Okay, this Sunday. And so that's a new thing. And so pray for that work and that the kids get connected to the word at their level. We're gonna study now, we're gonna transition over, we're looking at the concept of God and government probably in our last few meetings about this topic. I will not be here with you next Sunday because we have scheduled pulpit supply for the due date aftermath of the advent or the birth of the naissance of our little girl that we expect to be here with us any time the Lord decides. So next Sunday we have a special guest. We have Lou Sansone is gonna share with us first hour. And second hour is a writer and speaker named Israel Wayne. And so I'm excited to have him come visit. What we're doing today is looking at the concept of God and government in terms of our hope. Our hope. This is perhaps the most important way I can pastor you in the time in which you live from a biblical perspective with the issues that we face with government. Now, I do preface my remarks about God and government. Those of you that are visiting, you're like, man, everything he talks about is politics. No, first hour is this series we've been working on for a little while. The second hour service is the gospel of Matthew. We're working through the book of Matthew, which is about Jesus offering the kingdom to Israel and them rejecting it. And then he's going to come back someday and establish that kingdom. I mean, that is government, but it's the book of Matthew. And what I'm doing in this topical approach is saying we Americans have a specific set of decisions we have to make and a specific set of applications of God's Word to the issue of government. And I never am here to tell you how to vote. That's not the purpose. The purpose is to pastor you, to equip you, to negotiate the world you live in today. For example, here's a problem that we face in government. Everybody in the United States that's a citizen that has the franchise has to vote, or has the responsibility, the duty, the privilege of voting. And it's part of our citizenship. We're all functionaries of this civil, you know, Gentile government. It's not a theocracy, it's a secular government. And we all are, with the franchise here in this country, We're all part of that government. And we try to not do that. We try to say, no, we're the citizen mass and the government is those people that we've elected. Hey, that's good Republicanism. Yeah, we elect representatives and they legislate and so forth, but we do elect representatives and we have a responsibility that way. Now, when we talk about the responsibilities that we have as Americans, this is what happens. We say that because of a cultural divide between church and state, we say, don't talk about that at church. I won't mess up your message on Jesus at school or in the state house if you don't mess up our state stuff. We're trying to do statecraft when you're in church. And we try to make this big separation. But listen, this is perhaps you're about to check out on me, but this is the most important thing you can get about this. And I'm not advocating for theocracy. I'm just asking you to be a Christian every step of your life. We cannot say I'm a Christian on Sunday I'm a Christian when I pray in my early morning quiet time. I'm a Christian when I say the blessing over my bologna sandwich. But I will not be a Christian in my conduct of my work. I will not be a Christian serving Christ in my voting, in my assessment of the news. That's a different topic. You can't break your life into those compartments and be consistent as a believer. I know very well what it's like to do that. I'm speaking to you having worked through this in my own life. You go along and get along in your business side, and then you pray, and you make these compartments. Now your day is divided up into various activities. You have different things you do through your day, but the question is, do you walk by the Spirit, and so not fulfill the lust of the flesh, you're bearing the fruit of the Spirit, put it on Christ, through all of those steps? And that's what this study is meant to do. It's meant to say, how should I think as an American? This is a ministry to Americans, we're ministering the culture we're in. How should I think as a Christian who happens to be an American in the situation I'm in in government? And this would be a much better approach than getting your information or your instruction from a secular source. And I'll tell you why. Because the person that doesn't know Christ that's telling you to serve yourself or serve the state or serve something else, they're just offering idolatry. They don't know anything else. They don't know any other basis for life. And you can't live your life on that basis. That conservative, as I'm a very conservative politically person, I'm more and more conservative in terms of my ethics, in terms of my understanding of the functions of government, in terms of my philosophical stance, the more I'm biblical. I'm gonna be more American historically conservative. I'll also be critical of the areas where we haven't been consistent. All right, but forget the results of my biblical stance. Let's just go to the biblical stance. Right? The application of this is gonna be individual. It's gonna be what you do with the thoughts that we have. But these run very counter to the way people tend to think. So here's a big idea. A big idea is that the government provides