God is predictable! Science is defined according to “The New Lexicon Webster’s Dictionary” as “knowledge acquired by careful observation, by deduction of the laws which govern changes and conditions, and by testing these deductions by experiment. A branch of study, especially one concerned with facts.”
I believe with absolute certainty that based on the above definition of the word science, God deals with nations according to “The Science of Judgment.” Throughout the entire canon of the Scriptures (and noticeable in just about every book of the Bible) you can observe how God deals with people and nations. There is a predictable pattern for chastisement and judgment. God holds all people and nations accountable to His laws as all men are born with a measure of faith (Romans 12:3). In Romans chapter one, God holds all men and nations responsible for the truth that He created people to intuitively know. If they go into deception and sin it is because they purposely rejected truth.
It is clear by the preponderance of the evidence that God holds all men accountable for deeds done in the body. (2 Peter 2:9-22; Matt 25:41; Jn 3:36; Rev 20:11-15; 21:8, etc.)
If God holds all men responsible for their life on earth (and indeed He does), then how can God in his grace, mercy and love not also chasten the ungodly during their lifetime on earth? I believe that God does indeed chasten both the righteous and the unrighteous while they are alive on planet earth! It goes beyond any reasonable doubt that a righteous, holy, loving God full of mercy and grace, not only disciplined the nation of Israel during King David’s lifetime; not only disciplines the born again believer, but Scripture indicates he leaves the ninety-nine to go after the one lost sheep/person (Luke 15:4). In Moses’ time, it did not matter whether a person belonged to the nation of Israel or was a citizen of Egypt. God personally dealt with them and their nation according to His laws established since the foundation of the world that have been enforced since the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve certainly did not fall under the Mosaic laws but they were held accountable to the Word of God placed within their hearts just as the people did during the time of Noah and later Nineveh.
Dr. S.I. McMillen, M.D., explains in his book, None Of These Diseases, how diseases come upon all mankind living within every nation according to the findings that scientists have discovered in their medical research. What is totally fascinating to him is that as he has studied the scriptures exhaustively, he has concluded that within the Scriptures are clear instructions or commandments on how we are to live to avoid the devastating sicknesses and diseases that people today are contracting.
Dr. McMillen writes, “This book was born as a result of a thousand sighs for the many people who left my office without receiving adequate help...In this book I have written the prescription I would have given to those patients if only I had had the time. I hasten to add that this counsel is not original with me. When God led the Israelites out of afflicted Egypt, He promised them that if they would obey His statutes, He would put “none of these diseases” upon them. God guaranteed a freedom from disease that modern medicine cannot duplicate...Were the Israelites miraculously freed from these diseases? Would the same regulations save us today? I am confident that the reader will be intrigued to discover that the Bible’s directives can save him from certain infectious diseases, from many lethal cancers, and from a long gauntlet of psychosomatic diseases that are increasing in spite of all efforts of modern medicine...”
Dr. McMillen explains in his book, God has already given forewarning in the Scriptures how to avoid deadly diseases that mankind finally discovered after many thousands and even millions of people have died due to different plagues and medical errors. You will find in reading his book how the cause and effect of obeying or disobeying the Scriptures avoids or produces sicknesses, diseases and even death. Again, the conditions of God for health, prosperity and long life or chastisement, discipline and eventually judgment are clear. God declares in his Word that early disease and death can be avoided “if you keep my commandments” .
Drs. Frank B. Minirth, M.D. and Paul D. Meier, M.D., state in their book, Happiness Is A Choice-A Manual on the Symptoms, Causes and Cures of Depression, that “As physicians who have researched genetics quite thoroughly, we get disgusted with people who blame everything on their ‘bad genes’! People today are actually blaming such sins as alcoholism and homosexuality on ‘bad genes.’ The so called scientists who do such things are slanting the data and grasping for straws. Our genetic make-up does have an enormous effect on our intellectual and emotional potentials, but our degree of wisdom and happiness as adults is not determined genetically (as some would like to think). Most human depression is the result of our irresponsible behavior - our own irresponsible handling of our anger and guilt. Some individuals are irresponsible because they choose to be, but others are irresponsible because of lack of knowledge. It is our hope that many readers of this book will grow in knowledge of how to handle their own emotions responsibly and put that knowledge into action.
