Well, again, I'm thankful to be here and I enjoy this as much as you do, I hope. I hope you're enjoying it. And I want to pick up sort of where we left off last time, which has to do basically with understanding the difference between Christian thought or the Christian gospel position and the humanist or satanic position that's there from the garden. And that presentation last week is designed to give us a framework for evaluating our world, our own lives and thinking, the world around us. And really, you can carry that framework into virtually any field and use it as a means to evaluate. You know, what the serpent said to the woman in the garden. has implications in virtually every field. Now, I'll give you some for instances. If you're a pastor and somebody comes to you and they're having marital problems, you know, typically in our world, what happens is at some point the pastor says, well, now you really need to get professional help on this. And so that person is sent out and they go to a professional certified psychologist. who has an evolutionary view of man, and all of his systems of dealing with men are based on that evolutionary view. For example, if it's Freudian psychology, the basic principles of Freud are that what is natural is normal, and the pathologies, the problems that men have, are related to this religious instruction that runs counter to what comes natural to us. And the goal of Freudian psychology is to get over your hang-ups. All the hang-ups are the indoctrinated hang-ups that have been placed upon you by parental instruction, by church instruction, by all these should-nots that go against the nat, and so you are, the goal is to get over your hang-ups and live without guilt. The guilt, again, is not from sin in their view, it's from instruction that runs counter to nature. Now you can see what a satanic system it is at the core. Most of us don't understand that Freudian psychology is that. So is behavioral psychology. So is Carl Rogers and the other approaches, you know, where they look for in Rogers' thing, well, the answers lie within you. Get in touch with yourself. And maybe not just you, but the group is there to help. And so we're going to have a group therapy session. Again, all the mind of man somewhere in there has the answers, and we don't have reference to the Word of God, and we don't view man as created by God. We view him as an evolved being in contact with universals, and so on and so forth. Now, again, I'm giving you one illustration of how the outline that we dealt with last week is particularly applicable in that situation of counseling someone who's in some sort of difficulty. Now, you can take it and apply it to apologetics. And you go all the way back to the 13th century, and Thomas Aquinas, in his Theistic Proofs, is dealing with metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. He's dealing with the doctrine of being, he's dealing with the doctrine of knowledge, and the doctrine of law. And that all plays into his approach to defending the Christian faith, flawed as it was, The categories, the principles are there. All we're going to do in order to understand the situation that we're dealing with in our nation is apply the same principles to the field of civil polity, the field of government, and the role of the civil government in our world. And that's the situation that we're dealing with. So what we want to do is begin with the principles that we've looked at in Genesis and carry them forward with respect to the civil magistrate. So, in that, I want to give you something of a little history, a modern history of political thought. Now, before I do that, maybe I should say this. We have to be mindful of Jesus' words. It's one basic thing that we ought never to forget. And that basic thing is, if the Son make you free, you'll be free indeed. Okay, now that is true for the individual who is release from the bondage of his sin. Without Jesus Christ, there is no release from the bondage of sin. The Son must make you free. And that is as true for the individual, but it's also true for the civil society. The possibility of liberty in a civil society is only the gift of the Son of God. Jesus Christ alone is the author of liberty, and so if we're going to have liberty in a civil society, it must come from the Son of God. It is particular to gospel faith, and there has never been a free country that did not adopt the knowledge of God and defend it in its polity or whatever. There's no such thing as a free pagan country. Now, I know that runs a little bit counter to what you hear in the modern world when they go out and they say, well, what are the sources of American constitutionalism? And they'll go back to some ancient pagan culture that had some little aspect where there was some restraint on authority. And they'll say, see, that's an antecedent to what we have here in this little thing. And they'll go through Greece. and Rome, and all the ancient pagan cultures, and they'll try to bring forward this idea that, well, we really have antecedents in all those cultures, and we drew our ideas from all sorts of different sources. And that explains the liberty that we have, and this great country that we have that's a free country, and so on and so forth. And all that is hogwash. I mean, you can take some little antecedent aspect, some little aspect of the adjustment of power in a nation. That's one thing. But what was the nation you're looking at? Well, it was bondage. Greece had 20,000 gods. You know, they were idolers. Rome took their girl children, threw them out in the streets to die. They didn't have a boy, they just threw them out. We don't want this one. Toss it out by the feet. That was their view of life in Rome. And so when you go around these pagan cultures, you'll never find liberty anywhere. It's bondage, continual bondage. In the pagan cultures in Mexico, those pyramids, we go