my needs. That's a big problem for a Christian community. For people that believe in God to say, I love God on Sunday, but the government provides my needs day to day, That's not gonna be good for us, even if the government is cutting you checks. And I'll tell you why. Because the Lord shall supply all my needs. And so you've changed, you've traded something when you see the government as your provider. That's the kind of thought that will give you a biblical perspective, and then you're not stuck. Here's what happens, we're lazy. I know, we're all lazy in some way. Here's what happens. Pastor, what are you saying? Are we supposed to vote red or blue? Well, I'm not saying you're supposed to vote red or blue. Well then, I mean, what's the point? I don't want to sink down and think. I'm asking you to think so that you can negotiate red and blue, so you can understand what we're dealing with. So if you don't do the lazy out and say, I'll pick a jersey and go with them, they're always right. And you think through why you believe what you believe and who best aligns with those things, you're equipped to do the worship of God in how you cast your votes. And let me say something else. This electorate where we're making decisions requires intelligence, requires information. You have to understand what's going on to make decisions about what should happen next. And this is always the weak spot. This is always the weak spot. Do y'all know what pravda means? Do you guys know what pravda means? Russian, sounds Russian, that's Russian. What's pravda? Pravda is the Russian word for, anybody know what it is? Truth. So the state Stalinist newspaper telling people what the government wanted them to believe, to control them, was called truth. And it's not just Stalin. There's a devil's influence in all of world cultures, not just here, not just other places, in all cultures. The world system of deception and independence from God has infiltrated all the cultures. So this, our culture is better than your culture. Well, to what extent have you absorbed satanic worldly ideas as a cultural norm? Look at the United States culturally today, pretty bad, pretty independent from God, pretty, we're gonna have it our way and we're strong and tough and we'll do our own thing. Very different from our founding as we'll see. But see, Satan's infiltrated. And so what happens, Satan is not primarily a military figure, he's primarily a press figure, he's primarily a communicator. And his main efforts, if you read the scriptures on Satan, it's deception. He's deceived the nations. He's blinded their hearts. He's put a veil over their hearts. This is what he does. He's the accuser, the slanderer. And so when you have information going forth, just understand there's gonna be some misinformation baked in. So we are making decisions, right, as voters, and we want to make wise decisions based on actual information. And the more we look at our information sources, the more we have to say, I don't really know nearly as much as I think. And if I know just what the headlines say, I probably don't know a lot about what's really happening. And that is a hard thing to be in when you have to make decisions. And there's two things you could do about it. You can embrace the uncomfortable fact that you don't really know much. That's where I live. Just embrace it. We really don't know much about what's going on, but we know a whole lot if we watch the scriptures on what will happen, where things are going. I know where things tend because God has told me I trust Him, and I'm not really so sure about the headlines that I'm receiving, and I'm very cautious about making decisions based on them. I can do that, or you can do what most people tend to do, and it's start jumping to conclusions. You can make conjectures and think you know stuff that you don't know. And so these are the options, uncomfortable or deceived. I'll go with uncomfortable. and I challenge you to that. So let's do something that's very comfortable. Let's talk about where our hope really lies because as I said, this is the passage, this is the study that is most important for our thinking about what's gonna happen in our country as it goes forward. We'll take a passage of a prophet whose nation is being dissolved by divine discipline around him and his message to that nation. He says, thus says the Lord, cursed is the man who trusts in mankind and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord. Cursed, you wanna be that? Who wants to be cursed? Who wants to have the opposite of blessing? Who wants to be miserable? Who wants to suffer horribly? Right? I mean, we can be uncomfortable knowing that we're being lied to and we're not sure where. That's an uncomfortable place to live. But this is far worse. Cursed is that person, that man, who trusts in mankind and makes flesh his strength and whose heart turns away from the Lord. I'm not turning away from the Lord, I'm just trusting in the presidential election or the sufficiency of our powerful military. We have the great American Navy and the Air Force and then the troops, the ground guys can go clean up after the Navy and Air Force do their job and we'll be fine. Never in world history has that been a good idea to think that way. And it's a curse for Israel, Jeremiah says, for Judah to think that way. This is a curse. And if I don't internalize that and think about it, I'm gonna be an idolater. Because to make flesh my strength, to trust in man, any man, is going to mean I'm turning away from the Lord in Jeremiah 17, five. For he will be like a bush in the desert. in the desert, and he will not see when prosperity comes, but will live in stony waste in the wilderness, a land of salt without an inhabitant." That's really encouraging. I want to live like that. Well, this is wisdom. This is the two ways that you'll see all through the Scriptures of wisdom. There's the Psalm 1 wisdom of the foolish man and the wise man. Okay. The foolish kings and wise kings in Psalm 2 and all through the Proverbs. It's a big theme in Scripture. Do you want to be this guy? You don't. You don't want to be the bush in the desert that doesn't even know when there's prosperity because it doesn't come into the desert. Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord and whose trust is the Lord. You hear the alternative? This is pretty straightforward. Now understand, in the day that Jeremiah wrote, we're talking about international geopolitical unrest with the barbarians at the gate, the Babylonians coming to destroy them, as God said. He would raise them up to do as God sent them in a functional divine discipline. He used a dirty instrument with the Assyrians in destroying the northern kingdom and part of the southern kingdom. He used a dirty instrument in Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians to destroy the southern kingdom. And they see the writing on the wall, we're gonna get rolled by the Babylonians. They're gonna march through and destroy us and tear up our babies and change our genetics. through a military marching on undefended populace, all the babies that are born from that. They're gonna do this horrible thing that's the military on our soil. And so what do we do? We get allies, get people together to help us. And then start saying messages on the street that no, God's not gonna destroy us and the Babylonians won't prevail. Well, Jeremiah is the prophet from Yahweh. These other guys are false prophets. They're false news. They're fake news. They're saying things that aren't true. And we're getting the real story from the Lord. And the problem, again, for Jeremiah's day and Judah was not the Babylonians. It wasn't Nebuchadnezzar. God could just, in Daniel 4, just kind of snap his fingers and Nebuchadnezzar goes feral. He becomes an animal in his mind. And then he unsnaps, and then he's got his brain again seven years later. And the problem is not Nebuchadnezzar, he is just an instrument in the hands of a God bringing discipline on the nation, according to Leviticus 17. See, covenant Israel has violated the conditional covenant stipulations of the relationship with God through idolatry, and God is bringing international divine discipline through the Babylonian army. And so what you have is the thing you can see. I see Nebuchadnezzar and he's got so many chariots. How many people we got over here? Can we go to the Egyptians? Can we get some alliances with other people? Can we get some people with chariots to fight those chariots? And we're doing what we see. And the problem is not Nebuchadnezzar's chariots. It's God. He's bringing Nebuchadnezzar's chariots. You think if you beat Nebuchadnezzar, you think God doesn't have something else? Right, you're fighting God is the problem. And so, blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord and whose trust is the Lord, for he, this is the wisdom, this is the wisdom, whatever happens in your nation, the person's trusting in God will be like a tree planted by the water that extends its roots by a stream, will not fear when the heat comes, but its leaves will be green, it will not be anxious in a year of drought, nor cease to yield fruit. This is what you're supposed to think, Judah, national southern kingdom of Israel, you're supposed to think in terms of the trust in God, and you're not. You're trusting in man. And this is the problem. It's always the problem is that we ignore God. We don't think of Him because we can't see Him and we slip into various forms of errant epistemology thinking that we know things that we don't know. Like we know that God isn't there because we can't see Him. You don't know that. You feel that way in the flesh. We know that if we're suffering, then God must not be loving us because this hurts. You don't know that, you feel that way. What you know is what God told you, right? And God is there and you bring your faith to that suffering and you trust in him even though, and you say with Job, even if he kills me, yet will I trust in him. And then you will learn something through that about God's faithfulness and true joy despite suffering. So the two ways in Jeremiah, you can trust in man and be cursed, you can trust in God and be prospered. And you can't think the way the people on the street in Judah are thinking, and think the way Jeremiah's saying. You can't be like, we're walking by what we see, and there's a military crisis and we gotta fix it, and at the same time, be trusting in God to resolve the problem, because if you listen to Jeremiah, you'd know God brought the military invasion. There are recourses to God. What did the Ninevites, what did the king of Nineveh say in Jonah 3? Remember Jonah? Jonah has a message, pretty straightforward. In 40 days, you'll all be destroyed. Very terse, very matter of fact. What did the Ninevites do? They said, well, where's the threat coming from? If it's gonna be a