Decision Making in the Voting Booth

Lesson #2

 

Once again, we are in that 4-year cycle that Americans love so much, celebrating our freedom and our right to vote and participate in choosing our leaders.  I hear many people who are rather tired of this whole election cycle.  It seems like we have had people running for president ever since the last election four years ago.  This gets to be such a serious subject sometimes that we have to have a little humor now and then.  I always like Maxine because she has a way of communicating one kind of wisdom.  “They hold elections in November because it is the best time for picking a turkey.”

 

As Christians, we need to learn how to think about every area of life from a biblical framework.  That word framework is a very important term.  What that tells us is that within the Word of God, there are things that are taught, things that are revealed that address every area of life in a broad sense, so that that gives us a structure for thinking about everything that may not be specifically addressed.  The Word of God gives us a value system for evaluating things and making decisions.  The Bible emphasizes words like discernment and wisdom which have to do with taking what God says in His Word and then applying it in a skillful manner to all the different things that we face in life.

 

When it comes to an election, we are going to make a choice.  We choose one of several candidates, in some cases, which is the one we believe to be the best one.  We make various value statements such as, “This is the best candidate,”  “This one is qualified to be in this particular office,” “This is a good choice; that is not a good choice.”  Whenever you use any of these value-judgment words, you imply that there is some sort of system, some standards that exist outside of us to which we appeal in order to make these kinds of decisions and judgments.  If you are going to say one is better than the other, on what basis are you making that choice?  What is the information, what are the facts that go into making an informed decision that one is better than another, one is worse than another, one is good and one is bad?

 

It is through a study of God’s Word from Genesis to Revelation that we build this kind of a framework for understanding everything within God’s creation.  There is a framework for understanding law or  society and the way society should function.  Because there are oughts and shoulds and musts in the Scripture, that structures that framework for us so that we can make decisions that are consistent with the oughts, shoulds, and musts in Scripture.  That gives us an ethical standard for evaluating God’s Word.

 

We get into books such as Proverbs, which are considered wisdom literature.  That word wisdom that we have there is a Hebrew word that means skill at living.  It is the ability to take the raw data of Scripture, to put it all together, and then to make decisions that are consistent with that.  The best way to use an analogy on this is thinking about natural science.  When God created the earth, He loaded the earth with all these natural resources - beautiful plants and animals.  Yet, it was just, as it were, raw data as far as man was concerned.

 

When God created Adam, there was no data on God’s creation; there was no information, categorization, or even vocabulary because Adam had not yet named the animals.  So there was no categorization, classification, or analysis.  God told Adam to name the animals.  He began to name the domestic animals within the garden.  That was the initial idea, but we are still doing that.  We discover new species, new animals; we are still categorizing and classifying those animals.  We are still in the process of discovering all that we can about God’s creation and taking all of that data, putting it together, sifting it, and coming up with new information, new applications in areas of technology, medicine, science. 

 

By analogy, the Word of God is the same way.  God reveals this to us in the context of narrative literature, history, wisdom literature, legal literature, epistolary literature, poetry.  The beauty of the way  God has revealed this to us is that if He had just given us a systematic theology with all the doctrines categorized, we would read it all through once, say “Good, that answers all my questions,” close the book and put it on the shelf.  But because God gave it to us the way He did, we have to mine that data bank of the Scriptures over and over again.  Each time we go back to it, we discover new things, we see new relationships and correlations, and we build this structure of doctrine or theology.  It is out from that we develop applications.  That falls under the category of wisdom or skill (hochma) at taking that and then applying it within our life.

 

The area we are working on application right now is one that is very real to every American citizen, or should be, and that is in the area of voting.  How do you make decisions in the voting both, especially when you may have two good candidates, and the choice is between one that is good and one that is better.  Or as is so often the case it seems, one that is not good and one that is worse.

 

I wanted to establish a basic understanding of my premise and basic rationale in this series.  I’ve summarized this in three syllogisms.

 

The first rationale.  The major premise - All citizens of the U.S. have a responsibility implicit in their citizenship to vote intelligently and wisely to preserve and defend the Constitution.  It is the same thing that the president swears to, military officers swear to – to preserve and defend the Constitution, which is the basis for the blessing of freedom which we have.  The minor premise – All Christians are mandated to do whatever they do, including voting, to the glory of God.  Whatever they do – whether it is a plumber, an electrician, working in technology, doctor, working with your hands or your brain, a mother or housewife, a husband or father – is to be done to the glory of God and to the very best of our ability.  Conclusion – All Christians who are citizens of the U.S. should vote wisely and intelligently to preserve and defend the Constitution for this glorifies God.

