Can America Avoid a Second Civil War?
The American Civil War was called “the greatest man-made disaster in American history.” Between 1861 and 1865, 623,000 American soldiers were killed, more than all the Americans lost in both world wars.
As bloody as the Civil War was, in the end the country came back together. This would almost certainly never have happened if not for the leadership of one man: President Abraham Lincoln.
Today, Americans are bitterly divided again, and many knowledgeable people are seriously discussing the possibility of another civil war in America.
Lincoln has much to teach us today. In fact, in his book November: Lincoln’s Elegy at Gettysburg, author Kent Gramm wrote: “If we Americans can’t find Lincoln, we are lost.” I believe that is true—and I will explain why.
Lincoln’s Education
Abraham Lincoln had less than one year of formal education, yet I believe he was the most educated man we ever had in our presidency. He was truly a rare human being.
During his lifetime, many people thought he was the only man who could win the Civil War and save the union. That war was a time of terrifying violence like no other in United States history, yet this rare, deep-thinking man rose to the challenge and played a pivotal role. But where did his thoughts come from? How did he move people and lead people?
Abraham Lincoln read the Bible from cover to cover, and what made him all the more rare was that he believed the Bible. That is truly uncommon. Most people are quite ignorant about the Bible, yet the Bible is God in print! What a waste to have God’s mind in this book and not to believe it or even read it!
Lincoln once said, “In regard to this great book, I have but to say, it is the best gift God has given to man.” That is something you can prove for yourself as well.
Think about it: Most of Abraham Lincoln’s basic education was from the Bible. His stepmother read it to him, and he also read it for himself. He knew it contained that which we need to understand.
“Lincoln read the Bible closely,” biographer Carl Sandburg wrote, “knew it from cover to cover, was familiar with its stories and its poetry. He quoted from it in his talks to juries, in political campaigns, in his speeches and in his letters.”
It is interesting that Lincoln read and believed the Bible, yet he did not attend church services regularly. Was it because he disagreed with the Bible? No: It was because he believed the Bible and disagreed with the churches. He recognized that even the church preachers were not teaching from the Bible.
Lincoln said, “When any church will inscribe over its altar as its sole qualification for membership, the Savior’s condensed statement of the substance of both law and gospel, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself,’ that church will I join with all my heart and all my soul.” That is quite a condemnation of the churches!
This man had a profound mind, and he believed the Bible. Because of that simple fact, he knew God in a special way.
A House Divided
Matthew 12:25 quotes Jesus Christ as saying, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.” Lincoln famously quoted this scripture in his speeches. In the mid-1800s, America was a “house divided.” Today, America and its brother nations of Britain and the Jewish state—all of which descended from the biblical nation of Israel—are suffering from bitter internal divisions.
A few decades before the Civil War, when discord in America was simmering, French aristocrat and author Alexis de Tocqueville deeply studied American society and wrote Democracy in America. He reminded people of that same principle from that same scripture: “Any free society founded on liberty, yet without a sacred moral code to govern the actions of individuals, cannot stand.”
In 1858, with the nation horribly divided, Lincoln reminded Americans of that scripture and said, “In my opinion, [the division] will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed.” And what a terrible, bitter, deadly crisis the Civil War was!
What lessons have we learned from that terrible war? What lessons have we learned from Abraham Lincoln?
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Lincoln was facing—and today we face—the threat of collapse!
A Day of Fasting
In the 1860s, America had Lincoln. One example of his nation-saving leadership is summarized in his proclamation appointing April 30, 1863, “a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer.” In it, this great president wrote, “It is the duty of nations, as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God … and to recognize the sublime truth announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord. … We have been the recipients of the choicest blessings of heaven. We have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation ever has grown. But we have forgotten God.”
We have forgotten God!
Those are strong words, and they came straight from a president of the United States. Can you imagine a president addressing the American people that way today?
“We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us,” he continued; “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.”
This proclamation went on to call for a day of humiliation, fasting, prayer and confessing “before our God.” Lincoln called on the American people to repent! And amid such terrible suffering, that message resonated with many people.
How America Became Great
As President Lincoln pointed out, Americans find themselves “in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the Earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil and salubrity of climate.” Yet he repeatedly reminded us that we “toiled not” in acquiring these blessings, and that they came not from the efforts of America’s founders but actually from the blessings of God. It was reminiscent of how Moses told the Israelites before they entered the Promised Land that they were not receiving those blessings because they were great or deserving.
