Listen to or download this week’s radio program:

© 2016 Don Pinson / To Download, right-click here: [Download]

Joshua called together the leaders of Israel and challenged them to finish the work of establishing the Jews in the Promised Land.  He admonished them,

“…choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served…or the gods of the Amorites…but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.”

(Joshua 24:15)

The nations around them worshipped (through their idols, Psalm 106:37) a god—satan—which produced a dictator for their civil government.  God, our true Creator, had given to the Jews, through Moses, a government where the people chose their rulers through elections.  The first form of government enslaved the people to their king, the dictator; God’s form of government enslaved the government servants to the people, the citizens, giving to the people in government only specifically written powers which they could exercise over them (we call that a “Constitution”).  The nations around them had a dictatorship for their form of government; the Jews had a republic for their form of government.  And the Jews experienced, through their republic, more liberty and justice for their citizens than any nation had ever experienced up unto that time.

This is one of the things that makes voting such an important act.  We will always be choosing more enslavement or Continue reading →

Listen to or download this week’s radio program:

© 2016 Don Pinson / To Download, right-click here: [Download]

Samuel Adams, the Father of our American Revolution, stated,

“Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote that he is not making a present…to please an individual—or at least that he ought not so to do; but that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country.”

(Samuel Adams, The Writings of Samuel Adams, Harry Alonzo Cushing, editor (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907), Vol. IV, p. 256, in the Boston Gazette on April 16, 1781.)

Why did America’s Founders teach that voting was so important?  First of all, they believed that the Bible taught it.  Indeed, in Genesis 1:26, where God tells why He made man, one of His three reasons was that man might “have dominion.”  “Having dominion” means, first of all, that we rule over our own desires.  We call this “internal self-government” (America’s Founders often called it “virtue”).  But that internal self-government must be allowed to grow out into the culture.  We must also “take dominion” in the institutions of the culture.  I refer to the home, the church, and civil government—for those are the three structural institutions by which God builds every nation.  If we do not lead in those institutions then those who do not know and walk in the truth of the Scripture will lead; they will “take dominion” and lead us Continue reading →