 

All Christians have this as their responsibility.  It is not just a responsibility to vote wisely and intelligently but to do so within a biblical framework of doing it to the glory of God.  Not just doing it because that is what you do as a citizen, but because you are a believer, you have a transcendent motive.

 

The second rationale.  The major premise – The U.S. citizen, like the U.S. president, is to preserve and protect the U.S. Constitution.  The minor premise – In order to preserve and protect the U.S. Constitution, we should understand the thinking which it embodies and the source of these ideas.  If you are going to preserve and defend something, you need to understand what it is, why it is the way it is, and understand the threats that come against it.  Where did these ideas come from?  Conclusion – Therefore, the U.S. citizen in order to vote intelligently and wisely must understand the thinking embodied in the U.S. Constitution, so that he can vote in a way that preserves and protects our heritage.  We are not going to overthrow the Constitution.

 

By the way, the U.S. Constitution has been in effect for 221 years.  In that time France had had four or five governments, Russia has had four governments since the early part of the 20th century, and many other nations have had many other forms of government.  I can’t count how many governments the Mexicans have had in that length of time.  It’s one of those high numbers they talk about in Revelation.

 

What is it that gave this sort of stability to our government?  I am arguing that it derived its fundamental principles from the Word of God.

 

The third rationale.  The major premise – The thought system which is embodied in the founding documents of this nation derives from Christian theism broadly and the Bible specifically.  Minor premise – All Christians who are citizens of the U.S. should vote wisely and intelligently to preserve and defend the Constitution, for this glorifies God.  Conclusion – By understanding the biblical framework that lies behind the Constitution, a Christian can vote more intelligently and wisely to preserve and protect the Constitution and the freedom it recognizes.  If you are a post-modern or secular humanist or a modern atheist and you go back and reinterpret the Constitution in light of your modernist views, then what you end up with is something that is completely divorced from what the founding fathers intended because you are inventing this out of whole cloth.

 

The assumption that I am bringing to this that underlies this entire approach is that in order to understand and interpret the Constitution, we have to understand its original historical context and the culture out of which it came in order to preserve and protect that.  Interpretation depends on literal, historical hermeneutic.

 

(Chart)  Today we live in a world where there has been a battle.  It developed out of the thought systems that came into existence in the 19th century.  The view on the right of the chart is that one interprets the Constitution in terms of its original intent, called the originalist, strict constructionist, textualist, or conservative.  The view on the left of the chart is the loose constructionist, revisionist, or liberal.

 

I was pleased to note that after the last class, I had five or six people in the congregation email additional information to me that this last Thursday (Oct. 16), the Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas, in his Wriston Lecture to the Manhattan Institute stated, “Let me put it this way; there are really only two ways to interpret the Constitution – try to discern as best we can what the framers intended or make it up.  No matter how ingenious, imaginative or artfully put, unless interpretive methodologies are tied to the original intent of the framers, they have no more basis in the Constitution than the latest football scores.  To be sure, even the most conscientious effort to adhere to the original intent of the framers of our Constitution is flawed, as all methodologies and human institutions are, but at least originalism has the advantage of being legitimate and, I might add, impartial.”

 

Because you are dealing with original intent, it has a standard, and there is objectivity.  That is what the justice is saying.  That is something we can all appeal to.  This was the role of judges and the role of the Supreme Court up until the early part of the 20th century.  Because there was this huge culture shift or worldview shift (you have heard the term culture wars) that occurred in the 19th century (which was exhibited in naturalism, secular humanism) away from objectivity and certainty of knowledge and away from a biblical way of thinking that had characterized the founding fathers and the generations of the 17th and 18th centuries and no longer characterized a majority of early 20th century Americans.  This lead to a gradual erosion of originalism and strict constructionism in the Constitution and began to change our culture.

 

I pointed out that Bible-believing Christians believed that the Bible should be interpreted literally, and, by extension, literal interpretation, which includes the author’s original intent, is the way that all writings should be interpreted.  Whether you are trying to interpret a Shakespearean sonnet, the instructions for your tax form, instructions to submit to FEMA in light of the recent hurricane or whatever it is, you are interpreting those documents in terms of authorial intent.  You are saying, “What do they mean by this?”  That is how we interpret things.

