When I went to high school, it was mandatory to study history for one period a day for all four years. To spend such a large portion of our education time on learning about things in the past tells you just how important our society thinks the study of history is. All of us are familiar with the great emphasis placed on learning about our own American history, and rightly so. The Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the industrial revolution, the thirteen original colonies, the Gold Rush, the Pony Express and many more topics are all part of our glorious past. They, in a sense, have helped mold you and me into who we are today.
The struggles to obtain and then maintain our freedoms are one continuous thread that we all can see running through our entire history. We have come to cherish the hard-fought battles previous generations have won for us. As a result of these victories, freedom rings true in all our land. Our schools fortunately realize how important it is to study about them in order to learn their causes. For to know the causes that helped to secure our liberty may just give us the clues we need to pass these freedoms down to our children and their children.
John Quincy Adams challenged us to learn from the past why America and “liberty” became two sides of the same coin to all the world around it. The sixth President of the United States once remarked, “Posterity, you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.”
This is the same man who once also said, “The first and almost the only Book deserving of universal attention is the Bible.”
May I challenge you to explore some of the evidence that I have shared in several past devotions as well as in future devotions concerning the unique role the Bible has played in the shaping of this great land we live in. For if we can establish a cause-and-effect relationship between the Holy Scriptures and the great liberty we experience today, then to discard the Bible and its teachings may just mean that one day these precious freedoms will no longer be ours.
Throughout world history, down through the centuries, nations have become great and powerful and, with time, have collapsed. Empires have been built and later have come crashing down. Even dynasties have lasted for hundreds of years only to eventually dissolve. Correspondingly, the ideologies that have allowed this great rise to power have also come and gone with the decline of these countries.
The Bible, however, like a shining beacon in the night, has weathered any and every storm it has had to face over the past 3,000 years. One thing we hear over and over again is that history always repeats itself. If this is any indication, then we can be sure that nations will continue to rise and fall and that the Bible will always be there.
The American ideology and the democratic free state it has so wonderfully fostered were conceived of by men with vision, who for the most part were men guided by the tenets of the Bible. Without the Bible, the great American dream would never have become a reality.
Just as the early sailors guided themselves through the seas by using the stars as their compass, our first American ancestors anchored themselves to the Holy Scriptures as their constant companion through all the trials and battles they faced.
What has made us such a great nation? Our wonderful beginning. And what brought about that beginning? The Bible.