America is awash with yellers lately. Cascades. Cataracts. I listen to a lot of it. I think it is about 98.035% blather. Yes, blather.

I’ll be brief, and quiet. But I pose a simple question: is it possible that we’re whacking at the leaves of the trouble-tree and not the root?

Jesus did few things more crucial than this: all previous reformers hacked at the branches of humanity’s true problems, but with His coming, John the Baptist (imperiously!) said this about Jesus, “…now is the axe laid to the root of the tree.” (Matthew 3:10) Western civilization happened because He came and put the axe where it solved the problem. And all the smart leaf-hackers put down their axes.  

For the moment, let us assume all modern would-be solutionists are honorable, but let us confess the possibility that there are too many leaf-hackers and too few root-hackers. The roots of the current civilizational kerfuffle?  I suggest three:

HISTORY

If you don’t have time to read the US Constitution (you might have to start your nightly protest an hour later), or even the Preamble to it, stop now and read the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln said he had never had a political thought which did not arise directly from the Declaration. 

The pursuit, however imperfect and intermittent, of the values stated there explains why America is so exceptional. Why over 400 thousand White Americans gave their lives to free (finally) over four million black slaves. (Nothing like that has ever happened on the earth.)  Or why America has liberated an estimated 400 million people in our history. (When did Russia or France or China, or anyone else, ever liberate anybody?) Why American blacks are more privileged than in any other country on earth. Why (as a black economist says) the amount of money in black American hands would make them the ninth largest economy on earth. Or why (!) America receives over a million immigrants, of all colors, every year, as we have for decades. And why hundreds of millions more want to come.

HOME

The building blocks of civilization are families, the more nuclear, the better. A man and a woman (those being the only genders God created) rearing children, through thick and thin, in love and patience, all the while preparing the children to face, with grit and grace, the challenges they will infallibly encounter. Even if some marriages won’t make it, still, the essence of a nuclear family must be pursued, with avidity, if a civilization wishes to stay alive.

The family in America, in general, is suffering terribly, but that is especially true of black families. Seventy percent of all black pregnancies are aborted. (Some black lives apparently don’t matter much.) Seventy percent of black babies who are born arrive in fatherless homes.

White marriage is also in a perilous state in America. Over 60 million babies have been aborted since Roe. Those are the ones we know about. The whole idea of a nuclear family has become a joke among our “elites;” nothing but a modern form of slavery. That is a root problem which we ignore at our peril.

HIM

Jesus, that is. Hear me carefully: no problem I have mentioned can be resolved by political processes. If that were true, God would have sent us a politician. If poverty were the problem, God would have sent us a banker. (America has spent trillions on black poverty and made it more widespread.)  If ignorance were the problem, God would have sent us a philosopher. Because every human is a sinner, God sent us a savior. Which is precisely what both individuals and families and nations need.  That includes you, in case you’re wondering. 

Of course, legislators must legislate, but they must do so with the roots in mind! And you and I will, necessarily, spend some of our precious time trimming the shrubs, but we simply cannot forget the roots. The fundamentals. The basic things. The tough stuff. If you and I and others don’t get the roots fixed, we are (to change the metaphor), but shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. 

Hear this: your relationship to God is truly the root of the matter, all matters, because, simply but profoundly put “…if the root is holy, so are the branches.” (Romans 11:16) And that is the root of our national troubles as well.  

Sound radical? It is! Ah, but the word “radical” comes from the Latin word “radix” which means…you guessed it, “root.”

Dear ______________,

A full-time university student!  Since this is a once-in-a-lifetime-experience for you, I will be a little loquacious, but you just have to deal with it!

How well I remember my first university days!  I felt as if I was swimming in an immense pool of pure stun: the campus, the students from all over the earth, the libraries, the campus signature spots, the professors, the lectures, the sports scene, etc., etc., ad nauseum, ad gloriam!  It wasn’t just that I was the first university student in my family’s history—that would have been enough—it was the atmosphere, the sights/sounds /smells/tastes/textures of a community of scholars pursuing knowledge, and all that went with it.  And now it’s yours!

