Psalms 33:1 Shout for joy in the Lord, O you righteous! Praise befits the upright. 2 Give thanks to the Lord with the lyre; make melody to him with the harp of ten strings! 3 Sing to him a new song; play skillfully on the strings, with loud shouts.
4 For the word of the Lord is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness. 5 He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.
6 By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host. 7 He gathers the waters of the sea as a heap; he puts the deeps in storehouses.
8 Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him! 9 For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.
10 The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples. 11 The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations. 12 Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage!
13 The Lord looks down from heaven; he sees all the children of man;14 from where he sits enthroned he looks out on all the inhabitants of the earth, 15 he who fashions the hearts of them all and observes all their deeds. 16 The king is not saved by his great army; a warrior is not delivered by his great strength. 17 The war horse is a false hope for salvation, and by its great might it cannot rescue.
18 Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear him, on those who hope in his steadfast love, 19 that he may deliver their soul from death and keep them alive in famine.
20 Our soul waits for the Lord; he is our help and our shield. 21 For our heart is glad in him, because we trust in his holy name. 22 Let your steadfast love, O Lord, be upon us, even as we hope in you. ESV
Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.
Recent surveys indicate that 76 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christian. It’s hard to know what people mean by that, but that covers more than 230 million of the 308 million of us.
In April of this year our President was in Turkey when he announced to the world that we do not consider ourselves to be a Christian, or Jewish or Muslim nation, but a nation of citizens. Who he meant when he said we is uncertain, but multiplied millions of our citizens do think that we are a Christian nation. That is not to say that Christianity is the State sponsored religion. It is just saying that the overwhelming majority of our citizens think of themselves as Christians living in a Christian nation.
Those views of America can be debated, but one thing is very clear; we most certainly are a nation with very deep Christian roots. And that is what this talk is about this morning, the Christian roots of America—our Christian heritage.
Of the 55 men sent to the Constitutional convention in the summer of 1787, 95% of them were overtly Christian, 91% of them were Protestant and nearly all of them were Calvinists.
What that means is that they understood themselves and the world they lived in the light of the first 3 chapters of Genesis and all that follows it clear to the last words of John’s Revelation.
They were God-created participants in a God-created world. They understood sin, believed in heaven and hell and embraced Christ as their Savior.
These were men whose wisdom was connected directly to their deep reverence for God, which to them meant reverence for His Word.
They were also extremely well educated men having a wide knowledge of many historic forms of government and they actually studied to know the characteristics, weaknesses and strengths of each. Read the Federalist Papers through one time and you find the scope of their knowledge almost embarrassing in the light of the so called educated of our own day.
The mark of a Christian world view shows up plain enough in the thousands of private letters, speeches, and in the private notes made from the books they read, books by such men Cicero, Montesquieu, Blackstone and Locke, obscure to us but known and quoted often by them.
In this talk I want to highlight four Christian doctrines that lie behind just about everything our founders said and wrote, our Declaration of Independence (1776) and our Constitution (1787) being no exceptions.
1. Creation
2. The fall and depravity of man
3. The priesthood of all believers.
4. God the Law Giver — Biblical law.
1. CREATION
God created man (Genesis 1:26-28) and made him steward of the earth so that out of its bounty he might sustain himself. In making men stewards God bestowed upon man rights to creation and rights to sustain himself.
Our founders called these natural rights given to every man by nature’s God. These very broad natural rights are named in our Declaration—the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Pursuit of happiness means free to improve his situation and sustain himself from the earth by whatever means seemed suitable to him. He could be a fur trader or a wagon maker, or some day a jet pilot. He was free to exercise his liberty in God to pursue his interests so long as those interests didn’t harm the rights of others.
It was this Biblical understanding of liberty that made our forebears extremely sensitive to any hint of any kind of encroachment or trespass. They took it personally.
To the English Monarch the Colonists seemed volatile and ridiculous in their vigilance over these rights, even as many consider Tea Party people ridiculous and dangerous today. Our founders would have been very comfortable at a Tea Party rally. In fact I believe they held the first one in Boston Harbor in 1773.
In 1775 an Irish Parliamentarian named Edmund Burke attempted to explain the American view of liberty to the British Parliament. He said; “In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur (perceive) misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.”
What put them on such high alert against any advancing encroachment was the knowledge that it was God Himself who gave them life and God Himself who had attached these rights to the life of each individual man.
Further, many of them already knew what it meant to live under a government who trampled upon these rights, and it was the Bible that informed their minds and consciences that such tyranny was evil at the root and ought to be resisted.
They clearly set forth the reason for the Constitution they produced in saying. “We the People of the United States, in Order to … secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity —that is the language of men who understood and believed their Bibles.
2. THE FALL AND DEPRAVITY OF MAN
This doctrine says that by the sin of our progenitors (Adam and Eve – see Genesis 3) all humanity has fallen into a state of sin and depravity.