Most human beings, however, hate to face up to their own human responsibility, especially when it comes to their own emotional state. It is so much easier to blame all our woes on bad parents, a poor mate, unfair treatment by the world, hypoglycemia, or-in today’s modern world-’bad genes.’
Our genes can predispose us to getting drunk more readily than someone else, but our genes don’t magically get us to drink alcohol. Our genes may give some males fewer androgens than others, but our genes don’t force anyone to engage in homosexual behavior. No one is genetically programmed to become a homosexual. That is purely a myth! Our genes can predispose some people toward developing a clinical depression under stress because of a depletion of norepinephrine in the brain (whereas someone else might be predisposed toward schizophrenia under similar stresses because of an alteration in the level of dopamine in the brain), but our genes do not force us to hold grudges against ourselves or others. The irresponsible action of holding grudges is what brings on the majority of depressions.”
Dear saint, the evidence by medical doctors and psychiatrists is very compelling. If we as people live our lives within the laws of God, which are recorded in the Holy Scriptures, we will receive the blessings of God and not succumb to the consequences of the laws of “reaping and sowing” or “the cup of iniquity”. It matters none if we are Jew or Gentile; a citizen of Israel or another nation, God holds each person as well as every nation accountable to his laws. The Scriptures are intuitively obvious as you read them systematically, that God raises up leaders and brings them down. God uses leaders and nations as his arm of judgment. God is over all creation and even the angels are used of God to carry out his orders and to execute judgment. Animals, insects, oceans, the weather, famine, disease, plague and the sword all carry out God’s wishes to deal with man according to what needs to be accomplished under mercy and grace until the “cup of iniquity” becomes full and judgment is poured out first for redemptive purposes and then for utter destruction.
Dr. Peter Marshall and David Manuel, wrote in their book, The Light and the Glory that, “First, God had put a specific ‘call’ on this country and the people who were to inhabit it. In the virgin wilderness of America, God was making His most significant attempt since ancient Israel to create a new Israel of people living in obedience to the laws of God, through faith in Jesus Christ.
Certainly, there was no question in the minds of the Puritans themselves. Trained to view history Christologically and typologically , they saw the shadow of Christ extending over the Old Testament as well as the New. In the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, they found a prefiguring of their own circumstances. ‘Let Israel be...our glass to view our faces in,’ wrote Samuel Fisher in his Testimony in Truth in 1679. A generation later, John Higginson would sum up their thinking in his preface to Cotton Mather’s history of New England: ‘It hath been deservedly esteemed one of the great and wonderful works of God in this last age, that the Lord stirred up the spirits of so many thousands of His servants ...to transport themselves...into a desert land in America...in the way of seeking first the kingdom of God...’ for the purpose of ‘a fuller and better reformation of the Church of God, than it hath yet appeared in the world.’ As such, the Puritans understood New England to be ‘a type and emblem of New Jerusalem.’ And prior to both of these definitions, the president of Harvard, Urian Oakes, gave this simile in 1673: ‘If we ...lay all things together, this our commonwealth seems to exhibit to us a specimen, or a little model, of the Kingdom of Christ upon Earth...wherein it is generally acknowledged and expected.’
A new Jerusalem, a model of the Kingdom of Christ upon earth-we Americans were intended to be living proof to the rest of the world that it was possible to live a life together which reflected the Two Great Commandments and put God and others ahead of self.
Second, this call was to be worked out in terms of the settlers’ covenant with God, and with each other. Both elements of this covenant - the vertical relationship with God, and the horizontal relationship with their fellowmen - were of the utmost importance to the early comers (as the first Christian settlers called themselves). Concerning the vertical aspect of the covenant, they saw no delineation between the two Testaments, believing that an unchanging God had written them both. They saw themselves as being called into a direct continuation of the covenant relationship between God and Abraham: ‘Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great so that you will be a blessing”’ (Genesis 12:1,2).
“‘And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you. And I will give to you, and to your descendants after you...the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God’” (Genesis 17:7,8).