My counsel?  (a) Appreciate the privilege of swimming in that same pool; a university education is a rare commodity in the earth.  (b) Leave the University a better place than you found it, with the fragrance of your life lingering there on your departure.  (c) Quietly demand of yourself that you will believe that you can do that; the profoundest mystery of human life is that each of us is a creature, but a cause as well, and most of us emphasize the “creature” and not the “cause” aspect.  (d) Start and enjoy personal relationships with faculty and administrators as well as students; they’re people, too; you’ll be richer for it and they will be as well.  (e) Choose your friends with care, because many of them will be friends for life, and will—in some ways—define you as you will them. (Remember: each of our four children found their mates at university.  Scary!)  (f) Be especially mindful of international students, and the “unimportant” (who don’t exist!).  Every human is equidistant from God!  (g) Remember who you are and Whose you are!  (h) Walk into every class-room, not with pride, but with your head up and your shoulders back with a quiet serenity, as if you’re a champion.  You are!  (i). Enjoy!

Note that I didn’t say, “hit the books;” I know you’ll do that naturally and well.  I didn’t want to waste space.

_______, you’re a winner, and a champion.  And, like your parents and your sibling, I adore you and I’m proud of you.

Sincerely,

DAH

On April 19, 1775, in Lexington, Massachusetts, the first shot of the American Revolutionary War was fired and was labeled—in a bit of overstatement—“the shot heard ‘round the world.”  Without overstatement, the true “shot heard ‘round the world” was fired yesterday, June 26, 2013 in Washington, D. C.  Actually “shots.”  The Supreme Court sent down two rulings which have changed America forever, in fact, which have un-Americanized America.

First the Court said, in effect, to the state of California: “No matter what citizens in a given state vote for (Californian voters had overwhelmingly voted to overturn Prop 8), we, the Court, may well overturn their vote.  Our vote counts; yours does not.  In a second matter, relating to the Defense of Marriage Act, the vote of the court (in five years or so, say proponents) will legalize same-sex marriage in all states, with such unions receiving all the federal benefits (over 1100 of them) due to traditional marriages today.  (A question: now that no law prohibits me from marrying a Cocker Spaniel, if I precede my canine spouse in death, does it continue to receive Social Security benefits?)  

As an interesting footnote, an echo of Washington, D.C., as it were, the Texas legislature—on the same day–in attempting, among other things, to stop abortions in the state beyond twenty-two weeks, was filibustered causing a delay of the vote—by two minutes beyond the legal time-line–requiring that the legislature meet in special session to re-vote.  Note: the vote, which was passed too late to be legal, sought only to stop abortions after twenty-two weeks, but the abortionists want more blood, both early and late.  Even if they lose now, they won’t later.

I am writing you this note to my children and grandchildren, after seventy-seven years of observing –and loving!–America to say America is no more.  America is gone.  We have seen it coming, in spades, since the sixties, but now it has arrived.  I mean the America as founded on a constitution and by men who were motivated by conservative values (a “conservative” being a person who wishes to conserve foundational values of natural law, even if not biblical law).  Any conservative who denies my assessment needs only to be asked to name the last conservative victory attained at the federal level.  Add to that (a) a profoundly distrusted federal government in free-fall, (b) the accruing of an astronomical national debt which is fatally inimical to national health, (c) a burgeoning and rapidly growing underclass which sees itself as entitled to “womb-to-tomb” care by the nation’s tax-payers, (d) a refusal or inability to protect America’s borders (which no nation has survived), and (e) the commonly-and-openly expressed hatred for God, the Bible, and Christians.  Malcolm Muggeridge once said of western culture: “…the last foothold of law and order is being dislodged; we may expect the darkness.”

1.  None of that should surprise us; we have the explicit teaching of the Bible on the subject.  (See II Timothy 3:1-5!  And Romans 1:21-32 where God’s life-sized portrait of natural man is displayed.  And Revelation 18 which depicts the rapid fall of man’s final society—Mystical Babylon. The rapidity is shocking. 

2.  None of that should make us think our walk is going be as easy as it was for recent generations—even my own!  We have lived in a bubble of God’s protection and gracious deliverances as a nation.  Now, things are (and will increasingly become) changed, and we will do what our godly forbears did–and what our contemporary brothers and sisters in Christ are doing around the globe–we shall learn to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.  But sing it we shall!  (Study carefully Psalm 137 which depicts Israel in such a situation in Babylon.)

