Can a nation sin?

Question 60025.

Modern political thinking has almost no category for national sin. Nations are treated as power structures, economies, or administrative units, and the idea that a country as a country might be morally accountable to God sounds to most ears like something left over from an older world. Scripture takes an entirely different view, and it takes it consistently from Genesis to Revelation.

The prophets spend a great deal of their time addressing nations rather than individuals, naming what those nations have done, and announcing what God intends to do about it. If we are going to read the Bible on its own terms we have to reckon with that, and if we are going to speak to our own country we need to understand what we are and are not saying.

The prophets addressed nations directly

Amos opens by working around the map. Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, Moab, each named, each charged with a specific offence, each told that judgement is coming. Then, having got the neighbours nodding along, he turns to Judah and Israel and does the same to them. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Obadiah all contain similar collections. National sin is not a modern invention read back into the text; it is one of the standard categories of prophetic preaching.

What is striking is that the surrounding nations are held to account without ever having received the law of Moses. They are judged for cruelty in war, for treachery against a neighbour, for arrogance, for trafficking in human beings. Paul explains why this is just when he says that the work of the law is written on the heart, so that nations who never heard Sinai still knew that these things were wrong.

What national sin actually looks like in Scripture

The charges are remarkably concrete. Bloodshed, especially of the defenceless. The perversion of justice so that the poor cannot get a fair hearing. Dishonest weights and measures, which is to say an economy rigged in favour of those who already have. Broken treaties. Pride that treats military or commercial success as self generated. And idolatry, the elevation of something made into the place God alone should hold.

Sodom is a useful case, because everyone assumes they know the charge. Ezekiel gives it directly: pride, excess of food, prosperous ease, and no help for the poor and needy. That is a description of national sin in a wealthy society, and it is uncomfortably legible in a country like ours.

The Hebrew word for nation, goy, carries the idea of a people with a shared life, and it is that shared life which comes under scrutiny. A nation sins through its laws, its institutions, its habits and its public consensus, in ways that no single citizen invented and every citizen inhabits.

How judgement on a nation works

We need to be careful here. Nations do not have souls, and there is no national resurrection or national hell. The judgement Scripture describes on a nation is temporal and historical. It comes as defeat, exile, famine, economic collapse, internal disintegration, or simply as being handed over to the consequences of the choices already made. Romans 1 describes God giving a society up to what it insisted on wanting, which is a judgement that feels at the time like freedom.

Eternal judgement, by contrast, is always personal. Every individual stands before God for himself, and no one will be saved or lost on the basis of the passport he held. So national sin is real and it is answerable, but it is answered in history rather than at the great white throne.

Personal responsibility is not dissolved

This is where the doctrine has to be handled carefully, because national sin can be used to excuse everybody or to condemn everybody, and Scripture allows neither. Ezekiel 18 is the definitive passage. The soul who sins shall die, the son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, and the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself. Guilt is not inherited by bloodline.

At the same time, Scripture knows a genuine solidarity. Daniel had personally done nothing to bring about the exile, yet his great prayer says we have sinned and done wrong, placing himself inside the people he was praying for. Nehemiah does the same. That is not self flagellation over things one did not do; it is a refusal to stand outside one’s own people while pleading for them.

Holding both together keeps us out of two ditches. One says that because I did not personally do it, national sin has nothing to do with me. The other says that because my nation did it, I am personally guilty of it. Scripture says that I am responsible for my own conduct, and that I belong to a people whose corporate life I share in, benefit from and must pray about.

Britain and the question

I preach in a country with a great deal to answer for and a great deal to be thankful for, and I try to say both. Our history includes the slave trade and the empire that carried it, and it includes the movement that abolished it. Our present includes a national conscience that still recoils at cruelty, and a public settlement in which around a quarter of a million unborn lives are ended each year, and an economy that runs comfortably on other people’s poverty.

Naming that is not partisanship, and it is certainly not despair about Britain. It is the same thing Amos did, and it has to be done without pretending that a Christian party or a change of government would settle it. I have written more on whether Christians should be involved in politics and on what the Bible says about racism, and both touch this from different angles.

Mercy is available to nations too

Jonah is in the canon partly to make this point. Nineveh was the capital of the most brutal empire of its age, its national sin was announced, and when the city turned, God relented from the disaster He had said He would do. Jeremiah 18 makes it a general principle: if a nation turns from its evil, God will relent concerning the disaster He intended.

That is genuinely hopeful and it is not sentimental. A nation cannot be born again, because that happens to persons. What a nation can do is change its laws, restrain its cruelty, tell the truth about its past and protect the weak, and Scripture indicates that God notices when it does.

What a Christian does with this

Pray. Paul’s instruction that supplications and thanksgivings be made for kings and all in high positions is the first political act available to every believer, and it is not a token gesture. Confess as Daniel did, standing inside your people rather than above them. Speak plainly where you have opportunity, and speak about what Scripture actually names rather than about your own political preferences.

Then do the small local things that no headline records. Feed someone. Tell the truth in your trade. Take an interest in the people your society finds it convenient to overlook. National sin is a large thing and it is made of many small ones, and the church has always changed nations most by being a different kind of people in them rather than by capturing the levers.

How national sin is answered

If a nation cannot repent in the way a person repents, what is actually available to it? Scripture suggests rather more than we might expect. A country can change its laws, and law shapes conduct over time. It can tell the truth about its own history rather than curating it. It can restrain those who profit from cruelty, and it can protect the people it previously found convenient to overlook.

Josiah’s reforms are an instructive case, because they were genuine, they were led from the top, and they did not go deep enough. The idols came down, the book was read publicly, the passover was kept as it had not been kept for centuries, and Jeremiah was still preaching to a people whose heart had not moved. Reform restrained national sin without renewing anyone, which is exactly what political action can and cannot do.

So the church has a double task. We say what is wrong plainly, because national sin ought to be named by somebody, and we keep preaching to individuals, because that is where the deeper change happens. A country full of converted people would be a different country, and no legislative programme has ever produced one.

So, now what?

If this subject makes you anxious about where our country is heading, take that anxiety and turn it into prayer rather than commentary. Britain is not beyond mercy, and the God who spared Nineveh is not looking for reasons to be finished with us.

And do not let a large question hide a personal one. It is easier to be indignant about national sin than to deal with the sin in my own house, and God has given me authority over exactly one of those. Start where you have been given responsibility, keep praying for those in authority, and remember that our hope was never a reformed nation but a returning King.

Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.

Proverbs 14:34 (ESV)