DIMMING THE LIGHT

Wayne D. Leeper

   This nation has just gone through a week of remembering and honoring our fortieth president, Ronald Reagan.  While he is remembered for many things and many utterances, his most famous and enduring may well be his often reference to America as the "Shining city built upon a hill."  In his farewell address to the nation on January 11, 1989 he described that city.

"I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city on rocks stronger than oceans, wind swept, God blessed and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the  will and the heart to get here.

   Reagan, by his own admission, derived that phrase from reading a sermon by the pilgrim leader and Governor, John Winthrop, which he delivered while aboard the Arbella in route to "New England in the North America," in 1630.  The phrase and it's context are clearly what Reagan visualized when he used it.  As part of his sermon, with regard to the land to which they were headed, Winthrop said:

"The Lord shall be our God, and delight to dwell  among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways.  So that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with.  We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, ‘the Lord make it like that of New England.’ For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.

   While Winthrop stated it beautifully, the concept is actually taken from a passage in the Bible.

"You are the light of the world.  A city that is set upon a hill cannot be hidden....Let your light so shine among men that they may see your good  works and glorify your father in heaven."   Matthew 5:14-16

   When He made this statement Jesus was addressing his followers in what is commonly referred to as the "Sermon on the Mount."   He said that as his followers carried the word of God throughout the world they would be a light for the world.   It has been almost two thousand years since Jesus made that statement but it still holds true today and has been proven over and over since He said it.  When the Bible as we know it was compiled in 397 at the council of Carthage it was withheld from the people.  In approximately 476 AD the world entered what we commonly refer to as the dark ages.  It was only in 1380, when an Englishman by the name of John Wycliffe translated the Bible into the English language and in 1526 when another Englishman named William Tyndale arranged to have 6,000 printed copies smuggled into England and put in the hands of the common man that the world began to come out of the dark ages. This fulfilled a promise Tyndale had made years earlier when:

“Communing and disputing with a learned man in whose company he happened to be, he drove him to that issue, that the learned man said, "We were better to be without God's law than the pope's."  Master Tyndale hearing that, answered him, ‘I defy the pope and all his laws; and if God spare my life many years, I will cause a boy that drives the plow to know more of the scriptures than you do.

   The pilgrims brought this concept to America with them and upon the bedrock of the Holy Scriptures the founders established a nation destined to become the greatest in the world.  The Bible is the light of that Shining City set upon a hill, and America is that city.  Both Reagan and Winthrop had the same vision of a nation guided by the moral principals laid out in the Bible.

   Today we see a conscious effort to dim that light that has guided America's path for almost four hundred years.  There are those who, in the name of tolerance, are seeking to promote every form of licentiousness and ungodliness ever conceived in the hearts of man, and, if given the opportunity, they will turn our nation into a jungle of unrighteousness unparalleled since the fall of the Roman empire.  But they cannot do so without first dimming the light.  Thus we are seeing an unparalleled assault on the Bible and its position as the moral code of this nation.

   Neither a person nor a nation can be turned 180 degrees at one time, but both a person and a nation can be turned one degree 180 times.  Beginning in the sixties we saw our society slowly being turned away from the Bible, one degree at a time.  First there was free love and drugs, followed by abortion on demand, then comes the cry for gay rights and same sex marriage and, finally, an effort to remove the name of God from our Pledge of Allegiance and from our money.  Under the banner of "separation of church and state," their actual goal is to separate "God and state."  They want a godless society in which they will be free to pursue their personal desires without any restrictions being placed on them by a "moral code."  To accomplish this they must first discredit the Bible.  No intelligent person would deny that we are seeing this taking place on a daily basis.  The Bible is being reduced from being the divinely inspired Word of God to being just another philosophy to stand along side other human philosophies. 

   We see men being placed in high offices in the churches of America who openly practice a lifestyle that God has declared to be an abomination (Romans 1:24-32; I Corinthians 6:9-10).  We see the Bible banned in schools and the Ten Commandments banned from the public square.  We see holidays being renamed to remove any reference to the Creator, and people being elected to the highest political offices of our land who have the morals of alley cats. These people appoint like-minded judges who will uphold their positions.  One degree at a time we are seeing America being turned from a nation of God fearing people, the source of it's greatness,  into a godless society more and more living in darkness and following in the path that leads only to the same corrupt end as that which felled the Roman empire.

   Yes, we are seeing the lights of the "shining city" being turned off, one by one.