3.  None of that should prevent us from being salt and light in a putrifying and darkening culture. (Matthew 5:13-16)  Doesn’t take a lot of salt to save a boiled egg and a flash-light no larger than my thumb allows me to walk safely through a huge building on the darkest night.  THAT IS OUR BIG ASSIGNMENT! 

4.  None of that should cause us to forget that there are many truly godly people in America–scores of millions of them(!), and much ministry that honors God, and points others to heaven while helping them in practical and mundane ways to cope with life’s challenges, all of which blesses our country and honors God. 

5.  None of that should steal our joy!  Paul spoke in Acts 20:24–as he faced certain death– of “finishing his course, his race, with joy !”  (The larger context of Acts 20:17-38 is a rich study, especially fitted for modern saints in Babylon.) 

PS: On yesterday, June 27, 2013, something else, “under the radar” and without press coverage, happened as well.  In my tiny niche in earth-and-time-space, thirty-two  youngsters attending Vacation Bible School at First Baptist Church, Grapevine, Texas, made first-time professions of faith in Christ as their Savior and Lord! Reminds me of Leigh Hunt’s:

“Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I’m growing old, but add…Jenny kissed me!

(None of that is true of me, except the Jenny line!  “Jesus” fits there for us and His new converts.  That’s the really big news of the day!)

He may never have read—in fact there are palpable evidences he hasn’t—the biblical mandate to Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply,” but, whether consciously or unconsciously (my bet), he’s obeying it.  “He?”  One Howard Veal, from Muskegon, Michigan, of whom it is reported that he has produced 23 children by 14 women.  He is now in legal trouble because he either cannot or will not support the women and children financially.  Or in much of any other way as well. (He owes over $500,000 in child support.)

No observant American can be surprised.  In fact, Veal is a piker compared to one Desmond Hatchett of Knoxville who reportedly produced 30 children by 11 women.  (Two men produced over five football teams!)  Like eyesight in fading light, one becomes accustomed to such things.  Let the reader beware: we may have a budding television series here.  To re-phrase Barnum: “Nobody ever lost a dollar overestimating the prurience of the American public.”

Culture observers can legitimately see the event as a definitive snap-shot of modern America.  How so?

1.  Marriage, in any meaningful sense, has fallen on very hard times in western civilization.  This event does not necessarily signal the end of marriage but it signals (along with many other “marriage” issues) a culture-wide dismissive attitude towards the single most important institution of our history, and rational people can only anticipate, despite faint and desultory rhetoric on the other side, that traditional marriage has a bleak future here.  The church herself, once the pro-marriage bastion in America, has herself chosen—by and large—to stand aside as a non-participating observer.

2.   The event also sends a palpable signal of the growing sense (far too weak a word) of entitlement, as in, “Children should become, at birth, the responsibility of the state, which has ‘all the resources necessary’ to take care of them.” Few would call them serious voices, but seriousness counts for less and less to modernity. (Remember: both Plato’s and Orwell’s dystopias called for the same arrangement.)

3. The nexus of the event with Father’s Day, 2013, is interesting.  The late Dr. Joyce Brothers famously said that “Fathers are a distinctive and necessary social invention.” She was right and wrong: Fathers are a distinctive supernatural invention (see Genesis, chapters 1 and 2) but they are, indeed, demonstrably necessary.  I know of no psychotherapist of any sort who would not say that the most distressing fact about our culture is the absentee father—either physically or emotionally.  A friend of who has a nation-wide ministry to prisoners says he has never met a prisoner who did not hate his father.  (The essay to read here is that of Dr. Paul Vitz, in Life, God, and Other Small Topics, ed., Eric Metaxas.  Vitz is a professor of psychology and prolific writer and speaker on fatherhood.  Here’s a sample: “At the center of the crisis in the family is a crisis in what it is to be a father.  We’ve lost this understanding of the capstone, in my judgment, of what it is to be a man.” Emphasis added.)

The point of attack in ameliorating the causes of such dysfunctionality is, as always, a sure and certain word from God Himself in His book in which He is famous for not equivocating about such things.  Alas, modernity has voted overwhelmingly against God and His book.  Perhaps a quote from one not so transcendent will be acceptable. Dr. Henry Kissinger once said: “People think that responsibility is hard to bear.  It’s not.  I think that sometimes it is the absence of responsibility that is harder to bear.  You have a great feeling of impotence.” One could wish for a culture-wide parsing of Kissinger’s last word in the light of this event of biting irony: a man spectacularly potent in reproduction but spectacularly impotent in responsibility.

