It has been said that a historian is a prophet in reverse. I do believe we can learn from the past, but we don’t. I also think that the conditions leading up to the 1929 stock market crash have been increasingly prevalent again today. As of today, about 45% of the world’s wealth has been destroyed and now banks from 20 countries are going to meet together to figure out how one world bank might alleviate some of the global banking situation. Our government is looking to spend potentially trillions of dollars it doesn’t have on problems it can’t fix. Why?
We forgot to ask for our daily bread.
Consider this quote…
As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence punishes national sins, by national calamities. ~ George Mason
God deals with nations. America is not the same as Old Testament Israel, but we are a nation, nonetheless. Furthere, if you know much about history at all, from the Plymouth Rock pilgrims to the founding fathers, there was a recognition and dependence upon God that produced tremendous prosperity, which has since led to our becoming overly comfortable and independent of God.
We’ve allowed our prosperity to cause us to become dull to moral limitations and boundaries. We’re in a moral free fall and God will judge us. In fact, I believe it is inevitable.
Jesus, in teaching us how to pray, first taught us to praise God, and secondly to seek God’s purpose. We’re looking at the third aspect of prayer which is given in a short phrase in Jesus’ model: “Give us this day our daily bread.”
There are some very simple truths that flow out of this tiny phrase…
We need God
We are not self-sufficient or self-existent, but He is. He alone can sustain us and provide for us. We can explain our own existence without Him only by dreaming up the most fanciful dreams. We need Him.
We need God’s provision
That is to say, we need for God to be actively involved in our lives, providing for our needs. I’ve been reading much about the Puritans the last day or two, and there was a definite turn in their prospering when they failed to recognize God’s providence in every single event, which had formerly been a benchmark of the Puritan faith. Do we give God credit?
We need God’s provision daily
I think one of the things that always precedes total economic turmoil is when men devise ways to get rich quick in large groups. This happened in the 20′s with the increased production of automobiles and other technologies. It happened in the 90′s with the dot com boom and bust. And it’s happening today, again, with a stock market that stands on such shaky legs. Listen to this…
The fate of the world economy is now totally dependent on the growth of the U. S. economy, which is dependent on the stock market, whose growth is dependent on fifty stocks, half of which have never reported any earnings. ~ Paul Volcker, former chairman of the U. S. Federal Reserve, May 21, 1999
So here we are. The world is in trouble. America is in trouble. Families are hurting like they have not in eighty years. What do we do? We get back to asking for our daily bread.
On a bigger scale, we repent and return. That’s the cycle repeated throughout the history of Israel and the world. And when a nation refused to repent? God’s judgment falls. Consider the Amorites, the Greeks, the Persians, the Romans, and Napoleon’s France. And consider America. Consider your heart. It’s time to ask for daily bread, to depend on the One with whom we have to do. It’s time to respect, honor, and glorify Him again.