down and say, oh, you know, you're on a tourist bus, and over here is this pyramid built, and so and so. Those pyramids had steps. They would march them four abreast. up the steps, slaughter them in human sacrifice on the top of the pyramids, cut their bodies open, the priest would eat the hearts and the blood would pour down the steps and they were marching in four abreast to be slaughtered on the top of the pyramids as far as the eye could see. That's what that vicious Cortes found when he came to Mexico. And again, the pagans of our world glorify these cultures. I remember Neil Young has a song. It's called Cortez the Killer. He came dancing across the water with his galleons and guns, looking for a new world and a palace in the sun. Hate was just a legend. War was never known. And the people worked together and they carried many stones and they carried them to the flat lands, but they died along the way, but they build up with their bare hands what we still can't do today. Just a wonderful, beautiful pagan culture. And human sacrifice, what's that? They gave themselves in sacrifice so that others could go on. These are the lyrics. of Neil Young glorifying human sacrifice in the pagan cultures of Mexico and South America. And there's another one. What's the other one? The other one was, oh, you know, it's the conquistadors. They're mocking the conquistadors. And so this is the strain of pagan thought in our own land in the last thirty years. rock music that plays off this idea that pagan culture is just this blissful thing. Bob Dylan has... I won't go into all the music. This is all my pagan background. I know all this stuff because I was one of them. But by God's grace, I've seen how bad it is. But that's the situation we're dealing with. So when you go out in the history of the world, when you go out to try to find a free culture, There are no free cultures. Paganism is slavery and bondage. Paganism exalts one central figure and you are all peons that work in the society for the glorification of that society. The king, the pharaoh, whatever he is, is a divine human link. He is a god on earth, much like Kim Jong-il was in North Korea until his death. And then you have a crisis, your God died, and now somebody else has got to take his place. But that's what it is in the world, in the history of the world, apart from Christ. So we as Christians have to have this in our understanding in the first place. If the Son makes you free, you'll be free indeed. And if you don't have the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, at the very root of your culture, at the very root of your civil polity, you're not going to be free. There is no liberty apart from Christ. And that's the first lesson that we can get, really, from Scripture. Christ is the one who is the author of liberty. And he says it to the disciples. You know how the Gentiles exercise authority upon them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It's not to be like that with you. Whoever is great among you, let him be your servant. And when he took to town, he washed his disciples' feet. He said, you know what I've done to you? You call me Lord. And that's right. If I've done this to you, this is what you're to do with each other. This is how you are to serve in the role of authority that you have. I love the centurion for this. You know, the centurion is so glorious to me because he's, first of all, he shows you what a master is like with his servant. Now, his servant is sick. And he doesn't say, well, I can get another piece of meat. He says, oh, my servant's sick. I love my servant. And he's going all over the world to find Jesus. He's looking for medical help. He's looking for the best medical help. He's looking for help that's going to solve the problem of his servant being sick on the death. So he goes to Jesus to heal his servant. Now, that's the best medical care you can get anywhere. The Master is going to get for his servant. He says, help, my servant's sick. Now, if you read the parallel text, I think it's the one in Luke is the parallel text. It says, he sent the elders of the Jews to Jesus. The one text says that he came to Jesus saying, my servant is sick, but he didn't come in person. He sent the elders of the Jews on his behalf. And they said, look, now this guy's worthy that's asking this. He's built a synagogue for us. And he's a godly man, you know. Jesus says, great, I'll come. And then he hears Jesus is coming. And he says, He says to other representatives, look, I'm not worthy for you to come under my house. Say the word only. Because I'm a man under authority. And I say to this one, go, and he goes. And to another, come, and he comes. Just say the word. And what kind of a view of authority does he have? He says, I'm under authority. So therefore, I have authority. I'm under authority, so I command. And he yet is a picture of one who has authority, and how does he use his authority? To heal his servant. Again, he is the minister to his servant. Because he has authority, he is able to command, he sends the elders of the Jews, he sends another representative to Jesus. He's a picture. of the godly use of authority for us, and Jesus says, you know, there's not that kind of faith, not in Israel. He commends the centurion's faith. Now that's the situation that we have to first have in our minds, that there is no liberty apart from Christ. So if the debate in a political society is about what God would have us do and God is accepted as the standard in that society, then you're dealing with a society that at least is on the way to freedom or maintaining their freedom, and so on and so forth. And if the question of God in Christ is not entering into the debate of the society, you have a society that's headed to bondage. That's how you can delineate one from the other. If the debate, if the level of the debate is, this is what God says, this is what