Let's open in a word of prayer and then we'll get started. Father in heaven, we thank you for this day. Thank you for this great time of fellowship we can have together. We thank you for your goodness and mercy that you have blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. We pray for this time as we consider historical information that it would be edifying and uplifting and encouraging that we may serve you more faithfully. We ask in Christ's name, amen. All right, so I'm gonna do just maybe couple part series on precedence to the American Declaration of Independence. I often thought when I was growing up that the Declaration of Independence was something extremely unique. That we as Americans had come up with things that nobody else had ever thought of. And there's probably some truth to that. But if you go back and you study the history of the Protestant Reformation, there is a heavy plagiarization that the Declaration of Independence does, and not in a bad way, but in a good way where they draw on the best of the best when they go back historically. And there are even instances where I think it was Rushworth and Jefferson specifically studied the Puritan declaration to take up arms, which we were talking about with the fighting against Charles I. Before they took up arms against him, they did a declaration. and they did some fast days before that. Rushworth and Jefferson studied those documents as they were preparing for fast days in our Declaration of Independence. They looked into those things explicitly. So there's some really good historical precedent from the Protestant Reformation especially. And what you find is, as we'll go through some of these documents, is in some cases they're extremely unoriginal. The American founders are just copying and pasting, more or less. And not with an unthinking mind, of course. Everything is tailored to the circumstances with George III and with the Parliament in England and our specific governments and the way that our charters were structured. They're not mindlessly aping what their ancestors had said, but they're incorporating the appropriate principles in a way that's suitable to our circumstances. So I wanted to go through a couple of these. We were talking about ancestry. So Lutherans are a big part of American history. They're also a big part of the Protestant Reformation because, of course, Martin Luther nails the 95 Theses in 1517, and that triggers the Protestant Reformation in England, Scotland, France, Netherlands, all over the place. So it's the Lutherans who lead the way in a lot of things and help to open up the fallow ground. I wasn't there. I can't claim credit. No credit claim. So this is just a brief excerpt from the Magdeburg Confession here. And this is Charles V seeking to undo the work of the Reformation. And these are the German princes. And specifically in the city of Magdeburg, the magistrates and the ministers of Magdeburg put together this declaration about how they will not submit to Charles V. And this is, they're giving reasons why. A lot of people don't realize this, but without what we would call the doctrine of civil resistance, the Protestant Reformation never would have happened. It would have been crushed by the civil government, the centralized European power of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. He would have undone the Reformation on a couple of different instances. He tried to do so, but it was the fortitude of lesser magistrates who said, we will not do what you say. We will take up arms. We will die first before we allow you to do these things. And this is one of those confessions. So what I did is I broke up this excerpt into, I don't know, five or six. It's on the back of the page. I think I broke it up into five parts. And then we'll just point out the basic tenets that they're teaching here, and then how that relates to our Declaration of Independence. So starting there on point two, on the front of the handout. We will show from Holy Scripture that if a higher magistrate undertakes by force to restore Popish idolatry and to suppress or exterminate the pure teaching of the Holy Gospel as in this present instance. Now what's interesting is they're doing a couple things. One, they're identifying there's a standard they're going to go by. They're going to show from Scripture. They're identifying their current political circumstances, the higher magistrate. and the usage that that higher magistrate makes of force. So this would be using the force of civil government in order to fight against a moral duty. So idolatry is contrary to the second commandment. You're not to worship graven images or in any way that God hasn't commanded. And so the Lutherans are saying, if you're trying to force us to do this immoral act, then you as a higher magistrate seeking to do this, this is an abuse in other words. So they're laying out and they do this in the Declaration of Independence as well. There's a higher authority There is a higher magistrate who's violating his duty of office under that higher authority of God and seeking to impress upon us some immoral thing that he's requiring us to do. So this is the long train of abuses idea. And then there's the higher authority of God, which is over even the supreme magistrate on earth. And then saying that the use of force here is illegitimate or it's tyrannical, in other words. So force being used against the moral law, as opposed to the duty of civil government, which is to use their force in favor of the moral law, as opposed to forcing out God's commandments there