Monday, December 6, 1999

Editor:

Gene Touchet ("Scriptures Should Be Applied as a Balm, Not as a Weapon," Sunday Opinion, December 5, 1999) will not tolerate the beliefs of Bible-believing Christians, and seeks to impose his Secularist values upon us. The Bible commands us to use it as a weapon against those who would destroy the moral fabric of society, repeatedly likening the Word of God to a sword (Hebrews 4:12; Revelation 19:15; Ephesians 6:17; Isaiah 11:4; Matthew 10:34).

"Unfortunately," Mr. Touchet moralizes, "words such as ‘wrong’ and ‘sin’" are too often used by Christians, which he says is wrong, if not sinfully contrary to "the Constitution, [which] gives each of us the right to believe or not to believe." But in the Constitutional Convention on Wednesday, August 22, 1787, George Mason, "The Father of the Bill of Rights," urged a constitutional prohibition on slavery, as being among those evils which

bring the judgment of Heaven on a country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities.

On March 23, 1798, President John Adams issued an official proclamation

that Wednesday, the 9th day of May next, be observed throughout the United States as a day of solemn humiliation, fasting, and prayer; that the citizens of these States, abstaining on that day from their customary worldly occupations, offer their devout addresses to the Father of Mercies . . . with the deepest humility, acknowledge before God the manifold sins and transgressions with which we are justly chargeable as individuals and as a nation, beseeching Him at the same time, of His infinite grace, through the Redeemer of the World, freely to remit all our offenses, and to incline us by His Holy Spirit to that sincere repentance and reformation which may afford us reason to hope for his inestimable favor and heavenly benediction;

In the midst of the Civil War, which he believed was one of those "national calamities" spoken of by Col. Mason, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed,

it is the duty of nations 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 truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord . . . .

The voices of "tolerance" are those mocked by the Prophet Jeremiah: "They have healed the hurt of My people slightly, saying, 'Peace, peace!' when there is no peace."