God requires of us, this is His word, this is His law, this is what His faith dictates, and this kind of thing. If the level of debate is, God says this, and there's that witness, and that's what everybody, you know, is at least debating. then again, you have a society that's headed towards liberty. And if not, if it's what I think, if it's here's my idea, here's my proposal, here's this, here's that, without reference to God, it's a society that's being carried into bondage. And why is that? Well, because it's only a return to the principle of the fall. Where man is thinking, doing his thinking without reference to the revelation of God. Just like the serpent. suggested in the garden. Your eyes will be open. You'll know good and evil. You don't need God in order to find truth. Truth is truth for everybody, for God as well as for us. It doesn't come from God. It's not dependent on God. It's a thing in itself apart from God, and it's accessible to us on the basis of reason. And so we can think our way to true things, and we can arrive at truth without reference to God. That's Satan's program in the garden. So again, that's just a little bit on introductory ideas and evaluating the circumstances of our nation. Now, what I want to do is in the first place, give you something of a political history of, we can make this 2,000 years. since the resurrection of Christ. And I'm going to turn to a secular political professor, Daniel J. Elazar. He's a Jew, so he's an unbeliever. This is unbelieving political philosophy. And he's interesting for that in that, though he is an unbeliever, he's interested in the Old Testament because he's a Jew. And so his book, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel, gives us a nice summary, a nice working summary of some things that we can talk about to begin with as we ask the question, how do we evaluate politics and political systems and this kind of thing. So what I'm going to do is take a little bit out of his introduction and a little bit out of the first chapter and take it across the board and comment on it. This is interesting to me, too, because a lot of what he says is a lot of what I've been saying for longer than I knew he was saying it. I did a series 10 years ago on the civil magistrate and developed a lot of these ideas that he said, and I read this book last year, so it is interesting to me on that point. Let me take some things and we'll comment. This is again as an introduction. The covenants of the Bible are founding covenants of Western civilization. Perforce, they have to do with God. They have their beginnings in the need to establish clear and binding relationships between God and humans and among humans. Relationships that must be understood as being political far more than theological in character. Designed to establish lines of authority, distributions of power, bodies politic, and systems of law. It is indeed the genius of the idea and its biblical source that it seeks both to legitimatize political life and to direct it into the right paths, to use theopolitical relationships to build a bridge between heaven and earth. And there is nothing more earthly than politics, even in its highest form, without letting either swallow up the other. Now, it's fascinating. Again, this is an unbelieving position. He's not dealing with personal salvation. He is a professor of politics. He taught political science at Temple University in Philadelphia, which used to be a Baptist school. It's not a Baptist school now. He also taught at the University of Jerusalem. And for his thesis, he was given a whole department And while he lived, his department was called the Center for the Study of Federalism. Okay, now that's a little bit about Daniel Elazar. Well, apart from the fact that he has no commitment to the theology of Scripture and the communication of God to man about himself and about the salvation that's in Christ, aside from the fact that he's merely interested in politics, it's fascinating, isn't it? that the covenants of the Bible are founding covenants of Western civilization. And that is simply to say that the people that founded the institutions of the West, and particularly from the Protestant Reformation forward, took as the model for that the scripture. It was called the Great Political Textbook of the Patriots. They got their ideas about civil society from the Scripture, and they went to the Scripture for an understanding of how these things were supposed to be interrelated. Now, that doesn't mean they always got it right, and that's part of the issue we have to be able to deal with, is a critique of it. But here's a recognition and an understanding that men were looking at Scripture for their political foundation, for the philosophy of their politics. And that is a true statement from an unbelieving man who is a political scientist. The biblical discussion of the government of ancient Israel stands at the very beginning of Western political life and thought, just as the political experience of ancient Israel, as recounted in the Bible, laid the foundations of Jewish political tradition in all its aspects. The Bible's concern with teaching humans the right way to live in this world gives the scriptural political dimension particular importance. The highly social character of biblical concern with achieving the good life leads to its emphasis on the good commonwealth. The biblical account of the history of the Israelites can be seen in that light. The biblical account of the origins of the Jewish people reflects a blend of kinship and consent that generates a special political culture and a variety of institutions at home in it. family of tribes becomes a nation by consenting to a common covenant with God and with each other, out of which flow the principles and practices of religious life and political organization that have animated the Jews as a corporate entity ever