to enforce God's commandments. So then it goes on in the Magdeburg Confession there. Then, in this instance, then the lower God-fearing magistrate may defend himself and his subjects against such unjust force in order to preserve the true teaching and the worship of God together with body, life, goods, and honor. So here the Magdeburg gives us the lesser magistrate or the lower magistrate And they show here that this lower magistrate fears God, meaning you have the structure of Charles V on top, the lesser magistrates under him. And above Charles V is God himself. So these ones below Charles V can make an appeal directly to God. They fear God. And they're using their force, that's what the word defense implies, It's a defensive force. It's responsive to the tyranny. It's not aggressive. It's not initiating the conflict. It's recognizing that the conflict has been brought to us. This is part of the just war theory that our declaration bases itself off of. You've done all these evil things. We've tried to stop it. You've refused to do your duty, and therefore we make our appeal to heaven, to divine providence, to the laws of nature and nature's God. We're going to appeal to those higher authorities and make a defensive move against you with lesser magistrates. And this is exactly what the Colonial Congress did. I believe that's what it was called, Colonial Congress or Colonial. There was a specific term that we used for when we met together in the colonial period. Anybody recall what that is? I'm having trouble remembering. Continental Congress, thank you. So the Continental Congress would be the lesser magistrate. George III would be the higher magistrate in our instance. These lesser magistrates are exercising a defensive play with an appeal to a higher authority of God. And that's exactly what the Lutherans are doing here. They also use a phrase that's almost picked up at least partially the idea of, what do we say, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. That's what they're talking about, body, life, goods, and honor. Same ideas being brought out. We're willing to risk all this because this is the duty that we have as magistrates who fear God, is to block the use of immoral force in order to defend moral force, which in this case they talk about defending the subjects against unjust force to preserve the true teaching and the worship of God. Now, the true teaching and worship of God are also moral issues. In fact, those are the first two commandments. The truth is God himself, and then the worship of God is the second commandment. So the first two commandments of the 10, they're saying the civil government has duty to defend these things, even if it costs him his life, or he maims his body in war, or his goods are all wasted and stolen, or he becomes defamed by his enemies, his honor, even if all those things happen, he has that duty under God to rule, even though he has a civil magistrate above him. who tells him, you need to enforce the idolatry of the Pope. You need to stop the teaching of the Bible among the German peoples. They say, no, the lesser magistrate must be willing to sacrifice everything to fulfill his calling. And then they're on page two on the backside of the handout there, they go on. They say, the powers that be are ordained of God to protect the good and punish the bad. And this is extremely important. They're giving, what are the two purposes for civil government? What makes legitimate civil government? And they say from Romans 13, to protect the good, or I think Paul uses the word to praise them that do well. And then to punish the bad, they say, or to, Paul uses the term, execute the vengeance of God against them that do evil. So the basic purpose of civil government underlies what their argument is. Without this purpose of civil government, their argument doesn't work. It doesn't make any sense. Because if every power, some people think that the powers in Romans 13 is just a description of any power that exists. They could be moral or immoral, But they're ordained of God, so you have to do what they say. So if Hitler says, pull the gas switch in the chamber or go and invade this other country, then you can't resist on that theory of Romans 13, because then you'd be disobeying the ordinance of God. So the Lutherans, as well as our founding fathers, our belief is that Romans 13 describes what civil magistrate is bound to be. They are bound to be God's ordinance. They're bound to be his ministers. They're bound to praise those that do what's well and bring the wrath of God down against those who do evil. That's their purpose. And that then frames how we conceive of what they're doing, how we evaluate. Are you legitimate or are you illegitimate? Well, the only way I can know that is, do you protect those who are good and do you punish those who are bad? Because if you do the opposite, we will see in a second here, then you are actually ordained of the devil. On occasion, there's the argument against what we believe in this framework is some people, especially, I guess they'd have to be non-believers in the Bible. What they hear instead is, you're telling me you believe in a theocracy. And of course we don't, but this is how they perceive it. So what's the proper response to that? How would you explain that? First, I'll have to tell you to put all my cards on the table, I do believe in a theocracy. And the reason I believe it is that everyone believes in a theocracy. The question is, do you believe in a Christian theocracy, a Muslim theocracy, a democratic theocracy, a pluralistic