I was listening to a radio show recently, and the speaker was noting that with each passing year, the current crop of young voters moves further away from our history. Those who will vote in November were born in 1997-ish and as such, only know our past two Presidents. The speaker was discussing his concern with how they will vote being typically unaware of our nation’s history. Many studies show that the nation is so very weak in knowing, let alone understanding our national history. I was of course cheering him on; were it up to me, taking US history would be required for every college student in the nation. Heck, I’d love to see a law that once every 10 years, a voter would have to sit through a 10 week refresher course on our history before they could vote.
However, this is not a new issue. Previous generations have lamented this. Thomas Jefferson famously complained in the latter years of his life that the current voters didn’t remember him or understand the ethos of America. The point about forgetting is critical. Current events do not emerge ex nihlio, out of nothing, but rather are the product of past decisions and choices.
Moreover, with proper investigation, what emerges is that the “past decisions and choices” that have led to a current event often are 50 years, 80 years, 120 years hence. History is a grand story of an ongoing series of choices that have led to this moment and so to understand something current, one must dig deep into history to understand why it happened in order to know what would be best to do.
I was thinking about this while preparing for what I will teach on Sunday at my church. We are in a series from the writings of the prophet Isaiah. In chapter 57, God slams the poor leadership that led the nation of Israel into destruction. Look at what he says there:
- The leaders were sarcastic and mocking
- The leaders were sexually loose and immoral
- The leaders pursued a variety of other gods
- The leaders were liars
- The leaders were rebels
- The leaders killed their own children
- The leaders forgot the true God and were no longer fearful of Him
In all these things, the leaders not only did these things but also led the people to do the same. They pursued this course of action, and even when warned to change their ways, they persisted, stubbornly, in their way towards destruction. Worse, the destruction wasn’t just for them, but for the entire nation.
In the end, the people, the nation, forgot its own history. They no longer knew what had transpired to get them to this point. They no longer remembered that centuries before they had been slaves in Egypt. They no longer remembered the years of warfare to win the Promised Land. They forgot the call to moral living and God’s directions of how to worship Him.
Take a look at one of the writings of the Israeli history to see this clearly. If you read II Kings 22, you’ll see the then young king Josiah has a remarkable discovery. He had decided that the Temple, built over 300 years ago by Solomon, needed to be refurbished. It had become ravaged by time and not really taken care of by the nation. Upon this restoration work, his high priest, Hilkiah, discovered a copy of Moses’ writings containing the laws God had given the people.
Now, for my non-Christian, non-religious readers, please put aside your own bias of the folly of religion and just accept that there are some people who believe deeply in their faith. Think, then, about a nation of those people….one should easily be able to understand that such a nation would obviously keep safe and protected the core documents about their faith. They might even put those documents in some place of honor. And yet, over the centuries since the Jews returned to the Promised Land, under the leadership of increasingly poor kings….they not only had abandoned the ways of their God, but had apparently lost the documents that were to guide them.
Stunning.
In other words, no wonder the nation was so messed up and far removed from how they were supposed to live. They had lost the instructions. God had directed them in how He wanted them to operate, but they no longer had those writings.
Once Josiah learned the history, he immediately set out to follow the instructions. By doing this, Josiah had a 31 year reign that largely brought impressive reforms and restoration for the nation. In fact, God decided to wait on the punishment; make no mistake, it was still coming, and four years after Josiah’s death Babylon would come.
Do you see it? Forget the religious overtones if that really bugs you. The point is that a people of any civic society, built on a set of rules, cannot follow those rules if they don’t know the rules or the history that led to those rules. Our nation is in trouble not because our young people don’t know the history….we are in trouble because MOST OF OUR PEOPLE don’t know our history.
You want to Live Well, want to be someone who makes wise decisions in the face of complicated situations? Be someone who knows the history. When I became one of the leaders of the faculty at our College, the President for my campus faculty…I went to several of our veteran faculty who had taught at the school at least since the 1990s in order to learn from them the history.
Would that our current people and leaders do the same.