I am a big fan of Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Charles Krauthammer. In the past few years, like a shooting star, he has ascended the heights of American punditry to become one of the most respected  commentators in the nation.

No wonder his latest book–Things That Matter–currently sits atop the New York Times best-seller list. It is a great read would make an excellent Christmas gift for any of your thinking friends and relatives.

However, after reading the book, it strikes me that although Charles Krauthammer may be among the most robust thinkers of our day, his book reveals a glaring weakness.

Charles Krauthammer has a missing source.

Dr. Krauthammer is a 63 year old  physician/psychiatrist who launched a journalism career the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981. Then, he was left of center politically.

Now he is a staunch conservative.

In 1972, during his first year in medical school, he broke his neck in a diving accident and remains a paraplegic. Whenever you see him on television, he sits upright, almost regal, in a chair, not drawing attention to the fact that he has no feeling from the waist down.

The accident changed his life, but not his spirit. Determined to finish his studies on time, he asked his Harvard instructors to come to the hospital and project his lessons on the ceiling of the hospital room. Thus began years of learning to live without lower body movement.

Her still graduated with honors–on time–with his classmates.

Now forty years later, he has reached the pinnacle of political discourse by being a regular on the Fox News Channel and writing a weekly column for the Washington Post that is syndicated in over 400 newspapers.

How did Charles Krauthammer go from being a liberal (working on Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign) to being a clear-eyed conservative? His simple answer is: “I was young once.”

Meaning? He “grew up” over the years as he watched the Democratic Party go from being strong on national defense to making deals with dictators (e.g. the present mullahs in Iran.) Like Ronald Reagan’s conversion before him, be honestly states that “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. It left me.”

On domestic issues it was a different matter. “The Democratic Party remained true to itself. I changed. The origin of that evolution is simple: I’m open to empirical evidence. The results of the Great Society experiments started coming in and began showing that, for all its good intentions, the War on Poverty was causing irreparable damage to the very communities it was deisgned to help.”

Krauthammer says, “As I became convinced of the practical and theoretical errors of the social-democratic tendencies of my youth, it was but a short distance to a philosophy of restrained, free market governance that gave more space and place to the individual and civil society. In a full circle return, I found my eventual political home in a vision of limited government.”

Charles Krathammer became a foreign policy conservative because he recognized evil in the world which couldn’t be appeased. He became a fiscal conservative because socialism doesn’t work and free enterprise does.

Now to the book. Things That Matter is an updated collection of his best columns of the past thirty years. It’s a fast-paced read with each chapter sharing a distinct thought in usually 2-4 pages. There are three sections in the book

PERSONAL

The opening section contains his most emotional writings on family, friends, manners, follies, space and earth, and his passions and pastimes which include baseball (he’s an avid and knowledgable fan of the Washington Nationals) as well as chess. (His column on Big Blue the computer beating the ‘human” world champion chess player is a riot.)

One of Charles’ greatest gifts is profound pithiness. In an article about bank robber Katharine Ann Power who killed a policeman and orphaned his children, then rationalized her actions, Krauthammer observes, “Allen Bloom once described a man who had just gotten out of prison, where he had undergone ‘therapy.’ He said he had found his identity and learned to like himself. A generation earlier he would have found God and learned to despise himself as a sinner.”

But no. The new, secular world is about self and changing the definition of sin. “Reflecting on the man who learned to like himself in prison, Bloom notes that in the life of this ex-con the problem lay with his sense of self, not with original sin or devils within him. We have here the peculiarly American way of digesting Continental despair. It is nihilism with a happy ending. Except for the orphans.”

I can’t do justice to his writing style in this snippet, but you get the point. In most of his columns, Krauthammer lays out the empirical or common sense understanding of truth and then drives it home with a verbal left jab–leaving you stunned and sobered..

“Except for the orphans.”

