Anyone who thought Barack Obama could solve America’s problems didn’t understand the nature of the problems.

This country’s foreign policy didn’t suffer from a lack of international engagement, of diplomacy or discussion. It wasn’t that America projected arrogance toward other nations. It wasn’t that we were too mean to Iran. It wasn’t Guantanamo. It wasn’t America’s failure to apologize enough for its past.

The problem with the economy wasn’t that the government hasn’t been involved enough in manufacturing cars, or in banking or the housing market. It wasn’t that Washington didn’t offer enough entitlement programs and needed to take over health insurance. It wasn’t that we needed to junk our cars and buy new ones.

These “solutions” aren’t improving America’s standing in the world, and they’re not fixing its economy. They aren’t solving anything—because they do not address the real problems.

This administration didn’t cause America’s problems; the country was already in a fine mess when it took over. But clearly, what it’s doing now isn’t working. The promise of hope and change was an illusion—and things are getting ugly. Companies are closing; jobs are down; unemployment benefits are about up for hundreds of thousands. Americans are locking horns; town hall meetings are becoming barroom scuffles; citizens are shouting down politicians and vice versa. One definitely has the feeling that all these trends are apt to get far worse.

“America’s next president will be in over his head,” we wrote before last November’s election. Sure enough.

Our nation is plagued by troubles of our own making at every level: crushing debt, economic instability, unbridled immorality, family breakdown, immigration and racial tension, an overstretched military—all amid the looming existential threats of terrorism and wmd proliferation. Over a period not of months, but of generations, we have amassed an Everest of evidence proving our utter inability to solve our own problems.

But who will admit it? Herbert W. Armstrong often said that the hardest thing for human beings to do is acknowledge error. Facts are stubborn things, John Adams famously said. But people can be even stubborner. We have an uncanny knack for clinging to error even when it’s been shot through with facts. The president’s supporters seem to think the only reason his “solutions” aren’t working is that not everyone is getting on board. The president’s critics seem to believe that if their own presidential candidate were in power, everything would be peachy. Both of these ideas are pure fiction. Actually they’re worse. They are deceptions that blind people to the truth: that the problems are bigger than all of us.

There is a darker reality that most people won’t accept. It is that this president stands at the helm of a cursed nation.

That may seem primitive and superstitious. But if you believe the Bible, you know curses are real—even today.

To the ancient nation of Israel, while God promised manifold blessings for keeping His laws, He also warned about terrifying curses for breaking them (e.g. Leviticus 26; Deuteronomy 28). A discerning look at history proves that God carried out those promises.

The United States and Britain are the modern inheritors of the birthright promises made to their progenitor Israel (as our free book The United States and Britain in Prophecy proves). God’s law applies to us—as do the blessings or curses that accrue depending on whether we keep it.

In Jeremiah 5, the prophet describes the thoroughly sinful state of the modern nations of Israel. “Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem [which, as the ancient capital of Israel, prophetically typifies the nations of Israel today] … seek in her open places if you can find a man, if there is anyone who executes judgment, who seeks the truth, and I will pardon her” (verse 1, New King James Version). Here God is pictured as looking for any righteousness that would give Him reason to extend mercy to His people. Alas, none. And so God corrects.

Why? For the same reason you correct your children when they’re acting out: to set them straight. But notice verse 3.

Here the prophet says to God, “You have stricken them, but they have not grieved; you have consumed them, but they have refused to receive correction. They have made their faces harder than rock; they have refused to return” (nkjv).

This prophecy is unfolding in America today. Look around. Witness the evidence of our failures. We are suffering for our sins in every quarter. We are cursed. Yet we keep plowing ahead, heedless of warnings, ignorant of correction, ignoring God, beating our head against the brick even harder, trying to work things out on our own.

That’s the real problem. We’re breaking God’s law and getting spanked for it—and we refuse the correction.

Wise Solomon once said, “Crush a fool in a mortar with a pestle along with crushed grain, yet his folly will not depart from him” (Proverbs 27:22, Revised Standard Version). That fool is us.

Biblical prophecy tells us where this cycle is going. The economic, moral and familial failures are prophesied to keep trending downward. Class- and race-related hostilities are prophesied to heat up and explode into violence. Poverty and pressures on food supplies are prophesied to intensify. National willpower and global influence is prophesied to continue to shrivel. Not only that, these issues will be compounded by still more crushing crises, including devastating natural disasters and disease epidemics, more lethal terrorist attacks, pestilence and famine.

In addition, God prophesied the loss within America of strong, masculine leaders to shepherd the nation through such tribulations (Isaiah 3:1-4). The resulting national weakness and wreckage will leave America imminently vulnerable to the prophesied nuclear attacks by a foreign nation that leave cities without an inhabitant (Jeremiah 4:7)—and subsequent national captivity. For a thorough scriptural study of how these prophecies apply to the United States, read Herbert W. Armstong’s book The United States and Britain in Prophecy.

It’s unimaginable to us—but this is how the Bible describes America’s coming days. The tempo at which this sequence of curses is already beginning to ravage the U.S. is accelerating. This nation, by refusing correction, is demanding that God get stronger and more severe with it.