flood, we're gonna build a wall. We're gonna build up, what are those walls you build up to stop the flood? Watch your mouth in church. He said, damn, the levees, build up the levees. We're going to do the earthworks to stop the flood. And that's how we're going to fix it. And that wasn't Jonah's message that you need to get your engineers together. His message was that God is angry at you and he's going to destroy you. And what did they do? They did the smartest thing you could do. They went right to God. They said, let's repent. Let's address the problem at its source in our creator. And then God relented. And that's the story in Jonah 3. It's very interesting. It's wisdom. And so the question is, do you walk by faith and not by sight? Or do you walk by sight and not by faith? It's kind of simple. Just grabbing places in the Bible that have this theme that you shouldn't be trusting in humans. Psalm 118 is another one. How would I find that? Well, you know I'm about to show you on a slide. To get Psalm 118, I would get to about the middle of my Bible. And since this has other stuff in it, like indexes and stuff, that put me in the Song of Solomon. So I've got to go back a little bit to the Psalm, just a little bit. If you got to Job, that means you go forward a little bit. But anyway, you go about to the middle of the Bible, and oh, this is weird. It's not even marked, but I opened to Psalm 118. So Psalm 118 has a word just like Jeremiah chapter 17. He said, it's better to take refuge in the Lord, in verse eight, it's better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man. It's better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes. And the Hebrew looks something like this, and it's really well translated in terms of its order in that New American Standard translation. He says, he says, Tov plus the men in the next line means it's better than, and he uses these two words, these two verbs twice in parallel. It's better, to take refuge in Yahweh than to betach and then to rely upon Adam. So the opposition is very clear. Is your source of faith in man, Adam, where we get the word man, or in Yahweh? God. Now this is really interesting to me because Adam and Adma are kind of the same word. Adma means dust because man was made from the dust. And so the name Adam, Adam, which is also man, it means dirt boy. It means the one created from the dry dust. It also has the sense of red dust because it's also the root word for Edom, for red. And so the red dirt boy is kind of what this word means, Adam. He's taken from the red dust. That's what we are. That's a good object of our faith, right? Trusting in humans. Now, idolatry in the Old Testament, the ancient Near East, is man using artifice, using various methods of construction and creation to artfully render an idol. You've got the silversmiths, you've got the metal, a lot of metallurgy is in idol construction. Well, we're not sophisticated like that. We're just simple country folks, so we make them out of clay. So you make idols out of clay and they'd bake the clay. you could make pots, or you could make an idol out of clay. And we have lots of examples of various Ashtoreth and other false gods, Baal clay sculptures from the ancient Near East. And so what man does, or, but hey, I'm not that clever, I don't have clay, I've got sticks. But you can take a stick and a stone knife and you can carve that stick into an idol. That's what an astropole was. It's an idol that's just a stick. And so wood, clay, metal, all this methods, we're talking about all the arts and crafts and boy scouts, right? We didn't get into leather work. But I'm just saying all these different ways humans would craft and create from earthly materials something to worship. And the scriptures make fun of this. You just made the stick into a picture and you're worshiping the picture that you made. Like that's ridiculous that you would worship that. And we understand that it's a representation of the God that they're worshiping. They're not unsophisticated, they understand. But notice that you're bowing down to a stick. Why would you do that? The prophets call them out for this through the Old Testament. Well, I'm saying that that's the idolatry that we think of, that they made an idol, a physical idol, and then they worship the idol as though it's the God behind the idol. Now, just dispense with that and recognize we are made of clay, we're made of dust. And man becomes the object of faith. Any man, any leader. and you end up with this same problem of idolatry. And it's really closer than you think to worshiping clay sculpture, since we are just made of dust. Anyway, that's the problem that they've got, is they're worshiping the creature instead of the creator, and it's Yahweh, the sacred name for the creator God, who has covenant with Israel, and Adam. That's the choices. The next choice, the next opposition is Yahweh. And this word that is fairly rare, the Nadiv. Nadiv does not mean prince usually, that's usually tsar or some other word that is, there are other words for princes but they've translated it consistently because they're following their father the Wycliffe. Wycliffe said princes in his translation in the 1300s. This word would be better translated the aristocrats or the noblemen, the wealthy. the people that are of status who at least they can, if we get behind them. It just means somebody with power. So it could be translated prince but it wouldn't normally