Filling up of Iniquity

The bible teaches us that nations and people groups experience a generational compounding effect in their embrace of sin.¹ One generation espouses an evil practice, the generation following takes it a little further and so on until a people considers actions such as killing, maiming, and castrating children as a moral good. Satan works incrementally to effect change toward greater sin and evil.² Barring reformation and national repentance, the concerted effort to plunge people into greater sin continues to progress.

When the wickedness increases, God’s people become the outcasts. Society perceives them as immoral according to the current warped morality. Despite this, they call their society to return to good ways.³ They also stand in the way of the progress of evil and restrain it from becoming worse.

Looking at the United States of America, we can see how this principle of moral decline played out by taking two soundings of national morality.

More than two hundred twenty years ago, President John Adams issued a proclamation that contains these words:

I have therefore thought fit to recommend, and I do hereby recommend, that Wednesday, the 9th day of May next, be observed throughout the United States as a day of solemn humiliation, fasting, and prayer; that the citizens of these States, abstaining on that day from their customary worldly occupations, offer their devout addresses to the Father of Mercies agreeably to those forms or methods which they have severally adopted as the most suitable and becoming; that all religious congregations do, with the deepest humility, acknowledge before God the manifold sins and transgressions with which we are justly chargeable as individuals and as a nation, beseeching Him at the same time, of His infinite grace, through the Redeemer of the World, freely to remit all our offenses, and to incline us by His Holy Spirit to that sincere repentance and reformation which may afford us reason to hope for his inestimable favor and heavenly benediction; that it be made the subject of particular and earnest supplication that our country may be protected from all the dangers which threaten it; that our civil and religious privileges may be preserved inviolate and perpetuated to the latest generations; that our public councils and magistrates may be especially enlightened and directed at this critical period; that the American people may be united in those bonds of amity and mutual confidence and inspired with that vigor and fortitude by which they have in times past been so highly distinguished and by which they have obtained such invaluable advantages; that the health of the inhabitants of our land may be preserved, and their agriculture, commerce, fisheries, arts, and manufactures be blessed and prospered; that the principles of genuine piety and sound morality may influence the minds and govern the lives of every description of our citizens, and that the blessings of peace, freedom, and pure religion may be speedily extended to all the nations of the earth.[1]

America’s first gradual and more recently, headlong decline into perversity and evil is such that in 2022, the office of President Joseph Biden, issued a proclamation that contains these words:

Efforts to criminalize supportive medical care for transgender kids, to ban transgender children from playing sports, and to outlaw discussing LGBTQI+ people in schools undermine their humanity and corrode our Nation’s values. [2]

The proclamation implies that it is a national value, a moral good, to castrate a child and mutilate his or her reproductive parts upon the child’s declaration that said reproductive parts do not belong to them.

Instead of holding back a child from commiting identitiy suicide, government officials support it, and condemn those who do not. As a sage once observed, “The kindest acts of the wicked are cruel.”

God sees, and the measuring cup of national iniquity fills up a measure more. At His appointed time, God will come to judge and will not keep silence. But how much better would it be for the people of this nation if the gospel was widely believed and obeyed here?

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