Emanuel Bowen, A Map of the British Empire in America with the French, Spanish and Dutch Settlements Adjacent Thereto (London, 1741).
When Ferdinand and Isabella sent Columbus west in 1492, freedom was the furthest thing from their minds. They were after gold, glory, and advantage for a crown, and the peoples already living on this side of the ocean would pay dearly for what the voyage set in motion. Not one person in that Spanish court was thinking about liberty, and certainly none of them was thinking about the gospel.
And yet two and a half centuries later, under a different flag and for reasons no one in that court would have recognized, a free nation would rise on this continent, and the gospel of Christ would reach souls who could have found it no other way. The men who came for gold never meant to carry an eternal mercy in their cargo. They carried it anyway.
The pattern runs through the whole story
This is not a quirk of the founding. It is the shape of the founding, from its very first page. God bends the purposes of men toward ends they never intended.
Augustine saw it sixteen centuries ago, writing about empires already long dead. God, he said, "gives kingly power on earth both to the pious and the impious, as it may please Him," on terms hidden in a wisdom too high for us to audit. The land was here, the peoples were here, and the timing that carried a Bible-reading people to an open continent at the very hour the ideas of liberty were ripening was never anyone's to arrange.
"For the kingdom is Yahweh's And He rules over the nations." (Psalms 22:28).
What He was actually after
Men sought gold. God, it turns out, was after something the gold-seekers never thought to price. In the 1730s and 1740s a great spiritual awakening swept the colonies, and preachers like George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards pressed one message on rich and poor alike: that a person must be born again, and that the new birth is a work God does, not a ceremony a church performs.
"Do not marvel that I said to you, 'You must be born again.'" (John 3:7).
That message did something no king's treasure could buy. It leveled people. It crossed every colonial and denominational line at once, so that for the first time a man in Georgia and a man in Massachusetts had lived through the same thing, and thirteen scattered colonies began to feel like one people, under God, before they were ever one nation under law. Empires came for treasure. The treasure God was gathering was souls, and a people in the habit of answering to Him before any earthly authority is not easily told it has no rights its rulers are bound to respect.
The comfort hidden in it
Here is the mercy folded into the history. If freedom on this continent grew up out of the tangled, selfish, often cruel purposes of men, then no part of your own tangled story is beyond the reach of the same hand. The God who bent a treasure hunt toward a freedom no one intended, and toward a gospel no one in that court would have carried on purpose, has not stopped working that way.
We trace this thread, and the rest of the American story, in a free booklet written for the country's 250th anniversary, Liberty Under God, made for families to read aloud together, honest about the sin and glad in the mercy, with the final hope set on Christ rather than the nation. It is free to read in full, and free to share.
It is the same conviction underneath everything at GraceHaven Academy: that history is His story before it is ours, and that a child who learns to see the hand of God in the rise and fall of nations is learning the truest thing history has to teach. The Academy's American History course walks this whole ground with a tutor to think alongside.
He sought gold. God sought souls. He is seeking still.
See our new video series that covers this book as well. Liberty Under God | Episode 1: The Roots — How America Began Before 1776