Depravity refers to the impairment of virtue and moral principles. Depravity doesn’t mean that we can do no good deed like helping someone change a tire. It means that our nature is such that if we are not on guard we will turn what began with pure intentions into a way of exalting ourselves rather than glorifying God.
The overwhelming majority of the Constitutional delegates had a healthy distrust of their own motives. They were learned but proud men. They were also suspect of the purity of the motives of others who claimed to want to do good.
This suspicion was the practical wisdom of the Scriptures at work in their hearts and minds. It is exemplified in Paul what said concerning himself, “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.” (Romans 7:21 ESV)
The knowledge that man’s virtue and goodness has been depraved (bent, warped) is why they insisted on a government with limited (specified) duties. It is the reason for the 10th amendment (1791) which says; “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
They did not want a government with creeping and ever expanding powers.
Our government, for example has no legal power to make sure that fur traders and wagon builders make the same income. They are authorized to protect each man’s choice but they are not authorized to manipulate the outcome of his work.
Our Government has no Constitutional authority to make laws saying that everyone must have health insurance, let alone arrange to make sure we all have the same kind of health insurance (except Federal Employees).
The Federal Governments and State Governments have only those powers specified and all other power of decision belongs to the individual. And the control of governing power was left in the hands of a people who elected representatives to act on their behalf (representative republic).
It was their Biblical understanding about depravity that kept our founders from thinking that they were creating a perfect government in order to create a kind of heaven on earth. They said they were attempting to establish a more perfect government in order to secure the Blessing of Liberty for themselves and their children.
Personal liberty, private ownership (as stewards of God), free enterprise, and rights to the fruit of personal labor, these alongside righteous laws to protect one man from the ambitions and avarice of another, these are the rights God has given us, and that is why our founders were so jealous to keep them.
Our founders believed that all men were created equal but the last thing they wanted was to legislate a managed outcome of the life that each person lived.
Socialism in its infancy allows men to choose what they will do but insists on manipulating the outcome. This management often goes under the title “Social Justice”. But in its mature state socialism not only demands equal outcome but begins to regulate the choices as well. Crop farmers must become steel producers because the government needs more steel. Herdsmen must become factory workers because the government needs more widgets. Families can have only one child.
The Russians and the Chinese communists called such management “five year plans”.
The problem was and is this, that since men are not angels but depraved creatures, as soon as they knew the outcome was fixed they saw no more reason to work very hard (if at all). Russian workers coined the saying “The government pretends to pay us and we pretend to work.”
So when it comes to the Marxist economic equation which says; “From each according to his ability, and to each according to his need” it doesn’t take any one long to figure out which side of the equation gives and which side gets, so they opt for the side that says “… to each according to his need”.
In Russia the net result of socialism was that by the end of the first couple Soviet five year plans, farm production dropped 60% and industrial output dropped almost as much and people were hungry, cold, depressed and many stayed drunk and many families fell apart.
China in 1958 began what the Communist Party called “The Great Leap Forward”. This was a government plan designed to modernize China. Part of the result was such a drop in staple food production that upward to 40 million people died, most by sickness and starvation and not a few by suicide. It was a dark and sad and horrible time for the Chinese people.
When you separate people from the right to use their own wisdom and knowledge and to pursue their own lives, and enjoy the fruits of their own labor and invent for them a right to enjoy the fruits of their neighbor’s labor, depravity will soon cause them to desire the fruit of their neighbor’s labor rather be the source of their neighbor’s income.
Winston Churchill said this, "Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery not of wealth."
If men were pure angels instead of depraved humans Socialism might work.
I know that there are some who think that socialism is when the government provides for everyone. The question is where do we think a socialist government gets what it gives? The easy answer is that is coming out of the pockets of those who are working, but that is not an accurate here in the U.S.
Our experiments with big government socialism are being financed with borrowed money. At the moment our national borrowing stands at just over $13 trillion dollars. It is being borrowed from places like the Social Security fund and the Medicare fund. Both those funds have nothing but U.S.Gov. I.O.U. slips in them. This is called Intragovernmental Debt, what you and I call robbing Peter to pay Paul.
We have borrowed from the private investors by way of U.S. Bonds and Treasury Notes. We have borrowed from China and oil rich Muslim nations by the same means.
And when our government can’t find enough people to buy Bonds and T notes to cover current bills due (like payroll for 14 million Federal employees, or Social Security payments now due) here is what they do; they petition the Federal Reserve to print enough currency so the U.S. government can buy its own unwanted Treasury Notes. This maneuver the Fed chairmen call “monetizing the debt.” Sounds safe enough doesn’t it. It is also called inflating the money supply and making your savings and retirement fund worth less than when you put it aside. Printing money is a clever way to devalue the savings of the private sector. That is why some today are buying gold, because they know that our Federal Reserve Bank can’t print more of it. That is why gold, last I looked, was over $1200 / oz.