since. The record of that experience represents the oldest stratum in Western political thought. And since the record is derived very directly from the Israelites' experience, the latter is in itself an important factor in the development of Western political institutions. If this is more difficult to perceive today, than it was in Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke's time, it is because the study of the political experience of ancient Israel has been generally neglected in the centuries since. The Reformed Protestant theologians and state builders and the political philosophers of the 16th and 17th centuries paid serious attention to it in shaping the political views of the moderns who were to reject Scripture as authoritative. Now that's a mouthful, but you understand what he's saying? He's saying, look, the people that were the political architects of Western institutions paid serious attention to Israel's experience as reflected in the Old Testament, as recorded in the Old Testament. And they took it as authoritative. And the people who now live in our world don't take it as authoritative, and that's why we don't see the connection between the political revelation or the revelation of God in Scripture about politics and the problems of our current world. Christian church isn't looking to the Scripture for the answers when it comes to politics. They're in the same program of human reason that is there in the garden at the fall. They are willing to admit to an evolutionary view. with respect to the constitution of society and how things are to be adapted and so on and so forth. And they are willing to admit man's law into the political process and debate with man what law should be. And because they aren't that, working on the satanic system, they don't have any understanding of the problems that we're dealing with. But once upon a time, men took it seriously. once upon a time and looked at the scripture. Now, a little clue on Alazar, he is a scoundrel. Believe it or not, at one point in this book, he advocates, the way he interprets Joshua is in a constitutional interpretation. He says, now Joshua here is affirming that there's no possibility of changing the Constitution, and that's the precursor to actually changing it. And so if we're going to change the Constitution, the politics of our country, we can take a clue from Joshua. Here's how you do it. Well, you tell them there's no possibility of changing it, that it's always been this way, that it's always meant this, while you subtly institute the changes you want to make. So he's no friend, again, I'm going to a secular scholar, he's no friend of the position that I'd be presenting to you. And his devotion, his interest in the covenant is a way of gaining legitimacy for what I would say is basically, he doesn't say the New World Order, but I would say it's the New World Order. He was celebrated as a political philosopher, taken seriously by the scholars because he saw in Israel's experience as a Jew giving attention to the Old Testament, something we can use for our program in this world. Now that's my analysis of Al-Azhar, so I'm cluing you in on that because some of that comes out in what he's saying. Covenant is one of the major recurring principles of political import that informs and encompasses all three things. I've spoken of the themes, but here they are again. An idea that defines political justice, shapes political behavior, and directs humans toward an appropriately civic synthesis of the two in their effort to manage political power. As such, covenant is an idea whose importance is akin to natural law in defining justice and to natural right in delineating the origins of power and proper constitution of political society. While somewhat eclipsed in political science since the shift to organic and then positivistic theories of politics, which began in the mid-19th century, it persists as a factor shaping political behavior. in those civil societies whose foundations are grounded in the effort to translate that idea into political reality, and in others, searching for a means to build a democratic order on Federalist rather than Jacobin principles. Covenant can be studied in three dimensions, as a form of political conceptualization, as a mode of political expression, as a source of political ideology, and as a factor shaping political culture, institutions, and behavior. As a form of political conceptualization, covenant shapes the way in which people look at the world and understand the nature of politics and civil society. The covenantal worldview is one of two or three mother worldviews shared by humanity. It is by no means far-fetched to assume that basic to every personality as it is formed by both nature and culture is a worldview that is either, and here are his three worldviews, hierarchical, organic, or covenantal. The uses of covenant demonstrate how political conceptualization and expression go hand in hand. Thus, during the 16th and 17th centuries, the Swiss, the Dutch, the Scots, and English Puritans not only conceived of civil society in covenantal terms, but actually wrote national covenants to which loyal members of the body politics subscribe. Similar covenants were used in the founding of many of the original colonies in British North America. Covenantal thinking was the common mode of political conceptualization and expression during the American Revolution, where it was reflected in any number of constitutional documents. There's no better way reflected than in the differences between the separation of power system of the United States where the president, I'm skipping ahead with this one, and Supreme Court interact in creative tension to balance one another, and similar systems in Latin America that are modeled institutionally on the U.S. Constitution, but have been imposed upon a radically different political base. Lack of covenantal