 

Think back when you were 16, 17, 18, or 19 years old, and you got that first love note from someone you were interested in, you looked at it and said, “What do they mean by that?”  You understood innately, because that is the way God made us, that to understand something, we have to understand what the author intends, and we cannot read into it whatever we want to.  We cannot just make it up out of whole cloth.

 

(Chart)  We have two presidential candidates: McCain, on the right, is an inconsistent originalist, but he rejects judicial activism, at least theoretically.  But on the left, we have Obama, who is a consistent revisionist and has voted against originalists on the two times he had serving as a senator.  He affirms judicial activism.  I believe that this is the single most important issue in this election where a president only serves four or perhaps eight years, but his appointments serve for several decades.  I believe if Obama is elected as president that he will change the Court in such a way that we won’t win it back for two generations, if ever.  This is the most important aspect of this election, I believe, the most important criteria.

 

If we are going to understand why and how the founders produced these incredible documents (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, various state constitutions, various other founding documents), where did they get these ideas?  When this question was posed by the next generation to John Adams in 1860, he said these ideas came from the pulpits in America, the preachers proclaiming and teaching the Word of God, going back to the early Pilgrims and Puritans.  This is the source of these ideas.  Numerous studies have documented that it is the pastors in the pulpits and the Word of God that supported that.

 

Benjamin Rush, one of the founders, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and served in three early presidential administrations, said, “My only hope of salvation is in the infinite, transcendent love of God manifested to the world by the death of His Son upon the cross.  Nothing but His blood will wash away my sins.  I rely exclusively upon it.  Come, Lord Jesus!  Come quickly!”  This was expressed by dozens and dozens of the founders who signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

 

In 1776, after they signed the Declaration of Independence and they passed it around to the colonies, the place where they sent it was to the churches.  They didn’t send it to the town hall, town square, town crier, or to the mayor.  They sent it to the pastors to be read in the pulpits.  But they knew once word was out (and the word spread quickly) that this country had declared its independence from Great Britain, they knew that they had a problem, because the instant they declared independence, all of the colonial charters ceased to exist.  At that instant, there was no more state law or colonial law in each of these colonies, so those who had met in the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia went back to their home states to help write their state constitutions.  In the way they wrote their state constitutions, we come to understand a lot more about their thinking and what they had in mind.

 

Men like Samuel Adams helped write the Massachusetts constitution, Benjamin Rush and James Wilson helped write the Pennsylvania constitution, and George Reed and Thomas McKean helped write the Delaware constitution.  All of these colonial constitutions were written, as least in part, by men who had been in Philadelphia and signed the Declaration of Independence.

 

The Delaware State Constitution stated, “Everyone elected and appointed to office shall make and subscribe the following declaration, to wit: I do profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, and in the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed forever more, and I do acknowledge the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration.”  This is not to go to seminary or Bible college; it is to serve in any elected position or any appointed position anywhere in the state.  Notice the emphasis is on the character and belief system of the individual – that is what is important.  Not how many degrees he has or how much experience he has serving in office but on his character and belief system.

 

In the Pennsylvania State Constitution, we find the following statement:  “Each member [of the legislature], before he takes his seat, shall make and subscribe the following declaration, viz: I do believe in one God, the Creator and Governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked, and I do acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by Divine Inspiration.”  They add that phrase in there that He is the “rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked” because they want every legislator to know that they are not just accountable to the people, but when you die, you are going to be accountable to God.  This weighed so heavily on the conscious of John Adams that he said he feared the fiery torments of hell because that would last a long time.  He wanted to make sure he did things correctly.

 

The Massachusetts State Constitution, written by Samuel Adams, states, “[All persons elected must] make and subscribe the following declaration, viz: I do declare that I believe the Christian religion and have firm persuasion of its truth.”

 

In the North Carolina State Constitution: “No person who shall deny the being of God, or the truth of the Christian religion, or the divine authority either of the Old or New Testaments or who shall hold religious principles incompatible with the freedom and safety of the state, shall be capable of holding any office or place of trust or profit in the civil department, within the state.”  No Jehovah’s Witnesses, no Mormons, no atheists, no secular humanists, and nobody who works for the ACLU.  None of these people could subscribe to these kinds of documents. 

 

When you hear the modern distortion of that - separation of church and state, which phrase is actually not in the Constitution or Bill of Rights – you need to remember that what they had in mind is not what has been put into practice in the U.S. for the last 70 or 80 years.  The founders of this nation believed that a person had to be a Christian and had to believe the Bible was the inspired Word of God, or he was not qualified to serve in civil government. 

