In the first five chapters of Isaiah, we see how Israel slipped away from its moorings to God and His covenant, falling into deeper and deeper corruption. Then they went beyond corruption to an ultimate depravity. They started calling good evil and evil good, honoring the dishonorable and dishonoring the honorable. How could any nation fall to such profound evil, much less one that had known The Lord the way Israel had and seen so many of His marvelous works on their behalf? The same way America has.

        We now do the same thing, calling evil what God has called good and calling good what He has called evil. We dishonor the honorable and we honor the dishonorable. Like Israel, we are now tottering on the brink of a terrible destruction, those that the biblical warnings declare will surely come upon any nation that has known Him and then turned from Him to follow evil.

        God sought to turn back each step of Israel’s fall with the discipline of His judgments. When they refused the message of His discipline, the judgments got more severe. In a final attempt to turn them back, the last judgment was to give them over to immature, capricious leaders. This was written about Israel, but it is a stunning parallel of what has come upon America.

         Some of the natural disasters prophesied to come upon nations to wake them up to their folly and turn them back to The Lord are storms, floods, droughts, fires, and earthquakes. We have seen waves of these come, and each new wave has been more severe than the last. Just a few years ago it would have been alarming for the U.S. to spend $20 billion on natural disasters in a single year. In 2018, we spent almost a billion a day! That is correct, we spent over $300 billion dollars in one year on catastrophes that only insurance companies seem to have the understanding to call them what they are—“acts of God.” How bad will it have to be to get our attention?

        The first step in restoring our Republic is to return to The Lord in repentance and humility. “We the people” must ultimately take ownership for the meltdown of the spiritual, moral, and constitutional foundations of our Republic, and “we the people” must be responsible for restoring them. If we return to The Lord by turning from our wicked ways and the depravity of calling “good evil, and evil good,” He will return to us and give us mature, wise, godly leaders who will restore the Republic and lead us to fulfilling our destiny as a nation.

        Why is having immature, capricious leaders the final judgment before destruction? We have all likely witnessed a family that has become subject to the tyranny of a five year old. The spoiled, undisciplined child can dominate the entire family with their tantrums, determining where they go and what they do. Now the U.S. is controlled to a large degree by a tiny percentage of the loudest, most obnoxious, and capricious ones. These demand tolerance for their aberrant behavior, but they most intolerant of any who challenge their dominance.

        When wise, decisive leadership is restored in a family, you can expect the tantrums to get even more severe for a time. Even so, if the family resolves not to endure the tyranny of the capricious five year old, but holds their course, peace and order can be restored. Peace and order can likewise be restored to our country, but we can expect some extreme outrage for a time when the capricious lose their influence. What we’re experiencing now is the result of authority beginning to be restored to a degree by a decisive President. As more authority and order come, we can expect more outrage from those who think they can control us by their tantrums, but peace and order is possible if we do not cave to this.

         So we have a choice. Are we going to continue to be controlled by the undisciplined and immature or will a leadership arise that will not be controlled or manipulated, but rather persevere until order is restored? Either choice requires embracing some rough times ahead, but if we do what is right, things will ultimately get better. If we go the way of allowing the loudest, most obnoxious, and outrageous to control us, then we are headed for a nightmare.

        We love the youth because parents tend to love their children more than they love their own lives. If we truly love the emerging generations, we will give attention to the biblical warnings for them. The Scriptures do not have anything good to say about the last generation. Both Jesus and the apostles described it as being deceived and prone to deception, because they can only hear what makes them feel good. That is the symptom of an immature, spoiled child, which biblical prophecies declare will result in them becoming “disrespectful, irreconcilable, selfish, haters of good and lovers of evil.” What could better describe what the emerging generations are like now? Certainly this is not true of all, but it fits most. So what can be done for them?

        First, we must love them as The Scriptures exhort us to, which is equated with discipline. King Solomon wrote that “He who spares the rod hates his son” (see Proverbs 13:24). Contrary to biblical wisdom and truth, child psychologists warned against spanking to the degree that it is now a crime in some countries and is treated like one here. Those psychologists promised that our tolerance and lack of discipline would produce wonderful, reasonable children. How has that worked out? It seems to have unleashed everything Jesus and the apostles warned about with the last generation.

         However, we have this remarkable promise in Isaiah 60:1-5: when darkness is covering the earth and “deep darkness” the people, the glory of The Lord will arise and appear on His people. Then the nations will come to His Light! The Light will win! So how does the Light win? It wins by the people turning back to it. It is time to turn back to biblical truth and turn away from the “the wisdom that does not come down from above, but is earthly, natural, and demonic” (see James 3:15).