POLITICAL

Krauthammer is primarily a political commentator who wanted to keep politics out of the book. He says that “this book was originally going to be a collection of my writings about everything except politics. Things beautiful, mysterious, profound, or just odd. Working title: There’s More to Life Than Politics.

Then he gives a powerful explanation as to why that changed. “But in the end, I couldn’t [leave out politics]. For a simple reason, the same reason I left psychiatry for journalism. While science, medicine, art, poetry, architecture, chess, space, sports, number theory and all things hard and beautiful promise purity, elegance, and sometimes even transcendence, they are fundamentally subordinate. In the end, they must they must bow to the sovereignty of politics.”

“Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything, because, in the end, everything–high and low–lives and dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away.”

“This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933. Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay and everything burns.”

Read those lines again–and never again share a negative view of politics. It makes or breaks everything else–either promoting freedom or allowing tyranny.

HISTORICAL

Krauthammer’s final section is a compilation of his best writings on past history, the 80s, 90s, the Cold War, the Age of Terrorism and what is coming in the future. Three essays in this section are speeches he gave before national think-tanks. They’re worth the entire book. One is called the “Uni-Polar Moment,”a subject you’d better become familiar with. The others are “Democratic Realism” and “Decline is a Choice.”

There are quite a number of essays in the book on the Jews, the Holocaust, Middle East etc. Krauthammer is a Jew–so he knows his own people. Maybe that’s one reason he is so brilliant: by ethnicity, he is one of God’s chosen. On the humorous side, Bob Weiner says, “the reason God created Gentiles is that somebody needed to pay retail.”

(Read that again and you’ll get it!)

Here are a few more Krauthammer quotes:

• Social Security: “The average senior receives in Social Security about a third of what the average worker makes. This is one Ponzi scheme that can be saved. Social Security was not meant to provide two decades of green fees for baby boomers.”
• 20th century: “The uniqueness of the 20th century lies not in its science but in its politics. It invented the police state, the command economy, mass mobilization and mass propaganda, mechanized murder and routinized terror–a breathtaking catalog of totalitarian horror.”
• Left and right: “Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”
• Voting: “I don’t really care what a public figure thinks. I care about what he does. Let God probe his inner heart. Tell me about his outer acts. Know them by what they do and judge them by their works.”
• Politics (again): “If we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction. Politics is soveriegn in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it.”
• Border security: “When you build a wall to keep people in, that’s a prison. When you build a wall to keep people out, that’s an expression of sovereignty.”
• Jihad: “The greatest moral monster of our time is the suicide bomber. It is the ultimate perversion of the ‘good death’ done for the worst of motives–self creation through the annihilation of others.”
• Me Generation: “Its genius is to take the stigma out of self-love and turn it into virtue. Its beauty is to take health and hygiene, and make them a religion. In a political era demanding more public displays of piety and morality, liberals can now enthusiastically declare,’We got religion too!'”
• Atheism: “The declining faith in the supernatural has been accompanied by the rise of the monstrous totalitarian creeds of the 20th century. When people stop believing in God, it’s not that they believe in nothing; it is thereafter that they believe in anything.”

I agree with Dr. Krauthammer about 95% of the time. That’s despite the fact that I am a follower of Jesus and he is a non-practicing Jew.

But that brings me to his one missing source--which leapt out from the pages of Things That Matter. In a number of chapters on abortion, the origins of the earth, capital punishment and a few other issues, I put question marks or “No’s” in the margins of the book.

For example, he said he didn’t “oppose capital punishment,” but was against it. He remarked that “For some people, life begins at conception.” Also, he’s against creationism being taught in the schools and says that “The Bible is not about fact. It’s about values.” Again, we shouldn’t teach “biblical fables as science.” He also believes that the earth is 4.5 billion years old and postulates there is life on other planets (one column is entitled, “Are We Alone in the Universe?”)

