God's Reflections

Biblical Insight from America's Story

Ronald Ian Phillips, Ernest Schmidt, David Grotzke, Seth Grotzke

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781666735727, 9781666793109
• eBook ISBN: 9781666793116
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Using a unique and ground-breaking approach that combines religion with American history, these four authors masterfully present a thoroughly researched and captivating account of fifty-two inspirational stories of America's exceptionalism intricately woven with God's truths. Each story connects the life-giving honesty of the American people with a life-shaping application from the gospel.Individuals interested in the history of the United States or Christianity and looking for an overarching account of what unites us as Americans and believers will be enthralled by these inspiring stories of struggles and triumphs. We are not the light, just the reflection if we stand close enough to the Source. The further we move away from God's will for our lives, the more we stumble in the dark. But as believers we know there is an all-powerful force that will lift us up and help us to walk in the light. The goal of God's Reflections: Biblical Insight from America's Story is to draw Christians closer to the light source, so they can radiate brighter in their service to God and their country and be part of the greatest rescue mission of all: making disciples for Jesus Christ!

1

Discovery of the United States of America

Into the Unknown

The history of the present-day United States mainland begins with the settlement of indigenous people thousands of years before any European explorers came to the New World. These early inhabitants soon diversified into hundreds of culturally distinct nations and tribes.1 But who was the first European to cross the Atlantic Ocean and discover this land?

How can it be such a mystery to discover which European first set foot on what is now the continental United States of America? Ask reasonably well-educated Americans and it is almost certain they will not know the answer, or they will get it wrong.

Children across America learned that Christopher Columbus discovered America by reciting: “In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” But did he? One might think so considering fifty-four United States counties, cities, and other municipalities, including the Nation’s capitol of Washington DC, are named in his honor.2 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt designated Columbus Day a national holiday in 1934, and in 1968 Congress added Columbus Day, now the second Monday of October, as an official public holiday.

Long before Christopher Columbus left the shores of Spain in August of 1492, well-educated people, and even those who did not pay attention in their university studies, knew the world was not flat.3 As fifteenth-century sailors took one last longing look, they could see the lower part of the city they were sailing from was invisible. They attributed this phenomenon to the Earth’s curvature, which led them to conclude the Earth was round. Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, and Aristotle, among others, all made observations that led them to believe the earth was a sphere,4 but hundreds of years earlier it had already been recorded in the book of Isaiah. A study of the Holy Bible would have led them to this truth recorded in Isaiah 40:22: “He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.”

The real danger for sailors in these small ships, crossing vast stretches of the Atlantic Ocean, was not falling off the edge of a flat Earth, but turbulent seas, coping with disease, and having ample food and water until they reached land.

After receiving the rank of “Admiral of the Ocean Sea,” and funds for his voyage from Spain’s King Ferdinand & Queen Isabella, also known as the Catholic Monarchs, Columbus set out to find a direct water route west from Europe to Asia. Instead after a several thousand-mile voyage across the Atlantic Ocean lasting six and a half weeks, Columbus and his exhausted crew sighted a small group of islands in the archipelago known today as the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, and went ashore. The “Indians” of the Bahamas, and in fact all whom Columbus encountered on his first voyage, belonged to the so-called Taino culture of the Arawak language group. On first seeing the Europeans, they plunged into the sea, swam to the boat, and climbed on board to see if Columbus and his crew had come from heaven.5 The Tainos, whom Columbus found so gentle and hospitable, are long since extinct.

Christopher Columbus changed the world by initiating the permanent European colonization of the Americas as the result of his four voyages to Central America, South America, and the Caribbean between 1492 and 1502. Columbus shattered the unknown and the obscurity between the Old and New Worlds, but he never set foot in North America or discovered land that is now the United States.

The Americas were named after another Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci.6 Vespucci made his voyage a decade after Columbus first crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Christopher Columbus opened the new world for Europeans, but Vespucci is credited with recognizing that they were not exploring India but an entirely new continent. While Columbus underestimated the earth’s circumference by approximately 6,000 miles, Amerigo Vespucci predicted the circumference within fifty miles. But like Columbus, Vespucci never entered North America.

Norse sailor Leif Erikson is believed to be the first known European to set foot on continental North America in AD 1000.7 Five hundred years before Columbus’s and Vespucci’s voyages to the new world, Erikson reached the island of Newfoundland in modern-day Canada.8 Erikson’s discovery was a relatively unknown Viking saga for centuries until the Americas were visited again by Columbus when he reached the Bahamas on October 12, 1492. On June 24, 1497, John Cabot, commissioned by Henry VII of England, repeated Erikson’s accomplishment and paved the way for England’s colonization of most of North America. However, neither Leif Erikson nor John Cabot entered land currently in the United States.9

So if Columbus, Vespucci, Erikson, and Cabot didn’t actually explore what is now the continental United States of America, who di...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Discovery of the United States of America
• Chapter 2: The Mayflower on Its Way to a City on a Hill
• Chapter 3: The Great Awakening
• Chapter 4: The Father of the United States of America
• Chapter 5: Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride
• Chapter 6: Alexander Hamilton
• Chapter 7: It’s Just a Flag
• Chapter 8: Lewis and Clark Expedition
• Chapter 9: The Adams Family
• Chapter 10: Go West, Young Man
• Chapter 11: Soapy Smith
• Chapter 12: Abraham Lincoln
• Chapter 13: The High Price of Freedom
• Chapter 14: Failure Is Not an Option
• Chapter 15: The Gilded Age
• Chapter 16: Thomas Nast’s Sharp Pencil
• Chapter 17: Liberty Enlightening the World
• Chapter 18: Fanny Crosby
• Chapter 19: Alexander Graham Bell
• Chapter 20: P. T. Barnum
• Chapter 21: The Great Flood of 1889
• Chapter 22: Not One of the Idle Rich
• Chapter 23: Their Fate Was Sealed
• Chapter 24: Carry A Nation
• Chapter 25: Annie Oakley
• Chapter 26: Shadow of Death
• Chapter 27: Mary Jane (Blight) Phillips
• Chapter 28: Sinking of the Lusitania
• Chapter 29: Unprepared for a Pandemic
• Chapter 30: Death-Defying Harry Houdini
• Chapter 31: Trial by Fire
• Chapter 32: The Lost Generation in the Roaring 20s
• Chapter 33: The Scopes Monkey Trial
• Chapter 34: Thomas Midgley Jr.
• Chapter 35: Amelia Earhart
• Chapter 36: Mount Rushmore: Bigger Than Life
• Chapter 37: Compassion for the Forgotten
• Chapter 38: Huey Long
• Chapter 39: Consider Your Ways
• Chapter 40: Don’t Believe Everything You Hear
• Chapter 41: Ashes to Ashes
• Chapter 42: General Douglas MacArthur
• Chapter 43: The G.I. Bill
• Chapter 44: Norman Rockwell Paintings of America’s Best
• Chapter 45: Dwight David Eisenhower
• Chapter 46: Life in the Suburbs
• Chapter 47: A Struggle for Human and Civil Rights
• Chapter 48: Sandra Day O’Connor
• Chapter 49: The Supreme Court
• Chapter 50: Endless Wars
• Chapter 51: In God We Trust
• Chapter 52: A Journey to the Heavens
• Bibliography