be. So I've translated nobleman and notice that in both cases it's taking refuge like you're an animal with a another predator coming after you and you go hide in a rock the predator can't get into, that's taking refuge. And then trusting and relying, that's building yourself on. Batak means to build on, like a foundation to be stabilized by something beneath. And so in both cases it's the Lord versus people versus humans for various reasons. Man is the general statement, nobleman is the specific statement. You can see how it goes from general to specific. So the words chassah That's the two words in Hebrew for trust here, chassah, to take refuge, and betach, very common word for faith in the Old Testament, to rely on or trust in. Now the word that we translate faith is aman, where we get the word amen, or Jesus says it, amen, amen, amen, amen, I say to you. That's aman, that's the Hebrew word that is most parallel to pistis or pistou in the New Testament, faith. When you amon something, you are either being faithful or you are recognizing the faithfulness in someone else. And what people do toward God is always that second one, always recognize His faithfulness. Amon is never God looking at us and saying, oh, He's faithful. Amon is always us looking at God and saying, He's faithful. And that's faith. But here, the words are picturesque, because it's poetry. Notice I say, that's how I transliterate the chet. To rely on, to trust in, to build on with a steady, stable basis. That is, these are word pictures for faith, and I want you to guard your faith. As Americans, in a political process with regard to government, we should be guarding our hearts about where we put our faith. Let me illustrate guarding your heart. Where do we usually use that language, guard your heart? Usually talking to teenagers about their emotional entanglements. because there's nothing more powerful than the draw of she likes me and I dig her, and I don't really know anything about her, but we have this connection. It's real, I feel it. What do you feel? I can't describe it, but it's it. I'm not denouncing romance. I'm not saying it's not a valuable thing. I'm saying it's not the relationship. It's the beginning of the relationship. And so we tell children to guard their hearts. What do we mean? We mean that you need to establish that you have a person of character before you give your life and forfeit your future options. Because you might have somebody that that initial phase is delightful and then they have no integrity. And then you're stuck. and you didn't guard your heart. That's the idea of guarding the heart. It's I made a choice on the basis of false pretext and it was because I believed something, I had faith where I shouldn't have had it. And so how many relationships have you seen in your life? We could make a list of this. How many relationships you've been in or seen where you didn't really know what you're dealing with but you believed it would go well and so your faith was misplaced? The best way to tell young people, by the way, to guard their hearts is to say, if you believe in Christ, then you need to walk as though Christ is your life, for me to live as Christ. And then you need to consider what he wants for you in this relationship, even in this thing. In my romantic stuff? Yeah, even in your romantic stuff. I mean, that's not church stuff. A lot of the Bible is about this. It's a major aspect of your life, and again, it's one of these power moments. You're gonna make this lifelong choice, not eternal choice, but a lifelong choice about what you're gonna do with yourself, with the spouse, and if you don't bring God into that discussion, then your life will not be His. That's how it works. So, Batak, to rely on, I'm really sure that this guy, she says, he's really gonna be the man he's supposed to be. I mean, he's only 17. He hasn't ever done anything yet, but I know He's gonna work out. What do you mean He's gonna work out? Well, He's always gonna pay attention to me. He's never gonna hit me. He's gonna be kind and faithful, and He's gonna do whatever I want. And He's gonna buy me more things. He's already bought me some things, and He's gonna buy me more things. I know, ladies, you're not mercenaries that way. You don't think that way, so other people think that way. And it's gonna go well, because it's going well now, and after all, Valentine's Day was great, and so, I mean, he's only 17, but he'll turn out. And those of you that did, congratulations. But those of you where it didn't, you know what I'm talking about. And so, when I say, well, what do you mean he's gonna work out? Do you mean he's gonna learn how to work for 10 straight hours? Cause he hadn't done it yet in America at 17, unless he's a very rare 17 year old. He has never worked for 10 straight hours for a week. 10 hours. What are you crazy? That's like overtime. That's life. Has he worked 10 straight hours and then gone to work when he got home? Has he ever had a chance to choose for himself or someone else, and he's chosen for someone else because it was the right thing, because it was a duty? Have you seen him in duty yet? Have you seen him under the load of actual responsibility? No, no. You've seen him in the nursery, and he looks good, and there may be something to that, right? But you haven't seen him under pressure. You haven't seen him perform, and he may. Well, if I provide enough influence, then he will perform. No. You