The way the light breaks across this country—there’s nothing like it. The vast darkness lightens and rolls away, clarifying into the golds of sunrise.

The morning sky, world of vapors, storms, thunders and snowfall, stretches forward. Sunrise glints a million times on the great and wide waters on the surface below. It illuminates rocky shores and dry land: bays, beaches, marshes, river deltas, fields and creek beds. Springs descend the hills, past the stones, into the meadows, pastures and wildernesses, sinking through loam, sand and granite to the foundations of the mountains and their chambers and caverns.

Day breaks through the matrix of limbs and branches and twigs to the forest floors, across the waving grasses and fruited plains of blade, herb, petal, seed, sprout, stalk, thicket and woodland. They turn toward the light. And the fowls make their nests, the fish lurk in the rushes, and every beast takes his drink. From creeping things to behemoths, some lay down in their dens, some lay down to return to the dust.

Sunrise reveals grand arrangement, intelligently designed as a dwelling place for man.

A People

Men in this country are up before dawn. They see that light, watch those skies, know the land and what it grows. They see the providence of all these things, and they know from whence they came.

Six days they go forth to their labors and to their work until the evening, raising crops, animals, buildings. On the southward slopes are gardeners and farmers. In the shade and in the dark are timber-cutters and diggers of ore. Surveyors, engineers, foundrymen, freight loaders, carriers, navigators, toolmakers, draftsmen, captains, stackers of wheat and millers of grain shovel, drill, splice, bind, stamp, fasten, weld, generate, sort, record, bale and plant.

Their sons feed the herds, roof the barns, operate the equipment, learn their maps, their equations and their instruments. Their wives and daughters are at the cradles, hearths, stoves, sinks, desks, pens, coops, libraries, schools, sickbeds, graves.

They build their cities. They learn architecture, commerce, natural history, painting, poetry, statuary. They remember their heritage: the pilgrims, the patriots, the heroes who more than self their country loved. They keep their traditions. They honor their fathers.

They are a country, a nation, a people, a family grown large, crowned with the blessing of brotherhood.

Neighbors talk to neighbors. Strangers wave. Men hold doors. Buyers and sellers agree. Owners and workers give. Leaders are wise and understanding. And men know that they are created equal and that in six days they shall do all their work, and on the seventh they shall honor the Creator of light, of the waters and the firmament, the dry land and plants, the heavenly lights, the fowl and the fish, the beasts and creeping things, and the generations of man.

They glory not in themselves, their cities or their armies but only in their Creator.

Among them remain disputes, deceits, injustices, impoverishments, pollutions, selfishness and sin. But they are ever pursuing happiness, as said one of their poets, down paths through the wilds of thought, to mend their flaws, to make their successes into nobleness, to make their gains divine, to confirm their souls in self-control, their liberties in the keeping of the law.

Where is this country? Who is this people?

Is this our people, in the 250th year of the independence of the United States?

A Destiny

This was our destiny. Our Founding Fathers dreamed that their fathers had learned subsistence and piety so that they might learn war and natural law, so that their children might learn politics and civic virtue, so that their children might pursue arts and letters, so that their children might have the hope of somehow learning and perhaps attaining the purpose for which man was created.

This is the light of hope. This is the patriot dream.

It is not merely a dream of partially resisting the depraved, expelling some of the intruders, briefly jailing the incorrigible, making and unmaking our allies, sporadically fighting the butchers, fitfully threatening our rivals, and boldly proclaiming that we will put ourselves first.

It is not merely the glow of anniversary celebrations, exciting though they may be: history exhibits aboard trucks, tractor-trailers and jet airplanes; volunteer service; civics competitions; field trips; storytellings; concerts; races; block parties; parades; airshows; sailing ships; reenactments; ceremonies and memorials beneath the Stars and Stripes.

The celebrations of the 2026 semiquincentennial are a glossy, red-white-and-blue gilding over a society of confusion, division, subversion, perversion, hatred and self-destruction—a society in darkness that has forgotten and sins against the God who made and blessed it.

Take a look at some of these well-produced “America 250” festivities, and just use your imagination for a moment. Imagine those crowds under those fireworks keeping the civil laws and the Ten Commandments. Imagine them not only reading about but also participating in national days of humiliation, prayer and fasting. Imagine that those schoolchildren who look wide-eyed at the displays of the Constitution are going home to their fathers, who are devoted to their mothers, who are devoted to their children learning the laws of nature and of nature’s God.

Imagine that America sees its destiny because it sees its God!

America’s destiny was clearly manifested to our ancestors—not in Philadelphia but in Canaan and Sinai.

A Law

The same God who renewed the surface of the Earth in six days and rested on the seventh called Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Israel) to believe and obey Him, promising that their descendants would become as numerous as the dust of the Earth, would become a nation and a company of nations, would possess power over their enemies, would yield kings, and would spread west and east, north and south. These were world civilization-defining promises.