theocracy of polytheism, or like the Roman polytheism? Everyone believes in a theocracy. And in fact, I would argue that if we say we don't, we're being dishonest with ourselves because everybody has blasphemy laws in their minds. They have some source of ultimate authority and truth, whether that's the individual and their choice or whether that's the Quran or whether that's the Bible or the canons of the Roman church. Every state, every civil state in order to function properly has to have some final court of appeals. Where is it that we know? And when Paul makes the argument in Romans 13, he argues, I would say in this way, civil power exists as God's servant. God is ultimately the one who exercises the vengeance against those who do evil. But he's delegated and said, I want you, civil government, to do my job. My job is to punish people who do evil. I want you to do it for me. So that immediately forms what I would call a theocratic reference point. And I think if you study the founding fathers, their views of civil government are heavily theocratic. They're based off of the pilgrims and the Puritans who are even more heavily theocratic than the Founding Fathers. The Founding Fathers are a step down from the black coffee theocracy of Puritan New England. But could you make that case without using the word theocracy? Because I think it just scares people. Sure, it scares people. Because they don't really know the proper definition. And I thought the same thing. I mean, I haven't probably articulated it as well, but I mean, that seems to be, from the framer's standpoint, what I see for them is a Christian government. They'd be Christian per se, I mean, and that's, A type of theocracy. Yeah, it is. Most people think of theocracy as the church rules over the state, which is really how Muslim theocracy works. That's how Roman Catholic theocracy works. But if you look at the theocracies of the Protestant Reformation, the way that they work is you have two cooperating powers, the church and the state. In fact, you have more. You have the family, you have the private interests and societies, and then you have the church and then you have the state. And ultimately, for Protestant theocracy, all those are meant to work together on coordinated basis, but none of them has the authority over the other one, except in limited cases. The state has the authority over the church if the church does something criminal. For example, the church can be punished. It's officers, unlike the Roman Catholics who say, no, you can't punish our priests. The Protestants made the point, no, if a minister does evil, he can be punished by civil government. He can be accountable. The whole church could be accountable if they do something criminal in the church courts. So that's cooperation, but it's not dominion by the state over the church. In the same way, the church can excommunicate magistrates and they can preach sermons. You see this founding era, it's like all the pastors are preaching election day sermons. And they're saying, don't vote for this guy because he's a rascal and a scoundrel and his platform is evil. And vote for this guy because his platform is godly and he wants to promote good things. They're constantly preaching, and they're correcting their civil governments, and people in civil government were afraid of the church speaking against them, because that would sway the populace not to vote for them. So there has to be coordination, but for the founding fathers is what I would say, they view civil government theocratically. Without religion and without morality, you can't have a civil state, as Washington said. And we looked at this last time, Washington's Thanksgiving proclamation, it is the duty of nations to obey the revealed will of God. That's theocracy. There's no other word you can use for that. It's not the church ruling over the state. It's the state submitting itself to the higher power of God through whom they have legitimacy. And yeah, we could use a different word from theocracy. I'm not sure what else to say other than, well, that's the first commandment. And the two tables of the law, that's, you know, it's not without reason that they hate the 10 commandments because the first one says you can't be a God, no other gods. Second says you don't get to worship him however you want, you worship how he dictates. Third is you have to use his name with reverence. You have to speak of him and about his things with reverence. Fourth is you have to observe his day and keep a day of rest. And fifth is you have to observe the hierarchies of superiors, inferiors, and equals, and keep according to that. I mean, it's the kind of thing that if we don't have the first table, we don't respect God's rights. Why would we expect our rights to be observed? And I think that's really what it comes down to. And if you think about today, the left is heavily theocratic. They have excommunication. They have blasphemy laws. They have a priesthood. They have an oracle. All these things that they ridicule the religious right, well, you can't escape it. You're going to have to say there's some heresy that we must punish. You're going to have to say there's some saint that you can't touch. And for them, it's like, what is the heresy? You don't speak against transgenderism or sodomy or some wicked practice like this. Blasphemy is saying words like sodomy. You're supposed to say LGBTQ plus ABC, DFG, whatever. You have to use their vocabulary or you're a heretic. And if you're a heretic, they'll excommunicate you from society. They'll de-platform