by Carl Diener
(A personal letter written to Wayne C. Anderson from Carl Diener)
I can’t be with you for the conference at Vero Beach, Florida, this coming August, but my heart will be with you all there. It is already there in a sense. I couldn’t sleep tonight; the words kept coming to me, “For our posterity”.
Ok, so hang with it; I know where this is going. I am not going to get any sleep tonight until I look, listen, and write. I get up and I walk to this Bible one of my friends, a fellow clock restorer from Boston, secured for me. He is a non-believer (so far), but he loves antiques and he knew what this Bible would mean to me.
This Bible is 200 years old, and it belonged to the Harvey family of New Hampshire. In 1830, Matthew Harvey was elected Governor of New Hampshire. Some of the notes taken during some long ago sermons are carefully preserved in the pages of this Bible. A poem written long ago about a loving, tender hearted mother reading the Bible to her children by the hearth fire is also concealed between the pages of this Bible. These were the forefathers of our nation that owned, loved, and read these precious pages. The purchase of this Bible, printed in Philadelphia in 1806, represented a considerable investment to a family at that time.
As I turned the pages, I could hear the whisper in my spirit, “For our posterity” over and over. I looked up the word “posterity” and found that it indeed means “future generations.
I came to the middle of the Bible and began to read… and the tears came to my eyes. One page written in fine hand with a quill pen recorded the births, the next page, the deaths. I felt it – so many precious births received with joy. On the next page – it went on line after line,
“Nancy – died on March 19, Age – 13 days, Emma – died. Age – 3 years 40 days,” and on it goes…
So many, many children died in those days of things we have a cure for now. Think of it, Wayne, what is a parent’s very worst nightmare? And then think of it happening again and again and again. Think with me for a moment of how precious children were in those days. The ones that died were missed and loved; the pain of loss after loss – how great that pain! The ones that lived through childhood, the ones that survived, they called them “our posterity” – the precious treasure of a family and a nation. Everything was to be for them. Family’s thought that way. A young nation thought that way. The first law passed by the State of New Hampshire was The Deluder Satan Act, which stated, “…that there might be schools… that our young might learn to read the Bible and escape the wiles of the Devil.”
The mothers of many of these children died in childbirth, and yet I believe with their last dying gaze, the mothers looked at that little baby and said, “My little child, you are beautiful; and you were worth it” as they closed their eyes and died. In their death, they knew they had given the most precious gift of all, a new life. It was their precious posterity.
Yes, I believe there is a great cloud of witnesses that looks down from heaven and I hear again the whisper, “For our posterity.” The Ecclesia of this hour must indeed hear the cry. The tears of our forefathers who understood family and fatherhood – what must it be like for them to witness our nation and world now? What must it be like for these mothers, who gave up their very lives to bring a new baby into the world, as they watch from above while women, who have every medical advantage for safe birth, choose to murder their baby? What must a father, who gave everything so his son or daughter would have the best chance at life, think as he watches the so called fathers of this world look on their kids as an inconvenience?
I asked an active, faith-filled, born again Christian man last year if he and his wife were planing to have kids. He said, “No, they are just little asset burners.” Little asset burners? And yet I hear the words whispered through the ages echoing in the heart of God to the Ecclesia of today, “It was all for our posterity.”
Here, today, you see deadbeat dads who won’t pay child support let alone be there for their son or daughter. John G. Lake says a man is worse than a beast that won’t take care of his own. We have congressmen and senators that care only for themselves and care nothing for our children. They leave a huge burden of debt. Who can blame them when a generation of young people have no respect anymore for their elders? Even steeped as they are in the deception of the modern education system, they can smell the rot. They are a generation abandoned; and in their hearts, they know it.
In the midst of it all, my IAM family is having a Malachi 4:6 conference. Too little, too late, some might think as we look on a lost generation of disillusioned young people. But to our God, nothing is impossible.
We seek his face and pray, and turn our hearts to the heart of the Father for his lost sons and daughters. We pray for mercy, and above all, we pray for revival. For His love is a great, great love shed abroad in our hearts. We are His chosen ministers of reconciliation. His love is a love that never fails.
Rejoice and be glad and remember a small fish and a few loaves of bread once fed a multitude. So also shall the love that we show to a lost generation, even if it is a few at a time, be multiplied.
And so, “for our posterity” the land will not be cursed.
Carl
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