The same God who promised national greatness to the children of Israel later brought them in their multitudes to Mount Sinai to give them the very law of the Creator, the commandments that shed light on human life, interaction and government; that would save trillions of deceptions, thefts, divorces, murders, orphans, oppressions, impoverishments, sicknesses and conflicts (see Exodus 19-20).

He promised that if they would keep this law and “obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine: And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation. …” (Exodus 19:5-6).

“Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the Lord my God commanded me, that ye should do so in the land wither ye go to possess it,” Moses told the people before he died. “Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people” (Deuteronomy 4:5-6; see also Deuteronomy 7:6-8; 26:18-19).

Does this sound familiar? A nation unlike any other, protected by God, enriched by God, empowered by God and taught the laws and principles of God. A nation blessed, beyond all probability, beyond all comparison, not for its own sake or because of its own righteousness, but blessed in spite of itself—for the purpose of being an example and a blessing to other nations. (See Deuteronomy 7-9; Ezekiel 36; John Winthrop 1630, George Washington 1789; Abraham Lincoln 1863, etc.) A nation standing in the sight of the nations.

A city on a hill.

What was true of Israel was and is true of America because the Israelites are the ancestors of the Americans.

God-of-Israel Nationalism

American exceptionalism isn’t about Americans: It’s exclusively about the God of the Americans!

This is the real reason for your heart to swell with devotion, wonder and pride when you see Washington; when you read Jefferson and Madison or John and Abigail Adams; when you watch black-and-white reels of GIs in the mud; when you hear the 24 notes of “Taps.” Amid and despite the failures and sins of we Americans remain the beautiful, undying, precious, perfect principles of the Creator of all mankind.

The patriot dream of “America the Beautiful” is not an increase in gross domestic product, disposable income and pride. It’s gleaming alabaster cities, “undimmed by human tears.” This is the dream of our fathers: an America that fulfills its purpose, an America that fulfills its destiny.

This is not cash-money nationalism, rock-and-roll nationalism, stealth-bomber nationalism. This is Ten Commandments, morning prayer, family dinner, Creator God nationalism. This is God-of-Israel nationalism.

This is the “patriot dream” of our ancestors and, in fact, of their ancestors: a people, a nation, an example that shows what human beings were created to be.

Where is that country? Is it a fiction? Who is that people? Are they only a dream?

The people in this vision are not our Israelite ancestors. They are not our 1600s colonist forbears—though we honor them for forsaking all to try to establish the rule of the Creator on Earth. They are not the Americans of 1776 or of 2026.

But they are real. They are the future. America 300, if you will.

Unlike other peoples, the Anglo-American people benefited from commandments and principles given directly by the Creator: rule of law, covenantal relations, administration of justice, limited and separate powers, personal property, submission to God through His judges and kings. Over the course of human events, we have retained some and lost much of what we received. Recently, we have constructed a new government, laying its foundation and organizing its powers in such form as to us seemed most likely to effect our safety and happiness, most likely to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.

Implicit in our founding was the fact that only the Creator, nature’s God, the Supreme Judge of the world and His divine providence can rightly govern human beings—and He is not currently directly doing so. So we proceeded with a grand experiment in government.

The experiment would have aborted immediately but for repeated miracles that prolonged it: the grand arrangements of North American geography and resources; the inexplicable nexus of the great men of intellect and character who existed at the same place at the same time with the same cause in 1776; miracles in battle at Trenton, Princeton, Saratoga, Yorktown, New Orleans, Gettysburg, Midway, Normandy; miracles of population; miracles of economics and finance; miracles of industry and invention; miracles affecting the armaments of the enemy and the aim of the assassin.

Yet even with all these advantages, this experiment, this city on a hill, is the dimmed, sorrowful, shameful example the world sees today. And the fault belongs with we the people.

In spite of ourselves, we are proving to the world that all peoples and all nations are, and of right ought to be, direct subjects of the Creator of heaven and earth, obedient to the laws of nature and of nature’s God.

Generations of rebellion and sin have removed Americans from the God of Israel. National repentance is hard for even the most visionary of Americans to imagine.

Yet there is hope.

The God of creation, the God of the Bible, blessed Israel with opportunity and cursed it for disobedience, not merely to punish it but to show all peoples and nations that sin against God’s law leads to destruction—that sin, in fact, is destruction.

The God of Israel blessed the United States of America with the fulfillment of blessings He promised to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and the children of Israel. He showed the monumental scale of what it means for the Creator of mankind to say, “I will make thee exceeding fruitful.” But we have taken His physical blessings of wealth and power and have turned ourselves, our children and the nations away from obeying His laws. We must be cursed for our disobedience, for our own sake and for the sake of the nations.

The Bible prophesies this. But it also prophesies something else. The Creator God, the God of Israel still will not give up on us. Not only will He save all nations from mass-destruction suicide, but He will yet choose the nations of Israel to serve their purpose as example nations in spite of themselves. He will literally come to Earth to directly govern nations and men, as only He can. He will make us a good example in the sight of the nations.

And one day, someday, in the sight of all the nations, the sun will rise on this country, and our people will obey the God of Israel, will be a wise and understanding people, and will lead mankind to his Creator.