The USA and Manifest Destiny

---I am someone with a minority view that the USA is the final Babylon of Revelation 18.

---The reason is that cuneiform texts indicated that Babylon was the name of every major city of a great empire that ruled the “world” of its time.

---Thus, Niniveh was Babylon because the Assyrians were rulers.

---Babylon was Babylon because the neo-Babylonians ruled there.

---Shushan and Persepolis were Babylon in Persian times.

---Athens was Babylon in Greek times.

---Rome was Babylon in Peter’s time and he said that at the end of his letter.

---The Holy Roman Empire was Babylon with its seat at the Vatican.

---When it fell in 1798 and holy constitution was replaced by secular constitution, it was the start of the USA as Babylon.

---The same syndromes that you found in all the other empires is undercurrent in the USA psyche as well.

---The following examples can be seen underlining this “we are the world” mentality. We must expand Eden and sell it in every land.

---Do not get it wrong. The Gospel must be given in every country. It has nothing to do with creating a heaven on earth or post-millennialism.

---This syndrome or view of the psyche that we are a special nation selected by God with a role to play in the world, is called “Manifest Destiny”. Let us look at it.

---So Evangelism and Mission the Adventist way is not colonialism. Period. It is about the content of truth to be accepted or rejected. Give truth a chance. One time.

American Progress (1872) by John Gast is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west. Columbia, a personification of the United States, is shown leading civilization westward with the American settlers.
A symbol of Manifest Destiny, the figure "Columbia" moves across the land in advance of settlers, replacing darkness with light and ignorance with civilization.

---When the Puritans settled in the North of North America, one of them said that they should shine as a beacon like a “city on the hill”. In 1630 John Winthrop declared that this new society should welcome “the eyes of all people upon us” and shine as a beacon of hope – “a city upon a hill”.

---The Great Awakening Preachers George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards worked with a post-millenial view of Daniel and Revelation. Heaven will be on earth before Jesus comes.

---The millennium would be on earth. They must help create it.

---That started the manifest destiny.

---The Puritans felt that they must build a “city on the hill”.

---The settlers and trekkers of the USA felt that they must increase the promised land.

---Thomas Jefferson, the first president after the fall of the papacy in 1798, created a policy of “every man is equal”.

---If that is the case, every man needs a farm and if every man needs a farm, without stealing farms around them, they had to trek across the west and find farms. Expansion. More land.

---This mindset was coined by John O’Sullivan “Manifest Destiny” in 1845. He was a Newspaper Editor.

---The religious Second Great Awakening created another reason to head west.

---Many settlers believed that God himself blessed the growth of the American nation. 

---The USA became the “Promise Land”. Eden.

---This mentality is called “Manifest Destiny”.

---In several poems one can find this “Manifest Destiny”.

---At the Statue of Liberty in New York is a poem and that poem outlined the destiny of the USA as a redeemer of all nations of the world. Check online.

---America as just another Rome was the theme of Thomas Dwight in his poem on the USA’s growth in 1785.

Source: Timothy Dwight and William Livingstone, America: or, A poem on the settlement of the British colonies; addressed to the friends of freedom, and their country.

Dwight, Timothy, 1752-1817., Livingston, William, 1723-1790.

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/evans/N13258.0001.001/1:2?rgn=div1;view=fulltext

He said that “

"Hail Land of light and joy! thy power shall grow

Far as the seas, which round thy regions flow;

Through earth's wide realms thy glory shall extend,

And savage nations at thy scepter bend.

Later he calls the land as one of many Romes.

He said:

“Earth's richest realms their treasures shall unfold,

And op'ning mountains yield the flaming gold;

Round thy broad fields more glorious ROMES arise,

With pomp and splendour bright'ning all the skies;

EUROPE and ASIA with surprize behold“.

"Then, then an heavenly kingdom shall descend,

Later he present post-millennialism. Adventist are pre-millennialists. He said:

“No more shall War her fearful horrors sound,

Nor strew her thousands on th' embattled ground;

No more on earth shall Rage and Discord dwell,

But sink with Envy to their native hell."

---The trumpet of the Second Coming only blows after this event, says Dwight in 1785. Post-millennialism. 

---The sacredness of the constitution was part of this syndrome of Eden arrived.

---‘The American Constitution has a moral meaning, a sacredness, over and above what political science and civil compacts can ever give to the organic law of a commonwealth.’ [Harpers 1858]

---Tuveson remarks that one could see the American intervention in WWI as the accomplishment of this prophecy.

Source: Tuveson, Ernest Lee; Redeemer Nation; University of Chicago, 1968.

https://archive.org/details/redeemernationid0000tuve/page/n3/mode/2up

---Tuveson talks about “The politics of providence and the holy utopia”.

---In the appendix he talks about  “A Connecticut Yankee in the Mystical Babylon”.

---He talks about “Chose race, chosen people”.  

---He mentions "The ennobling War". 

---Religious post-millennialism is a dangerous idea to harbor for it is similar as the dream of Islam to spread Islam across the world and get rid of the infidels. Satan wins among Christians just as much as among Islam.

---The Bible said in Daniel 4 to Nebuchadnezzar: God is the One Who puts a ruler up or take him down.

---Socialists and anti-colonialists will be very happy to read this, and also communists. But they will all be wrong.

---It is not that people knelt down, pray and went to grab land from the locals.

---They tried to negotiate, buy land but got killed and wars arise from this.

---It is very complex with lots of detail not known.

---These poems collected as examples in this essay, are just manifested romanticism of poets and people about achievements.

---But such romanticism reveals that they perceive themselves with a Manifest Destiny. Islam also has a Manifest Destiny.

---The only Manifest Destiny that is not wrong, is the command of Jesus to give all people of the world an opportunity to choose God or reject Him. Free choice. No force. One time opportunity. No punishment for rejection there and then.