A Veterans Day reflection on a debt we can never repay

Some debts can and should be paid back. A home mortgage or car loan comes to mind. Anything you borrowed and have not yet returned. Speeding tickets and anything else that will only become more costly the longer you put them off.

Other debts can never be repaid. The pathologist who discovered our son’s cancer and saved his life. The teachers and spiritual influences who shaped us along the way. My wife’s parents, who suspended all logic and allowed me to marry their daughter.

Veterans Day fits into the latter category. 

There is obviously nothing we can do to pay back our veterans for their sacrifices. We cannot give them back the years spent in service to our country. We cannot make wounded veterans whole as if they had never been wounded. We cannot bring back those lost on the battlefield.

We can and must express our gratitude, honor their commitment, and support them medically, emotionally, relationally, and financially. But we cannot pay our debt back in the sense of giving them what they lost in serving our nation.

But we can pay it forward. We can strive to be a nation worthy of their sacrifice.

Let’s consider for a moment the moral and spiritual dimensions of this “debt.”

“Sufficient virtue among men”

Our Founders were convinced that their new nation’s democratic experiment would stand or fall on the morality of its citizens.

• John Adams declared, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
• James Madison wrote that the Constitution requires “sufficient virtue among men for self-government.” Otherwise, “nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.”
• George Washington said of the nation he led: “The government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.”

However, the Constitution they framed, while providing abundant guidance on the laws that constitute morality, gives us no power by which to carry them out. Nearly 250 years later, we are forced to admit that human laws cannot change human hearts. We are as prone to sin as our first parents in the Garden.

If we are to be a self-governing nation, we must govern ourselves. But we have no agency by which to choose right over wrong consistently and effectively.

Even worse, we now live in a day that rejects the very concept of right and wrong. For decades, our postmodern culture has convinced millions that truth is personal and subjective. There is no such thing as absolute truth, we’re told (which is an absolute truth statement, by the way). We find ourselves with the ancient Hebrews: “There was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).

This is one reason the royal families of Europe ruled their kingdoms for so many generations: their culture believed in the “divine right of kings,” the concept that God chooses a nation’s rulers and rules through them. Given the class stratification of the day, many people had little access to literacy and the tools of governmental leadership.

So they believed that the key to flourishing lay in obedience to a king they hoped would lead them with wisdom and morality. When the monarchs failed to do so, the people suffered as a result, but there was no other system available to their worldview. America’s democracy, replacing the power of the monarch with the power of the people, was a radical concept, one that many in England and Europe considered destined for failure.

“Never more than one generation away”

They would likely have been proven right, except for the spiritual awakenings that transformed colonial America and its people. Many historians are convinced that the First and Second Great Awakenings did more to preserve and promote the unity and morality of the infant nation than any other forces.

It was the power of God’s Spirit, working through God’s people, that formed and forged a moral people who could govern themselves and their nation as they were governed by God.

Accordingly, the key to our future lies in our past. The solution is a return to monarchy once again—not that of men, but that of God.

We will be a nation worthy of our veterans’ sacrifices to the degree that we are a nation submitted to the word and will of our Lord. This begins with you and me. Spiritual awakenings always start with believers who pray for them with urgency and passion, and then work to answer their prayers by surrendering to God’s Spirit and fulfilling God’s purposes.

And so, Veterans Day is a vital day for Christians to reaffirm our commitment to such a movement. We owe this to those who have sacrificed so much for our nation. We owe it to ourselves as we seek to flourish among a flourishing people. And we owe it to generations to come, remembering with Ronald Reagan that “freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.”

James Madison observed: “What is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections of human nature?”

What nature do you want our government to reflect today?

How will you be the change you wish to see?