 

Why did they think that?  Because they understood Jeremiah 17:9 that “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?”  In fact, both Washington and Hamilton commented that it was on the basis of that verse that they put in the separation of powers between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches because they knew that man was inherently evil, and it was very easy for depraved, sinful man to turn government into a force for tyranny that would destroy freedom and liberty.  Remember that freedom and liberty are not freedom to go do what you want to do: it is freedom from government interference and tyranny.

 

They were concerned about the thought system, the belief system that someone had, not because they were establishing a theocracy.  They understood within a broad sense that only within the framework of biblical Christianity was there an appreciation for real freedom and liberty that could allow for people to reject it.  Of course, they couldn’t serve in government, but they go make their fortune and own half the state and do whatever they wanted to.  They had freedom to live their lives apart from government interference; they could be an atheist and do whatever they wanted to.  If you were going to serve in the government, you had to subscribe to certain beliefs, otherwise it would lead to destruction of the nation.

 

In 1892, the Supreme Court recognized that each of the then forty-four states in the union had some type of God-centered declaration in their state constitution.  After citing over 60 precedents, the Supreme Court then concluded, “There is no dissonance in these declarations.  There is a universal language pervading them all, having one meaning; they affirm and reaffirm that this is a religious nation, this is a Christian nation.”

 

That is not an acceptable conclusion for many people today.  Both Christians and non-Christians attempt to change this and say, “How can you have freedom in a Christian nation?”  They do not understand what real freedom is all about.  They think if you are going to have a Christian nation, that is going to force everybody to be a Christian.  They also think that this means that everybody marched in lockstep in terms of their Christianity among the founding fathers.  That is not true.  Some were Roman Catholic; some were Methodist or Episcopalian or Presbyterian.  The vast majority came out of a Presbyterian-influenced background, but they were not forcing their views on anybody else.  They also had many other ideas that influenced the culture at large at that time, just as it does in every generation.  The vast majority of the ideas came out of the Bible.

 

The founders of the Republic viewed themselves as establishing a Christian nation and not a theocracy.  For example, one of the early representatives in Congress from Virginia was John Randolph of Roanoke.  He was very much inclined toward Mohammedanism (as he put it), toward Islam.  He was lead to the Lord and discipled by Francis Scott Key, who wrote the Star Spangled Banner.  He later, as he matured, became a very strong believer and had tremendous influence in many different areas.

 

The founding fathers had a set body of beliefs that are embodied in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and those structures of government flow out of the Bible.  They are not the only way in which you could apply the Bible to government, but that is where they come from – the outworking of biblical truth.

 

The next question that concerned the founders was how do we pass this on to the next generation?  It is very easy to lose it.  You have one generation that understands these principles and fought hard and won the freedoms on the battlefields, and now the next generation can come along and lose it.  We have to educate them; we have to pass this on.  Education was crucial.  In fact, many of them were involved in the establishment of universities, colleges, schools, public schools, and many wrote textbooks and history books because they understood how vital it was to pass this information on to the next generation.

 

One of these men was Noah Webster.  We refer to him when we refer to the modern version of the dictionary that he originally wrote.  He was an educator, a lexicographer, founder of educational institutions, translator of his own translation of the Bible in 1833.  He served in the Connecticut House of Representatives and also served as a county judge.  In 1776, he served in the Continental Army under the command of his father.  From 1783 to 1785, he published at Hartford a 3-part tool for educating the young.  The first was a spelling book, the second was a grammar, and the third was readers, entitled the Grammatical Institute of the English Language.  It was a pioneer American work in its field, and it soon was used in every school in the U.S.  It was a primary text all the way through the 19th century.

 

He also wrote a book on American history, and in the preface of that book, he writes, “In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government ought to be instructed…  No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people.”

 

Noah Webster served in the legislatures of two different states, and he was one of the first of the founders to call for a Constitutional convention.  He was personally responsible for writing Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution.  He also established Amherst College, and he wrote many other textbooks other than the one on American history.

 

He wrote, “Our citizens should early understand that the genuine source of correct republican principles is the Bible particularly the New Testament or the Christian religion.”  This does not refer to Republican or Democrat party; this refers to the standard that this nation is a republic and was founded to be a republic, not a democracy.  The early founders thought a democracy was a “mobocracy.”  When we pledge allegiance to the flag and the republic for which it stands, we are affirming that we believe this nation is a republic and not a democracy.

