God Is Not A Religion...

God is not a religion or a political device. He is the God to whom the founders appealed in the last sentence of the Declaration for his protection

By Bernard Reese

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The Declaration of Independence proclaims as America’s Rule of Law that it is “self-evident that all men are created equal.” Men were fighting and dying in the Civil War in 1863 to free the slaves in a crisis of punishment for violating God’s moral law.  

The United States Congress directed President Abraham Lincoln to prepare and broadcast a proclamation asking God for his forgiveness and direction. In response to Congress’s direction on March 30, 1863 Abraham Lincoln published the following proclamation:

“And whereas it is the duty of (this nation) as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truths, announced in the holy Scripture and proven by all history, but those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord. And, inasmuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful in of our national reformation as a whole people?” (And for the United States at the present time, although we are not in a civil war, we are in a national crisis characterized as economic, but when in fact it is a moral crisis that is devastating this land as a result of taking the lives of millions of innocent children in abortion.)

“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and in prosperity and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving Grace, too proud to pray to God that made us!  

“It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to Confess Our National Sins, and to pray for Clemency and Forgiveness.”

“All This Being Done, in Sincerity and Truth, Let Us Then Rest Humbly in the hope authorized by the Divine teachings, that the united cry of the Nation will be heard on high, and answered with blessings, no less than the pardon of our national sins and the restoration of our now divided and suffering Country, to its former happy condition of unity and peace.”

“(Signed by) President Abraham Lincoln (and) attested by William H. Seward Secretary of State on March 13 in the “year of our Lord 1863 and of the Independence of the United States the eighty-seventh.”

The merciful God of heaven answered that prayer. The Union was preserved and the slaves freed. America’s bloodiest war made possible 145 years later the election of Barack Obama, a black American, to the presidency of the United States of America. 

God is not a religion or a political device. He is the God to whom the founders appealed in the last sentence of the Declaration for his protection stating: “For the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”  

The Declaration is a legal document, not a religious document. God and His moral principles legally were to be freely expressed in our political and educational life. For the last 60 years the courts, in violation of the Declaration, have denied that right. In addition, the courts have declared it legal to kill 4 million unborn children a year; a ruling acquiesced in by a majority of the voters in the last election. 

We live in the growing darkness of financial chaos, stalking terrorism and the realistic threat of a nuclear holocaust without a sign of repentance or recognition of God’s moral laws.

We need the admonition of the Prophet Amos who was sent by God to warn the nation ofIsrael that a society which cared more for gain than honor and moral obedience was sick to death and that without repentance judgment was on its way.

Bernard Reese of the law firm Reese & Reese is a trustee of the Supreme Court Historical Society.