, but the people desperately wanted peace in their land and for God to get all the glory for their deliverance in a horrific time of need. 

We need millions of praying people reading and praying Psalm 83 for America.

Bill Anderson

This is the first letter of this sort in my more-than-half-a-century in Christian ministry. It comes out of a stark sense of incomprehensibility, and has to do with your call for the eviction of the current American president. 

I will be brief: (a) You have caught the president out as a moral failure. Congratulations. (b) You say he is a hypocrite. I repeat, congratulations. You are right on both counts.

My simple question is, why not the same treatment of past presidents? Why nothing about the “normalcy” of American presidential hypocrisy? Think of his predecessor, an inveterate and egregious liar. Did you ever call for the removal from the oval office of Bill Clinton? Or presidents Kennedy and Johnson, both famously immoral? 

Two questions: (a) Will every human being stand before God and give an account for his/her actions? (b) If so, how will any of our recent presidents escape hell for being murderers? For making heroes and heroines out of people who kill unborn babies, are good with their bodies being cut apart and marketed piece-meal for personal profit, while being unable to decide exactly how long abortion escapees should be allowed to live?

Maybe another question: (c) How many future American babies will have a chance at life because Mrs. Clinton did not become president, and Mr. Trump did? (d) Maybe a fourth: how many hundreds of thousands of babies might be saved – in the next fifty years – because of Supreme Court appointees by our current hypocrite of a president?

The recitation of Mr. Trump’s sins would make a multi-volume biography. Our presidential choices are difficult since – which may come as a surprise to you – each is binary. We don’t have seven choices.

What you have written will galvanize many against a “Christian” periodical which tells us who is and who is not truly repentant. (Thanks for that; we haven’t had anybody with that ability around since Jesus was here.) It will, as well, galvanize many conservative voters, who, in binary choices, will vote for the candidate who gets the big things right, however clayey his feet. 

Sincerely,

William E. Anderson

Americans are hearing a lot about reparations, that is, repayment to blacks for their suffering caused by America’s slavery past.

The enslavement of blacks in the US is a horrific chapter in our national history. Period. Full stop. End of story.

Assuming modern Americans should pay for the sins of our fathers, however, even if reparations seem to be a part of the solution, is a classic Gordian knot.

What algorithm is capable of determining equitable payment for such loss to a modern black person? Down to, say, the third generation away from any slaveholder?

What about the black who has absolutely no sense of such pain, because in their specific context, they did not suffer?

If it is impossible—as is often said, as a predicate for reparations—for a white person to understand the burden of a person of color in America, it is also impossible for a person of color to understand how it feels to be born with a white skin and being held guilty for a crime in which he had absolutely no involvement. (That would obviously include the non-black American whose forbears immigrated to America after 1865, and who, therefore, had no relationship to slavery. Does he pay up? If so, why, and, again, how would his debt be equitably determined?)

And then there are the descendants of the hundreds of thousands of whites who lost their lives in the Civil War to free black slaves. Reparations from their descendants?

What is to be done about the descendants of black slavers/slaveholders, including blacks who captured slaves in west Africa and sold them to slavers, black and white?

What about the slaveholders, and their descendants, who treated their slaves with kindness and gentility, as fellow human beings, who saw that they received an education, and freed them of their own will? Maybe a ten percent break on the fine?

Interestingly, I have never heard any call for modern slaveholders in various mid-eastern countries to free their slaves and pony up. (Check the web, and various histories of the middle east. See, especially, the acknowledged guru on the subject, the late Bernard Lewis’ “What Went Wrong?”)