political culture in Latin America with its corresponding lack of a sense of consent rather than force as the basis of political life, of limitations on the use of power, sharing among partners to advance the common good while preserving their respective integrities, and abiding by the rules of the game is both a response to and a generator of circumstances which lead to the abuse or distortion of the institutional framework." What's he saying? He's saying, look, you sort of have to have this underlying covenantal perspective in order to make this work. And that's what the English Puritans, the Scots, those reformers of the Swiss and others had when they came to these shores. Our institutions are covenantal in their perspective and you can't make them work outside of that perspective. Now that's the same as saying, look, there's a faith that underlies the operation of our institutions, and you can take the same institutions, per se, and try to superimpose them on Latin America, and you don't have the faith there. They can't make them work. They won't do the duties, there's not the morality in the culture, to make the system work. Now that's the same thing as saying, look, the faith has to underlie the system in order to make it work. This is a Jewish unbelieving historian, a political scientist, saying this. You understand the problem we're facing? You've got to have the faith to make the institutions work. The covenant idea with its derivatives and cognates offers a particular orientation To the great questions of politics in theory and practice, perhaps the clearest indication of this special orientation is to be found in Thomas Hobbes' translation of the principles of natural law into what he called articles of peace, that is, the articles of the original civil covenant. In its theological form, covenant embodies the idea that relationships between God and humanity are based upon morally sustained compacts of mutual promise and obligation. God's covenant with Noah, Genesis 9, which came after Noah had hearkened fully to God's commandments in what was, to say the least, an extremely difficult situation, is the first of many such examples. The first such civilization, and the most influential, was that of ancient Israel located on the western edge of southwest Asia, whose people transformed and perfected a device originally developed among the Amorite and Hittite peoples who inhabited the area. The first known uses of covenant were the vassal treaties. Now this is not something I can agree with, but I've taken you here to show you the way he approaches this thing. This idea that's in the Bible, the Bible's not inspired, but the Bible is the particular heritage of these Jews, and they're a great people, and they have a great contribution to the New World Order to give us, and covenant is one, and they took what they saw in the Amorites and the Hittites, and they developed it into this system, and the system's what we really can learn from. I mentioned the idea before. Authors found some expressions in political thought. It was really not until the Reformation that covenant re-emerged as a central category, first in political theology and then in political philosophy. Reformed Presbyterianism turned on the covenant concept and its spokesmen and churches embraced it with relish. finding in it the most appropriate expression of their theological ideas and expectations for church and civil polity alike. The federal theology that they articulated, federal is derived from the Latin foitus, which means covenant, stimulated the renewed political application of the covenant idea. which was given expression first by the political theologians and then by political philosophers such as Althussius, and in the next century was, and mark this, secularized by Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza. By the late 17th century, the concept had come full circle with its political dimension having taken on an independent life of its own. Okay, now that is the political history of the Western world from the time of the Protestant Reformation in a paragraph. They understood a covenantal approach to civil polity. That is that if we want to have liberty, if we want to be a free people, if we want to adjust to governments of nations, It must be done according to Scripture in the knowledge of God. That means we must take God for our God. We must confess the truth about God, and we must have a system of government built upon the revelation of God. Now, we'll define a little better what's involved in the covenant as we go on, but they understood it as a covenantal thing. Later thinkers, nominal Christian thinkers, or secular thinkers took this covenantal idea and divorced it from the God of Scripture, so that it took upon itself a life of its own. It's living apart from its biblical foundations. You know, it's the form of godliness without the power. And that's the situation. Historically, we're in this situation, you see. We're at the end of this process, but that's his analysis of 400 years of political thought. That indeed is what Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke, among others, tried to do. The end result was modern liberal democracy. Hobbes and Spinoza are the two most important figures in this process. The great student of medieval philosophy, Henry Austrian Wolfson, has made a strong case for the thesis that medieval philosophy began with Philo and ended with Spinoza. We all know that medieval philosophy is mainly a synthesis of biblical and Greco-Roman intellectual systems. What Philo did was to take the biblical outlook and integrate it into the Greco-Roman systems, that is, covenant thought into natural law philosophy to set a pattern followed by the Church Fathers, the great Catholic and Islamic philosophers, and even Jewish and Protestant thinkers prior to the 17th century. Spinoza, in essence, reversed the process. He