You've probably heard by now of this week's "America Reads the Bible" Celebration, which is being observed as part of our country's 250th anniversary. It was launched this past Saturday night at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. Beginning this past Sunday morning and continuing through this Saturday, around 500 individuals, such as President Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, have been selected to participant in a continuous and weeklong live-streamed public reading of the Scripture to America. Now, I'm glad that our country, at least some of our citizenry, is celebrating the Bible. After all, President Andrew Jackson once said, "The Bible is the Rock upon which this Republic rests.” Furthermore, Jackson was certainly not alone in calling the Bible the bedrock of America. For instance, consider all of the following.
JAMES MADISON
“We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”
NOAH WEBSTER
“The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scriptures ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws.”
“All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery, and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.”
“The Bible is the chief moral cause of all that is good, and the best corrector of all that is evil, in human society; the best Book for regulating temporal concerns of men, and the only Book that can serve as an infallible guide to future felicity.”
DANIEL WEBSTER
“If we abide by the principles taught in the Bible, our country will go on prospering and to prosper; but if we and our posterity neglect its instructions and authority, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us and bury all our glory in profound obscurity.”
“If the power of the Gospel is not felt through the length and breadth of the land, anarchy and misrule, degradation and misery, corruption and darkness will reign without mitigation or end.”
EDWARD EVERETT
“All the distinctive features and superiority of our republican institutions are derived from the teachings of Scripture.”
W. H. SEWARD
“The whole hope of the human progress is suspended on the ever-growing influence of the Bible.”
SALMON P. CHASE
“There came a time in my life when I doubted the divinity of the Scriptures, and I resolved as a lawyer and a judge I would try the Book as I would try anything in the courtroom, taking evidence for and against. It was a long, serious and profound study and using the same principles of evidence in this religious matter as I always do in secular matters, I have come to the decision that the Bible is a supernatural Book, that it has come from God, and that the only safety for the human race is to follow its teachings.”
F. C. MONFORT
“The morality of the Bible is the safety of society!”
DAVID JOSIAH BREWER
“No nation is better than its sacred book. In that book are expressed its highest ideals of life, and no nation rises above those ideals. No nation has a sacred book to be compared with ours. This American nation from its first settlement at Jamestown to the present hour is based upon and permeated by the principles of the Bible. The more this Bible enters into our national life the grander and purer and better will that life become.”
WILLIAM MCKINLEY
“The more profoundly we study this wonderful Book [the Bible], and the more closely we observe its divine precepts, the better citizens we will become and the higher will be our destiny as a nation.”
CALVIN COOLIDGE
“The foundations of our society and our government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be difficult to support them if faith in these teachings would cease to be practically universal in our country.”
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
“It is necessary for the welfare of the nation that men's lives be based on the principles of the Bible. No man, educated or uneducated, can afford to be ignorant of the Bible.”
RONALD REAGAN
“Of the many influences that have shaped the United States into a distinctive nation and people, none may be said to be more fundamental and enduring than the Bible.”
While acknowledged throughout our history as the bedrock of our nation by our Founders, presidents, Supreme Court Justices, and prominent citizens, and while being celebrated today, at least by some of our citizenry, in "America Reads the Bible," it must be noted that it is not enough to celebrate or read the Bible. Instead, the Bible must be believed and obeyed, not just read and heard. If I may be permitted to paraphrase Charles Spurgeon, the "Prince of Preachers," we have no book that is so much bought in America today, but so speedily laid aside and made so little use of afterward than the Bible.
The Bible itself teaches us that we are not to be just readers and hearers of the Word, but doers also, lest we deceive our own selves (James 1:22). Christ, in His Great Commission to His church, commissioned us to make disciples, not decisions, and added that no disciple is made until he or she is obeying all of His commands (Matthew 28:18-20). As D. L. Moody succinctly put it: "Every Bible should be bound in shoe leather," because the Bible is not just meant to be celebrated, read, and listened to, but to be believed, obeyed, and walked out, as well as lived out, in our daily lives.
America's problems will never be solved by us simply applauding, acknowledging, or even advocating the Scripture, but only by us personally applying it, as well as faithfully adhering to it and practicing it in our daily lives. What we really need in this country today is for America to obey the Bible, not just to read the Bible. After all, if we read it, only to ignore it, what good can it possibly do us?