you, de-person you, and eventually they'll kill you. That's their goal. But they have heresy laws, they have blasphemy laws, they have a god, which is the individual self and his desires. It's kind of like a satanic do what thou wilt. So we all have the notions of some ultimate reality, whatever it is. Classical liberals have their ultimate reality and the individual hardcore leftists have the group and its rights and thinking. But I would say, I don't know how to say it other than theocracy. But I think that the whole propaganda machine and the manner in which they filter and hear, they don't hear the other stuff that you're explaining. It's almost too obvious. They just can't see it. So I guess my late husband did PSYOP. You have to PSYOP it in some way. you know, David Barton would say, think biblically, but speak secularly. So that's the challenge, I guess. There is a challenge there. And what I would say is you have to be able to, the early church fathers did this really well. You have the Romans with the pagan theocracy coming in and saying, you can't, you can't be an atheist. That's what they said. Christians were put to death on the charge of atheism because you don't believe in the gods. So, The Christians never argued, well, that's illegitimate to enforce religion through the state. They never said that. I mean, there were a couple of them who said it occasionally. Augustine did in his early writings. He said that was wrong. In his later writings, he retracted it and said, I was wrong. I was mistaken. What they generally said was, okay, you have gods, you enforce their will, but your gods are immoral. Your gods engage in these behaviors that you know in your conscience are wrong. They're pedophiles, they're murderers, they're lust-filled, they're filled with vengeance, they're bloodthirsty, they're capricious, they're not consistent. That was the argument that they made. And therefore, you ought to abandon your gods and you ought to come over to our gods. So I think there's a similar thing that can happen. Paul did the same thing at Athens. You appeal to the truth that they instinctively know, and you use their own words and their own thoughts to demonstrate that they actually do believe there is a higher morality. They do believe a law that applies to everybody. They do believe in punishing blasphemy and heresy. They just call it something else. They just say political correctness. They say this or that, but they have a moral conscience that says, I have to stop you from blaspheming my gods. And that is, you don't speak against ABC, DFG, LGBTQ, whatever. You have to speak the right terms. You have to be orthodox. So appealing to people on that level, I think is extremely useful. And in a secular society, that's a good point. You have to do it in their terms to bring them over to see, well, you already believe the same way that I do. You just have the wrong gods. Your God is immoral. Your God is corrupt. Your God is progress and there's no end to it. So there's really no limiting principle to leftism or progressivism. and that may be useful, but I don't think it, in my view, it doesn't do any good to apologize or to cover it up. I feel like, yeah, I believe in a theocracy, of course I do. And just like you do. We all do. But then you're like, when you flip that, it's just that the media is so corrupt. They would take you and they'd just hear that one little slice, and then they wouldn't hear the rest of how you explained it. It's almost like it's too intellectually pure. They can't digest it. No, they can't. That's not the goal. Their goal is to create a specific narrative because they're postmoderns. They don't believe that there's actual fact that they're supposed to be relaying. They believe there's a narrative that they're supposed to be crafting to make people think a specific way. I think that the Republicans for a long time have played that game where they try to not say things to offend them, And then Trump came along and just started offending everybody. And now we all realize, yeah, that's probably the way we should have been doing it. Yeah. The other doesn't get us anywhere. Now it does provoke a hostility of reaction. Trump was honest and therefore they couldn't handle the truth. You know, like that, what is that movie? Yeah. You can't handle the truth. But I think it's opened a lot of people's eyes that the other way really didn't get us anywhere. The only thing that's going to be getting us anywhere is if we say the truth, say it in love, but say the truth nonetheless, and try to do it in a way that's winsome, that's persuasive. But at the end of the day, if God's not going to open their eyes, he's not going to open their eyes. I can't change people. And I have a duty to God to be respectful toward him. And if I'm talking about what he says, He says, you have to protect the good and punish the bad. Ralph Northam protects the evil and punishes those who do what's well. Therefore, he's not ordained by God. He's not a lawful civil magistrate. Same with Joe Biden, same with most of the members of Congress. None of these people are legitimate. So getting us to think this way, I think is an antidote to the chaos that's coming. Because if everybody in our area thought this way, we would have sheriffs who think this way. We would have town council, we would have, you know, all the people, if everybody thought this way, which is unrealistic, but if everybody did think this way, or more people thought this way, we could very easily stem a lot of this stuff. But it takes just being honest about it. And