Rev Mark H Creech, an American, believes that the pilgrim fathers who founded the USA did so with God’s covenant with Israel in mind. The record of that covenant is found in Deuteronomy 8:7-20.
Puritan Samuel Fisher, in his Testimony of Truth (1679) saw Israel as a mirror in which America could view itself. The Pilgrim Fathers who had fled religious persecution in England saw the vast continent as their Israel. Rev. Creech has paraphrased Deuteronomy 8:7-20 in words very descriptive of the USA:
“The Lord your God has brought you into a good land, a land of incredible beauty, with great rivers and streams flowing through green valleys and majestic snow-capped mountains, a land with a sea of flatlands covered with wheat and barley as far as the eye can see, a land where every good thing grows: vegetables, fruits of every kind, and the sweetest of life’s delicacies. You eat of this abundance and are not hungry. This land, so bounteous with natural resources, makes you lack in nothing. All of it is yours and you shall bless the Lord your God for the good land He has given you.”
Fair enough. But there weren’t too many pilgrims in Australia’s First Fleet. Its eleven small ships transported more than 800 chained convicts to the hostile shore of a continent very unlike America or anywhere else on earth. The issue was not religious persecution but rigorous prosecution.
Those on our First Fleet found themselves in a nightmare landscape of tinder-dry forests and waterless plains. The largest creature in the landscape hopped at the speed of a galloping horse. Another perplexing discovery was a furry underwater creature that breathed air, laid eggs, had a duck-like bill, and swam with its four feet. Still another was a bear that wasn’t that kept itself aloof from other creatures—eating only eucalyptus leaves, doing nothing and drinking nothing.
If this land was a mirror, it reflected traumatised people in a weird new world. A new Israel? More like the Wilderness! Rev Creech suggests that God’s promise was “not only for Israel but also for every nation and race willing to submit to His Lordship.” In principle, a good way of measuring a people’s faithfulness to the Lord for His blessings.
But how to paraphrase Deuteronomy 8:7-20 in words that best describe Australia? I’ll have a go.
“The Lord your God has brought you into a good land, a land of blue skies, with creeks that flow from the timbered mountains through green valleys past small towns and big cities to a sandy coast with the world’s best surf, a land where wheat and oats wave in the hot wind beyond the high wall of the Great Divide, a land where irrigated valleys of vegetables, and valleys patched with orchards abound for a people with the vision and the will to re-route the waters of their northern rivers to allow surplus waters to flow inland and release the crop potential of virgin soil; a land so bounteous with mineral resources that we want for nothing, and our vast geography and tropical and temperate climates allow us to surf waves or ski snow in the depth of Winter. We thank you, Father God.
We thank the Lord for the courage of the 1350 who came in the First Fleet, and those who followed them down through the 215 years since then—officers, soldiers, seamen, convicts, settlers and goldminers. They left family and friends in green England, Scotland and Ireland for an dry, unknown land, and faced, fought and beat enormous problems. They endured drought and flood, bushfires and torrential rains, stifling heat and howling cyclones. They were overrun by rodents, plagued by grasshoppers, and struck down by diseases and disasters. We thank the Lord for giving us a land worthy of our hardest efforts and our highest endeavours—the world’s greatest island continent, the once unknown Terra Incognita but now well known “Australia, Land of the Southern Cross” – the Land of Wonder, Down Under.
America, a land of great rivers, was a haven for the Pilgrim Fathers, and an Israel for those who came after them. Australia’s bounty is won by overcoming the nature of a country that is unforgiving in the extreme. We don’t have the religious heritage that pilgrims bring, but we do have a God-given opportunity to build, and the ability to endure adversity and win out. Thank God for Australia!