A final example is a heart-wrenching treatise on the future of the Jewish nation, in which he believes Israel will either be annihilated or never return to their land again. “The Ten Tribes had melted away into history. Every other people so conquered and exiled in time disappeared. Only the Jews defied the norm. Twice. But never, I fear, again.”

On all these points I disagree. God is the author of just capital punishment. Life does begin at the moment of conception (Psalm 139). Creationism and macro-evolution are both faith-theories that should be debated. The Bible is about facts, not fables. The earth may not be billions of years old and there is no evidence of life anywhere but on planet Earth.

As for Israel? God is currently bringing the Jews back to their land where a great end time revival is coming where “all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:26). The end is not at hand for the Jews. Their salvation is nigh.

So why does is the wise and thoughtful Charles Krauthammer either confused or simply wrong on these issues?

He has one missing source: The Bible. He apparently does read it or know it. It clearly answers all those questions and many more. Charles Krauthammer believes in God, but has not grounded that belief in the inerrancy of Scripture–our guide, compass, sourcebook on reality.

By honest seeking, looking at empirical evidence, and thoughtful brilliance, Dr. Krauthammer has arrived at the truth in many areas of his life. What is lacking in his journalism is the best source of wisdom–the Bible,

I learned the majority of the “things that matter” in my life from the pages of God’s Word. I hope Charles Krauthammer finds his missing source. 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s been very painful to listen to the president of the United State this past week because it is now nearly universally admitted that over the past four years, Barack Obama didn’t tell the truth to the American people about the Affordable Care Act.

Some say he misspoke, misled, didn’t give us the truth–whatever term you want to use–it all really boils down to one dubious reality.

He lied.

Period. (to use his own favorite punctuation mark.)

And lying destroys the foundation of trust upon which democratic republics are built. Without faith in our leaders and institutions, laws will not be obeyed and peace and civil society cannot exist.

I’m deeply saddened about the Administration’s deception. Today, I will move in the opposite spirit and share with you the straight truth about Obamacare.

First of all, let’s remind ourselves what constitutes a lie. It is a conscious, intention to deceive. It happens when a person knows the truth, but chooses to ignore it.

Here are two examples from recent history. I’ll choose both a Republican and a Democrat to be fair.

• Richard Nixon – He authorized his political committee to illegally break into an office (at the Watergate complex) to help win an election–then lied about it. His famous falsehood was: “I am not a crook.” A few months later he resigned in disgrace because he was a crook who had lied to the American people.
• Bill Clinton – He committed adultery with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, in a small room just outside the Oval Office, then looked the American people in the eye and said, “I did not have sex with that woman.” Some months later, he admitted that he’d lied about conduct unbecoming  to a married president and was nearly impeached for it.

Let’s give one more example to clarify the difference between lying and simply mis-speaking.

President George W. Bush famously told the American people that we needed to invade Iraq because of the presence of weapons of mass destruction which might be distributed to Al Qaeda or other rogue terrorists.

When we got there, the WMDs were not to be found. Did Bush lie? The judgment of history is a clear nyet. Prior to the Iraqi campaign, all the respected intelligence agencies of the world believed that Sadaam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

We also knew he had them because he had used them on his own people--killing thousands of Kurds in the 1980s. He had them, used them, and then they disappeared. When we didn’t find them, we were left with two options: 1) Either he didn’t have large quantities, or 2) They were moved to another site (Syria?) before the American invasion.

Either way, George Bush didn’t intend to deceive. He simply misspoke based on faulty information.

It’s important to note the difference because this makes or breaks the believability of a leader. When you misspeak because of wrong facts, your heart and motivations can still be trusted. But when you deliberately choose to lie about a subject, then evil has entered your heart and destroys all credibility and integrity.

To state it again: Leaders can misspeak, learn the real truth, correct those mistakes, and still maintain their integrity and following. But when leaders tell a lie, they cause lasting damage to our faith and trust.

Yes, they can sometimes be restored via humility, repentance, correction, and renewed integrity. But that takes time. Rebuilding trust often requires months, years or even decades.