 

In his History of the United States, which was published in 1833, he included a number of cutouts called “Advice to the Young,” which were intended to be a textbook for young children coming up through school.  In his advice #49, he focused on the right of voting.  We should pay attention to this – such wisdom.  “When you become entitled to exercise the right of voting for public officers, let it be impressed on your mind that God commands you to choose for rulers, ‘just men who will rule in the fear of God.’  The preservation of a republican government [the kind of government embodied in the Constitution] depends on the faithful discharge of this Duty; if the citizens neglect their Duty and place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted; laws will be made, not for the public good so much as for selfish or local purposes; corrupt or incompetent men will be appointed to execute the Laws; the public revenues will be squandered on unworthy men; and the rights of the citizen will be violated or disregarded.  If a republican government fails to secure public prosperity and happiness, it must be because the citizens neglect the Divine Commands, and elect bad men to make and administer the Laws.  Intriguing men can never safely be trusted.”

 

I am going to summarize this.  He says five things with the consequences of electing bad men to public office.  Notice again that the emphasis is on character.

 

1)  They will corrupt government.

2)  They will make laws, not for the general welfare, but for “selfish or local purposes.”

3)  They will appoint other corrupt men to execute their laws.

4)  They will squander the citizen’s taxes upon those who are unworthy.

5)  They will violate the citizen’s rights.

 

Notice that the emphasis is the money from the citizens is the citizens’ money and not their money.  I want you to notice also that he puts the responsibility not on the bad rulers ultimately but on the voters who foolishly neglect the divine commands, who neglect Bible doctrine.  Because they neglect Bible doctrine, they vote bad men into office.  Of course, you all noticed Webster’s last statement about do not elect intriguing men; do not be caught up in the façade.

 

Benjamin Rush was another who wrote about the importance of education.  He says in his autobiography, “The only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government…is the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity by means of the Bible.”

 

We should note three things.  First, they clearly saw the biblical principles and how those principles were connected to good citizenship.  If, as believers, we are going to exercise our responsibilities as citizens to the glory of God, we have to understand those biblical principles.  Biblical principles are what lie behind the documents that established the laws of the land.

 

Second, they clearly saw the consequences of disobeying those principles – not the principles in the law but the principles behind the law, which are the principles in the Word of God, principles of Bible doctrine.

 

Third, we see how the consequences that they outlined have come to us.  They have landed on our doorstep over the last 75-100 years, and each decade becomes increasingly worse.

 

Our comfort is that God is in control.  We know that God is in control, and we know that as believers we understand the same principle they did, that is, “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart departs from the Lord” (Jeremiah 17:5).  We cannot trust in men and cannot trust in anything other than God.  That does not mean that we throw away our vote and stay home and pray, because we have a responsibility.

 

I haven’t notice that any of you sit outside praying for somehow the gas to be put into your car.  I think everyone of you has gone to a gas station and put gas in your car, while you pray that God will make sure you have gas and that you can get where you need to go.  We understand, on the one hand, we pray to God, but, on the other hand, we have certain responsibilities that we must fulfill.

 

What we see in all this is that this founding generation and subsequent generations had an extremely high view of God and of the Bible.  Noah Webster wrote, “The Bible is the chief moral cause of all that is good and the best corrector of all that is evil in human society – the best book for regulating the temporal [secular] concerns of men.”

 

Andrew Jackson, a generation later, said, “That book [the Bible], Sir, is the Rock upon which our Republic rests.”  They understood the foundation of this government was the Bible, and they had a high view of it.

 

Not long after the formation of this country, at the conclusion of the War for Independence, Congress met, and one of the first things they did was to authorize a man by the name of Aitken to print and publish a Bible under the authority of the U.S. Congress. This was known as the Aitken Bible, and here is a facsimile of its title page.  On the left side, it says, “The Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments, newly translated out of the original tongues and with the former translations.”  This is from the King James Version and is printed and sold by R. Aitken.  On the right is a resolution by the U.S. Congress.  “Resolved, that the United States in Congress assembled highly approve the pious and laudable undertaking of Mr. Aitken, as subservient to the interest of religion, as well as an influence of the progress of arts in this country, and being satisfied from the above report of his care and accuracy in the execution of the work, they recommend this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States, and hereby authorize him to publish this Recommendation in the manner he shall think proper.”

 

Another thing that was typical of that era is election sermons.  One was preached before His Excellency John Hancock, Governor of Massachusetts, Sam Adams, Lieutenant Governor, and the Council, Senate and House of Representatives.  The whole state government is assembled, and they would open up their assembly every year and have a pastor come in and preach.  Sometimes these sermons would be two or three hours long, and they would pray profound prayers – prayers that would make their hearers weep.