I said to you that working Americans are not paying this $13 trillion debt back. In fact it is growing larger by $3 billion per day. These bills are being paid for with borrowed money. Here is what that means. Right now the average worker gives 4 months of his wages to the Federal Government and is allowed to use the last 8 months to support himself and his family. But the debt is not being paid down. In fact it is growing by $3 billion per day.
As things now stand in order for these debts to be actually be paid off over the next 25 years we would have to work for the government something closer to 10 months out of every year, but we are not and thus the debt grows.
Here is what this means. For one thing it means that most of the Baby Boomer Generation and the people who produced that generation (people 58 and up) will hardly live long enough to pay any significant amount of this debt off. That means that this debt will fall upon our children and our grandchildren. It means that they will live (as Samuel put it) as slaves to this debt. They will be the ones who work 10 months for the government and 2 months to support their own lives. And the closer a society gets to that point the less interested its people become in truly imaginative and productive work.
If we really understand what we are doing to our offspring and don’t care then we are a very wicked and greedy people.
Here is what our founders knew and said in a variety of ways, that people who don’t care about their history and their ancestors will not care much about their future and their posterity.
3. THE PRIESTHOOD OF ALL BELIEVERS.
Through Christ all men can stand before God without an intermediary. They may seek His wisdom, look to Him for discernment, and petition Him for their needs as well as for the needs of others. In Luther’s words, every plowboy should be able to read and interpret the Scripture for himself rather than be bound to follow the interpretation given to him by his priest, for he himself is responsible to God for his own soul. Hence, education and learning was hugely important in the minds of Protestants and particularly in the minds of Puritan Protestants.
Every believer is accountable to become both knowledgeable and skilled in using the Word of God in order to understanding the ways of God.
Children were expected to learn and excel in their knowledge of world history as well as their own nation’s short history. Now we have pretty much abandoned the study of history for Social Studies. And how is that working? A survey by the Marist Institute taken on July 2, 2010 found that 40% of those surveyed who were between the ages of 18 and 25 did not know from which country we fought to gain our independence.
In contrast to what now passes for education in our public schools, from the Pilgrims (1620) well past the American Revolution and into the early 20th century American children were actually taught (usually at home and sometimes in one room school houses) to know math and science and history and be able to read and understand one or two of the early languages such as Latin and/or Greek.
Hence you find most of our founders reading with full comprehension the works of Cicero (born Jan 3, 106 B.C) in the original Latin. To place such expectations on children today would be considered child abuse.
It was largely the doctrine of priesthood of the believer that produced a high respect for education and was at the heart of the widespread high quality of American education. In a day when almost half our high school grads don’t know who we fought for our independence it is hard to think that farm boys to children of the wealthy alike understand our Constitution and the Biblical world view upon which it rested.
4. GOD THE LAW GIVER
Calvinists (which most of these men were) believed that God’s law, as revealed in his Word (the Bible) contains absolute and unchanging principles. They didn’t believe that the Bible articulates every law that might ever be needed like stop on red, go on green, but they did believe that all law had its rightful origin in God, that the Bible was the standard by which to guide and measure all the laws of men. Therefore laws that flow forth from the mind of men in order to accomplish ungodly principles are not laws at all and ought not to be obeyed.
It was Biblical law that caused them to see the God-assigned value in all human life, even when that life is no longer contributing to the welfare of the nation.
· Unborn … Our founders couldn’t possibly have envisioned anything in the Constitution to make the tax payers complicit in the abortion of 50 million babies. Our new Health Insurance law, unless repealed will make our participation law.
· Elderly … certain nations and states are already asking the elderly to take a pill not to get better but to kill the pain while they die. Some even going so far as to become Kevorkian-like death providers … pills or contraptions to end it all.
· Disabled … we are already at the place with the disabled unborn are viewed as non-productive members of the society, which means that very often sonograms become something more like a search and destroy mission. The disabled old will be next, and then, provided they make it out of the womb alive, the disabled in general. This is our new form of compassion.
The only way we could have gotten here is if most of the 76% Christians among us are largely ignorant of God’s Word, and have succumbed to a blind trust of men professing a desire to do good.
What we should take away from these thoughts about our founders and our foundations?
Psalms 119:105 Your word is a lamp to my feet
and a light to my path. ESV
2 Timothy 2:15 Study and be eager and do your utmost to present yourself to God approved (tested by trial), a workman who has no cause to be ashamed, correctly analyzing and accurately dividing [rightly handling and skillfully teaching] the Word of Truth. AMP
· If we ever hope to understand the times in which we live and how to correct the corruptions of our day we are going to have to be very familiar with God’s Word.
· If we remain Biblically illiterate (as most American Christians are), we will not know our God, not know or treasure our God given rights, nor will we be able to preserve them for those who will come after us.
· And we must be a people who read widely, think Biblically, and act rationally (as opposed to be reactive) in this fallen world.
Our founders knew it and we must relearn it, that the God of Genesis and Politics must be connected or else starry eyed politicians will make slaves of us all.