My father died when I was six weeks old. My mother, unable to provide for me, gave me (and a sister of 30 months) to a recently-married older sister who—for the next twelve years—became my mother.

As I reflect on that experience, I now realize how much I was learning about adoption (even though technically, I was not adopted, but a foster child).

I learned that God always provides, one way or the other, for such children.  His great loving heart watches over all little ones, but is especially solicitous for those not under the care of their biological parents.

I learned something else: very often, His provision for such children, even if not ideal, is a deliverance from what might have been a disastrous situation.  I cannot imagine that it was that way for me, but I have observed it often in other adoptive settings, and even in mine, such might have been the case.  The proper response of an adopted child to the discovery of his situation is a profound sense of triple gratitude:  gratitude to God for His loving care (not to mention his very life!), gratitude to his biological Mom who let him live, and gratitude to those who are God’s instruments of blessing in our lives.

That same sense of immense gratitude is also appropriate for those who have adopted such children.  After all, God has provided for them an immeasurably fulfilling privilege.  And even more significantly, allows them to participate in a symbol of Godlikeness.  Remember: adoption is an earthly picture of a heavenly event.  Natural adoption portrays supernatural adoption by which God Himself adopts people into His own family!  As the Bible says, “God sets the solitary in families.” (Psalm 68:6)

The Bible clearly teaches that nobody is born into the kingdom of God through natural processes, but through a supernatural one by means of which God chooses out of humanity’s orphanage certain ones to be His own! People not naturally His become His by spiritual adoption.  (And, of course, any human can, unlike earthly adoption processes, choose to become adopted by God.

In fact, the Bible has a lot of adoption stories: Pharaoh’s daughter adopted Moses (Exodus 2:10), Hadad adopted Genubath (I Kings 11:20), Queen Esther was adopted by her uncle Mordecai (Esther 2:7), Jacob adopted his grandsons (Genesis 48:5), and, indeed, the entire nation of Israel was adopted by God (read carefully the graphic account, in Ezekiel 16:3-7, of Israel’s plight when God found her as an abandoned baby, wallowing in her own blood, and adopted her). Mary the mother of Jesus was, in a sense (or perhaps formally) adopted by the apostle John (John 19:26-7).  And all Christians have been adopted by God himself; we have received “the adoption of sons” (Galatians 4:5).  That adoption changed our status from slaves to sons, and we became God’s own heirs! (Galatians 4:7; see also Romans 8:1-11)  Amazingly, Ephesians 1:4 says that God planned to adopt us from “before the foundation of the world!”

A beautiful aspect of adoption is that, while natural parents have no choice as to the child that is born to them—they must take whatever they get—adoptive parents have choices, marking off their chosen ones as objects of special affection.  I once heard an adopted boy say to a mouthy friend, “Yeah, but don’t forget: your poor Mom had to take what she got when you were born, but my Mom chose me!”  And the same is true of God’s adoption of us: He was under no obligation to allow us to be in His family, but He chose to grant us such a privilege out of His elective grace.

In my own experience, I came to know and love my biological mother and treasure her.  I thought she did the very best she could for me in seeing to it that I was provided for in a loving family when she couldn’t care for me herself.  And after all, she was my ticket to the Big Game, the very game of life itself!  (I once thanked her for not having me aborted, even though Dad was dying and she was almost penniless, and life would have been so much easier without me.)  But I also learned this: although I loved–and do love—my biological Mother (who is in heaven now), it is interesting that, on Mother’s Day, I always thought first—and do think first—of my adoptive Mother, my Sister who reared me.  My emotional attachment was always stronger to her than to my physical Mother.  (I remember distinctly how easy it was to call her “Mama”—after all, those were the first syllables out of my mouth as an infant to her!—and, although I loved her, how unnatural it seemed to say that word to my biological Mother!)

Are you an adopted child?  Be eternally thankful to your biological parents—they were God’s instruments in giving you life itself!  Be eternally grateful to your adoptive parents—they are God’s expressions of love and care now!  Be eternally appreciative to God for all such provisions of His of love and care for you! And especially, for His choosing you to be in His eternal family.  That’s the truly great adoption!