The Call.6

"...When the king learned of what had happened, he was enraged. He sent his palace soldiers into the provinces, and they caught the murderers, executed them, and burned their houses to the ground."

---Jesus

Take comfort in this, dear saints of God, 

HE WILL NEVER LET THE INMATES RUN THE ASYLUM!

Mark Steyn's newest book, After America, captures the essence of indifference to God's invitation to honor His kingdom, it's Leader and its godly heritage:

"King Belshazzar's wild party began with an act of desecration: 

"Then they brought the golden vessels that were taken out of the temple of the house of God which was at Jerusalem; and the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, drank in them. They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone...

No sooner has he done so than the writing appears on the wall, spelling out with disembodied fingers "mene mene, tekel, upharsin."  They're currency units: half-dollar, half-dollar, penny, and two bits.  But what does it mean? None of the A-list seers Belshazzar keeps on the payroll has a clue what it portends, so the King calls in Daniel the Jew to explain things, which he does, very bluntly:

Mene: "God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it."

Tekel: "Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting."

Upharsin: "thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians."

Within twenty-four hours, Belshazzar is slain and Darius the Mede is king.

Today, the units are larger than in Babylon: "mene mene, tekel, upharsin: is now trillion trillion, billion, half-trillion.  But the upshot's the same.  We've spent too much of tomorrow today--to the point we've run out of tomorrow: fiscally, our days are numbered; structurally, we've been weighed in the balances and found wanting; and geopolitically, the Medes are thin on the ground but the Persians have gone nuclear."  (from the prologue: The Stupdity of Broke)

America is a wild party out of control and its leaders are ignoring, nay, are antagonistic to the lessons of the past.  With gross neglect and hostile intent they now target messengers of God's patient and timeless invitation to come to his banquet and honor His Son: the Logos who embodies the Kingdom virtues of righteousness, peace, and truth.

America's history is not a story of collectivist planners herding the masses to economic prosperity.  It is the ageless story of individuals committing themselves to God, His ways and sharing a commonwealth of blessing by living out the principles that lead to those blessings.  Our hope of redemption, of reversing the tragic and accelerating decline is not in the election cycle, it's in the messenger's task of relentlessly inviting our neighbors back to the banquet!