Mario Cuomo, former governor of New York state, recently wrote in USA Today: "The brilliance of the Founding Fathers has been confirmed by the astonishing success of their experiment in republican democracy" (Dec. 7, 2004). Yet the United States owes far more to God than those founding fathers, who played a pivotal pioneering role in shaping the nation's destiny, could imagine.

Strange as it may sound, many Americans are the descendants of the biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (later renamed Israel). The nation has been a major recipient of the great national blessings that God repeatedly promised would come to Abraham's descendants (Genesis 13:16; 15:5; 17:5-7; 18:17-18; 22:16-18).

These astounding blessings were never completely fulfilled in ancient Israel and Judah. But these and other promised blessings have been fulfilled primarily in the United States, Britain and other major English-speaking nations. (For the biblical and historical evidence of America's true national and prophetic identity, please request or download our free booklet The United States and Britain in Bible Prophecy).

With incredible national blessings comes heavy national responsibility! Like our forefathers in ancient Israel, we have an obligation to live up to our heritage and godly calling as a nation.

The United States, along with Britain, has spread more Bibles around the world than any other countries by far. This fact deepens America's responsibility to live by the laws given in the Word of God, setting a right example for other nations.

Today the United States is seriously neglecting obedience to God's Ten Commandments. Many, in fact, don't even know what they are! It is the duty of God's Church to call these moral failures to the attention of our peoples. It is not anti-American to see a nation traveling in a wrong direction and to urge a national course correction.

Midge Decter, American author, social critic and recipient of the National Humanities Medal, delivered a thought-provoking lecture during a conference on marriage and the family. Her concluding words bear heavily on this theme: "Let's take back our country. Let us be decent, civil and even loving to our homosexual fellow citizens, but draw the line on what they stand for and everything else that makes light of our existence.

"For the privilege of living in the most nobly founded, the freest and the richest country in the world we owe nothing less, not only to ourselves but also to the oncoming tide of generations. We are given the choice of leaving them with a blessing or a curse. Not so many people in the world have that choice. I hope we can go down in history as having deserved it" (Imprimis, November 2004). GN