knocked the props out from under the edifice of medieval philosophy in an effort to replace it with a new secular modernism. Now, that's really a paragraph you have to appreciate. And what he's saying, if I could put it in the vernacular, is the problem we have at the fall in the garden has to do again with this evolutionary thesis. It has to do with the source of knowledge, where we look to for knowledge, and it has to do with the ethics, what we think is right and wrong. Satan's a program is an autonomous program that separates man from God and from the Word of God so that man does not look to the Word of God in order to find what's right, wrong, true. Doesn't look to the Word of God to find his law. Doesn't build his philosophy on a created universe. But he's divorced from those things. And what he is saying here, in my assessment, is also accurate. that the medieval program was a synthesis between the Christian and the non-Christian position. When the church, well if we go all the way back to the investiture struggle of the 12th century. In 1076, Gregory VII declared that the church was independent of the civil state And hereafter we're going to appoint our own bishops and we're going to, you know, the king is not going to have authority in the church. Now that is an important issue in itself, the separation of church as an institution from the authority of the king in the state. The prior system is called Caesaro Papism. That's where the church is a department of state and the king points heads of the church, and he governs in the church and decides what the church is supposed to do. Well, even in this medieval period, 1076, with what's called the investiture struggle, there was the attempt to free the church from the influence of the state in these matters. And that is a highly significant action on the part of Gregor, even though he was a designing man, probably not a humble man, and we probably wouldn't say that the Church has its head at Rome, and so on. Nevertheless, the issues were real. Now, we can go all the way back to the investiture struggle. Well, when the Church carved out for itself a sphere of law independent of the civil state, which it did, and the Church had responsibility for marriage and divorce and for issues involving communion and so on and so forth, they had a whole area of law that they carved out, independent of the civil state, in which the kings had no say. When they did that for themselves and began to say, okay, here's what the law is, we're going to exposit the law and take this law to the nations, at the same time, Aristotle's writings are discovered. And now they begin a gloss between Aristotle and the Bible. and in their statement of what law is to be, it's a mixture. It's a synthesis between Revelation and Greco-Roman culture. As Eleazar says here, that's the whole medieval period and process, a synthesis between these two things. And the question is, well, if you're going to evaluate that as a synthesis, have we freed ourselves in that program from satanic thought that came in at the garden, from fallen man's autonomous thinking about being, about knowledge, about law. Have we freed ourselves? The answer is no. If you're going to synthesize pagan thought built on the satanic system with Christianity that's supposed to be informed by the Word of God and the God of Scripture, you synthesize the two, you're corrupted at the core. Now that's the truth about the medieval period. And that's not to say it was all bad or anything else, but that's the problem we face. We're still operating in the satanic systems. In the late 18th century, the American Revolution translated the concepts of covenant into a powerful instrument of political reform. but only after merging it with the more secularized idea of compact. American constitutionalism is a product of that merger. Now you've got a covenant idea in which God is the source of authority, in which if we are coming to create civil institutions, we're bound by his word and law. we are to reason on the basis of what he has revealed. And then you have a secularized version of this same thing. He says, well, look, we can covenant together. We can have a covenant and we can have a covenantal structure, but you don't need to talk about God in this. That's really not material to the issues before us in our day. So you have a covenant structure based on Scripture and you have a secularized version of it that just says, social contract, social compact. Wasn't that Rousseau's book, The Social Contract, French Revolution philosophy? Two rival forms of this running down through history post-Protestant Reformation. Those who saw the hand of God in political affairs in the United States continued to use the term covenant. While those who sought a secular grounding, notice, sought a secular grounding. We don't want to ground our philosophy of politics in the idea of God and His Word. We want to ground it in a secular way. Let's change the language a little bit. Those who sought a secular grounding for politics turned to the term compact. While the distinction is not always used with strict clarity, it does appear consistently. The issue was further complicated by Rousseau and his followers who talked about the social contract, a highly secularized concept which even when applied for public purposes never develops the same level of moral obligation as either covenant or compact. The Russoistic formulation had limited popularity in the United States, but became the dominant terminology in revolutionary France, although it did share the field with the other two terms, particularly compact, especially in the earliest years of the revolution. With the triumph of Jacobin ideas, that's French Revolution ideas, philosophy, and so which themselves are the outgrowth of Rousseauian thought, the term social contract swept the field. Okay, now that is a solid analysis of political