Welcome to our occasional series that explores the moments faith, resistance and progress show God’s hand.
During the 483-473 BCE period the Children of Israel experienced a situation where someone “faithed around and found out” that God takes care of His people.
Wicked arrogant Haman allowed his hatred of one Jew to evolve into an ethnic cleansing scheme. Haman became so angry at Mordecai, a Jew, because he refused to show Haman the deference Haman thought that he deserved. He convinced the naïve Persian King Ahasuerus to accept a bribe in return for destroying the Jews. He had no idea that God had miraculously planted Esther, a Jew, as the queen in the palace.
As he was attacking Mordecai, Haman had no idea that he was attacking the queen’s family and God’s chosen people. It was only after he had a rope around his neck and was being shoved off the platform he had built to hang Mordecai that he realized that he had faithed around and found out that God takes care of His people
The Original 13th Amendment
People are aware of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and what they did for African Americans. However, few people know about the original 13th Amendment. In March 1861 many African Americans and abolitionists thought that the day was lost when the 13th Amendment, was passed in the Senate and House of Representatives. This Amendment guaranteed slavery in the South and required a 2/3rds vote of southerners to end slavery.
President Abraham Lincoln disappointed many when he sent the legislation on to the states for ratification. Ohio and Maryland ratified the legislation. That was just the latest blow in a series of actions which seemed to doom African Americans to a destiny of slavery for the foreseeable future.
In 1857 Roger Taney speaking for the majority of the Supreme Court stated that Blacks were not citizens and therefore, “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it.”
This decision stripped African Americans of the little legal protection they enjoyed and threatened Free-Blacks. The African American community was so concerned that Frederick Douglass contemplated moving to Canada. The powerful words of Sojourner Truth challenged his faith: “Frederick, is God Dead?”
Shift in the Wind
Then, things went from bad to worse in 1859 when John Brown made his heroic, but ill-fated attack on slavery at Harper’s Ferry. This made Frederick Douglass a fugitive and pushed him to speed up his plans for moving his family out of the country.
Fortunes were somewhat lifted in November 1860, when the quasi-abolitionist Abraham Lincoln was elected president. However, early on he proved to be a disappointment. He sent the original 13th Amendments to the states for ratification. He refused to utilize African American soldiers in the war effort. He returned runaway slaves to their owners. He refused to interfere with slavery at all. To add insult to injury, he wrote an emancipation plan that called for relocating African Americans to Nicaragua. For African Americans things looked bleak.
However, God is greater than our problems and our fears. It really didn’t matter what Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Roger Taney or anyone else said, God had a plan.
In 1860, Jefferson Davis then a Senator representing Mississippi said, slavery was “a form of civil government for those who by their nature are not fit to govern themselves, … We recognize the fact of the inferiority stamped upon that race by the Creator, and from cradle to grave, our government, as a civil institution, marks that inferiority.”
The Upward Trajectory
Despite his claims after four years of bloody warfare, on December 6, 1865, the United States ratified a new 13th Amendment which officially ended slavery. To demonstrate His power on July 8, 1868, God pushed the nation to ratify the 14th Amendment, which conferred citizenship and equal protection before the law on the former slaves. Then on February 3, 1870, Americans ratified the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed our right to vote and punished states that interfered with those rights. Just like the children of Israel, during Egyptian slavery and during the time of Esther, African Americans went from being a people doomed to a life of misery, to being full-fledged citizens of the United States.
Now, what is the lesson for us today? President Donald Trump, in issuing a series of Executive Orders, seeks to undo much of the racial progress our nation has made over the last 60 years. Working from a playbook developed by his advisor Stephen Miller and his American First Legal organization, the administration has a mission to make diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs illegal arguing that they violate the civil rights of white people.
There are many people who are frightened that we will go back to the bad old days when African Americans were treated as second class citizens. The constant attacks on (DEI) have terrified those of us who are working to heal racial wounds. We are also concerned about the thousands who have lost their jobs because of DOGE’s obsession to give the richest people in the world tax breaks at the expense of the poor and middle class.
The Fate of a Selfish Agenda
Fear and uncertainty threatens to grip many who now doubt God’s power, but Trump and his supporters may find out. Like Haman, so obsessed with destroying God’s people in favor of a selfish, narrow agenda that, if they are not careful, like Haman, they are going to faith around and find out that God does not play.
As bad it may seem right now, we have been here before. Just pray, keep the faith, and trust God. Just like we found out in the 1860s, though the night might be dark, the sun will shine bright, and God’s people will be saved.