Thus, when a high level leader lies, he is usually finished for life in the realm he served. Trust has been shaken, confidence has died, and people become cynical to following–which is the death knell to his or her government.

In democratic societies (ones that believe in character and integrity), lying leaders either resign, are impeached, are voted out, or their legacies are tarnished.

Sin has serious consequences.

Barack Obama now faces that reality.

But before we hurl any stones, it might be helpful to personalize the discussion. Have you ever told a lie–an intended deception? To a family member or close friend? To the government when filling out your taxes? To a policeman when being pulled over for a violation? To any other person to cover up something you did or of which you are ashamed?

I have–and I have asked forgiveness for those sins. And once I repented, I asked God to help me never do it again.

However, I never did so in a leadership position where it affected the trust of a group of people. That’s where Barack Obama is in serious trouble. At least 36 times–all perilously preserved on video–Barack Obama told the American people:

“If you like your insurance, you can keep it. Period. If you like your doctor, you can keep him. Period.”

You can watch all 36 false promises here.

Even some Democrats are owning up to the lie. Congressman Kurt Shrader D-OR now says:

“I think the president was grossly misleading to the American public  and is causing added stress and added strife as we go through a really difficult time with health care.”

He’s right. At least five million people in the nation have currently lost plans that the president said we they could keep.

And “we’ve only just begun.”

So what is the straight, honest-to God truth about the Affordable Care Act often called Obamacare? I will give it to you, to the best of my ability, in Q&A form.

Q: What were the original purposes of the ACA? A: From a liberal point of view, the main purpose was to provide health care to all the poor (uninsured) in our nation. A second purpose was to win their votes via this dramatic expansion of the welfare state. A third purpose was to super-size the Federal Government to control one-sixth of the American economy. The ACA is the largest wealth redistribution scheme in the history of the USA.

Q: Is the ACA a form of national or socialized medicine? A: Yes, it is the first step that direction which is designed, over time, to collapse the private insurance markets and create a single payer (government) system in America. Government control of health is the holy grail of progressivism. It is the beginning of the end of free and prosperous societies. Just look at Europe–and the former Soviet Union.

Q: Was the ACA wisely passed into law? A: No. Such a large, impacting, entitlement program should have waited for bi-partisan support as Social Security and Medicare did. But not one Republican voted for the bill, many Democrats were bribed into supporting it, and the Congressional rules were bent to force it upon the America people.

Q. Is ACA a good concept and well-written? A: Neither one. Governments are bad at providing services due to lack of competition and competence. They were not meant to be “providers” (done far more redemptively by the private sector), but rather “protectors” of the peace. The ACA is a two thousand page albatross. Here’s a rule of thumb: The bigger a bill, the worse it is (more regulations and bureaucracy are required). The ACA is the longest bill in American history. Get it?

Q: Will people lose their personal policies under the ACA? A: Yes, millions of them. Five million have already been dropped (including my family), and that number will rise to probably fifteen million. After the employer mandate kicks in, the number could rise as high as 130 million people.

Q: Why are people losing their policies? A: Because the ACA limits the freedoms of both insurance companies and individuals. It forces thousands of customized policies to be forced into four. The four approved by the feds require everybody to carry and pay for everything–even if you don’t need it. If you’re a man, you still have to pay for maternity care. If you’re a tee-totaler, you still need to pay for substance abuse counseling. This is the basis of the president’s lie: ACA changes the playing field so that all policies conform to the bureacrats’ wishes. Thus, scores of millions of people will lose the insurance and doctors they like.

Q: Why will people lose their doctors? A: Because ACA will completely change the landscape of American medicine. First, many doctors will leave the system because of financial dis-incentives and dreaded paperwork. There will be a huge doctor shortage. Plus, your new “forced upon you” plan may not include the group or hospital your personal doctor is associated with.

