Two Hundred Fifty Candles

Today, my son will be splashing around on a splash pad for his first Fourth of July. He is not even six months old yet, and the reality is, he will not remember a second of it. But I will, and someday I will get to tell him he was there, right at the start of his life, for America’s 250th birthday.

My son will be dressed in red, white, and blue, and he will wake up smiling at me the way he always does. The kind of smile that makes my wife’s and my whole day before it even starts. A few days ago, we sat him down for a little project and let him “paint” an American flag. He loved it (I think!). It is the kind of thing that matters a whole lot.

I have my own Fourth of July scar. I was about four years old, and somewhere in the middle of the celebration, I managed to wedge a lit sparkler between my big and middle toes. Every kid who grew up with a box of sparklers and a driveway, I am sure, has a story similar to that. It is not a metaphor. It is just what it means to grow up American in the summer.

Watching my son splash around in the water instead of nearly losing a toe will be an absolutely wonderful sight. I keep thinking about how little of this I actually deserve. God’s good grace to me, to my family, to this whole country is something I have to keep coming back to.

What We Are Actually Celebrating

I have been throwing this question around in my mind the last few days: what exactly are we celebrating today?

And here is where I keep landing: God has lavished grace on this country. Not in the same way He dealt with Israel, and not identically to how He has dealt with every other nation. Yet there is something that cannot be argued with: Yahweh God has uniquely been gracious to the United States of America.

Two hundred fifty years of a nation that has, on the whole, let the gospel run. Two hundred fifty years of open Bibles, planted churches, and freedom to raise a family in the fear of the Lord without receiving a knock on the door. That is not nothing. That is Yahweh God continuing to allow a great experiment to stand, and stand in a way most of church history never got to witness.

Despite all of America’s downfalls, and there are some very real ones, this is what we must keep coming back to: “Blessed is the nation whose God is Yahweh, the people whom He has chosen for His own inheritance” (Psalm 33:12, LSB). That is not a promise given to America specifically. But it is the standard. It is what any nation’s flourishing actually depends on, and it is exactly what a government ought to be promoting rather than resisting.

So yes, we celebrate America’s birthday. Not because America saved anyone, but because the God who “removes kings and establishes kings” (Daniel 2:21) has, in His providence, been remarkably good to this nation and to His church within it. I am not just grateful in spite of America. I am grateful for it.

A Government’s Duty

That is exactly the thread James Baird picks up in his book King of Kings. His thesis is stated as plainly as it can be: “Government must promote Christianity as the only true religion.” That is not how many of us were taught to think about the founding of this country in school. But Baird makes the case, straight out Psalm 2 and out of the Westminster Confession, where the kings of the earth are commanded to “serve Yahweh with fear,” and the fact is that civil government has never actually been let off the hook for the question of true religion, no matter how rude our culture has made that question feel.

Charles Spurgeon said it more bluntly than most of us would dare to today: “I often hear it said, ‘Do not bring religion into politics.’ This is precisely where it ought to be brought, and set there in the face of all men as on a candlestick!”

I do not think it is a coincidence that a nation, shaped in no small part by men who believed exactly that, has enjoyed 250 years of a kind of liberty most of church history never got to see.

I recently read a piece by Kevin DeYoung laying out just how many signers of the Declaration of Independence were Presbyterian churchmen (twelve to be exact), John Witherspoon chief among them, a Presbyterian minister and president of Princeton, who signed his name to the founding of this country.

Add George Whitefield, whose preaching spurred on the Great Awakening and shaped the religious field of the generation that would eventually go on to found this nation, and you start to see how much of what we now call “the founding” was never as secular as we have been told. Christ is King of kings whether or not a government admits it, and a great deal of what we are celebrating today is downstream of a founding generation that, however imperfectly, still believed that.

The Honest Middle

None of this means the story is clean. We live in a country that has, in recent decades, pushed to redefine marriage into something Scripture never allows and no court has the authority to redefine. We live in a country that has permitted the bloodshed of countless innocent children in the womb through abortion. We live with the steady advance of the LGBTQ+ agenda, with a government that keeps growing past its God-given bounds, and with scandal after scandal from the people entrusted to lead us.

These are real national sins, and pretending otherwise would make everything I have written here dishonest.

And yet I have learned something recently, that though there are great sins in this nation, they have never once cancelled the faithfulness of God to His church within it.

That is the hope I keep coming back to: Christ’s kingdom does not rise and fall with America’s fortunes. His kingdom advances. Every generation, God has raised up faithful men and women in this country who kept preaching, kept worshiping, kept raising children in the fear of the Lord, no matter which way the political winds were blowing. That is the real 250-year story, not a golden age, but a faithful God who has never once left His church here without a witness.

So, we must guard what others take for granted. We ought never to take for granted the goodness of God and His grace to this country, not for a single Fourth of July.

What That Means Right Now

Which is really the only reason a birthday like this matters to me. I do not want my son to grow up believing America saved him. I want him to grow up knowing that the same God who has lavished grace on this nation for 250 years is the God our family serves today.

He is not even six months old, and we are just getting started. But every time we hold him during family worship, every time we pray or sing over him before he can understand a single word, every time we attend worship on Sunday morning, we are already handing him something real: a family, in a country, under a King, who has been faithful the whole way through.

So today we are grateful. My wife, our son, a splash pad, and 250 years of a God who has lavished grace on this nation in a way I refuse to take for granted. That is worth celebrating, plainly and loudly.