Can we repent for our country?

Corporate repentance in the Bible

There is no pleasant way to say it–our nation is wicked.

We have killed 70 million of our own children.
We have allowed all manner of sexual perversion to be marched down the streets of our biggest cities and broadcast into every home.
We have bombed or starved countless people.
We have normalized fornication and divorce.
We have allowed doctors to destroy confused young men and women’s bodies through “gender affirming care,” and, in some states, have even made it illegal to try to talk the kids out of it.

“Righteousness exalts a nation,
But sin is a disgrace to any people.”
Proverbs 14:34

Face the facts: we are a disgraceful people. While she was never perfect, these United States once at least acknowledged Jesus publicly. Now we have gone from being a nation whose founding was cloaked in Christian language to being one that openly rejects and mocks His rule. It should not surprise us that the bill is beginning to come due.

“Wait a minute,” you might say–“We didn’t do any of these things. They did.”

In a sense, that is true. I believe the church has been too lax and tolerant of sins in our midst, but we certainly are not the primary culprits of all this wickedness.

So why say we are a wicked nation?

Because we are part of this nation. Even if we personally didn’t commit these sins, our people have. Many times in the Bible, God dealt with people corporately and not just individually. Achan took the contraband materials from Jericho, but the nation suffered for it and his whole family paid the price. The prophets were lone beacons of righteousness during their nation’s sinful days, but they still bore some of the consequences of their people’s wickedness.

This didn’t just go for Israel, either. Nineveh comes to mind (Jonah, Nahum), as do the Amalekites, the Edomites, and other nations God judged corporately.

The best example of this is found in Daniel 9.
Daniel was one of the most righteous men in the Scriptures, so the fact that he was in Babylonian and then Persian captivity was certainly not due to his own sinfulness. That punishment had been in the making for hundreds of years before he was born. Still, in one of the most moving prayers in all the Bible, he confessed Israel’s wickedness as one:

“We have sinned, committed iniquity, acted wickedly and rebelled” (9:5)

“We have not listened to Your servants the prophets” (9:6)

“Righteousness belongs to You, O Lord, but to us open shame” (9:7)

“Indeed, all Israel has transgressed Your law and turned aside, not obeying Your voice” (9:11)

“All this calamity has come on us; yet we have not sought the favor of the Lord our God by turning from our iniquity and giving attention to Your truth” (9:13)

“We have sinned, we have been wicked” (9:15, emp. added in all)

All Daniel ever did was stand up for God, even in the face of life-threatening persecution. Still, he had no hesitation to lump himself in in his prayer of corporate repentance. He was an Israelite, and the Israelites had sinned. Sins require confession and repentance. So, Daniel confessed and repented.

As postmodern people, we have been urged not to feel any ties or obligations to people or place.

Further, as postmodern Christians, we are often encouraged to think of ourselves as exiles (an idea debunked well by

Michael Clary

here) and that we are only Americans by a random, irrelevant luck of the draw.

I don’t think God is a postmodern, though.

I have the last name that I have for a reason. No matter how much I want to think myself a rootless individualist, I still bear a resemblance to my dad, granddad, and so forth.

Similarly, as much as I might want to think myself a human with no earthly ethnic or national ties, I’m not. There are distinctly American ways of thinking, talking, and living just in the same way that there are distinctly Japanese and Brazilian ways. For that matter, there are even regional ways of thinking, talking, and living within each country.

This is a beautiful design that God brought about, first by telling man to fill the earth, and then by forcing them to do so by confusing their language at Babel. He definitively proved there that He does not want us to think of ourselves as one global mass of humans, but that we are families that became nations. In fact, in Acts 17:26-27, Paul confirmed that God separated us into families and nations to help us seek Him.

Sure, we would do well to hope the people of Hungary, Ghana, and Thailand walk upright before God. But unless that’s where you live, those aren’t your people. In the same way, I want everyone to walk in the Light. But I’m more personally invested in praying for my own family, and my siblings and their kids. Augustine’s concept of ordo amoris (order of loves) is just common sense in this matter. (See the related Think Deeper episode for more.)

What does this mean for us?

Cloistering ourselves away from the wickedness of our people and saying “We’re over here, they’re over there, that’s their problem,” is a great way to keep ourselves from ever feeling a need to invest in making things better.

Like Paul, we should want our kinsmen in the flesh to come to Christ (Romans 9:3). But, also like Paul, there is only so much we can do for them. One of those things we can do is to pray prayers of corporate repentance for our people.

So, while we might not be personally responsible for the sins of America, we are part of this wicked nation. Like Daniel, it would be good and proper for us to confess America’s sins, repent, and pray that God would revive the hearts of our people. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to simply take Daniel’s prayer, revise it for our situation, and pray it from the pulpit.

A people guilty of great wickedness need prayers of great repentance.

This article is taken from my book Christ’s Co-Rulers: Understanding Christian Political Engagement, available on Amazon

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Notes

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