This is the world I see

I was talking to somebody I know the other day and he was telling me about how he had been reading through the Old Testament, specifically the book of Daniel. "Man, there's some scary stuff in there," he said. I agreed. The prophetic book has all kinds of strange imagery that can evoke fear. But this conversation has stayed with me because of what this guy said next, which is something along the lines of what I've heard preachers say for years now - that if God doesn't judge America soon, he is going to have to apologize to the people of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Of course, that's not in Daniel. It's in Genesis, but the Old Testament gives accounts of God judging the world and punishing people for wickedness. There was the flood. There was Sodom and Gomorrah. There was all the tribes who inhabited the promised land that the Israelites were promised. All of these people faced God's wrath, and so what of America, whose people are committing some of the same sins today and yet we haven't been invaded or led off into slavery? We haven't been destroyed with a flood or fire raining from heaven.

While I personally don't believe God regards the United States in the same way as Israel in the Old Testament, my issue here is not really a theological one, but a question of perspective. It's about believing whether or not our nation and the world we live in are getting worse and worse, more sinful, and more corrupt each day. Of course, certain end times theology that includes the rapture and destruction of the world as we know it (which I believe has been debunked by N.T. Wright) has contributed to this outlook as well. People are going to become more corrupt. They are going to turn away from God and practice more and more evil. It's supposed to happen this way...

But I wonder that even though things are extremely far from ideal, is it really true that we are getting worse? I mean, the present may not be all that great, but what makes anybody think that America's past is so much better than its present? At the countries founding, we had stolen land from the Native Americans. We forced them off of their land, fought wars against them, and killed them in the name of God when we were motivated by nothing more than greed and selfishness. We also imported human beings from Africa who had been literally ripped from their lives, homes, and loved ones. We shipped them across the Atlantic Ocean on ships in the worst of conditions, bought and sold them as property, and forced them to work for nothing. And then there was the fact that at our nation's founding, you had to be a white, property owning male to vote.

It seems to me that while lots of things in this world aren't great, we are at least in many ways making progress. You would think that if God was going to punish us, it would be for the things we did to blacks, Indians, and others. The fact that we might allow gay people to get married has got nothing on that. For those that long for the "good old days," when everything seemed to be nicer, simpler, and more Christian; remember that these weren't necessarily the good old days for everybody. Is there a black man or woman who would look back to the 1950s as a better time? I think not.

But, I assure you this: If tomorrow there is a loud trumpet blast and we Christians are zapped up into the air to meet Jesus in the clouds, or if some other nation invades and hauls us off into slavery, or if a terrible natural disaster (global warming? That would be ironic...) were to wipe us off the map, I promise that I will eat crow.