“A republic, if you can keep it.” That was Benjamin Franklin’s cautious reply to Americans who asked what kind of government the Founding Fathers had created. It was understood by the founders and Americans in general that this drastic experiment, making the government accountable to the people, could fail.
John Adams warned that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” If the American people lost what biblically based morality they possessed, no greatness in population, territory, wealth or strength could prevent its failure.
This deep understanding of the nation’s impermanence came in large part from a deep study of Roman history. The American republic was largely modeled after the Roman Republic. Founders Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison signed their Federalist essays supporting the ratification of the Constitution with the pseudonym Publius, after the Roman Publius Valerius, who helped found the republic in 509 b.c. George Washington looked to Cato, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson to Cicero—both prominent Roman statesman who defended the republic from oncoming tyranny. Even the architecture of the American capital city was designed to evoke ancient Rome.
Along with inspiration from Rome came a warning from Rome. The republic’s greatest threat turned out to be itself.
After nearly 500 years, the Roman Republic was powerful and rich. Its wars of conquest in Africa, Europe and Greece wreaked havoc on families and farms; great quantities of plundered wealth and slaves poured in; the people squandered their own freedoms, stopped sacrificing to uphold self-government, and they and their government became corrupted.
Rome was still the superpower of the known world, yet it fell to rigged elections, systemic bribery, pandering to the mob, and civil war. Faced with the perpetual choice between freedom and security, they opted for the latter. Unable to control themselves, they allowed Julius Caesar to arise and impose order on the res publica, the affairs of the people, by abolishing freedoms.
What was left of the republic—the Senate—warred against the tyrant and was defeated. Cato, who embodied Rome’s ancient way and its version of virtue, chose to die rather than submit to dictatorship. His death symbolized the death of the republic. It too had committed suicide.
This warning was embedded in America’s foundation. The Romans could not keep it. Could the Americans?
Under the caesars, dictatorial Rome actually conquered additional territory, gained additional wealth and wielded superior force for two centuries more. Virgil, Ovid and other poets called Rome urbs aeterna, the eternal city.
In a.d. 248, Rome celebrated a millennium in existence—a first in world history—with games, drink and more. The next year, its emperor was dead on the battlefield. And for 40 years, Rome was wracked with intrigue, corruption, murder and worse, with an emperor falling every two years, and with more non-Roman warrior emperors than Roman emperors. Yet the empire lurched on for two centuries more until the shell cracked and the rotting personal character of which the empire was now made could no longer hold it up. Romulus Augustus, richly named after both the founder of Rome and the founder of the empire, lost both to the Germanic king in a.d. 476.
Why did Rome fall when it did? The answer comes from the Maker of empires. As our editor in chief writes (article, page 1), God foretold the rise and fall of the empires of the West, including Rome, in surprising detail. In Revelation, He prophesied its repeated resurrection, to continue all the way up to the 21st century. And in books including Genesis, Leviticus and Jeremiah, God prophesied the rise and the fall of the British and American peoples.
God has said that America will not keep its republic or even its nation! American character has fallen, the American ideal of government is falling, and the American superpower will fall. God is working out a plan, for Americans and all people of all nations, from the mightiest of powers to the smallest of states.
If we should allow ourselves to be taught by millenniums of tragic history and by prophecies for the near future, we should learn that human beings need good government. The brightest hope for that in modern history, the United States, has gone dark. This leaves us with only one conclusion—the conclusion taught by the Bible and by history from beginning to end: Whether through monarchies, empires, republics, oligarchies, dictatorships or other experiments, human beings have no ability to properly rule themselves—never have and never will.
Human beings need an empire not “of the people” or “by the people” but truly “for the people.” They need the first and only empire that will be measured not just in one or two millenniums, but in millenniums without number, governed from a truly eternal city by the only King fit to be king. They—we—need Daniel 2:44 to be fulfilled: “And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.”
The end is near. Let us hope and pray for the hastening of the new beginning that will follow.