 

At one time when they were sitting in Congress before they wrote the Declaration of Independence, they had the pastor of a church in Philadelphia come in, and he preached for a couple of hours.  John Adams wrote home to his wife that this was the most profound psalm he had ever read, and he encouraged her to go read it.

 

Throughout these election sermons - sermons that related to citizenship, government, and the right role of government – there were certain passages that would surface frequently. 

 

Proverbs 20:28 “Loyalty and truth preserve the king, and he upholds his throne by righteousness.”  Where do loyalty and truth come from?  That assumes an external standard, and that the king is under the authority of truth and is not an autocrat.  They rejected the whole idea of the divine right of kings and the divine right of government, but that the government was under the authority of God who produces truth.  They derived this from their study of the Old Testament.  The Puritans, especially, loved to study the Old Testament and understood the implications and warnings of 1 Samuel 8 against a large government and a strong, centralized power.  This was another reason why they specifically spelled out the responsibilities and the powers to the states and kept that away from the federal government.  They understood that the government was under truth and under law, and that was divine law.

 

There is an ethical foundation to governing.  It is not just a matter of having an MBA or having a PhD in economics or a law degree; there is an ethical standard that is inherent to leadership.  Proverbs 29:4 “The king gives stability to the land by justice, but a man who takes bribes overthrows it.”  Justice implies a standard.  Where do these candidates go to for their view of righteousness, of right and wrong?  What informs their thinking?

 

Proverbs 14:34 “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people.”  We do not legalize sin; we do not legalize homosexual marriage.  We do not legalize many things that have been legalized because it is sin.  There are people who think you do not legislate morality.  You cannot force people to be moral, but the very foundation of any law is you ought to do something and you ought not to do something else – that is morality.  Morality informs every single law that we make.  There must be an ethical dimension there.

 

Proverbs 29:2 “When the righteous increase, the people rejoice, but when a wicked man rules, people groan.”  They rejoice because there is justice in the land, true justice: the same for the rich as for the poor, the same for the elderly as for the children.

 

Proverbs 29:12 “If a ruler pays attention to falsehood [Let’s paraphrase that – if a ruler thinks according to a fraudulent worldview] all his ministers become wicked.” 

 

In this election, people will be concerned with two broad issues: one broad issue is national defense and the other area is economics.  For the last 18 months, the liberal media has been screaming that we are in a recession, although the figures did not support that.  Certainly, there were areas of the country that were slower than other areas of the country, but now we actually may be in a recession.  They have generated a self-fulfilling prophecy where they just managed to scare the heck out of everybody and make them think that we are in a recession and ought to throw out the current administration. 

 

I remember back in the 1990s hearing people who had voted as life-long Republicans, and everything was going so well for them in the stock market in 1996 say that they for the first-time in their life had voted for a Democrat (Bill Clinton).  Why?  Well, because their money was doing so well in the market.  Economics took priority over everything.

 

But if you look at the Word of God, the priority is never on economics; it is on ethics, on righteousness.  When the nation under the Mosaic Law was righteous, God took care of them economically.  Before the Mosaic Law, when you had people like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob living their life before God and had righteousness in their life, God supplied and took care of their economic needs.

 

We have the same principle stated by Jesus in Matthew 6:33 “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness [can only be defined by God’s Word] and all these things [details of life: prosperity, economic stability] will be added to you.”  Ethics and righteousness are the priority.  Not how it is going to impact your 401k, not how it will impact your Social Security check, not how it will impact your job, and not if this or that person gets in and will see that legislation gets passed so that you will get more money or your company will get a government contract.  Those should never influence your decision making, because we are to make a decision for what is right and good for the nation based on an external standard.

 

There is a very important responsibility for people to go to the polls and vote.  They are to analyze these issues and vote in righteous men.  What happens when there are not righteous men?  Unfortunately, that is too often the case.  We have to vote against the one who is less righteous.

 

We have a high responsibility, as John Adams stated, “We electors have an important constitutional power placed in our hands: we have a check upon two branches of the legislature…  It becomes necessary to every [citizen] then, to be in some degree a statesman: and to examine and judge for himself…the political principle and measures.  Let us examine them with a sober…Christian spirit.”  What is the framework that we are to use to evaluate our choices?  It is going to be the Word of God and the truth of God’s Word.

