The United States of America celebrates her 250th birthday this month. Fireworks will light the sky. Reenactments and documentaries will bring to life scenes ever fading from our collective memory. Patriots will commemorate the strength of America’s past. Politicians will capitalize on the opportunities of the present. Philosophers will wrestle with theory and progress. Prophets will predict. Pastors will theologize. Professors will lecture. Podcasters will opine. But regardless the sentiments of either masses or factions, it must be recognized that God has richly blessed this country by no merit of our own, and it must be our humbled plea that He might extend to us this unmerited grace and bless us again.
Our country, like so many, is a theological curiosity — a case-study in God’s unmerited grace and interminable mercy. From the dehumanizing evils of chattel slavery to the moral pitfalls of gender revolution, and from the systematic disenfranchisement of native peoples to the philosophical entanglements of critical theories, ours is a nation that has frequently slighted the hand of the One who has fed it. But this hand still has chosen to establish us, shepherd us, and preserve us as a nation, “one … under God.”
We are not unique in this way. God has chosen to establish and work through countless nations and empires throughout history that have no rightful claim to the grace and favor He has shown them. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that America is exceptional, but it is not really an exception. Every good thing we have to claim may only be rightfully attributed to the hand of the sovereign God who has chosen to bless and prosper us, in spite of us.
We owe an unpayable debt of national gratitude to the brave men and women who have served in our armed forces, their shoulders having borne the weight of the freedoms we cherish. We celebrate the brilliance of innovation from American technological movers through the generations and the inspiration of creative expression from gifted artists who have enriched our culture in many forms. But our country is blessed by its Blesser, established by its Establisher, and preserved by its Preserver. Apart from Him we can do nothing — we are nothing.
I am grateful to God to live in America. I have no desire to settle under any other flag, or to pledge my allegiance to any other institution of secular government. As long as I live, these stars and stripes will know my salute and its anthem will hear my voice, with full reverence and deep gratitude. But it is the “one nation under God” part that will always settle in the deepest places of my heart, for it was only “under God,” and only by His grace, that we became, and are, e pluribus unum.
Amid strenuous debate and intensifying division, the elder statesman Benjamin Franklin addressed the divided, angry delegates of the Constitutional Convention in 1787:
“In this … assembly, groping as it were in the dark to find political truth and scarce able to distinguish it when presented to us, how has it happened, sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings? … I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this 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?”
Sparrows have fallen, and the United States has risen, neither one nor the other apart from God’s notice or absent God’s mercy. May He incline His ear to the prayers of our people on this 250th celebration: “God, show us political truth; grant us heavenly discernment; mold within us Christian character; illuminate our understanding; train our hands for righteous action; God, bless America again.”