Jenga is a popular family game in which wooden blocks are stacked into a tower. Players remove a lower block and gingerly place it on top, hoping the tower survives.
“Jenga” is a form of the Swahili word, kujenga, meaning “to build.” That’s ironic because every game ends with hoots and hollers as the tower collapses.
But what if those blocks represented the fundamentals of our civilization? Imagine the players blindfolded. And what if the object isn’t to keep the tower standing, but to bring it crashing down?
Welcome to the 21st century. The so-called influencers at the table are blind to history’s facts and the principles on which the West was founded. Considering it evil from its inception, they want society demolished.
It’s a common criticism that the Founding Fathers were mostly deists or atheists who wanted a secular government, with God banned from the public square. Thomas Jefferson is given as an example. Well, let’s hear from him:
“God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the Gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever…” (Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII, p. 237)
I recall visiting William Bradford’s cenotaph at Burial Hill in Plymouth, Massachusetts. It bears inscriptions in English, Latin, and Hebrew. On the obelisk’s north side it reads: “Under this stone rest the ashes of William Bradford, a zealous Puritan & sincere Christian. Gov. of Ply[mouth] Col[ony] from 1621 to 1657, (the year he died) aged 69, except 5 yrs. which he declined.”
Below is a Latin inscription whose translation slapped me! “What our fathers achieved with such difficulty, do not carelessly abandon.”
That’s exactly what’s happening! People today have no idea that discarding the Bible undermines everything else. A rejection of the Creator jettisons our inalienable rights.
Abraham Lincoln could be addressing us when he wrote:
“We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God…and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving Grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!” (A Proclamation Appointing a Day of National Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer, March 30, 1863)
The psalmist asked, “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Ps 11:3) When load-bearing beams like faith and family are dynamited, what’s left to hold us up? TicToc, the Kardashians, petrodollars, politicians, and think tanks? Forget that!
Thankfully, David answers his own question: “The Lord’s throne is in heaven.” (v 4) Yes, our God still reigns supreme.
Oh, the Hebrew inscription on Bradford’s memorial? It’s appropriately engraved above all the rest: “Jehovah is our help.”
There is no other help. We’re long past due for another “Day of National Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer.”
Article by Jabe Nicholson first published in the Commercial Dispatch, Saturday, June 17, 2023.