Perhaps the best way forward is to understand that all individuals and all collections of individuals, skin-color aside, are actual sinners. And maybe it is time for all well-meaning people to admit our sins and move on: Catholics for Torquemada, Protestants for Calvin’s Geneva (and Servetus), Muslims for their sixth-century ravages across the mid-east (and modern jihadism), Anglicans for King Henry VIII, American southern evangelicals for serious anti-black sentiment (I pastored a church in the south which for its first 118 years had never received a person of color into its membership!), Mexicans for what they did to the Aztecs, Mayans, Toltecs, et al., early Americans for what they did to aboriginal peoples in the western hemisphere, blacks for white-prejudice/mistreatment and whites for black-prejudice/mistreatment, and much else (!)and get on with doing the best to pursue justice and opportunity for everybody.

America’s curse is that our founders set such a high standard for us and our failure to achieve their ideals. That curse is, at the same time, our glory. America has lifted more people out of poverty, has raised the living standards for more disenfranchised people, liberated more people, and accepted more immigrants than any nation in human history, but we—like every other nation on earth—have much to regret and a long way to go toward acceptable behavior.

The whiny tit-for-tat “who-owes-who-for-what-and-for-how-much” game could easily go nuclear and destroy us. Like MAD, the Mutual Assured Destruction of the Cold War days.

Nothing must prevent us—today—from doing what is right about injustices of any serious sort, but one can hope we will soon tire of dragging corpses about and move on to a better future. Now. The impetus? Just this: it is better to fail in a grand cause then to succeed in a debased one.

Bill Anderson
Grapevine, Texas

The word “incredible” is seriously over-worked, but it fits here: America’s response to recent events in Washington, DC is truly incredible.

“What,” you ask, “is happening in DC?”

How about, for the first time in American history, a serious attempt at a coup d’etat, that is, the overthrow of a duly-elected president? The incredible? Our general attitude about it. Our hair ought to be on fire, but we’re glued to “Cupcake Wars,” either metaphorically or actually.

(1)  I am not sure a single anchor on a major television company, excepting Fox, would not be elated if such a coup occurred. And joyously report as news whatever aids and abets such an act, regardless of a total lack of accuracy or pertinence of their charges against the president.

(2)  A “special counsel” with immense resources and illimitable time is desperately attempting to find cause to unseat the president. Period. There is no reason to believe they will ever forsake their goal, even if, as currently, not a scintilla of evidence of anything akin to “high crimes and misdemeanors” on the part of the president exists.

(3)  Key members of the FBI and Justice Department (heretofore the envy of the world!) have admitted their desire, and actual attempts, to remove the president from office, going so far as to seek out any of the president’s staffers who might help them depose him, confessing a plot to wear wires to catch him out. And casually reporting their efforts to giddy major television interviewers, while getting richer by writing self-adulatory books for their crimes. A dozen of them—and their acolytes—should be in orange jump-suits. No, this is not about a banana republic; this is about the greatest nation that ever existed on earth. And we sit unabashed.

(4)  Before the president was actually installed, there were—and continue to be—howls from members of Congress for his impeachment, and it is openly discussed throughout the media/political realm as a real possibility. (Another openly-discussed subject: must the military get involved?)

(5)  Etc., ad infinitum!

This is no call for the beatification of our current president; it is to state the facts. Listen up: a coup of an American president! How is that not incredible? Why are not Americans, of every stripe, marching in the streets, screaming by every means possible that this is a violation of the very first foundational principle of American political philosophy and practice—the right of Americans by means of the ballot box to determine the shape and practice—and leaders— of our political process?

In a secularized society, as America certainly is, the right to vote is, to use theological language, sacrosanct, the cardinal virtue. It is at the very apex of American societal practice. And extremely rare on the planet. But we are so far down the road—can you bear to hear it?—that a visceral and cerebral (I admit, with low-powered batteries) hatred for America dominates the seats of power in the country. The proof? Ponder this: he who believes non-Americans should have the right to vote in our elections hates America. What is it but idiocy for census-takers to be disallowed to ask if a resident is actually an American? Further: he who does not accept the absolute necessity of secure borders hates America. How in the name of common logic does either position make sense? You’re reading this and wondering, “Why, in the name of God, are such subjects even up for discussion?” That’s because you’re rational. Rationality, alas, is a foreign country to the America-haters on the left. Think AOC!