 

We have seen some of the ways the Bible has impacted the individuals and has impacted their view of government.  They understood foundationally this was within the realm of ethics and morals because an unethical, immoral people who did not understand righteousness could not perpetuate the government that they were establishing in the Constitution.

 

Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, in a letter to James McHenry wrote, “Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion, whose morality is so sublime and pure…are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments.”

 

James Madison, who was the fourth President of the US, wrote, “We’ve staked our future on our ability to follow the Ten Commandments with all of our heart.  We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it.  We’ve staked the future of all our political institutions upon our capacity…to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”

 

I can just hear a number of people screaming “theocracy” right now.  But they were not forming a theocracy.  If you think this is a theocracy, you do not understand what it is, and you do not understand Bible doctrine.  Nobody in their right mind would ever read the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and think they were establishing a theocracy.  They were establishing a republic where there was freedom, but they understood that that had to come out of a certain framework, and that framework was established by the Bible. 

 

They understood that the first control had to come from the Bible because man’s heart was evil, and his thoughts turned to evil continually because of total depravity.  The second control was external law – the written law of the land.  They understood that law was over government and that law had its source in God.  The primary source for understanding and interpreting the law in the English-speaking world at that time was Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, which were the recognized authority on law and the recognized tool for interpreting law and handling legal problems in the U.S. and by the U.S. Supreme Court from 1776-1920.  Blackstone’s Commentaries were endorsed by almost every founding father.

 

Blackstone recognized that all law had to derive ultimately from the Bible, that laws could not contradict God’s direct decrees.  However, he understood when the Bible did not address a specific area, then we were free to set our own policy.  For example, in the arena of murder, that is expressly forbidden by the divine command “Thou shall not kill,” which in Hebrew means “Thou shall not murder.”  When it comes to developing a law on import and export regulations, then that would be up to the individual nation to derive laws that would be righteous and just.  This was the foundation.

 

They recognized there is this external authority of law and that there was this internal problem of man’s sin that could only be dealt with by his relationship with God.  This was something they struggled with going back into the colonial period.  In the 1660s, the colony of Carolina sought help from John Locke, who authored their first constitution.  Locke’s idea was that a good constitution would protect the people even if bad men were in office.  Good government would be secured through righteous laws even if there were poor leaders for the poor leaders would be bound by the righteous laws.  He is thinking only in terms of that external control of the law.  But as we see when we have just laws and there are unjust men, then those just laws become corrupted.

 

At the same time he was writing the constitution for the colony of Carolina, William Penn was putting together the foundational government for the colony of Pennsylvania.  Penn believed that a long constitution with righteous laws would not be enough because he understood total depravity.  He believed that something else was needed: you had to have good men with integrity.  Penn understood that integrity could come only from God’s Word.  He wrote, “Governments, like clocks, go from the motion men give them…  Wherefore governments rather depend upon men, than men upon governments.  Let men be good, and the government cannot be bad…  But if men be bad, the government [will] never [be] good.” 

 

Penn understood that the goodness of government was not simply dependent upon righteous laws but upon the integrity of men.  He wrote, “I know some say, ‘Let us have good laws, and no matter for the men that execute them.’  But let them consider that though good laws do well, good men do better: for good laws may [lack] good men...but good men will never [lack] good laws, nor allow bad ones.”  He understood that there was this internal problem with man, so there has to be an internal check and that can only come from the Word of God and from eternal truth.

 

This establishes the thinking that characterized the founders of this nation that inform the writings of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.  This is the worldview that is embedded in those documents.  What happened?  What happened was that there was a gradual erosion that occurred in the 19th century with the influence of the Enlightenment coming out of Europe.  The Enlightenment had begun back in the 1660s, and as the impact of that thinking snowballed, then you had a major shift in the way people thought about knowledge with Immanuel Kant in the 1770s, about the same time of the American Revolution.  Then you had the development of European thought during the 1800s that rejected supernaturalism and God.  You had the rise of naturalism, the rise of Darwin, and the rejection of God as creator and what the founders believed to be institutions that were built into the fabric of God’s creation, like marriage, family, government and justice and righteousness that within a Darwinian framework were just products of time+chance and are no longer built-in absolutes but are social conventions that people found worked.  Then you developed various elements of idealism, pragmatism, and other isms that come out of late 19th century.

 

As you see the rise of secular humanism in that period, a couple of things come out.  One of those is the idea that religion is really something private: it is just between you and God and is nobody else’s business.  In contrast to the founders, who clearly stated that it was important to know the spiritual thinking of the relationship with God that a leader would have, they said that no, that was not relevant.  You just need to know their practical skills; you do not need to know their character.

