In the eighth chapter of Nehemiah we see the starting point for any true national renewal. It is the Word of God.
Verses 2-12 tell of a great public assembly in which Ezra the priest read the law of God to the people and of how they were affected by it. The people showed extraordinary reverence for the law, for they rose in respectful silence when Ezra opened the scroll. When he prayed they responded, “Amen! Amen!” and worshiped God. As the account unfolds we discover that the reading of God’s law led to national revival.
That is what we need in the United States, too. But instead of honoring the Word of God and hungering after it as the people of Judah did in the days of Nehemiah and Ezra, our country seems intent on doing everything possible to keep the Bible and even religion itself from public life. It is strange that this should be so, since our country was founded with a conscious attention to and respect for biblical principles.
We have been told that our founding fathers were for the most part unbelievers or at best deists. But while there is some truth to that, it is nevertheless also a distortion.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was a deist, but that does not mean that he utterly discounted the Bible. On the contrary, he said, “The Bible is the cornerstone of liberty.”1
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was a skeptical unbeliever, but he believed in prayer. He inaugurated the practice of prayer before deliberation which still prevails in Congress.
George Washington (1732-1799) gave strong testimony of faith. In a small prayer book composed when he was about twenty years old Washington wrote:
O most glorious God . . . remember that I am but dust, and remit my transgressions, negligences and ignorances, and cover them all with the absolute obedience of thy dear Son, that those sacrifices (of sin, praise and thanksgiving) which I have offered may be accepted by thee, in and for the sacrifice of Jesus Christ offered upon the cross for me….Direct my thoughts, words and work; wash away my sin in the immaculate blood of the Lamb; and purge my heart by the Holy Spirit.”2
John Witherspoon (1723-1794), the president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) and the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, wrote, “He is the best friend to American liberty who is most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion.”3
Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), the seventh president of the United States, said, “The Bible is the rock on which our Republic rests.”4
Each of these men, though possessing various degrees of spiritual understanding and differing in their ecclesiastical traditions, recognized that a nation is only as strong as its underlying faith in God and that the Bible is essential for survival.
How far we have fallen away from that! How much we need to rediscover Scripture!
1Cyril J. Barber, Nehemiah and the Dynamics of Effective Leadership (Neptune, NJ: Loizeaux Brothers, 1976), 122.
2William J. Johnson, George Washington, the Christian (Nashville: Abingdon, 1919), 23-28.
3Peter Marshall and David Manuel, The Light and the Glory (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1977), 296.
4Barber, Nehemiah and the Dynamics of Effective Leadership, 112.
