History Does Repeat Itself

“And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.”  Matthew 12:25

I may have written this before in a prior blog, but it fits in well with today’s subject.  When my daughter was in the fourth grade, she asked me, “Mom, if history is going to repeat itself anyway, why do we have to study it?”  I answered, “So that we won’t repeat it.”  But as we all know, whether we study history or not, generally speaking, we rarely seem to learn from our past mistakes.  Of course we all have the capacity to learn from our individual mistakes, and many of us do, but as a nation, we, like the nation of ancient Israel, just don’t seem to profit from the bad judgments that we make as a people.

When I study the Old Testament books of the kings of Israel, I see so many parallels to today’s world that it is rather spooky.  For those of you who are students of God’s Word, you will recall how that after the death of Solomon, the nation of Israel was divided into the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah.  The southern kingdom was ruled by Solomon’s son, Rehoboam, and the northern kingdom was ruled by a man named Jeroboam who was not of the line of King David.  God had promised David that one of his descendants would sit on Israel’s throne continually.  We know that Jesus Christ came through the line of David through both his birth mother Mary and his adopted father Joseph, the entire reason for God’s promise to David.

Thus the nation of Israel was divided.  Some of the kings were righteous, but there were those who were about as evil as one could get.  Many of the kings led their people into idolatry, worshiping anything and everything that wasn’t the LORD God.  Among their forms of worship were child sacrifice, perverted sexual acts, worship of the sun, moon, and stars, also known as the Baal gods, some of whom were the gods of weather and storms, wealth, and power.  There was nothing off limits when it came to their worship.  They abandoned the God of Israel instead turning to man-made idols and items in nature.  They mocked God and acted as if they would not be held accountable for their idolatry and wickedness.  But they were.  God allowed them to promote their evil for a time, but eventually He called them into account.

Fast forward to today.  We have a divided nation.  There are those who value individual freedom and the rights which are guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without government interference.  The government was created to protect these rights of the individual.  Then we have those who see government as a nanny who needs to order our lives to suit those who would have the charge over all people.  In other words, they want to be God.  They do not want to honor Him.  One party even tried to eliminate God from their platform.  That speaks volumes about who they are and what they espouse.

We have those who desire to kill infants before and after they are born.  That’s what I call child sacrifice.  They approve of all kinds of sexual perversions, they have attempted to create genders besides the only two genders that God created, and they have made climate change a religion.  God let Israel go a long time, by man’s measurement of time, before He brought them under judgment.  The evil acts that folks are perpetrating now are the same things that they were doing in ancient Israel.  Since their sins eventually caught up with them, how can folks think that America will be spared?