Former Pres. Ronald Reagan once referred to America as “a city set on a hill.” Other politicians have also borrowed this phrase to describe America’s role in the earth. It is, of course, from the Bible, and Jesus is the originator: “You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid” (Matthew 5:13-14).
Jesus was referring to the righteous who live according to the moral and spiritual code of the Bible. When America was founded, she was established by men who looked to Scripture for guidance. In fact, our three-branch government was based on Isaiah 44:22: “For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king; He will save us.” This aptly depicts the judicial, legislative, and executive branches of our government. The revolutionists who rebelled against the English oppression of King George declared, “We have no king but King Jesus!”
The Judeo-Christian beliefs upon which America was founded have brought us great bounty and blessing, so much so, that multitudes of immigrants from around the world have thronged to America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. For them America was not only “a city set on the hill”, but a golden door that opened for the religiously-oppressed and needy of this world. Engraved on the Statue of Liberty given to us by France is this poem by Emma Lazarus: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuge of your teeming shore. Send these homeless, tempest- tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
There is great significance to the reference of “the golden door.” In 1Corinthians 16:9, Paul wrote, “For a great door and effectual is open to me, and there are many adversaries.” In his writings Paul used the metaphor “open door” at least three times, and it means, in a word, “opportunity.” What Paul said is, “A great door of opportunity is opened unto me,” and the structure in Greek grammar means: It stands wide open. He referred to the fact that there was an extraordinary opportunity for him to minister the gospel, but he said that along with this golden door of opportunity, “There are many adversaries.” There are many enemies. Satan will always challenge those who go forth with sickle in hand to reap the harvest of souls. Great opportunity = great opposition!
God has used America to evangelize the world and to send missionaries to the ends of the earth. As a result, we have been blessed above any nation that has ever existed. Therefore, we are ever in Satan’s crosshairs of attack. As long as we obey our Lord’s commission to preach the gospel and to bless Israel, the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we will be blessed and our nation will continue to prosper.
But within there are enemies who even go so far as to revise our nation’s history in an effort to stamp out the significant religious pillars of her foundation. They vehemently deny America’s Christian heritage and seek to rewrite it minus all references to God and the Bible. They have already done so with textbooks being used in our public schools.
Psalm 11 admonishes: “In the Lord put I my trust: How say you to my soul, Flee as a bird to your mountain?” (v1). In other words, where are we to flee in time of trouble? We are the righteous!
“For, lo, the wicked bend their bow; they make ready their arrow upon the string, that they may privily (privately) shoot at the upright in heart” (v2). The righteous are under attack!
“If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (v3). The foundations of righteousness in our nation are being destroyed — What are we going to do about it?
“The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord’s throne is in heaven; his eyes behold, his eyelids try the children of men” (v4). God is looking to see what we are going to do about the erosion of the righteous foundations that the anti-God, anti-Christian, anti-Bible people are destroying. They have gradually destroyed the foundation of the family structure as God created it. Abortion and homosexuality have become the law of the land. Since they both fly in the face of the Bible, the alternative for its proponents is to deny, denounce, refute, renounce, and remove biblical teachings from our history, our present, and create a godless future without biblical restraint. In order to pursue their lusts without condemnation, they must either claim: “There is no God”, or fashion a God that is all love and no holiness or justice.
Paul explained in Romans: “Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools….And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind” (1:21-22,28).
“The Lord trieth the righteous…” (v5). In this verse and verse 4, the Hebrew term trieth means “to prove.” God is proving, putting to the test, the hearts of the righteous to see where we stand “in the midst of a perverse and crooked nation, amongst whom you shine as lights in the world” (Phil. 2:15). We are the light of the world! We are the city set on a hill!
Today when we hear TV reporters reporting from Washington DC sign off, “John Doe reporting from the hill”, we know they are referring to Capitol Hill, our nation’s seat of government. It is more than interesting that our nation’s Capitol is set on a hill! But with every new Congress we have seen more bipartisanship, more arm-wrestling politics, and more anti-Bible sentiments expressed in legislative liberalism. In the past four years, greater damage has been done to the pillars of marriage and family and the right to life that the Bible established. Religious liberty is jeopardized by lawsuits demanding the dismantling of all references to the God of the Bible including the 10 Commandments. Crosses that have stood as monuments for decades are taken down because some atheist sued for the sake of his so-called offended conscience.
Should we look at the Declaration of Independence, the very first document that birthed our nation, we would find an appeal to Almighty God. Our forefathers gathered together through hot summer days (with no air-conditioning), in their white powdered wigs and ruffled collars up to their chins and thick tights, and they labored for three weeks to craft this history-changing document. They looked at all the forms of government throughout Europe for a model after which they could model this government of the United States, but found nothing that was what they felt that God wanted for this nation. So after three long miserable weeks, a short, stocky bespectacled Benjamin Franklin stood up and said: “I have lived a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of the truth that God governs in the affairs of men, and if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, Sirs, in the sacred writing that ‘Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.’ I firmly believe this, and I also believe that without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel.”
The verse he quoted, Psalm 127:1, is from the sacred writing of the Bible, and the rest of the verse says: …Except the Lord keeps the city, the watchman waketh in vain.” Holy Scripture was the foundation they chose for the framing of our government, because they were not out to build a Babel, a city of human pride and rebellion against God, but a city of righteousness, a city on a hill that cannot be hid. The greatest collection of human knowledge assembled on the planet is in our nation’s capital at the Library of Congress. Were you to visit its chambers, you would see written upon one of its walls: “This nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom.” You would also find Bible verses written on its walls, including Micah 6:8: “Thou knowest, O man, what doth the Lord require of you, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”
But if the righteous have lost their saltiness, and Christians have allowed the godless to put out our lights, then the city set on a hill has become like a tower of Babel whose foundations cannot stand. And if the foundations be destroyed, what will the righteous do?
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