Ten Commandments (Part 2)
By Don Campbell
Last week I introduced the thought that if the efforts of some to defy the Supreme Court and post the Ten Commandments on the wall of schoolhouses is successful, it might not really make any difference in the nation’s compliance with those Commandments. I wrote, "It was the removal of truth from our hearts that prepared the seedbed for the harvest that we now reap."
We read in Hebrews 8:10-11, "I will put My laws in their minds and write them on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. None of them shall teach his neighbor and none of them shall teach his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them." The truth is that the word of God was never really written in the hearts of millions of Americans, including millions of professing Christians. Many had parents or grandparents who had the word written in their hearts, and as a result, the offspring still held to a form of godliness. They knew about God, but they did not know God. We were a Christian nation only in the sense that the majority of us had our spiritual roots in Christianity. Some of us continued to practice the forms without the personal faith of our fathers. Others gave up both the form and the faith, but continued to endorse the moral fruit of faith.
Many—if not most—Americans, still had their spiritual roots in the soil of Christianity. Some had a very shallow root system, to be sure; but there was still a form of godliness. Others had no root system. Several years ago Elton Trueblood described our society as a cut-flower society. Cut flowers have all the beauty of flowers that are still attached to the plant, but they are severed from the root, cut off from the source of life. They will never produce fruit or provide seed for new plants.
Posting the Ten Commandments in the schoolhouse in an attempt to bring spiritual life back to America is like grafting cut roses onto the dead rootstock of what was once a prize-winning plant. If the rootstock is dead, do we face a hopeless situation? (I will seek to answer that question next week.)