have an influence, ladies. You'll do something with that. You will have an effect, but it won't change who he is. And so you gotta learn who he is before you sign on. And the secret is, there are horrible flaws in every one of us. Every man and woman, there's horrible flaws. If you don't see any flaws, you don't know enough yet. So, anyway. But we act on faith. We take a leap. How many people have told me, Pastor Dave, this is the one? How do you know? Oh, the Lord. He's just, this is God. This has to be from God. Cut two, we just, it's not working out. If he emotionally disregards me enough, can I claim abandonment and get a divorce? That's cut two. Cut one was, this is God's will for us. Cut two is, I'm looking for ways out. And I have a word for that too. And it's a wonderful word in Matthew 19. Anyway, the point is that what I'm illustrating with romance, the idea of putting your faith. You don't put your faith in that other person. Your faith is in God to provide for you and you ask him and you walk with him and you include that part of your life into your walk with God. Flipping over to Psalm 146, he says, do not trust in princes and mortal man in whom there's no salvation. Well, we don't have princes in America. We have elected officials. Aren't they doing a great job? Oh, yeah. It's amazing to me, not to talk politics too much, but it's amazing to me how consistent the left will be in their voting. They're consistently unified on not serving God. We will not accept that there's a creator and we will not legislate as though we're responsible to him. That's the left, it just is. It comes from Marx, I'm sorry, that's just where the left is. But the right can't get together because they don't really have any principles. They're trying to. They're trying to appeal to certain people. We have traditional values. And then they can't align and agree on anything. So the weakness of the right is just on display. It's so hard to watch. Well, God isn't weak. So let's take our eyes off of the politics. Don't trust in princes or immortal man whom there's no salvation. His spirit departs. He returns to the earth. And that very day, his thoughts perish. You ever had somebody that was, you were really fond of and they died and No, no, no more. I mean, that's done. All we can now talk about is their legacy and how the people alive can harness the idea of that person and use them. But they're done. And God is never done. Isaiah 31, that's flipping a little further forward. Isaiah 31, which we're headed to quickly on Wednesday nights. Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help. Again, this is the case of the Assyrian crisis. Judah, the southern kingdom, is going to Egypt to ask for help against the Assyrians. Now, if you've been paying attention, why do you think God brought the Assyrians? Ah, just ruined it. Why are the Assyrians coming? Because God brought them. That's the quiz. I can't even write a quiz. but at least I don't have to do any grading. All right, so the reason for the Assyrian crisis in the 700s in Judah is because of their idolatry, because God brought the Assyrians, that's the answer. Now I understand today that'll be poo-pooed in a secular frame, and see, those are just primitive people that believe that the reason for their trouble was from the gods. That's just the ancient Near Eastern worldview. And we are sophisticated beyond that. We understand the realities of geopolitics and so forth. And okay, that's a fine thing to choose. But what you're saying, listen, what you're saying is that this is not what God has said. This is not revelation. You have to dispense with God's word to take that attitude about history. And yeah, the made up stuff of the false religions and the idolatry of the worship of Chemosh and these other gods, where the prophets say this is what God's saying, that's always happening. You always have people saying I have a word from God. But what we're also saying is Jeremiah is and Isaiah is God's word through these prophets. And what they say is, woe to those who go down to Egypt for help and rely on horses. What are horses? Horses are tanks. Horses are aircraft carriers. Horses are cruise missiles. It's the military tech of the day. It's very advanced to be a cavalry force back in those days. It's much easier and less expensive and costly per soldier to just have a foot soldier with a spear and a shield. But these are horses, and what's the measure of the effectiveness of military all through the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age in the Scriptures? They have iron chariots. The Philistines have these iron chariots. They have these massive cavalry forces. We'll never take them. Egypt has a massive cavalry force. We find out in Exodus chapter 14. We see it on display, and God whips them with water. A water gun. God takes down Pharaoh's chariots. Now, it's a big water gun to us. For God, it's not a big water gun. It's just the Red Sea. But this is the problem. They rely on horses and trust in chariots because they are many. We have a big military. We have a big army. We do have a very formidable army. Some of you are hearing intelligence reports, because you're associated with the submarine community, and they talk, and they probably talk too much. But they're running simulations and war games and things, saying things like, oh, the Chinese beat us in every scenario we envision. We are no longer capable of, in the long