Sometime on Tuesday, while most of us were pouring our second cup of coffee or driving the kids to school, the odometer on the United States' national debt quietly rolled past a number no honest mind can comprehend: $40 trillion.
That's our national debt friends. Forty trillion dollars. And it arrived months earlier than the forecasters said it would - - - which tells you something about the speed we're traveling. (Spoiler Alert: We're going too fast!)
I'd like to try for a moment to make that number mean something, because it's so large it's likely to slip right past you.
Let's say you sat down and wanted to count to 40 trillion - - - one number every second, no sleep, no breaks, no bathroom. Did you know it would take you nearly 1.3 million years to get there. So, for the sake of argument, let's speed you up. Let's say you were allowed to count a full million every single second. Tick - a million. Tick - two million. At that blistering, impossible pace, it would still take you a year and three months before you reached 40 trillion. Yep, that would mean counting by a million every second for 40 Million Seconds - - - or 463 days - - - non stop.
That is our debt. And regrettably, there is no end in sight.
Because the elected politicians running this show (poly = many, ticks = blood-sucking, disease-spreading insects) have no serious intention of turning it around.
I have come to the point where I believe they've already done the math the rest of us are afraid to do. I believe they looked at the enormous size of this thing and quietly concluded that this Titanic will not turn. And having concluded that, they've decided they might as well keep dancing on the deck until she goes down - - - grabbing every dollar they can while the getting is still good.
Poly-ticks indeed.
Here is the part Scripture will not let us look away from
Proverbs 22:7 says it plainly: "The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender."
Read that slowly. God did not call the borrower a "partner." He did not call him a "customer." He called him a servant! And we - - - a nation founded by passionate men who crossed an ocean to escape servitude - - - have voluntarily marched our 335 million "free citizens" back into it. At the same time, we have enslaved our children, and our children's children, to foreign lenders - many of whom do not wish us well. Proverbs 13:22 says a good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children. We are leaving them a bill they never voted for and a chain they never forged… and a heavy weight they cannot get off their backs.
That's the stewardship crime. But there's a bigger story here we also need to pay attention to…
Why isn't America in Bible prophecy?
For years, thoughtful believers in America have asked a question that troubles them a little: Why isn't America mentioned in Bible prophecy? We're the wealthiest, most powerful nation the world has ever seen. How do we simply not appear in the final chapter at all?
I'd gently suggest we've been asking all of this backwards. The question isn't why America is absent. The question is what happens to a superpower that removes itself from the equation - - - and I believe we are watching the answer accumulate right in front of our eyes - - - at a rate of trillions of dollars.
Turn to Revelation chapter 6. When the Lamb opens the third seal, John sees a black horse, and its rider carries a pair of balances - - - scales - - - in his hand. And a voice cries out: "A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny." (Revelation 6:5-6)
That is a picture of a day's wages for a day's bread. An economy where a man works from sunup to sundown and takes home just enough grain to survive the night. It is the image of money that has collapsed, of scarcity measured out by the ounce, of a world where the scale - - - not the storehouse - - - rules the table.
Now let's look at our ledger again. Forty trillion in debt. And get this: Our interest payments on that debt this past year outran what we spend on OUR ENTIRE MILITARY! Friends, I hate to say this but we have a government printing and borrowing against a future it has no plan to pay for. And ours is not the only one - - - nearly every government on earth is losing the same fight against this same evil, gluttonous appetite. This is not an American problem the Americans will solve. This is a global reckoning the whole world is racing toward together.
The black horse is being saddled. You can hear him neigh off in the distance.
So where does that leave those of us who see all of this coming?
Not panicked. Never panicked. If you belong to Christ, the black horse is not your master and the collapsing scale is not your storehouse. In fact, the opening of this 3rd seal - as mentioned above - occurs during the Tribulation Period - - - a time that graciously, we will not see. While the world is clutching its crumbling currency, our King is preparing to miraculously whisk His bride away from the Earth.
But hear me - - - we can't allow our theology to turn us into escapists. The watchman who sees the enemy on the horizon and says nothing has the blood of the city on his hands. We are watching a sign of the age unfold in real time, in real numbers, on a real Treasury ledger. This is one of the birth pangs mentioned by Christ before the time of the end. That means now more than ever we must be about the Father's business - - - keeping our lives above reproach to this world, and reaching out to them in more ways than we ever have. If we can visibly see all this coming down the road, we don't have much time…
And so I'll leave you where a watchman ought to: with your lamp trimmed and your eyes up.
The Titanic will not turn. Our leaders know it, even as they dance. But we are not passengers clinging to a doomed deck - - - we are children of the King, waiting for a rescue that was promised before the foundation of the world. But, in the meantime, the fields are white and ready unto harvest.
Let them count their trillions. We'll be counting the days.
— Signed, A Watchman on the Wall
(and every taxpayer who did the math)