Are any serious prosecutions in the works against the coup d’etaters? Surely you jest. Hatred for America in high places is incurably toxic, but very chic. Being otherwise makes it much more difficult to get to DC. Or to stay there.

Bill Anderson
Grapevine, Texas

More about America’s descent into barbarism as indicated by recent legislation in New York state. (See Descent – Part A). Consider twenty questions:

1. How is it that an immigrant has the immediate and full protection of the US Constitution upon setting his/her foot on US soil when a child born in America does not have a single constitutional right?

2. If an unmarried teenage girl gives birth and tosses her baby into a dumpster, can she be tried for murder if the baby dies? Or any other crime whether the child lives or dies?

3. What happens to the medical personnel and/or institution which refuses to perform an abortion?

4. What will the response of our Catholic friends be? (My prediction: they will be stupefied or stupid. No criticism of Catholics, but historically they have been staunchly pro-life. My hope is that biblically-literate evangelicals—my crowd—will be stupefied into serious action.)

5. The fifth amendment of the US Constitution guarantees “due process of law” (against, among other things, deprivation of “loss of life or liberty”). Shall we revoke the amendment? (An amendment, by the way, which is the envy of the world and purchased with the blood of American patriots.)

6. Who will determine at which age the life of an abortion escapee must be protected under US Constitutional law?

7. Under NY law, if a normal child is born and the mother chooses not to let it live, how, precisely, will the life of the child be terminated? Is it given water? Food? An injection to make passage easier for the child? Gentle suffocation? Who, precisely, makes such a decision?

8. Does such legislation lead us to the persistently repeated promise of “few, safe, and legal” abortions?

9. Are we on the road to the time when the state, and not the mother, will be able to dictate which child may live and which may not?

10. Should American taxpayers continue to pay over 40% of Planned Parenthood’s abortion bill— over half a billion dollars a year—when most of us decry the act?

11. Why is there no provision in the bill against the widespread selling of fetal tissue/parts? Remember “I want a Lamborghini?” (To put it otherwise: if it is morally acceptable to make money by taking a baby’s life, why is it morally unacceptable to make money by selling parts of him?)

12. What effect will all this have on the life of the elderly who, like babies, are economically non-productive, thus expendable? If an infant’s personhood may be denied, why not that of the elderly?

13. A healthy baby is born; the mother doesn’t want him to live; the father does; does the father have legal grounds against the mother?

14. Why is there no feminist outcry about more female babies being aborted than males, as is the case?

15. How far are we from some government functionary telling us which babies may be allowed to live or not? (I am thinking here of babies who may be discovered, either in-utero or after birth, having some abnormality: mental, emotional, physical, societal, or imagined.)

16. Can any Democrat who is openly pro-life be elected to the presidency? To the Congress? Same, by the way, with pro-lifers!

17. Lincoln once said about the central moral issue of his day (as abortion is of ours), “As I would not be a slave, I would not hold a slave.” Does his unimpeachable logic hold in the current situation?

18. Jesus once said that we should do to others what we wish they would do to us. Does His unimpeachable logic hold in the current situation?

19. Do you, personally, ever wonder what the Creator thinks about this issue? (Yes, of course, you believe in Him! You know the eminent Russian philosopher, Nikolai Berdyaev, was right when he wrote, “If God does not exist, anything goes,” and you don’t want somebody shooting your kids at school today and giving in defense, before the jury, “I agree with Berdyaev; there is no God and therefore I cannot be held accountable.”)

20. When Mother Teresa was asked, in an American television interview, about the future of western civilization, she said that when a woman can kill the baby she’s carrying for no reason but a dislike for the inconvenience, “there is not much in western civilization worth saving.”