Christians not being afraid to, I believe in theocracy. It's not like it's a dirty word, it's just, yeah, everybody does. Which God do you worship? If we have the best religion on the planet, that has the best ethics, that has the best way of relating between humans, husbands and wives. It has the best order for the family, the best order for parenting children, the best order for education, the best order for civil commerce. Our religion teaches the best things on every point. Why would I want to keep that away from civil government? If it has all the truth and nothing but the truth, I want it to go everywhere. I want it to spill out into all of life. Because as these guys are pointing out, that's how you restrain this kind of tyranny. All right, so back to this. So the powers that be are ordained of God. So they give a scriptural purpose for civil government. And that's the standard that they're going to go back and evaluate in the first two points there that they made about higher magistrate being tyrannical and using unjust force, and then the lower magistrate fearing God and protecting moral observance. Then it goes on here, but if they start to persecute the good, they are no longer ordained of God. There are to be sure degrees of tyranny. And if a magistrate makes unjust war upon his subjects, contrary to his plighted oath, they may resist though they are not commanded to do so by God. And that's a really turn of interesting turn of phrase. So here, They make the case that Romans 13 does not apply to Charles V. That's what they're saying. And we make the same case in our Declaration of Independence about George III. He has become so evil. And yes, there are degrees of tyranny, but we've tried to work through all this. We've made our case to him. We've made our appeal. And we've said that he has a plighted oath. This is an appeal to constitutional law. We have charters as colonies, George III agreed to those or his ancestors did. He has a duty and because he's failing in that point of duty, he is no longer ordained of God. He is no longer a legitimate civil magistrate who can tell us what we may do and may not do. He's gone beyond the pale of what Romans 13 dictates. All right, now they say, though they are not commanded to do so by God, it's an interesting turn of phrase. I think what they mean, if I can editorialize a little bit, is that there is no direct command in scripture that says thou shalt resist a tyrannical magistrate. But I think what they're doing is they're demonstrating this magistrate does not fall under Romans 13. So therefore, the prohibition of resistance does not apply to them. They therefore, logically, there's no positive command to resist, but we have a right to do so because there's no condemnation. And actually, one of the other interesting arguments that they will make, if you go back and you read the Bible, you will find God blessing people who commit tyrannicide. So J.L. is the woman who drives the tent peg through Sisera's skull while he's lying down and resting in her tent. And there's a whole song of praise that Deborah, the prophetess, gives. There's Ehud, who's a left-handed man, goes in to bring the tax money to Eglon, a foreign power that God had put over them. It's very interesting. It identifies God as the agent who took this foreign power and put it over Israel in the book of Judges 5. But... He goes in to deliver the tax money and he assassinates their ruler that God put over him. And God doesn't say, naughty naughty, you shouldn't have done that, or that's a necessary evil. No, he's actually praised as a deliverer of the people. So when you read the scriptures from beginning to end, you find that not only is the view that Romans 13 describes Hitler, and that you ought to obey Hitler and do everything he says, not only is that totally bunk, but you find the opposite. That when people go and assassinate people like Hitler, God says, well done, good job. That's faithful to me. God is pleased with that. And so what they're saying here is, we recognize, though there's no explicit command in Romans 13, thou shalt resist a tyrannical civil government. They recognize that once a person moves into the realm of tyranny, and he's starting to make war upon his subjects, which is what Charles V did and what George III did, then they have violated their oath of office, they violated their duty to God, and therefore we may resist. Okay, and then finally here, we'll look at this last portion. But if a ruler is so demented as to attack God, then he is the very devil who employs mighty potentates in church and state. When, for example, a prince or an emperor tampers with marriage against the dictates of natural law, then in the name of natural law and scripture, he may be resisted. So this is really interesting. in the Roman Church and the civil government is now enforcing it, you could not get married if you're a priest. And so there was a law of nature that those who do not have the gift of singleness are to marry. That's a duty imposed on people to prevent fornication and to repopulate the earth. You have to get married unless you have this gift of singleness. So the church had imposed a law on all, well, it was in abbeys as well as in churches. Any clergyman, any holy person in their view, could not be married. That is a violation of the natural law. Charles V was trying to enforce that on the German ministers, that they could not be married as well. So their priests, so to speak, They said you can't be getting married or you're violating the civil laws which uphold the laws of