Anyone who failed to be moved by the strength of language and the clarity of delivery of President Obama’s inaugural speech lacks a balanced perspective. Likewise, anyone who failed to see the glaring lack of some of the most vital elements of the American heritage within that speech is simply ignorant of the nation’s origins, its reason for being, its true history, and its inevitable future.

There is no doubting the sincerity of America’s new president. But as Herbert W. Armstrong declared, one can be genuinely sincere, yet be sincerely wrong!

The new president opened his speech indicating that he was “mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors.” But was he mindful of the true reasons for those sacrifices?

Any real student of history would know that the pioneers sacrificed to establish a nation built upon the very foundational unit of a sound society, monogamous marriage and sound family relationships. Yet this president espouses as part of his personal political creed the destruction of life in the womb and perverse human relationships such as those condemned by the God whose help he requested at the close of the solemn oath of presidential office (Romans 1:22-25).

“On this day we come to proclaim an end to … worn out dogmas that for too long have strangled our politics,” declared the 44th president of the United States in his inaugural speech. Yet President Obama has gone public on his determination to redistribute wealth in line with the “worn out” and provably failed dogma of socialism.

Going on to announce to the people that all have the “God-given promise that all are equal, all are free,” the new president failed to declare the greatest of all qualifiers for the attainment of God-given freedom and equality, that such blessings are only guaranteed by the God of the Bible to those who obey His divine law!

In reaffirming, as the president did, “the greatness of our nation” and that “we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned,” is to state a very sound truth. Yet, to infer that America’s prior greatness was earned—to imply that such greatness was earned—by the people is to deny the reality that Abraham Lincoln clearly recognized that the greatness of America as a nation was a gift of Almighty God!

President Lincoln’s mindset was one that clearly acknowledged the Eternal God as the source of America’s bounty; witness his speech delivered at the proclamation of the day of thanksgiving: “We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.”

On such overarching truths the eloquence of President Obama fails to match the deep integrity and the humility of Lincoln.

Where the president’s speech departs most from the reality of the times is at the point where he exclaimed, “We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished.”

This is not rhetoric in the true sense. These are the words of a sophist that clearly are either designed to hide or to just deny reality. For the overwhelming facts are that America is the most indebted, rather than the most prosperous, nation on Earth, possessing the power but without the demonstrable political will to use that power. Thus it renders itself powerless in respect of carrying any of the conflicts in which it is engaged to a victorious conclusion.

America’s workers are rendered patently less productive by increasingly having their very employment cut out from under them, with whole industries facing failure!

With regard to America’s inventiveness, this is being increasingly outshone in large part by foreign competitors which often make products superior to ours, with production of the goods and services we once produced ourselves in abundance now significantly outsourced to foreign competitors. The resultant transfer of wealth has severely disrupted our national economy.

As to America’s capacity, it is increasingly being diminished, week by recessionary week!

When we get to the “we will do it” section of the president’s speech, it lacks the same thing his speeches always lacked as he stumped the country promoting himself for the nation’s chief office: any clear explanation of just how, in practical terms, his administration will achieve all that it promises. To declare that “we will build … we will restore … we will harness … we will transform …. All this we can do. All this we will do,” without any word as to the ways in which it is planned just how “we will do,” is leading the nation up the garden path to no-man’s-land.

Yet in his speech, President Obama labels any who would question his grandiose claims as “cynics.”

Midway through his speech, the president reverted to the vision of “Our founding fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.”

Yet Mr. Obama has already hinted that he regards that charter as imperfect, and that his administration is intent on “perfecting” it. Witness the following extract from the speech that he delivered as he commenced his train ride from Philadelphia to Washington: “I believed that our future is our choice, and that if we could just recognize ourselves in one another and bring everyone together—Democrats, Republicans and Independents, north, south, east and west, black, white, Latino, Asian and Native American, gay and straight … not only would we restore hope and opportunity in places that yearned for both, but maybe, just maybe, we might perfect our union in the process.”

To infer that the “perfecting of our union” involves the infusion of multiculturalism and homosexuality into the social stream of America would surely make the Founding Fathers, were it possible, turn in their graves.

Our editor in chief recently warned of the tragedy that would strike this nation should the extreme radical ideologues of the left seize control of its government. In our January edition of the Trumpet magazine, Gerald Flurry referred to then-Senator Obama’s claim that the 1953-1969 extremely liberal Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren was insufficiently radical in that it “didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.”

Mr. Obama sent an early shot across the bows of every truly freedom-loving citizen of the United States in his Philadelphia speech. It gives fair warning that his administration is intent on changing the very fundamentals upon which the United States of America is founded as a nation.

One of the most damning statements in the new president’s inaugural speech was his declaration that “We will not apologize for our way of life.” Yet that is the very thing for which we ought to be not only apologizing, but also deeply repenting before our God! It is the American way of life that has led its consumerist binge, that has filled its entertainment with pornographic imagery and funded the drug lords through the increasing demand for pushers on its streets. It is the American way of life that has led to the destruction of millions of lives in the womb and to the confusion of gender roles that has rendered our society sick at its very heart and core—the family unit!

Here, Mr. Obama is at extreme odds with President Lincoln, who corrected the whole American nation under his presidency for being “intoxicated with unbroken success” and becoming “too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!” Unlike Obama, Lincoln placed the onus on the people “to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”

In respect of our multicultural society, and perhaps an early warning of our future foreign-policy orientation, it was intriguing to hear Mr. Obama refer to the largest Judeo-Christian nation on Earth by maintaining that America is “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus—and non-believers” in that exact order, with the Muslim interposed between the Christian and the Jew, surely a first for any inaugural presidential speech!

The orientation of the post-baby-boomer mindset was easily seen in the order in which the president listed the duties of America’s citizenry: “[W]e have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world ….” That, indeed, is a far cry from the order of duties as seen by prior generations of Anglo-Saxons, raised to see their duty first to God, second to king or commander in chief, and third to country. It was taken as a given by better generations than ours that if one fulfilled one’s duties in that exact order, then we would be automatically fulfilling our duty to ourselves!

As he concluded his inaugural, Mr. Obama mentioned that the source of America’s confidence was “the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.”

Let us be clear. In the eyes of God, according to His inerrant Word, the destiny of America is assured! There is nothing remotely uncertain about it! In these times which President Obama rightly described in his speech as proceeding “amidst gathering clouds and raging storms,” you need more than ever before to know your nation’s God-rendered destiny!

Read our book The United States and Britain in Prophecy for a very clear analysis of the history, current state and guaranteed future of your country. That book will place in complete perspective the 44th presidency of the United States of America!