"Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.” Proverbs 16:18.
Disorder in France and the factors leading to it sound remarkably like the oracles of the Old Testament prophets.
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I am not presuming to speak for God and pronounce France’s tribulations as Divine punishment for turning away from God and worshipping secular socialism. But it is a fact that the Islamic jihad fits the warnings of Old Testament prophets to the kings of Judah who had strayed from the path of righteousness and led the people of Israel away from the Mosaic covenant.
A recurrent theme in the Old Testament is the frequency of Israel’s departing from God’s path of righteousness and turning to worship of the gods they encountered among other peoples, first in their wandering before entering the Promised Land, then afterwards when the structure of kingship had been established and economic prosperity led them again astray.
Pride and arrogance were always the sins for which the prophets reproached the people and their leaders. Passages from Isaiah, one of the greatest of the Old Testament prophets, are eerily applicable to conditions today, not only in France, but throughout the Western world.
Isaiah 2:6-18 reads:
6 You have abandoned your people, the house of Jacob. They are full of superstitions from the East; they practice divination like the Philistines and clasp hands with pagans. 7 Their land is full of silver and gold; there is no end to their treasures. Their land is full of horses; there is no end to their chariots. 8 Their land is full of idols; they bow down to the work of their hands, to what their fingers have made. 9 So man will be brought low and mankind humbled— do not forgive them. [a] 10 Go into the rocks, hide in the ground from dread of the LORD and the splendor of his majesty! 11 The eyes of the arrogant man will be humbled and the pride of men brought low; the LORD alone will be exalted in that day. 12 The LORD Almighty has a day in store for all the proud and lofty, for all that is exalted (and they will be humbled), 13 for all the cedars of Lebanon, tall and lofty, and all the oaks of Bashan, 14 for all the towering mountains and all the high hills, 15 for every lofty tower and every fortified wall, 16 for every trading ship and every stately vessel. 17 The arrogance of man will be brought low and the pride of men humbled; the LORD alone will be exalted in that day, 18 and the idols will totally disappear.
France was the greatest nation in Continental Europe so long as it remained a Christian nation. The 1789 Revolution brought about a complete rejection of God and embrace of purely secular, materialistic socialism, which remains today the religion of France. Apart from the brief bravado of Napoleon’s Empire, France has endured an endless succession of governments and constitutions, sinking ever lower in world influence. Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the 1850s that France already had gone through more than a dozen constitutions. It has had restorations of monarchies, empires, republics, dictatorships, and the Vichy government collaboration with Nazi Germany.
Today, in common with liberal-socialists here and elsewhere, French socialists pride themselves on their secular materialism and the belief that all they survey is the work of their own minds. They look, not to God, personal morality, and love of their fellows, but to the theories expounded by the technocrats produced by the Hautes Ecoles.
If the riots in France are part of organized and coordinated plans by Al Queda, socialistic theories that rely entirely upon satisfying material and sensual desires, i. e. the welfare state, will not be enough.
The damning sin of our modern world is the same as that of ancient Judah, the same as the cause of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. We believe that whatever good fortune we receive is entirely the work of our own hands and minds. We fail to thank God for His blessings and to seek His inspiration to wisdom and justice.
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