The Mind Of A Nation
by Karla Perry
Our long-term societal memory has become impaired. We are restricted to the constraints of a short-term memory. The edifices of culture are thought to be humanity as usual. Our western minds cannot recall a time before liberty. We sort of know that there was a time where man was not free and where we were subjects of empires and not citizens of nations. But it is so far in the distant past that we are foggy on the details.
In fact, the details are so far removed from our thought that we envision a world without nations. We envision a globe where all world views coalesce without religious wars or border disputes. Naivety has given way to utopianism. We think the world a better place than it is, and we think modern humanity better than we are. It is as if we do not know where we came from and so we have a warped since of where we are going.
The modern world is not a product of refined humanity which has become mature with the passage of time. People are as prone to barbarism as our ancestors were thousands of years ago. Or have we so quickly forgotten the massacres in our American schools? We are a society whose compass does not point true north anymore. We not know what direction is true or even where the idea of truth originated.
Two thousand years ago, Pilot asked Jesus, “What is truth?” Oh, the irony and yet how Roman have we become? We may use the word “truth” daily, but do we know where we got the idea of truth itself? Humanity did not invent truth. It did not sprout up out of any religious literature written by mere men. You can scour the earth looking for it, but only one book introduced the world to truth because there is only one God who is Truth. Truth can only come from the source of Truth. That Eternal Source inspired a true written book we call The Bible. Its authors were not writing from their own knowledge base, but from the source of truth Himself.
It is truth that sets us free. Civic liberty comes from this truth. No other source provides the basis for a free society. In a recent interview, Eric Metaxas asked the masterful thinker Os Guinness a compelling question: “If somebody does not take the Bible as the founding document of their thinking – from where would someone get the idea that there are human rights?” Os responded brilliantly, “you can’t,” he intoned in his rich British accent.
You can’t! It is not possible to have a philosophical grounding of human rights without the Bible. But that truth is entrenched in a forgotten generation. It has not been thoroughly passed down generation to generation as it ought to have been. We think human rights are common sense, or mature human thinking. They are no such thing.
Somewhere in the course of human events we became cut off from our history. We have succumbed to myths and we perpetuate myths. Instead of discipling in the truth, we share the myth that Christianity is only about Jesus saving us from our sins and taking us to heaven when we die. The earth, nations, and institutions can all go their own way because we cannot take them with us and God’s Kingdom is in heaven. It only comes to earth momentarily for salvation, healing, miracles, and maybe some prophetic ministry. Our worldview is limited for we do not know our history nor the power of truth to reform cities and nations to align with the Kingdom of God.
God wants entire nations operating in truth, not just individual souls. Will we open the door of our minds to the truth of the Gospel, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Or we will continue to limit our experience of truth to spiritual experiences and leave the practical natural world under the sway of the lies of the enemy?