 

There was this bifurcation that occurred that there is the spiritual life on the one hand and everything else on the other hand.  This is consistent with a Kantian epistemology – the idea that the Bible only addresses salvation in the spiritual life and does not address the practical things of life, such as budgeting, such as governing yourself or governing others, family, nation.  It does not affect any of those, just your spiritual life, and so it does not really affect politics.  That was not the view of the founders.

 

The result of the 19th century and the ideas of the 19th century lead to the chaos, the collapse, the erosion that we saw in the 20th century.  The 20th century is the result of the 19th century.  The ideas we are wrestling with now that many of us do not like are the ideas that came out of the 19th century.  What gave this country stability, prosperity, what built its strength were the ideas of the 17th and 18th century – those so-called archaic ideas of the Bible, not the modernistic ideas of the 19th and 20th century.

 

The Bible emphasizes the fact that character actually matters.  One of the election sermons preached to the Connecticut legislature was preached by Rev. Matthias Burnett in 1803.  In that sermon, he stated, “Feeble would be the best form of government without a sense of religion and the terrors of the world to come. [That is the idea of accountability, which we will get into with the first Divine Institution.]  Banish a sense of religion and the terrors of the world to come from society, and you leave every man to do that which is right in his own eyes.  The man who is not actuated by the fear and awe of God, has in many cases no bond or restraint upon his conduct, and therefore is not fit to be trusted with the nation’s welfare.  Think not that men who acknowledge not God or his laws will be corrupt in office.”  That is exactly where we are today: everyone is doing what is right in their own eyes.  They believe that man should have character, and they often went to Exodus 18:21, which is the episode where Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, comes to him and gives him advice on how to organize and administer justice for the people.  “Furthermore, you shall select out of all the people able men who fear God, [That is your priority: character and the spiritual life.] men of truth, those who hate dishonest gain; and you shall place these over them as leaders of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties and of tens.”

 

Rev. Matthias Burnett said, “Look well to the characters and qualifications of those you elect and raise to office and places of trust…  Let the wise counsel of Jethro be your guide.  Choose ye out from among you ‘able men, such as fear God, men of truth and hating covetousness and set them to rule over you.’ ”

 

Another election sermon, Rev. Chandler Robbins in 1791 said, “How constantly do we find it inculcated in the sacred writings, that rulers be ‘just men, fearers of God, haters of covetousness,’ that they ‘shake their hands from holding bribes,’ because, a gift blindeth the eyes of the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous.”

 

Noah Webster wrote “It is to the neglect of this rule of conduct in our citizens [that is, not selecting Godly men for office] that we must ascribe the multiplied frauds, the breaches of trust, peculations and embezzlements of public property, which astonish even ourselves; which tarnish the character of our country; which disgrace a republican government.”

 

Rev. Matthias Burnet said “Finally, ye whose high prerogative it is, to invest with office and authority or to withhold them, and in whose power it is to save or destroy your country, consider well the important trust…which God has put into your hands.  To God and posterity you are accountable for them…  Let not your children have reason to curse you for giving up those rights, and prostrating those institutions which your fathers delivered to you.”

 

The problem we have today is not a new one.  I think it is new in terms of degree but not new.  In the election of 1801, there was not at that point a distinction made between president and vice president, so you could vote for four different people, and they ended up having a runoff between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr.  It was clear that the people had rejected John Adams; he served only one term as president.  At the time, Burr was known to be a man who was irreligious and did not care much about the Bible and spiritual things, even though he was the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, who was considered one of the greatest preachers and theologians.  Jefferson, who had been very close to the Adams at one time, was rumored to be an atheist at worst and maybe only a deist and a very unprincipled man.

 

This left them with a conundrum.  They have a choice between two men that many did not think were worthy.  Abigail Adams, trying to think through this issue, wrote to her sister in 1801 “Never were a people placed in more difficult circumstances than the virtuous part of our countrymen are in at the present crisis.  I have turned, and turned, and overturned in my mind at various times the merits and demerits of the two candidates.  Long acquaintance, private friendship and the full belief that the private character of Jefferson is much purer than Burr, inclines me to Jefferson.  But have we any claim to the favor or protection of Providence when we have against warning, admonition and advice chosen as our chief Magistrate a man who makes no pretensions to the belief of an all wise supreme Governor of the World ordering or directing or overruling the events which take place in it?  If we ever saw a day of darkness in America, I fear this is one.”

 

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