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“It’s like church in here,” exclaimed Jamie Foxx at a recent event. “First of all, give an honor to God, and our Lord and Savior Barack Obama!”
“The Second Coming” is Newsweek magazine’s cover story this week. It heralds President Obama’s second term.
Imagery of deification has dogged President Obama since he first ran for president. As America celebrates his inauguration today, I am pondering. When I think of a savior, I think of a protector, provider, healer, a definer of morality and identity. And somehow, that seems to be exactly what our government is becoming.
Diluted Wine
Are we embracing a substitute savior? A few days ago, Jolene had a prophetic experience. She saw a vision of bottles of wine that were being diluted with water. She saw that it wasn’t white wine, nor was it red wine. It was blush. The Lord warned how the very blood of Christ is being diluted by the American church!
At our midnight watch, we processed and prayed through the dream. “Jesus turned water into wine,” Jolene noted. “We seem to be turning wine into water.” Diluted wine, deluded drinkers.
Matt Lockett picked up on the imagery of blush wine. As the bride of Christ, have we become so hardened to sin that we have now refused even to blush at our sin?
Watering Down the Message
Instead of rejecting the gospel, many are simply watering down the message to make it more palatable. The cross is an outdated icon, a means of torture we find distasteful. Lets remove it from our sanctuary. We can focus on the love of God–but it’s a little too early to bring “the blood” into the discussion. Especially when weighed in the balance with our sin. We don’t really want to believe our sin is so reprehensible that the very blood of the sinless Son of God was the only thing that could atone for it. Perhaps we water down the blood of Christ because we have watered down the travesty of our own immorality!
Return to the Blood of Christ
God is calling us to return to the undiluted gospel. To return wholeheartedly to the blood of Christ, the blood of His covenant! Our most desperate need is to pursue God relentlessly for this revelation before our culture completely removes the very boundaries that cause His greatest investment to even be valued.
After Jolene’s prophetic experience, I sought to better understand the value the Father places on the covenant sacrifice made by His Son. I Felt Holy Spirit whisper the following. “If you want to value the blood of Jesus, look at an infant. If you want to value an infant, look at the blood of Jesus.”
President Obama has rightly observed that “This is our first task as a society: keeping children safe. This is how we will be judged.” Though the president was referencing new gun laws, the implication of this statement regarding abortion is at least as relevant. Beloved, looking at the life an infant, an innocent child, gives only a small glimpse into the value esteemed by our Heavenly Father of Calvary’s agony. It was for us–the only way to break the vicious cycle of bloodguilt and judgment.
The Travesty of Bloodguilt–Second Inaugural Address
Along these same lines, below is the Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln. Within the words you will find an understanding of bloodguilt and judgment that is astonishingly missing from the teachings of both church and culture.
Second Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1865
Fellow-Countrymen:
At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war–seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