the church. So what they're arguing here is that civil government can't tamper with the natural institution of marriage. And if they do, that is so tyrannical that you can actually fight against your civil government. Now I would say in our day, the acceptance of sodomy as a legitimate form of marriage or lesbianism, that's a violation of natural law. So any civil state that recognizes or enforces those things is illegitimate. They've lost their ordination of God. They've gone into the realm of the devil. And the devil is the one who inspires these kind of satanic arrangements. So all that to say, if you go back and you think about our Declaration of Independence, whether you're talking about the train of abuses that they identify, the higher authority of God, the light of nature, the natural law, the laws of nature, and nature's God, the duty of civil magistrates to enforce moral law as opposed to fighting against moral law, the duty of lower magistrates to fight against the higher magistrate and to cast off his unjust authority. I would say in all of these ways, we find that our Declaration of Independence could very easily be traceable on several distinct points to this Magdeburg Declaration of Independence. So back to my original point, I grew up thinking, again, We made something totally new when we did the Declaration of Independence. We were extremely unique. We had no precedents. We weren't standing on anybody's shoulders. And after I studied these various documents in the Protestant Reformation, I realized we're actually very unoriginal. And in a good way, we have been able to stand on the shoulders of giants and really progress beyond. And that's my goal for us. Now in our day and us here locally is to stand on the shoulders of these giants who stood on the shoulders of those giants so that we can at least get to where they were and maybe go beyond where they were and have this be a frame of reference that we use. Any questions about any of this from the Magdeburg Confession or any other things that came up? I assume it's online that you could you could pull that up. Yes. There's actually a translation that was done from the German of the entire Magdeburg Confession. So if you look it up I don't remember the publishing house. I have a copy of it at home. But if you look it up there's somebody maybe in Wisconsin who has translated and published the whole thing. That would be a cool thing to have. I've never heard of that. What I had heard and read was that the English Bill of Rights of 1689 When I read that, that is like, that's our stuff. I mean, you weren't talking about plagiarism, it was very much a copy. One of the sources I'll get into as we go through the series. So we'll get into German Lutherans here, Scottish Presbyterians with Mary de Guise, they depose her from being their queen, the parliament does. The Dutch Declaration of Independence when they cast off the authority of the Spanish. We'll get into the English justification for taking up arms against Charles I, the English Bill of Rights. Now there are other books that I recommend. There's a very influential theologian from Geneva named Theodore Beza. You maybe heard of Calvin, John Calvin. When John Calvin died, his chair of theology was succeeded by Theodor Beza. Theodor Beza, in turn, influenced the English Puritans, the Dutch Puritans, so a lot of American thought from Holland and from the north of Germany and from England and Scotland, a lot of that is directly from Theodor Beza. So some people say John Calvin is the forgotten founding father. Some people say he's the founding father of America because our view of civil government is largely based off of Calvin's Institutes. And it's almost brought over wholesale once you think about Harvard initially is founded by Puritans. The civil government in America in the colonial days was largely based off of similar principles and ideals. How do you spell that Theodore's last name? B-E-Z-A. He has a really interesting book called Concerning the Rights of the Magistrates and he goes into this same theory of civil government and how lesser magistrates have a duty of resistance. There's also built on that is a Scottish Presbyterian named Samuel Rutherford. He wrote a book called Lex Rex, which was one of the most popular books in colonial America right before the war for independence. It's really hard to read, to be honest with you, and very difficult to follow. A lot of it is scholastic. Biza is much more understandable and much shorter. And then Rutherford is a extended tome, taking Biza and expanding on it. Well, I think I'm going to guess that the Rutherford Institute, which is over in Charlottesville, is named after him. Yes, Samuel Rutherford. And that's Rita Dunway spoke. She worked for him, or for the Institute. OK. She was the guest speaker last night at the tea party. She's one of the senior people on the whole Convention of States issue. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And very, very well-schooled and articulate. I always feel reprimanded when I listen to her. Just because she's so nice about how she says everything. She's all about trying to win people over the nice way. And I just keep saying, you know what? I'm just not seeing that happening very easily. But she's a really good speaker. That's good, that's good. Yeah, Samuel Rutherford is a very valuable theologian in his own right. He was persecuted by Charles II, even though he had defended Charles I and condemned his execution by the English Parliament, but that's just how life goes, I guess. Any other questions?