“This year 2007 is an unique anniversary not just because it’s the four hundredth anniversary of Jamestown. It is that to be sure. But did you know that this is the five hundredth anniversary year of America being called America? I wonder if you have even heard that before?

It was in 1507 that a man by the name of Waldseemüller looked at this new map that was being drawn of exploration across the Atlantic ocean and he wrote the name next to the Northern and Southern Hemispheres the word—America. Have you ever wondered why America is called America instead of Columbia? After all it was Columbus who discovered America. But the only problem is that Columbus thought he had gotten to the Indies.

That’s why the native Americans are still called “Indians.” There was this belief that he had found a way to India...Later there was another person by the name Amerigo Vespucci. Amerigo Vespucci came along and said this isn’t the Indies. This is a new world. These are unknown continents, and so the credit was given to him and the name has stuck forever. But what I want you to think about is that the name America is a derivative of Amerigo from a French named Emeric, which is a derivative from a German word that is Haimirich.

Now if any of you have studied German know that Haimirich means “The kingdom of Heaven.” Now think about that for just a moment. Do you realize that America’s name literally means the “Kingdom of Heaven?”...That’s a good description of America isn’t? It’s a place where the Kingdom of God has come and where the corrupting influences of humanity have been powerfully at work.

It was a hundred years after that Jamestown was settled and it’s interesting that 275 years ago this year that George Washington was born. 250 years ago this year, his (if you will) “adoptive son” Lafayette was born. It was 225 years ago this year that the first English speaking Bible printed in America was available because when Yorktown was victorious under Washington, now for the first time a Bible in English could be legally printed in the New World. It couldn’t be done because the King had a monopoly on the Bible. It could only be printed in Scotland and England. But now that there was independence that had been guaranteed, the Congress of the United States approved the Bible to be printed in America and it was approved as the Congress’s Bible 225 years ago.

This is a great anniversary year. A concatenation of events that surround the fact of Washington’s anniversary, the birthday of America being called America, the beginning of an English-speaking settlement that’s brought the Bible and American civilization at its best and tragically at its worst to the entire world through the English language.”

—Dr. Peter Lillback, author, George Washington’s Sacred Fire, President of Westminster Theological Seminary and keynote at the Jamestown Quadricentennial: A Celebration of America’s Providential History.