I once heard the penetrating English satirist and journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, make the following remarks concerning the advanced nature of decadence in English speaking world. He said, “When we consider world history, we see empires rising and falling, we observe revolution, counter-revolution, we see wealth amassed and wealth lost, and are reminded that Shakespeare once said that the great ones rise and fall with the ebb and flow of the moon.” (Essay, by Muggeridge, Gone with the Wind)

Looking in historical retrospect, the British/American story reveals that English speaking peoples from Great Britain and the United States of America dominated nearly 25 percent of the world during the first half of the 20th century and believed that the God that made them strong could made them even stronger yet. Obviously, this attitude was not produced totally in Biblical reality, but by our own hegemonic notions.

Within the last 80 years or so, we witnessed a demonic Austrian attempt the establishment of a Reich that he declared would last a thousand years and looked with incredulity upon an Italian joker that bragged that he would begin and terminate the calendar around his own rise to power. Muggeridge said, this all happened in lifetime, but is now all “… gone, gone with the wind!”

I visited the country of Russia eight different times during the 1990s, preparing to speak at the International Conference of Science, Philosophy and Religion (for the Eastern Bloc nations), the place where a steely-eyed, crazed, Georgian bandit, during the 1920s to the mid-1950s, named Joseph Stalin, alleged that he was wiser than Solomon and more humane than Marcus Aurelius attempted to take over the Russian nation, but the problem was that he ignored God. I observed the United States of America, during her post-World War II glory, and as a result became the wealthiest nation of the world, with the greatest military ever, only to abandon her founding philosophy and be humiliated in the 1960s’ Vietnam debacle. All in one lifetime, but now … gone, gone with the Wind!

And I am afraid that the handwriting is already on the wall, because we too have forgotten our Creator and His Word! America is without a doubt the greatest nation of the modern era, but it was our Biblical faith and Godliness that made us great—and we have abandoned those moorings! And as a ship without a rudder or a sail, we are afloat, tossed about by every human opinion and philosophy, can “America really be great again” if she forgets God and ignores His Word?

G. Thomas Sharp