You won’t have to search long in the Old Testament to find condemnations against wealth disparities.
The whole book of Amos is aimed at the ruling one-percenters of Samaria stomping the peasants. The upper classes were fat and sassy — “fat cows” in ch. 3 — while the rest of the kingdom was in bad shape. The upper classes were using laws and customs, but added a greedy abuse and violence to make sure their material progress didn’t slow down.
What Amos assumes his readers understand, of course, was the Northern Kingdom of Israel was all family. That’s the meaning of “nation” in the Ancient Near Eastern world. You can’t treat your family as dirt; it’s written in our very DNA, one of the few actual instincts humans have. This was abuse of blood kin, as the one-percenters were adopting an alienation, as if they had no accountability to God for their own.
Granted, we in the US today are hardly all kin to one another. Yet the principle of abuse by the ruling class by taking property — indeed, insisting their own comforts increase — while everyone else suffers bad economics is regarded by God on a par with murder in the first degree. This is not some communist-socialist crap about social justice; that’s another lie of Satan. No government has the right to take from one and give to another in that sense. It’s also the same as murder. Rather, we are required to adopt our neighbors as if they were blood kin in effect, and treat them with the same level of respect.
Sharp and predatory dealing is evil. There are two symbolic types in the Bible for leadership and rulers: Nimrod and David. The former is a great hunter, a predator who aimed to build an empire around himself. He used religion as an excuse for that, but any other excuse would do. David was by no means flawless, but he at least understood the necessity of loving and sacrificing for his people. He embraced his nation as his sheep, and he their shepherd.
We have built a culture which elevates the predator, and says shepherds don’t really exist, just a fable. God says such a culture is doomed. It’s not a newsflash, America: You are doomed to face God’s wrath. We are all guilty. Don’t think so? Do you watch TV; do you like it? If yes, then you are supporting that same evil culture which has destroyed everything God tried to give us. We have created a world where the one-percenters are encouraged to rape us, so we have no reason to complain. God will still judge them, but we’ll be judged along with them.
Amos warned the Northern Kingdom of Assyria’s rising power, and a mere two decades later, the City of Samaria lay in ruins. In the case of modern America, He will destroy us by our own hands. Those one-percenters are His wrath upon us, fully justified as our just desserts. So resisting them is sin, until you have first made all those radical changes necessary to stand on the grounds of His justice.
Enjoy the future you have purchased with your sin, America.
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I wonder about God’s intentions for the nation. Our “leadesr” are semi-titular, first off. Bad things done by them tend to get called out with eventual consequences. Maybe not in a timely manner as according to our carnal existance, but eventually. Then there is the example of Lot and Sodom and Gomorrah. God would have spared the city for what, one righteous head? Under grace I presume there to be many righteous heads in the United States. Lastly, are we under the law that imputes the sins of the fathers onto the sons?
Our nation has two distinct characteristics that lend me towards a reasonable doubt as to God’s intentions for our future. Here, the individual is the sovereign and the national social and legal framework are patterened after a Noahdic/Christian model. The sovereigns and the pattern may be abused and in tatters but then there are many sovereigns that fight for the pattern: like you.
In this case, I have a double barreled answer.
1) I regard this as a prophecy. It’s not something I like, but it’s my calling and I have to say it. It is my understanding we passed the point of no return some years ago, but God’s wrath is working slowly in this case. This is a prophetic warning of things to come, and I have no timeline at all, but you can see we are progressing toward a nasty police state, and this is the results of our national failures.
2) I realize it’s really hard to accept, but there is no place at all for the modern secular state under God’s Laws. I’ve written much about this in bits in pieces, such as condemning the Treaty of Westphalia as an attack on God’s Word. However, having said that, God tends to let people have enough rope to hang themselves. Whether merely for show does not matter, the founding of our nation claims things were done in God’s name. In His patience, He accepted our national covenant, as it were. We have not ceased to violate it, and God takes that personally.
It doesn’t help we have so very many Christians utterly convinced America’s founding concepts are right out of Scripture. That’s because they read the Enlightenment assumptions back into the Bible. Virtually every denomination founded in America reflects that intellectual frame of reference.
That’s my story, at any rate. It took me a long, hard ride to get from where I was — a member of that “America was God’s idea” school — to where I am now, utterly certain this is arrogant heresy. It included a long sojourn through depression, sometimes suicidal, etc. My whole world was being removed. I don’t wish that on anyone, but I cannot simply demur at the mission to warn people they are wrong about all those things. If what I teach does not blaze it’s own path through your soul, then it’s not a message for you.
PEACE AND BLESSINGS