Isaiah 24

The day of the Lord isn’t coming for one country. It’s coming for them all. Isaiah detailed the sins of both his people and their neighbors in Chapters 13-23 to set up what scholars call the "Isaiah Apocalypse" in Chapters 24-27.

Everyone in the ancient Middle East deserved judgment. But not because they were special and unique. They were doing the same things people in every corner of the world had been doing since the beginning of time. All mankind falls short of the glory of God:

The earth is defiled by its people; they have disobeyed the laws, violated the statutes and broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse consumes the earth; its people must bear their guilt. 

- Isaiah 24:5-6 

That is the doctrine of original sin in two sentences. It’s hard to argue the basic point. All you have to do is look around the world and see what we have done to it and to each other. 

No person is perfect. It's a theme runs throughout the Old Testament. Even its greatest heroes are still very flawed human beings.

Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, was constantly doing wild things. When he traveled through foreign countries, he would claim that his wife was his sister and give her to the local king. God promised to give him a son through his wife, despite their advanced age, but Abraham lost hope and conceived one with her servant. Then he abandoned both her and their son.

David was the greatest king in Jewish history. He was even called a man after God’s own heart. And yet he still slept with the wife of one of his soldiers and then had the man killed in battle.

You never know what you will turn up when you start poking in someone’s life. The only thing you can know for sure is that you will find something.

Mount Rushmore was built as a monument to some of the greatest Presidents in U.S. history — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. Now people are talking about blowing it up because of the crimes those men committed.

Forget where you stand on the monument itself. No one can argue that it honors men who did a lot of evil things. 

A toast to the dead, for criminals burning in hell.
I wonder how many Presidents are burning as well,
Emperors, popes, senators, generals. 

-- Immortal Technique

There's a reason the Bible stresses over and over again that no man should be idolized. None of the men on Rushmore had all the answers.

Most of the Founding Fathers weren't even Christians. Thomas Jefferson was a Deist who literally copied and pasted portions of the Gospels together into a book which collected Jesus' sayings but stripped his life of its supernatural elements. The Bible is pretty direct about people who change any of its words.

What happens to Rushmore is the least of Jefferson's concerns. He had to face God's judgment when he died. No amount of power or wealth or fame or pretty words can save you from that:

See, the Lord is going to lay waste the earth and devastate it; he will ruin its face and scatter its inhabitants -- It will be the same for priest as for people, for the master as for his servant, for the mistress as for her servant, for seller as for buyer, for borrower as for lender, for debtor as to her creditor.  

-- Isaiah 24:1-2

But not having power or wealth or fame isn't a free pass, either. Humans tend to view the world in binary terms. If one side in a conflict is evil than the other must be good. It's just as likely that both sides are evil.

Mount Rushmore is built on stolen land. The question is stolen from whom. The history of European colonization of North America is not as simple as "White people" vs. "Native Americans." The latter didn't see themselves as part of an undifferentiated group that ruled two continents. They identified as Mohawks or Cherokees or Navajos or one of hundreds of other tribes, and fought wars against each other constantly.

The Beaver Wars is an all-encompassing term for a series of conflicts in the 17th century for control of the trade in beaver furs as well as the Great Lakes region. The British aligned with the Iroquois while the French and Dutch aligned with the Algonquins.

The Iroquois were a confederation of five smaller tribes (Mohawk, Onondega, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca) who pursued an expansionist foreign policy that drove their neighbors off their land. They won the Beaver Wars and pushed their enemies out to the Great Plains.

It's a story as old as time. The Aztecs were ripping the hearts out of their enemies and eating them long before the Spanish came to Mexico. Human beings have been killing each other and stealing their land since the beginning of history. The Algonquins the Iroquois killed have just as much a right to justice as the Iroquois the Americans killed.

You can fight evil while still being evil yourself. The Soviet Union did the majority of the work when it came to defeating the Nazis in World War II. That doesn't make the things they did to their own people right.

My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires. Therefore, get rid of all the moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you.

-- James 1:19-21

You think God gave Stalin a free pass for the gulags and the Great Purge because he fought a war against another dictator? He uses evil people for good all the time. But they still have to answer for the crimes they committed. 

Just look at what happens in the Book of Isaiah. God's people in Judah and Israel sinned against Him and their fellow man so He used the Assyrians to punish them. The Assyrians overstepped their bounds so He used the Babylonians to punish them. Then He used the Persians to punish the Babylonians.

The same pattern has continued through history. Sin will be punished. Blood will be avenged. That is a guarantee. It might be America's time now. It's hard to know in the moment. But we certainly have it coming.

This is why Jesus never got involved in politics. He had a much bigger mission in his time on Earth. The last thing he told his disciples was to preach the Gospel to every nation, not found one of their own.

Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of age." 

-- Matthew 28:18-20

A nation is ultimately just a big group of extremely flawed human beings. No nation is perfect because no human is perfect. Putting your faith in any of them will only send you down the wrong path.

Fighting for a righteous cause doesn't necessarily mean that you are righteous. You still have to answer for all the evil things you have done in your life. Which leads us to the most important question of them all. Do you really want to be judged for your actions? Or do you want someone else to stand in your place?