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If you were to begin to read the books which record our national laws in Washington D.C; and you read them for eight hours a day for the rest of your life, you could not get them all read within your lifetime! Can you believe it? Why is it we have so many laws on today’s law books when early Americans had so few?
Actually the answer to that is quite simple. America’s Founders believed the Bible was the source for all law. Noah Webster said;
“The Bible was America’s basic textbook in all fields.”
(Webster, Noah. “Our Christian Heritage,” Letter from Plymouth Rock (Marlborough, NH: The Plymouth Rock Foundation), p. 5.)
They believed the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount reveal the moral and civil laws by which man needs to live. The first four of the Ten Commandments were about our relationship to God. The last six commands were about man’s relationship to his fellow man. These last six commands are based on the morality of the first four. Our Founders simply lifted the last six commands out of the Ten Commandments and built their civil laws on them, since these Commands tell us how to treat our fellowman. When America’s Founders wrote our Constitution, it was based on those simple teachings. That’s why our original Constitution is such a short document.
Our Forefathers were trying to help us understand that our relationship to man is based on our relationship to God. Thus, they based our civil law on God’s moral law. Without a proper relationship to God there can be no true love toward our fellow man.
This is why our Founders warned us over and over not to give up either our moral law or our civil law!
John Quincy Adams, our sixth President who lived during the time most of our Founders were still alive, identified this when he stated:
“The law given from Sinai was a civil…as well as a moral and religious code…laws essential to the existence of men in society….”
(Letters of John Quincy Adams to His Son on the Bible and Its Teachings, Auburn: James M. Alden, 1850, p.61)
This is why, when Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was, He identified two inseparable Commandments. He answered,
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” Then He added, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
(Matthew 22:37-39)
On these two Commandments America’s civil law was originally built.
How does our civil law being based on our moral law apply to this present time? Like this: When Mr. Obama endorses homosexual (quote) “marriage,” and says he got his inspiration from Jesus to believe this, he not only ignores the fact that the Constitution’s moral foundation is in the Ten Commandments; what’s worse, he denies Jesus’ own words about marriage and sexuality.
If you want to preserve civil law that will preserve the liberty of your children, then you must vote for candidates who refuse to bow down to the groups which deny that God’s Word is the true standard for both morality and civil law. But if you don’t vote; or you vote for those who will bring immoral practices into our communities and government, you are helping to destroy the very foundation of just civil law—which is Biblical morality. And thus, you destroy the very liberty we all hold dear!
It was Founder John Witherspoon, signer of the Declaration of Independence, who cautioned us:
“A republic must either preserve its virtue, or lose its liberty.”
(Witherspoon, John. May 17, 1776, “The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men” delivered at The College of N.J. (Princeton). V. L. Collins, Pres. Witherspoon (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969), I:197-98. John Eidsmoe, Christianity and the Constitution (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, Mott Media, 1987, 1993), p. 85.)
Will you vote to preserve moral goodness? Or will you bow down to the groups which laugh at the Word of God? Those are your only choices.
Think about it; because if you don’t, someone else will do your thinking for you—
and for your children! And you won’t like what that brings to you. I’m Don Pinson this has been Think About It.