The Strand Study Bible
PROVERBS PROVERBS NOTE - Unfortunately for America, the view that now dominates the public educational system is secularism, which denies and/or ignores the existence of a personal God. We have allowed the intellectual humanists to remove God, prayer, and the Ten Commandments out of our public schools. Now, in less than one generation our government reflects a people who have little morals, little if no shame, and absolutely no desire to get back to spiritual principles. The quickest way to destroy any house is to tear out its foundation (Psa 11:3). Since the Bible is the foundation of Christianity, when faith in its validity and authority is weakened, the natural result is the surrender of traditional Christianity, and the rise of faithlessness. No nation is guaranteed immortality. A nation lives only so long as it maintains the life-giving ideals about which it constructed its national life. When those ideals die, the nation dies. If this nation continues to strip its public of scriptural principles and continues to turn out its youth schooled in a philosophy which offers nothing but the grave as the final goal toward which all existence journeys, America will have entered that period which writes the last chapter before the curtain falls. Dr. Bob Jones Sr in Chapel Sayings notes: There is no tragedy as tragic as combining high mentality with low morality. 5 Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), English historian and scholar, the supreme historian of the Enlightenment, and author of the monumental work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 6 gave five reasons for the fall of Rome and its empire: 1. The undermining of dignity and sanctity of the home as the basis of human society 2. Higher and higher public expenditure of free bread and entertainment 3. The mad craze for sports (that became increasingly sadistic) 4. The building of great weapons of war (when the real enemy was within, due to the decay of individual responsibility) 5. The decay of religion within society (as faith faded into mere formality) Sound like America? Sadly, we’ve become Rome. Although we teach ancient and world history in our public schools and college universities, we, like Napoleon, have failed to learn from history’s mistakes. Dr. Harry Rimmer in Seven Wonders of the Wonderful Word said of the Bible: It is the foundation of the American way of life, and when it dies our civilization collapses. 7 Lord Macaulay, the great British historian, who died just prior to the Civil War, once said of America: 984 Your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth; with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without and your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your own institutions. 8 Sadly, Lord Macaulay’s dismal prediction of America has come true. William Lyon Phelps (1865-1943), one-time president of Yale University, made the oft-quoted statement: I thoroughly believe in a university education for both men and women; but I believe a knowledge of the Bible without a college course is more valuable than a college course without the Bible. 9 Martin Luther (1483-1546) agreed. He once noted: I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the heart of the youth. 10
1 Federer, William J. America’s God and Country . St. Louis, MO: Amerisearch, Inc. 2000. Print. 2 Dumphy, John. “A Religion for A New Age.” Humanist Magazine . January/February 1983. 3 “Patrick Henry quotes.” thinkexist. 14 Jan 2008
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