Q: Who will benefit the most from the ACA? A: Those who are currently uninsured and live below the poverty level. They will receive “free” healthcare via a vast Medicaid expansion. This includes a large sector of the elderly and probably many illegal aliens.

Q: Who will be hurt the most? A: The tax-paying middle class and younger Americans. In most cases, the tax-paying “center” of America will be forced into higher premiums and deductibles to pay for the “free” insurance for the poor. This will especially hurt younger Americans, most of whom need little or no health insurance (only catastrophic care), but no longer have that option. They will pay for everybody else.

Q: Why was the ACA roll-out so botched up? A: Because of the size of the program, the disparate computer systems that must communicate with each other, the incompetence and fraud found in most governmental programs, and a dirth of leadership. Computer glitches may someday be worked out, but the tentacles of this bureaucratic overlay on top of your health care will make going to the doctor seem like a visit to the post office.

Q: Will the Affordable Care Act save individuals and the nation money on health care? A: No. It will cost many times the first 900 billion dollar estimate–and for a majority of Americans (outside of the poor), it will cost much more than they are paying now. It will create more poor people.

Q: Will the ACA help produce jobs or bring down the federal deficit? A: No. It is the largest job destroyer in American history and will add trillions more dollars to an already unsustainable debt calamity.

Q: Are some insurance policies “sub-standard” or lousy? A: No. All people don’t need or want a Cadillac. When you’re young, you can save money through a catastrophic-only policy. If you have good health habits, you don’t need de-tox. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The more choices there are in health insurance, the better and the cheaper. At it’s root, the ACA is anti-choice.

Q: Are there any good aspects to the ACA? Yes. 1) The desire to insure all Americans (through a wrong method), 2) The portability of policies (you shouldn’t lose your insurance when you change jobs), and 3) Covering people with pre-existing conditions. But free market, cost-effective solutions can meet these needs better without a “one-size-fits-all” insurance coercion.

Q: Is health care a human right? A: No. Human rights are God-given, and they include life, liberty and property–which all human governments should uphold. Standards of living are not rights. They are outcomes of hard work, financial resources, and circumstances that are different for all people.

Q: How did this bad bill ever pass? A: Through a largely uninformed populace that is increasingly hooked on governmental entitlements rather than hard work, personal initiative, faith in God, and devotion to private charities (such as churches). We voted in bad leaders who are taking us down a road to personal and corporate ruin.

Q: So what can we do? A: We must ask God’s forgiveness for turning away from his truth and principles, rise up to cast off this tyranny, vote out the people that gave us the disastrous ACA, elect a freedom-restoring Congress in 2014 (especially in the Senate), and a liberty-loving president in 2016.

Then we need to repeal the ACA and provide our citizens a free-market based menu that will care for the needs of people and insure that the American medical experience remains the best in the world.

 

 

 

 

Two members of our extended family committed suicide, and I have been close to a number of other suicidal tragedies.

A businessman friend of mine, who was well known as a Christian layman, committed suicide a decade ago. At his funeral, his pastor told the grieving audience, “If Harry (not his real name) was here today I am sure he would ask your forgiveness for the rash emotional choice he made to end his life.”

I agreed. His death made no sense when compared to the life that he lived.

Nations and civilizations also commit suicide. They make wrong choices over time, maybe against their overall heritage, that plunge them into ruin. Why do nations commit suicide? What can be done to prevent it?

One of the hardest things for me to watch during this latter stage of my life, is the apparent suicide of  America–and really, all of Western civilization. This downward death spiral began in Europe, which has vastly moved away from God and biblical values. The USA is now boarding the same train which is heading to disaster.

It’s agonizing and heart-wrenching to watch the looming death spiral. It reminds me of one biblical figure –the prophet Jeremiah.