run, with our simulations, defeating the Chinese militarily in a major thing. That's conjecture, that's based on what we know, that's modeling, but what I'm hearing is we've never said these things before, not about the Chinese, but we trust in chariots because they are many, and so there's woe for us. Woe means it's bad. You don't wanna be that guy that's being told woe. So this is the attitude the Scriptures present. Now does this mean don't have a military? Have you ever heard of the book of Numbers? Have you ever read the book of Joshua? Why is David, the great hero, the man after God's own heart? He kills the giant. David is the soldier of soldiers. So no, the Bible doesn't say that there is no military role. It says that it isn't our faith, it isn't our hope, and that's our attitude we need to have. And I want you to understand, I am just saying what we said from our start. This was American cultural values. This is what we believed while in arms, under pressure from the juggernaut of the British Army in the 1770s. This is how we thought. And we'll close on some general orders from George Washington. This is in 6 March 1776, two days after they started the fortifications on Dorchester Heights, which ultimately kicked the British out of Boston. It was one of the rare victories. It was not really necessarily a strategic victory, but it was a tactical kind of win. We didn't win by military clash. We lost Bunker Hill, but we kicked them out of Boston, as it were. We were able to fortify our way to where Boston was no longer tenable. But two days after that began, and then a couple weeks before the the British left Boston, you have what Washington gave as his just daily general orders for March 6th. And he says down here, Thursday, the seventh instant, being set apart by the honorable legislature of this province, that's the Massachusetts colony, they call themselves a province now, the Massachusetts General Assembly said, as a day of fasting, prayer, and humiliation. This is in just George Washington's general orders as they're beginning to prepare to fortify against the British occupation of Boston. And the reason we're doing this says the legislature is to implore the Lord and giver of all victory to pardon our manifold sins and wickednesses, and that it would please him to bless the continental arms with his divine favor and protection. So they're not having a feast, they're having a fast, and it's a day where we're gonna collectively focus on our creator and pray. confess our sins, confess our individual sins, our national sins, and beseech the Lord to provide us victory. That was not we are gonna win because we are America strong. That was not, it's after all, it's us and we, we know how to hide behind trees and we can kick these British out if we just stay long enough. It wasn't that way at all. They were saying, we owe all we are to God, let's beseech his favor. And so all those that wanna grab Romans 13 and say that what they were doing is against the word, they were very serious about following the word. You have to peel that onion a little bit and not be so simplistic. That was the quote of the legislation, the Massachusetts General Assembly. Here's what Washington then said, all officers and soldiers are strictly enjoined, that means requested, to pay all due reverence and attention on that day to the sacred duties due to the Lord of hosts. That would be Yahweh Sabaoth in the Old Testament, the God of the armies. For his mercy's already received, so we're giving thanks for what he's already done, and for those blessings, which our holiness and uprightness of life can alone encourage us to hope through his mercy to obtain. We need to walk worthy and not expect discipline from him, because his discipline could be in the hands of the British, is what he's saying. We need to, in other words, he's appealing to the fear of the Lord. Don't, don't... Don't taunt him with your immorality. We should purify ourselves so that we don't incur his wrath. Do you think this is what the general orders sound like out of General Howe's office? They weren't thinking this way. Now, they weren't in trouble. Washington's got a ragtag band compared to the British military. I mean, he's got basically the beginnings of the army and the militia of Massachusetts at this point, but it's very likely that they're gonna get rolled. So they don't have the military strength. What do they have? Well, we'll just appeal to our Creator. And that is okay. When God brings you to that point, occupy it. 15 May, they've kicked the British out of, well, the British left Boston because of the fortification and the story of Dorchester Heights, and now they're setting up in New York for the battle of Manhattan and Long Island. And this, I don't know if you know this story, this was a big lose. We lost this one and had to run away at night and almost got destroyed, but Providence got intervened with weather and so covered their retreat. But it's one of those stories of the mouse barely got away from the cat out of New York. But this is in leading up to that. The Continental Congress, this is the whole nation, not just Massachusetts Assembly, which, interestingly, those Massachusetts people are Puritan's kids, and so there used to be the bastion of biblical belief, and that was the culture in Massachusetts. There's a spiritual aspect to Massachusetts. Be serious about it. Virginia's Christian too, but there's something, deep-seated