Adventists and the United States

I was talking to a classmate the other day about the Untied States in the eschatology of Seventh-day Adventism. I told him that in the Adventist understanding of the end time the United States would force people to disobey God and God's law. I assured him that in our thought the United States would become the New Babylon. I then began to feel the adventist evangelist in me well up as I began to quote Revelation 13 and compare it to the actions of the United States. I explained the lamb-horned beast and the image that that beast sets up. Then my classmate told me that all of that was interesting. He then asked the question, "How does this view of the end times inform your understanding of the war in Iraq?"I know that many of us would say nothing.

Is The United States a Beast Today?

Many of us are still hoping to be called evangelical and thus gain acceptablity with the rest of the Christian world. Some are bending over backwards to hide ourselves from the implications of stating that the United States is a Beast. Many of us wish to fade into the background of evagelicalism for we reason that America is better than everyone else. Some of us turn our head when this government removes our liberties becuase of a terrorist threat that it is making worse by starting wars with faulty intelligence. Some of us would turn our head when the military of our country tortuers war prisoners. We argue that they would do the same thing to us.

What would our early pioneers say when they saw slavery as proof that the contemporary United States was speaking like a dragon. I wonder what Ellen White would say when she said that we should not obey the unjust fugitive slave act. What would our pioneers say when this country left throusands of its own citizens in New Orleans.

I ask the same question of us as I my classmate asked me, "What is the relationship of our understanding of the end time and the Iraq war? How we answer this might hint at whether our Americanism is stronger than our prophetic interpretation.