James Montgomery Boice:
“The greatest sin of all is that we take glory to ourselves instead of giving credit to God. When we do well we think it is our achievement. When we do badly we think it is somebody else’s fault. It is the perspective of fallen humanity, and what we do as individuals in the leading of our daily lives we do nationally. America has known real greatness. It has been greatly blessed financially, culturally, spiritually, and in many other ways. But instead of giving glory to God, from whom such blessing comes, we boast of our achievement, assuming that it is because we are the kind of people we intrinsically are.”
“The history of humanity is (1) the raising up of a nation by the blessing of God, (2) men and women taking glory to themselves, and (3) God tearing them down in order to show that he is the Most High God and not mankind. That will happen in America. I believe it is happening already. It will happen to a greater extent unless we repent.”
Source: J. M. Boice, Daniel: An Expositional Commentary (2003), 52.