Judging the nations

S. Franklin Logsdon was a well-known evangelical pastor in the post-World War II years, serving in several large congregations in the United States and Canada. After a brief stint at Chicago’s Moody Memorial Church in the early 1950s, he became a popular itinerant Bible teacher, with a special focus on end-time prophecy.

In 1968 Logsdon published Is the U.S.A. in Bible Prophecy? He had been speaking in many churches, he said, about “America’s role in God’s plan for the ages,“ with people turning out in larger numbers to find out “just what God has to say about our great nation.” What Logsdon had to say on the subject, however, was not designed to put his audiences at ease. In the past, Logsdon argued, the United States was favored by the Lord as the “nation he has blessed above all others,” but now it was clear that God was not at all pleased with contemporary America. Indeed, Logsdon came to the conclusion that the present day American nation exhibited what he saw as 16 characteristics, derived from his reading of Jeremiah 50 through 53 and Revelation 18, of “prophetic Babylon,” a city that falls under the judgment of God for its wicked ways. Not that Logsdon had completely given up on the United States. “It may be the eleventh hour,” he observed, “but many a fight has been won in the last round.” From everything he could see, however, “our great Ship of State is currently in turbulent waters and headed for treacherous shoals.”

Given the way American evangelicals of the past have been attracted to the “patriot’s dream” perspective on America as having clear New Jerusalem potential, Logsdon’s discussion is noteworthy. While he never asserts without qualification that America is in fact “prophetic Babylon,” he clearly thinks that the United States may well be moving in a direction where its wickedness is so pervasive that it will become a special object of divine wrath.

We are not special

I am not particularly interested here in Logsdon’s specific way of applying the “Bible prophecy” themes to the present day United States. What is significant, though, is the fact of his ambivalence. While America obviously has New Jerusalem possibilities in his estimation, it also runs the real risk of becoming the irredeemably wicked Babylon of the end-times.

That ambivalence is, as I see it, the right way to think theologically about the United States or about Canada – or about any other nation, for that matter. In thinking about how a given nation measures up in the Lord’s eyes, we should not presume that the nation has a special status at the outset, so that the Lord is predisposed to be especially pleased with that particular nation’s virtues or especially irritated with its vices: “For the Lord your God is the God of gods and the Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God who does not show partiality nor take a bribe” (Deut. 10:17).

Logsdon was right to look to the Bible for the criteria that God employs in judging the nations, but he might have searched the Scriptures more diligently. Apart from widespread sexual immorality being condemned in the Jeremiah and Revelation passages he references, he does not give his reader much else to go on. Logsdon would have served his audience better if he would have highlighted the kinds of concerns that loomed large when the Lord did have – the one time only in redemptive history – a chosen nation. The prayer for Israel’s king should be prayed by believers for every government: “Give the king your justice, O God . . . . May he judge your people with righteousness and your poor with justice. May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor” (Ps. 73:1-4). This commitment to justice is emphasized by all the prophets, making the prayer appropriate in Washington and Ottawa, from Kiev to Moscow. For our whole world belongs to God and one day he will come, not to destroy but to redeem it, ushering even our Babylon-leaning hearts into the New Jerusalem.