Jeremiah lived through a powerful season of revival in the nation of Israel during his early years. He was a contemporary of the young, godly king Josiah whom the Bible calls the greatest king in the lineage of Jesus (2 Kings 23:25). Over a ten year time period, the southern kingdom of Judah went through a significant national reformation (you can read the amazing story in 2 Chronicles 34) that impacted a generation and lasted twenty years.

But after Josiah died, the nation began to self-destruct,  and Jeremiah, in his later years, watched the horrifying fall while trying to turn the nation back to its godly heritage.

But it wasn’t to be. The people were unwilling to change their ways.

In 586 BC, God used  King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon to rightly bring justice to the backslidden nation. Jeremiah warned and warned the people, lived through the national collapse, and ended up dying as a refugee in Egypt.

Jeremiah’s life started well–he experienced a national spiritual awakening–but it ended with his beloved nation falling from grace.

I see an eerie parallel in my own life. I came into God’s kingdom during a wonderful season of American renewal called the Jesus Revolution. In the 1980s, I was privileged to be a small part of the Reagan years which, at the least, retarded the acceleration of American decline. That political period was known as “Morning in America” and brought about a moral and economic renewal that lasted for nearly three decades.

But many of those gains are now being lost. It appears that our godly nation, once the land of great revivals, faith, morality, freedom, and economic prosperity, is careening down a path that could lead to national suicide.

Are we experiencing the birth pangs of “Sunset in America” and possibly all of Western Civilization?

Something inside of me doesn’t want to believe it. But honesty and reality tell a different tale that makes me wonder whether the pattern of Jeremiah’s life may be mirrored in our own time.

The best word I can find to describe what is taking place in Europe and America today is the concept of suicide. We seem to be willingly and foolishly voting for people and living for things that will kill us as a nation.

Let’s begin with the dictionary definition of SUICIDE:

b : ruin of one’s own interests.

The definition assumes that in the past, the suicidal person lived responsibly, with sound thoughts and lifestyle actions. But at a point in time, this individual abandoned their sane and wise course and began down a pathway that led to consciously killing themselves–destroying their own interests and true happiness.

This scenario is at work in America today, in at least five different forms.

Religious Suicide

This is always the root cause of personal or corporate suicide–a collapse of faith in God. When the Creator of the universe is honored, loved, and his principles followed, this tends to bring joy, peace, justice and prosperity to human existence.

The “American experiment in liberty” was once anchored in the idea of “In God We Trust,”–that respecting Him and following his ways were the keys to earthly success. Thus, early Americans prayed around their kitchen tables, built churches in their cities and towns, started schools teaching biblical character qualities and taking dominion in God’s world, and more than any nation in history, placed God as the center of national life.

There were plenty of exceptions to this rule, and even wars that were fought over our sins. But the United States of America rose to global greatness because of its faith and dedication to Almighty God which was rekindled numerous times through national awakenings and revivals.

But not today. Atheists have doubled in numbers in recent years, biblical truths have been taken out of the schools, and secularism, (a new name for being man-centered and anti-God), has now become the up-and-coming religion in the land.

It is for this reason that the Rev. Billy Graham, at the age of 95, will preach his “final sermon” the week of November 4-9. He knows that we are committing religious suicide and wants to do his part to call us back to faith in God and Jesus Christ.

I encourage you to participate in My Hope America with Billy Graham.

Family Suicide

The breakdown of the American family has been breath-taking in the past two generations. The nuclear family, a husband and wife and their children, were once the backbone of this country. How far we have disintegrated in such a short period of time!

When I was a young boy, divorce was rare and ninety percent of households built their lives around the love, nurture and protection of the family unit. Today, divorce and broken families are as common as cars on the road. In the black community, the single parent ratio has reached an astounding 72 percent. Absent dads, working moms, and kids who’d rather be in gangs than in church have become a norm in many neighborhoods.

It happened quickly–since the 1960s. Now, counterfeit forms of marriage and family are on the horizon which will only weaken the real deal. The family is committing suicide in numerous and alarming ways.