in the Massachusetts people in this day as it fades off as they head toward Unitarianism. But fasting, humiliation, and prayer, this is what we observed the 17th day of Friday, 17 May. Now I want to tell you that the military today, the United States military, does not think Friday of any day of any Friday of the year is a time for fasting and penitence and service to God. Friday is, as soon as we can get away, it's time to go see how much of our paycheck we can go through. And they're kids, and they're young, and we understand, you know, youthful indiscretion stuff. But this is the attitude that is fitting to this country. Fasting, humiliation, and prayer humbly to supplicate the mercy of Almighty God that it would please Him to pardon all our manifold sins and transgressions, prosper the arms of the United Colonies, and finally establish the peace and freedom of America upon a solid and lasting foundation. They're saying, God, do it. We can't do it, but we'll do what we can if you'll support us. This is the attitude of this country. Now, let me just say a word about cynicism and leadership using the political, you know, flourishing that people will appreciate. We're real cynical about our government. Someone gets up and talks about God today and you're like, yeah. probably just paying lip service to get votes and stuff. Let's be cynical and say George Washington was just being a master leader, manipulator, I should say, to use this God talk to get the army where it needed to be. Even if that's the case, and I don't believe that at all, but even if that was the case, The master manipulator is using language that he knows the general population will be motivated by, they'll respond to, this is their heart, this is their heartbeat. He's saying words appropriate to the people that they will receive. He's not saying things that people are gonna laugh at him about. There's a reason why Washington was revered, and it's things like this. That was your culture, that was the population. They, of course, expected that they needed to fast and pray before God and repent of their sins and confess their sins and beseech God's favor and walk worthy of the liberty they're asking for. They thought that that was the cultural norm. Well, I mean, this was to the army. You can't say that was about the population. Have you been around the army? It's young men. It's not young women who carry the moral flame of the culture. It's the young men. So even for stronger reason, this was your culture. This is who they knew they were supposed to be. And it's what we were expected to be as we were founded. And so when you see this culture and you look at our culture today, you have to say, these are two different nations. These are two different peoples. We have grown into something that was unrecognizable by the small population back then. And I agree. But that doesn't mean that that's not where we came from. And some of us are still thinking this way. And this is the heartbeat. This is the value of the American experiment. It was never, we're gonna win because we're tough. It was never, we've got the long rifles that we developed down in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, and we can shoot them at a longer distance because we've got rifles. It was never that attitude. Some people might have had it, but it wasn't the culture. The culture was, let's beseech heaven for his favor. So let's do it. Father, thank you for your Word and the challenge it presents to us. And I thank you so much as an American for the heritage we've received here. We have so many reasons to be grateful for the exemplars in our history. Father, did you show up in Providence when they asked for a nation? Did you show up and provide what only you could do when you brought the storm, you brought the snow storms, you brought the squalls in the water that destroyed the British fleet? Did you show up and Answer their prayers directly as you show again and again that you do in the scriptures. Did you respond to them because they, from the bottom up, were Christian, from the top down were leading with Christian ideals and thoughts and performances. Not performances, Father, just obeisance. They were truly seeking your face as they made their appeal. Father, we are not Israel. We never were national Israel. We didn't get a covenant with you at Mount Sinai or Mount Vernon or any place else. but you are our God to the extent that we're believers in Christ. We thank you for the heritage we have here. I pray for its witness. Father, there's a gospel witness in what you did in this country. I pray for that to go forward. This witness, Father, if it could only capture the imaginations of a remnant of people in this country, that they could remember why we even had a country in the first place. And we could wake back up to the thought that we belong to you, Because we're believers in a country of believers, a group, a culture composed of Christian thinking. is such a target of great blessing and prosperity. And we have been blessed so marvelously by you. Father, thank you for the freedom we enjoy today to this day. We pray against the efforts of those seeking to destroy it. And Father, we do that because we want to proclaim Christ. We want to be on mission. We want to be about your word and your work. This is the reason for our freedom. Let us never forget it. Let us be on mission. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.