An Irishman, Jonathon Swift, who has the reputation of being the most gifted satirist in the English language, wrote, with withering wit, about how to solve the problem of unwanted babies being aborted in Ireland in his day (in 1729!). You will never forget his “A Modest Proposal,” which is horrific, but, says a biographer, “The proposal is no more shocking than the condition which calls it forth.” The essay sounds, well, very New Yorkish.

Did you think America couldn’t fall off the floor?

Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, is lauding the state legislature for overwhelmingly adopting legislation which takes away every vestige of legal protection for a human being from the moment of conception until some undefined point after the child is born.

Several significant facets of the legislation shock the onlooker: (a) The age at which an abortion-escapee might be allowed to live is not determined. Will anybody be surprised if it’s two years? (One Democrat politician says that no result of a pregnancy should be labeled “human” until it has left the hospital.) (b) No doctor is required to do the abortion; nurses, physicians assistants, midwives, etc., may perform the procedure in “non-surgical or chemical” ways. (Would he be sued for producing an abortion if, say, a mechanic was the closest available thing to a medical practitioner?) (c) If a pregnant woman is injured and loses a pregnancy—no matter how far along she is—no homicide charges may be made against the killer of her unborn child.

All perceptive Americans said, following Roe v Wade in 1973, this is not the end, but the beginning. So here: this new state law in New York is not the end, either. Cuomo said the move was “progressive.” One asks, “Progressing toward what?” “What next step of ‘progress’ might we expect?” And, “What does a progressive Nirvana look like in its final stage?” There is no need to warn you, dear reader, that the idea of “death panels” for the elderly is still very close to the hearts of the left. If an infant is denied life because he/she is an inconvenience and/or he/she is economically non-productive…well, do the logic. Again, we predicted that back in 1973.

The most horrific charge, perhaps, that God made against old Israel, was that she had “the forehead of a harlot,” meaning the people had lost the capacity to blush. The Brit Stuart Barton Babbage once said, “Humans are the only animals that blush—or need to.” In the New York senate chamber, there were no reports of anyone blushing. New Yorkers rose in thunderous applause at the news of the new legislation. And Cuomo, getting into the spirit of the moment, had pink lights turned on in city buildings.

In the year 2016, 87,325 abortions were reported(!) in New York City alone. Imagine a city of that size losing all its inhabitants in a geological disaster! We’d be aghast. Well, we would have been aghast. Not now. We don’t need a disaster from the outside; we create them ourselves. (For a wider canvas, since Roe, over 60 million abortions have occurred in America. That’s the size of England. Or Italy.)

We have it on the authority of the moral illuminati of the left that we should treat M-13 animals with care because “every human has a bit of divinity in them.” “Divinity” for the blood-thirsty slaughterers, dissection (and sales!) for American babies. Tears for the brutish; trash cans for babies.
The graveyard of nations is jammed with remnants of once-powerful empires, even civilizations. In fact, that is the theme, the central ontological reality, the “bottom line” of this thing called history for collectives whose morals go south—as America is experiencing. You could call it falling off the floor into graves.

In the meantime: (a) Don’t give up! Outlive and outlove the moral idiots. (b) Don’t sell out or sit out; get up and get out and “tell the generation following” (Psalm 48:13) the glorious—and unchanging—truth of God’s word and way. (c) Finish your course with joy (Acts 20:24)! America is over-run with mean-spirited down-in-the-mouth grumblers. Refuse to drink their enervating elixir! (d) Anticipate the moment George Bernard Shaw once spoke of when he predicted a day when “God will step onto the stage of history and say, ‘Gentlemen, the play is over!'” A memorable line from a famed playwright!

A final word: God the Almighty will judge America for her moral turpitude as surely as the sun runs its diurnal course. (The applause/apoplexy factor on that occasion, by the way, will be intriguing.) There is only one escape from such a day: God yielding His throne to Mr. Cuomo and his ilk. Don’t bet the farm on that happening. Long shot.

Bill Anderson
Grapevine, Texas