Abraham Lincoln wrote these words in a letter to an Abolitionist friend in 1863:
“Blood grows hot, and blood is spilled. Thought is forced from old channels into confusion. Deception breeds and thrives. Confidence dies, and universal suspicion reigns. Each man feels an impulse to kill his neighbor, lest he be first killed by him. Revenge and retaliation follow. And all this…may be among honest men only. But this is not all. Every foul bird comes abroad, and every dirty reptile rises up. These add crime to confusion.”
The Atlantic Journal reported President Lincoln’s correspondence in its recent April 2023 issue. The author of the cover article entitled “The New Anarchy,” responding to Lincoln’s Civil War-era words of insight and their startling, descriptive symmetry to the situation of this day, observes and predicts:
“In recent years, Americans have contemplated a worst-case scenario, in which the country’s extreme and widening divisions lead to a second Civil War. But what the country is experiencing now—and will likely continue to experience for a generation or more—is something different. The form of extremism we face is a new phase of domestic terror, one characterized by radicalized individuals with shape-shifting ideologies willing to kill their political enemies.”
Extremist ideologies on both the right and on the left contribute to this “new phase of domestic terror.”. A decline in trust of democratic institutions is cited as just one of several root causes of the conditions of extremism and political violence the country faces now. The remedy is complex and challenging, to say the obvious, but specific changes are especially needed. They include, the journalist states, “…something we have not had and perhaps can barely imagine anymore: leaders from all parts of the political constellation, and at all levels of government, and from all segments of society, who name the problem of political violence for what it is….”. This call for leadership “from all segments of society” is one which I now hope to join others in answering, as a Christian academician and former seminary professor whose call to theological education I have rejoiced in striving to honor, as “steward of a sacred trust,” named so by esteemed former President of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Randall Lolley, in thus honoring our faculty members, in 1987. All glory to God!
Our country’s gravest loss has been its loss of trust in God. Seldom does a political leader appeal now in earnest prayer to Almighty God for His gift of our country’s faithfulness and trust in His guidance and Sovereign Will. That must be our starting point. We cannot trust God apart from our earnest appeal for that gift of trust from God. We cannot generate it ourselves.
When we want to trust God, more than we want water when we are thirsty; when we want to trust God, more than we want food when we are hungry, God will give to us the trust that is love of God. The first commandment is that we shall love God with all our heart, all our soul, all our might. Those are other words for trust. God desires our trust above all else.
Trust is not telling God what we want and having faith that God will grant it. Rather, trust is accepting what God intends and plans for us, and having faith that God’s decisions and actions are underway, and that they are, and evermore will be, always right and best for us, and for the purpose of God’s divine intention for His creation. Trust is deep, abiding confidence that God is with us, and bringing to pass that which is right and best for us, without remainder. This trust exceeds all other gifts of healing from serious disease and injury; this trust exceeds the gift of good health itself. This trust fortifies the human spirit for life’s most threatening challenges and comforts in our most disappointing losses.
And trust is joyous gratitude to God! It is vibrant thanksgiving to God for these mighty gifts of mercy and grace! Hallelujah! I know this blessed Truth from the Bible, and I know it from my own experience. Praise God from Whom all blessings flow!
Both Old Testament and New Testament overflow with this “Amazing Grace” and Truth. Abraham’s trust in Yahweh did not flag even when the sacrifice of his beloved son Isaac was in the balance. God stayed Abraham’s willing hand and blessed both father and son. Mary trusted God’s divine Will and became the mother of our Redeemer, the Incarnate Son and Savior. Christ Jesus Himself trusted the Father and His Will and inaugurated God’s New Covenant through His sacrificed blood, for all and for all time.
Let us pray for trust, and discernment for God’s Will for this day and its peril. Let us covenant with God to accept God’s Will with trust and gratitude, by God’s unfailing Strength and steadfast Love and Grace. Let us follow, as God’s covenant people, to God’s glory!
Thanks be to God.
Elizabeth Barnes is a native of Bladen County and a retired Professor of Christian Theology and Ethics at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. She formerly taught at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest. She is now an active member of Beard’s Chapel Baptist Church and teaches Sunday School there on first and third Sundays.