Thought the housing crisis was over? It’s not. There is an ugly, heartbreaking mess going on in foreclosure courtrooms across the country.

On one side of a courtroom—or maybe just a conference table in an auxiliary room—sits a lawyer hired by a large bank. He hands a file to the judge, who has been brought out of retirement expressly to preside over foreclosure hearings, and says that the homeowner has breached his contract and should be evicted from his house so the bank can repossess it. On the other side of the room sits either a lone, anguished homeowner, a homeowner and a defense attorney, or, quite often, no one at all.

There is no dramatic lead-up, no oratorical showdown, no tense wait for a verdict like in the movies. It starts and is over in five minutes. The bank issues its complaint, the judge quickly scans the wad of papers, and unless the homeowner has a good defense, if he is even present, the judge hurriedly signs everything the bank puts before him. House becomes foreclosed, bank becomes homeowner, homeowner becomes homeless.

“Next.”

This is the “rocket docket.” It’s a scenario playing out from California to Florida, representing an effort to process the huge amounts of foreclosures that splattered everywhere when the housing bubble popped. Florida, which has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country, has set up special courts to hear nothing but foreclosures. It has earned a reputation for skimping on due process and jurisprudence in favor of blasting through quotas of 25 cases per hour.

In many cases, this is how it must end. People who did not have enough money to buy homes bought them anyway and were unable to pay for them. So they lost the house.

But it’s not as simple as that, and it’s a lot uglier. In these courtrooms, many or most of the retired judges are unfamiliar with the foreclosure law, which has changed drastically over the past decade. Meanwhile, the plaintiffs are submitting some dubious paperwork to “prove” that the property should be rightfully theirs. First of all, since mortgage-backed securities began cavorting across the country and around the world being bought and sold, repackaged and re-bought and re-sold, the documentation showing who owned and owns what and when is virtually impossible to dogmatically discern, let alone within five minutes.

Another problem is that often, these banks basically committed fraud. In keeping with the theme of rushing through important proceedings, the banks rubber-stamped thousands and thousands of home loans they knew the borrowers could never repay. They engaged in such predatory lending because they considered it profitable, especially since they were only turning around and selling the loans to someone else as aaa-rated investments.

Now, in the rush to foreclose on those borrowers, banks are hiring people basically off the street as experts to foreclose on people. Some bank workers have testified that they had no formal training, and had trouble defining mortgage, personal property and affidavit. The last term is especially important, because that’s what they have been signing by the thousands. (The head of a gmac foreclosure processing team signed an average of 60 affidavits per hour.) Worst of all, some of these “robo-signers” admitted they hadn’t seen documentation and knew they were lying when they signed foreclosure affidavits.

This was life inside the predatory lending business, and it’s coming out into the open since the foreclosure proceedings are open to the public—against some judges’ wishes.

It is systemic. It is epidemic. And everyone admits it. There’s no getting out of it without changing the entire system.

Why is the U.S. financial system so diseased? It seems no one is willing to admit the real reason—even though it has been painfully evident for years.

The cause of this crisis is sin.

Greed. Lying. Stealing. Coveting.

The love of money, Scripture tells us, is the root of terrible, terrible evil. And as Proverbs 28:20 says, “[H]e that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent.”

Across the board people have been working the system to get all they can—regardless of right and wrong, regardless of the non-monetary cost, regardless of who gets hurt.

It has all been caused by the way of get. This breaks God’s moral, spiritual law, which establishes the way of give.

Whenever we write about this, many readers turn up their noses. Good article—until you brought the Bible into it! God and economics don’t mix, we hear. Why do you keep hammering at the Old Testament? That doesn’t apply to us anymore.

Oh, but it does apply. Our broken economy proves it.

No one doubts the existence of physical law. The skyscrapers on Wall Street couldn’t have been erected without a respect for it. Some even believe in a Creator who designed physical law. Why should we believe, then, that the moral law that He authored and codified to govern human relations is any less binding on us—even when we see mountains of evidence that it breaks those who break it?

God’s Ten Commandments prohibit lying and deceit. That would include fraudulent accounting practices, falsifying loan applications, misrepresentations of the health of mortgages to potential buyers, and so on. Man-made regulations and laws forbid most of these practices, but still, countless individuals and businesses felt they would come out ahead if they engaged in them anyway and got away with it. They overlooked the fact that they were also breaking a God-given moral law—something that always exacts a penalty.

The commandments proscribe stealing. The commandments forbid coveting and greed. These sins have been at the very heart of this financial crisis. At every level. And no financial system can stand for long when its foundations are compromised by such corruption.

People do not want to hear about sin. But whether or not they admit it, that is exactly what has caused their economic suffering. All those who are losing jobs and wealth are suffering the results of broken spiritual laws. Not necessarily their own sin, but sin just the same.

The loss of America’s global prestige and influence occurring as a result of this collapse is a curse that comes from breaking God’s law.

Many people believe God’s law is a curse. Actually, it is an incalculable blessing, because it reveals exactly which behaviors will inexorably lead to curses such as those we see today, and which will lead to blessings.

Deuteronomy 28 actually records the blessings that will accrue to a people that chooses to keep that law, and the curses that will befall a people that pays it no heed. One blessing is especially pertinent: “The Lord shall open unto thee his good treasure, the heaven to give the rain unto thy land in his season, and to bless all the work of thine hand: and thou shalt lend unto many nations, and thou shalt not borrow” (verse 12). As recently as the 1980s, America was the world’s largest creditor nation.

Still, at that time, thanks to the government’s financial mismanagement, public debt began to balloon rapidly. As it rose from the mid-$1 trillion range up to $3 trillion, Plain Truth editor in chief Herbert W. Armstrong warned, “The U.S. and the entire world face a grave economic future from the burden of mounting debts” (letter, Oct. 25, 1985; emphasis mine).

That debt has since swelled to almost $14 trillion—not counting promised Social Security checks and other liabilities. In a single generation, America has become the world’s most indebted nation. It is suffering from the curse described in verse 44 of Deuteronomy 28.

An enormous amount of the government’s debt is owned by foreign nations. Now, because of America’s epic indebtedness, other nations have the power to decide America’s economic future! As Proverbs 22:7 says, “the borrower is servant to the lender.”

Twelve years ago, the late Tim Thompson, the Trumpet’s financial writer at the time, spoke of this very inevitability. “On the international level, strength of character is equated with strength of economy, and both are extremely lacking today in America!” he wrote. “[G]lobal investors are becoming increasingly aware that an investment in America is no longer an investment in strength. There is only an illusion of strength being propped up by foreign capital” (Trumpet,November 1998).

The historic blows America’s economy has suffered over the past two years have irreparably devastated its standing as a sound investment.

“Once a loss of confidence occurs,” Mr. Thompson continued, “the reaction is similar to the effect of adultery in many marriages today—victims of such a breach of trust start looking for a way out, and many times they take every financial advantage they can on their way out the door.”

The global system is still dependent upon America enough that this effect may take a little bit more time, but soon there will be a pile-up of sell orders on America’s “stock.”

Mr. Thompson concluded, “America is going to be blindsided and totally shocked when she is rejected by the investors of the world.”

Biblical prophecy tells us exactly which power is going to take America’s place, and the financial heights it will reach on America’s broken back. For an overview of that prophetic future, read this. For a more detailed study, read Herbert W. Armstrong’s The United States and Britain in Prophecy.