Moral Suicide

The decline of morality has also been stunning in the past fifty years. Sex outside of marriage used to be rare; Adults preying on kids was once viewed as hideous and evil; Men having sex with men and women with women was viewed as an abomination and crooked; Babies were cherished and protected, not slaughtered in abortion mills.

Our moral suicide can be time-lined by the songs of past decades. The early Beatles reeked of innocence when they first crooned “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” The Rolling Stones descended into outright lust when they proposed “Let’s Spend the Night Together” (a very lewd and foreign idea to single Americans in Judeo-Christian America just fifty years ago).

More recently, the young generation just shrugs (or maybe twerks) when rapper Cee Lo Green parades onstage and bellows out profanities, such as the song F**K You.

It’s a long way from shyly holding hands to tossing F-bombs to minors. It’s the mark of a death spiral that has numbed and destroyed the morals of a once godly people.

Fiscal Suicide

In the past four years, Amnerica’s fiscal insanity has ballooned to the forefront. Cheating in morals usually leads to cheating with money. If you can get away with fornication, then you can certainly bend the rules of debt–to your own demise. Many Americans are lost under a mountain of personal debt, and the politicians we’ve elected have followed our lead in running up a 17 trillion dollar national time bomb.

In Washington, D.C., they don’t even do budgets anymore, and it’s not uncommon to have yearly deficits of 500 billion to one trillion dollars. In 2013, the stock market is being manipulated to phony highs by quantitative easing, we linger in a painful and debilitating recession, 151 million people are receiving government checks of one sort (100 million of them on welfare), and only 125 million people earn their own way (paychecks). Yet, we keep electing politicians who are spending the nation into a disaster.

This insanity of national fiscal suicide may be the most sudden and painful of all–when it hits.

Health Suicide

Closest to home at the moment, through the foolishness of the misnamed “Affordable Health Care Act” (commonly called Obamacare), we are driving some nails into our national coffin via the destruction of the best health care system the world has ever known.

People are losing their doctors and personal plans; Premiums and deductibles are going up for millions of Americans; There will be a doctor and health care shortage in the coming years; There will be death panels for some of the elderly.

We’ve even spent a billion dollars on this government intrusion into our personal health– and the federal website doesn’t even work! Plus, you will be penalized (taxed) for non-compliance.

America’s healthiest days are behind her if we do not cast off this governmental health monstrosity. It is unaffordable, is not about health (it’s about control), does not really care for the good of the nation, and is an act we can do without. Still, probably half of the nation doesn’t even realize that we’ve stuck a hypodermic needle filled with poison into our national body politic.

Maybe that will be the ultimate suicidal act of a civilization gone mad.

So why do nations commit suicide? There are a number of factors to remember:

First, the Bible says that “My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6). This certainly applies to the knowledge of God, right and wrong, godly perspective, and the wisdom to pursue true liberty. Nations die when they forget–lose the knowledge–of what made them great to begin with.

Second, nations commit suicide when they fail to grasp the power of human depravity–that we are fallen human beings who, if left to ourselves, will always descend into lust, greed, carnality and death. The human tendency to sin is the most tragic form of entropy (“gradual decline into disorder”).

That is why we need God to enlighten, forgive, redeem and empower us to neutralize the destructive tendencies. We CANNOT do it without Him.

And finally, both individuals and nations commit suicide when they make emotional decisions to go against their good character or history in the pursuit of personal pleasure. That’s what happened to my friend Harry. It is happening to the United States before our very eyes.

I am reminded of a scene from the sci-fi movie  Independence Day when a group of emotional, unthinking, city residents went up on the top of a tower to party and “welcome” the aliens to planet Earth.

They were incinerated in a moment.

We are not there yet, but we are getting close. We might be Jeremiah in our latter years, or we could be God’s chosen instruments of the next great spiritual awakening. Be awake to the former, but give your life for the latter.

God does not want us to commit national suicide. He wants us to live, not die.