And the early comers knew that Jesus had shown them the only way that it would or could work: ‘...If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me’ (Luke 9:23). This meant a daily commitment to the crossing out of self-love and self-will, in order to obey God and love one another. For the more selfless they became, the more they could truly love their neighbors. This was crucial to God’s plan: it was His clear intent that, as they lived the Christian life, they would grow into such unity that they would become, in effect, a body of believers-His body, until His return. How unified God intends the Body of Christ to be was summed up by the apostle Paul, in his letters to the first Christians: ‘So we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another’ (Romans 12:5). ‘If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together’ (I Corinthians 12:26). This was the way the early comers covenanted together, as each group formed its church.
God did keep His end of the bargain (which is the third major theme), and He did so on both an individual and a corporate basis. It is a sobering experience to look closely at our history and see just how highly God regarded what can only be called ‘a right heart attitude.’ One finds long droughts broken by a settlement’s deliberately fasting and humbling itself, turning back to the God whom they once trusted and had imperceptibly begun to take for granted. One also finds instances of one settlement being spared from Indian attack, while another is decimated, when the only apparent difference seemed to be in their heart attitude towards God and one another. Whenever we began to wonder if we might not be ‘shoehorning’ history to fit our presuppositions, we had the recorded beliefs of the settlers themselves as a guide. And in page after page of private diary or public proclamation, the immediate response to any disaster, human or natural, was ‘Where do we need to repent?’ In fact, there seemed to be a continuing, almost predictable cycle: in great need and humility a small body of Christians would put themselves into the hands of their Lord and commit their lives to one another. They would do their best to live together as He had called them to live. And He, in turn, would begin to pour out His blessing on them with health, peace, and bounteous harvests.
But as they grew affluent, they would also become proud or complacent or self-righteous. Nonetheless, the blessing would continue unabated, sometimes for generations, as God continued to honor the obedience of their fathers and grandfathers (Deuteronomy 7:9). But inevitably, because He loved them (and because even God’s patience has an end), He would be forced to lift the grace which lay upon their land, just enough to cause them to turn back to Him. A drought, or an epidemic of smallpox, or an Indian uprising would come, and the wisest among them would remember....Like the prophets of old, they would call the people to repentance. And if there was a true and lasting change in their heart attitudes, God would forgive their sins, and His grace would be returned.
That a drought could be broken, or an Indian attack averted, by corporate repentance is an idea which sounds alien to many Christians today. Yet it was central to the faith which built this country, and is one of the most prominent, recurring themes in the Bible. One of the most familiar examples is, ‘If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land’ (2 Chronicles 7:14). The key, of course, was that His people - three thousand years ago, three hundred years ago, or today-had to first see that they were sinners. Without accepting that truth, there could be no repentance, for they would not see any need for humbling themselves. This was the linchpin to God’s plan for America: that we see ourselves, individually and corporately, in a state of continuing need of God’s forgiveness, mercy, and support. And this was the secret of the horizontal aspect of the covenant as well: for only at the foot of the Cross can we be truly united in Christ. Only starting from that position of each of us having to see our own sin, can we be truly one in the Spirit.”
The amount of evidence within the Scriptures is overwhelming, demonstrating how God judges nations and people regardless if a person is a Christian or not. I plan to close this series on “The Science of Judgment” in my next article, number thirteen. I will discuss cases where God used not only a nation but He used lions and bears to execute His Hand of Judgment on the disobedient.
Do you enjoy these newsletters? Please help me get the Warning message across the United States and around the world by passing this article on to another person whom you feel impressed to give it to. Just ask the Holy Spirit and He will lead you to a person, whether it be a family member or a friend. Maybe God will have you give it to a complete stranger in the market place, on the bus or in an airplane! I need you to help me reach more people with the love of Jesus Christ before God judges the nations after Jesus returns. Help me build up our mailing list with concerned people who know the signs of the times and are concerned with the situation in the world and in the church. Both are sick and need to repent and come under the authority of Jesus Christ instead of men who use them. Give this article to someone who you think will want to receive these articles each month and will help us reach the nations with their prayers and financial support. May God use all of us to reach the nations. With much love and prayers to all of you in this great harvest field,
Jonathan Hansen
© 2005 World Ministries International