After the Civil War and Lincoln’s death, America went on to explode into wealth and power. It developed an enormous economy and also won two world wars. This was in fulfillment of prophecies to America’s ancestors, including Genesis 35:11-12. Britain, which came from the patriarch Ephraim, became the greatest “company of nations” in world history, and America, descended from Manasseh, became the greatest single nation.
Even as that greatness was coming to America, Lincoln was there to tell us that we did not toil for this—it was a gift from God!
You must know why America became great in the first place. Lincoln gives you a clue, and The United States and Britain in Prophecy, by Herbert W. Armstrong, will lay it all out for you in a way that will astound you. And it fits exactly with what President Lincoln said.
Considering God’s generosity to us, don’t we owe Him our gratitude and devotion? Shouldn’t we strive to respect and obey Him? Even Abraham Lincoln was deeply disturbed by the sins of America at that time, including slavery. And though we don’t practice slavery today on the scale that we did then, America’s immorality and lawlessness has grown scandalously worse in recent decades compared to what it was in the mid-19th century.
Lincoln warned that lawlessness was national suicide!
In 1863, President Lincoln issued a proclamation to set aside the last Thursday in November as a day of thanksgiving and prayer to express repentance toward God for the mighty national sins that caused the war. He told Americans to repent of those sins! That is truly a rare speech—an extraordinary subject for a president.
Lincoln’s Second Inaugural was like a sermon; in it he repeatedly quoted Scripture. He mentioned God 14 times, he invoked prayer four times, and he declared slavery a sin. It is a sin, and we ought to know that.
Lincoln understood that for a people to enjoy real freedom, they must have strong personal character. The Constitution will not work for a people who lack real character and faith in God! It was not designed to work for people who cannot govern themselves. Lincoln loved the ideal of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Yet how many people today hate that kind of government?
One of History’s Greatest Speeches
In Lincoln’s Mentors, Michael Gerhardt writes this about the Gettysburg Address: “Honoring the battle was secondary to Lincoln. He had eyes on the bigger picture. And what had happened at Gettysburg was monumental, but it was only part of the larger Civil War, which remained unsettled. The burning question in so many people’s minds was: Why must this horrendous war continue? Why can’t we just stop it?”
Lincoln could have stopped it. He was facing enormous pressures. But he delivered the Gettysburg Address in less than three minutes, and in so doing gave one of the greatest speeches ever given, by far.
“Four score and seven years ago,” he began, “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
He was not only recalling the aspiration articulated in the Declaration of Independence. With language like “four score and seven years,” he was also echoing the Bible.
Lincoln reminded people of this extraordinary fact: America was the first nation in history to declare to the world that “all men are created equal.” What a marvelous declaration! Do you truly believe it?
The Declaration goes on to say that all men are endowed with specific, inalienable rights by their Creator. The founders who wrote that did have the ugly institution of slavery in their midst. Though they were unable to eradicate it, they did try, as Lincoln said, to put it on the path to “ultimate extinction.” Now the divisions had resulted in terrible crisis, and he would help the nation eradicate it and live up more perfectly to that beautiful statement all men are created equal.
Lincoln told Americans that if they don’t look to the Bible, they simply cannot know what is right and wrong.
Lincoln was implying, We have only a few years—about three score and ten or so, as the Bible phrases it—and then we die. We must use our lives to do what is right!
2 Timothy 2:3 says that God has chosen His people to be soldiers—spiritual soldiers—and that we must fight for the truth. That is the only way that people can have real freedom and an opportunity to have a wonderful life on Earth. Lincoln was a soldier and a defender of truth. He was ready to fight like all the other soldiers at Gettysburg. That service ended up costing him his life.
“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us,” he said at Gettysburg, “that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”
How wonderful is a government for the people, rather than some tyrant ruling over us!
America’s founders intended to uphold that noble ideal as an example for all nations! What a goal! That was the purpose God had intended His chosen nation Israel to fulfill anciently: to be an example to the world. America is descended from ancient Israel, and I’m afraid we have failed at that responsibility.
“This nation, under God,” Lincoln said. Lincoln brought God into the Civil War. And with God’s help, he won the Civil War and saved the union!
How much do Americans love Abraham Lincoln? He was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the American presidents. We are accountable for his history; in many ways, he is a witness against us. The only way to avoid suffering on a scale even greater than that of the Civil War is to look to the God that Lincoln invoked—and repent.