"Those from among you shall build the old waste places; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; and you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in." ~ Isaiah 58:12
Thomas Jefferson taught us the principle that “Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty”. Watchfulness over their government by the citizens of a Republic is the only way to make sure liberty is preserved. And only if liberty is preserved will the Gospel go to the next generation by public means.
And yet, in my upbringing, I was not taught that we should be present to watch over local government meetings- and local government is where most seeds are planted that grow into state and national laws. Consequently, though I was a committed Christian and minister of the Gospel of Christ, I set no time aside to be at local government meetings until I was in my fifties. I simply didn’t see the need for civil government being given any of my time, except to pray for government servants and to try to vote for moral candidates. What’s wrong with this picture? Continue reading →
Recently there’s been a lot of talk about government and the money it takes to operate it. And all this has produced is just more debt, more tax, and more destruction of our nation—while the government gets larger and larger. And if we don’t quickly return to the founding principle of America we will shortly live under a dictator.
Our Founders taught a principle to their children which summed up all the Biblical teaching about government. It was this:
“The more internal self-government you have the less external civil government you need. But the less internal self-government you have the more external civil government you need.”
America was built on this principle. The Pilgrims learned to walk in the internal self-government which the Holy Spirit produces when a life is surrendered to Christ. This started when they received Christ as their Lord and Deliverer and, thus, were born again. But the earliest among them had learned something about this internal self-government that would profoundly affect the birthing and the growth of America. In the mid-1500’s they had gone to Geneva, Switzerland to learn from a scholar by the name of John Calvin. Calvin taught a simple principle which would change the course of the Western world. He called it “renovation”. Continue reading →
When America’s Founders wrote and approved our Declaration of Independence they understood something most of us were never taught. That is, only a people who walk by internal self-government are qualified to maintain external civil government. Because they had been reared in the Biblical thinking of the Great Awakening, they understood that governing one’s self by the power of the Holy Spirit within was the only foundation of good civil government. A people who are not controlled by their own principles of morality will have to be controlled by a large civil government. And a large civil government means less liberty for the individual, the family, the church, and society as a whole.
Robert Winthrop, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in the mid-1800’s stated it precisely when he said,
“All societies of men must be governed in some way or other. The less they have of stringent State Government, the more they must have of individual self-government. The less they rely on public law or physical force, the more they must rely on private moral restraint.
“Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled either by a power within them, or a power without them; either by the word of God, or by the strong arm of man; either by the Bible or by the bayonet.”
(Winthrop, Robert Charles. May 28, 1849, in an address, entitled “Either by the Bible or the Bayonet,” at the Annual Meeting of the Mass. Bible Society in Boston. Addresses and Speeches on Various Occasions (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1852), p. 172. Marshall Foster and Mary-Elaine Swanson, The American Covenant – The Untold Story (Roseburg, OR: Fd. for Christian Self-Government, 1981; Thousand Oaks, CA: The Mayflower Institute, 1992), p. 7.)
But how are we to develop internal self-government? First we must receive Christ as our Master and Deliverer from the sin which would keep us from being self-governed. Continue reading →
The Bible says, “Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.” (Galatians 5:1)
Ladies and Gentlemen: The following document is the reason you and I, in America, are free:
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitles them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Continue reading →
Interposition – what on earth does that mean? Noah Webster, in his original American dictionary defined it as, “being, placing or coming between; intervention.” In geography, it is illustrated by the way Kentucky lies between (or, you might say, interposed between) Tennessee and Ohio. In government it is one governmental power, such as Kentucky’s state government, intervening between the national government and the people to keep the national government from forcing its will on Kentucky people. You might ask, “Is this the right thing to do?”
Actually the idea of interposition comes from the Bible. Jesus stepped in between God and sinful man to pay our debt to God of one perfect life we had stolen in the Garden of Eden and used for ourselves. Jesus, by offering up His perfect life to pay the debt we owed, interposed His life between us and God. He stepped in between God and man to turn away the judgment of God on man. As the Bible says,
“For Christ has also once suffered for sin, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.”
(1 Peter 3:18)
Jesus did this because it’s a law with God that every debt must be paid. Jesus legally paid our debt so God could legally accept us just as if we had never sinned against Him. This is the principle of interposition. Continue reading →
From my earliest days of knowing Jesus Christ through the new birth, I remember being taught that Christians should, quote, “obey the law of the land.” Romans 13:1 was used to support this teaching. It states,
“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.”
The reasoning ran like this: Since God allowed the current civil government to exist, we, as Christians, should submit to it. Later I would learn that there’s just enough truth in that idea to be dangerous!!
Don’t misunderstand me: God did create civil government, as we just read about in Romans 13. He did it to control the “sin-root” in man so that one man could not take away another man’s rights of “life, liberty, or property”. And all citizens, including Christians, are to obey law that is designed to protect those rights. That part of the teaching was right. But the implication that all laws do protect God-given rights was the part that was bad wrong! Wicked government servants, like Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar, can make bad laws. In that case Christians are not obligated to obey those laws! If we submit to bad law, all liberty will quickly be destroyed! Continue reading →
Was the American Revolution a rebellion, as it’s often called nowadays? Were George Washington, Samuel Adams, and Thomas Jefferson just rebels wanting to overthrow the authority of the English Crown in the American colonies? Or were they re-establishing Godly authority by declaring “these colonies are, and of right, ought to be free and independent states?” Why is the Declaration of Independence almost never referred to in our courts today?
Actually the understanding of one simple principle, which our Founders understood, would answer all these questions. It is the principle of interposition. You may be asking, “What on earth does interposition mean?” I’m glad you asked. Noah Webster, in his first American Dictionary, defined interposition as being the act of “…placing or coming between; intervention.” Then he added this comment to illustrate what he meant: “The interposition of the moon between the earth and the sun occasions a solar eclipse.”Continue reading →
Recently a judge declared a Pennsylvania law which protected marriage as being between a man and a woman only to be in violation of the U.S. Constitution. In degrading language he insists this law should be discarded “into the ash heap of history.”
Why do we keep getting this kind of judge in our court system? It’s because we, the citizens of America, have believed the lie that law should be “secular”. “Secular” law means civil law without the influence of God and His moral law. But there is actually no such thing as secular law, not in the strictest sense of the word law. Consider…
The word “law” is defined in Noah Webster’s dictionary as “that which is set.” In other words, it can’t be changed. What law cannot be changed? Well, only the law of God never changes. Therefore, all civil law—for it to be truly law—must be based on God’s moral and civil law revealed in the Bible. This concept, while foreign to most attorneys today, was very well known by America’s Founders who wrote our original government documents. Our Founders had studied extensively William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law. These commentaries on law sold more copies in the America colonies than they did in England, where their author was a distinguished jurist. Blackstone’s statement concerning the foundation of all civil law reveals how our Founding Fathers thought about law. He stated, Continue reading →
And yet, in my upbringing, I was not taught that we should be present to watch over local government meetings- and local government is where most seeds are planted that grow into state and national laws. Consequently, though I was a committed Christian and minister of the Gospel of Christ, I set no time aside to be at local government meetings until I was in my fifties. I simply didn’t see the need for civil government being given any of my time, except to pray for government servants and to try to vote for moral candidates. What’s wrong with this picture? Continue reading 
