FAITH & CULTURE 24 JULY 2026 www.goodnewsfl.org Good News • South Florida Edition For years now, we've heard the call to make America great again. But few stop to ask what made America great in the first place. Was it military strength? Economic power? Political genius? History suggests something far less impressive to the modern ear, yet far truer to the work of God. In March of 1863, with the nation tearing itself apart in civil war, Abraham Lincoln called the country to a day of fasting and prayer. In his proclamation, he reached for a truth he believed older and steadier than any battlefield outcome: "Those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord." Lincoln didn't invent that line. He was quoting Psalm 33:12, a verse that shaped much of the political thinking behind America's founding, and one our own cultural moment badly needs to hear again: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” The blessing What does it mean for a nation to be blessed? In God’s vocabulary, blessing does not consist primarily in wealth or power, nor in the self-help happiness our culture chases. It means something closer to flourishing before the face of God, experiencing the deep stability and joy that come from living in right relationship with your Maker. That is the spirit behind the Declaration of Independence's phrase, “the pursuit of happiness.” The founders were drawing on a classical tradition that defined happiness as a life of virtue and flourishing rather than one of self-indulgence. Scripture sharpens that insight: true flourishing is finally found not in virtue for its own sake, but in a right relationship with the God who is its source. Here is what is easy to miss about Psalm 33:12: it is not a promise reserved for one chosen nation. The Hebrew word translated "nation" is a general term, used elsewhere in scripture for the Gentile nations as a whole. The psalm is not saying Israel alone can be blessed. It is saying any nation, under any flag, in any century, finds this blessing available on the same terms: when its God is the Lord. That is the principle the American founders grasped, even if they didn't always live up to it. They didn't believe they had cornered the market on God's favor. They believed they had discovered something true about how any nation flourishes, and they tried, imperfectly, to build a country on it. You can trace the thread from the Puritans, who founded schools so children could read Scripture for themselves, through John Adams's sober warning in 1798: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." The Declaration of Independence itself closes with an appeal to "a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence." The founders believed that reliance, not any particular genius of American design, unlocked two and a half centuries of remarkable liberty. The blessing lost But the same psalm that promises blessing also describes divine judgment. God doesn't only bless nations; he rules over them and holds them to his own standard of righteousness — not whatever standard a culture happens to prefer in a given decade. And the honest truth for any of us living in America today is that our nation has been drifting from dependence on God toward dependence on government, or any number of other modern substitutes for him, instead. That drift didn't happen overnight. One clear marker came roughly a century ago, with the rise of a movement explicitly committed to displacing Christian conviction with a different faith altogether, one waged in public school classrooms rather than pulpits. A widely cited 1983 piece in The Humanist magazine described the classroom itself as the new battleground, with teachers cast as missionaries for a different gospel entirely. Whatever you make of how that battle has unfolded since, the pattern Scripture warns about is plain: When a nation stops calling good "good" and evil "evil" by God's definition, and starts defining both for itself, it loses the very blessing it was after. The blessing reclaimed So how does a nation find its way back? Not primarily through politics, and not through any single election. Scripture's answer is the mobilization of the Church — God’s people. Jesus told his disciples in Matthew 5 that they were salt and light: salt that preserves and heals, light that brings clarity to a confused and darkened culture. The church does not reclaim a nation's blessing by seizing control of the state. That was never our calling. Christ has given each sphere of society, family, church and government alike, its own God-given authority and limits. The church's task is to be faithfully present within its own sphere, bearing witness to truth in word and life, and trusting God to work through that witness in every other sphere it touches. Practically, that begins with a recovered, rightly ordered patriotism. Christ and his kingdom come first. Our citizenship in any earthly nation comes second, real and good but never ultimate. An imperfect nation, like an imperfect family, is still worth loving and still worth telling the truth about, including the truth of where it has fallen short of what it claims to believe. It also requires something we cannot manufacture ourselves: a genuine, Spiritenabled revival. Before there was a Declaration of Independence, there was a Great Awakening, decades of bold gospel preaching that reshaped the hearts of a generation before it ever reshaped a government. We need that again, a movement of God's Spirit that begins in changed hearts and works outward into a changed culture, rather than the other way around. History offers a picture of what that kind of faithfulness can look like under pressure. On the night before the first shots of the Revolution were fired, the pastor of the church in Lexington, Massachusetts, was asked whether his congregation was prepared to stand. His answer, the story goes, was simple: Through years of faithful preaching of God’s Word, he had prepared them for this very hour. By morning, several of his own church members lay dead on Lexington Green. We may never face a morning like that one. But every generation faces some version of the same question: Have we been prepared, by the steady, patient work of gospel faithfulness, for whatever hour we are given? The blessing of Psalm 33:12 was never an American inheritance to be cashed in. It is a standing invitation to any people, in any age, who will say again that the Lord, and not any government, is their God. Dr. Robert J. Pacienza is the Senior Pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church (Fort Lauderdale, FL) and the CEO and President of Coral Ridge Ministries. - Dr. Rob Pacienza - Senior Pastor, Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church What Really Made America Great American Revolution Battle Green Common and Revolution War Monument, Lexington, MA. Oct 2024 Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord. – Psalm 33:12 “ ”
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