history, in my estimation of political history, and you can take it from Philo the Jew forward to our own period of time. The question is, has the church ever had a consistent approach to politics, and some more so at times than others, particularly the heirs of the Protestant Reformation, but not necessarily have we ever accurately understood what the issues are. So, going back now, I want to talk about the biblical doctrine, this idea that we looked at in the fall and the American founding. The history of the United States demonstrates the doctrinal failure of the Christian Church on these shores since 1607. And you can trace that failure in terms of the idea that God has ordained civil magistrates to be under him, over the people, for his own glory and the public good. And he's designed him to do certain things. And then the adjustment of the relationship between church and state. It's on those two points that we can trace the doctrinal failure. Let's take the colonization of the New World. We should note that this was decidedly a Christian program. The program to colonize the new world was not trying to prove that the world wasn't flat. I was taught that in government schools. I was taught in government schools that, well, you know, Columbus was speculating on whether or not the world was flat. And that's the motive. And then they were looking for trade routes and so on and so forth. In Columbus's journal, on the first voyage he took, he wrote back to the king and queen of the Spains, Ferdinand and Isabella, about the circumstances that influenced him and his desires. And I'm going to read a little bit of that. Because most Christian and very exalted and very excellent and very powerful princes, king and queen of the Spains, and of the islands of the sea are lords, In this present year of 1492, after Your Highness had made an end to the War of the Moors, who were reigning in Europe, and having finished the war in the very great city of Grenada, wherein this present year, on the second day of the month of January, I saw the royal banners of Your Highnesses placed by force of arms on the towers of the Alhambra, which is the fortress of the said city. And I saw the Moorish king come out to the gates of the city and kiss the royal hands of your Highnesses and the hands of the Prince, my Lord. And then in that present month, because of the information which I had given your Highnesses about the lands of India and about a Prince who was called Great Khan, which means in our Romance language, King of Kings. how he and his predecessors had many times sent to Rome to beg for men learned in our holy faith that they might be instructed therein, and that the Holy Father had never furnished them. And so many peoples believing in idolatries and receiving among themselves sects of perdition were lost. Your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians and princes, loving the holy Christian faith and the spreading of it, And enemies of the sect of Muhammad and of all idolatries and heresies decided to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the said regions of India to see the said princes and the peoples and lands and learn of their disposition of everything and the measures which could be taken for their conversion to our holy faith. And you ordered that I should not go to the east by land. which is customary to go, but by way of the West, whence, until today, we do not know certainly that anyone is gone. So that after having banished all the Jews from all your kingdom and realms, in the same month of January, your Highness has ordered me to go with a sufficient fleet to the said regions of India, and for that purpose granted me favors and ennobled me. And he goes on, you know, with all the grants about how he'll be the perpetual governor and so on and so forth. 1492. Now, remember, Protestant Reformation is 1517 with Luther's 95 Theses. So this is, there is nothing but Roman Catholicism in Christianity at this point. What's the goal of Columbus's journey? The evangelism of these Indians. The story was told by Marco Polo. in his travels, how this great con wanted to be instructed in the holy faith, and Columbus was responding to that, you see. And so this colonization program was a Christian program, the attempt to spread the gospel. Same thing true of the English purposes. The first charter of Virginia made by Elizabeth grants authority to take possession of all remote and barbarous lands, unoccupied by any Christian prince or people." And you can play this same story out with the various English charters. Herb Titus has a lecture on this where he goes through, takes you through those charters and reads sections of the charters. And they're all about Christianizing the lands that these Englishmen are going to. in the reign of James I, Elizabeth's successor, the English having been unsuccessful in establishing a permanent colony to this point. So if you know your English history, and English history is rather important to understanding this battle, as Eleazar even has laid it out for us. You've got Henry VIII, who had then a son, Edward VI, who was reformed. and he reigned, but then Edward VI died or was poisoned, and after an attempt to get Jane Grey on the throne, Bloody Mary, who is the daughter of Catherine of Aragon, comes to the throne and slew all the Reformers, or as many as she could get her hands on. So there's this battle back and forth between Roman Catholicism and the Reformed faith. Then Elizabeth, who basically takes the middle road, but does maintain the Reformed faith in 39 of Edward's 43 articles. So you've got 39 articles of the English church that were Reformed articles of Edward VI. 39 of his 42 or 43, something like that. So you've got this situation. Well, Elizabeth was, quote unquote, the virgin queen, never married, never had a child. And when she dies in 1603, James I ascends to the English throne. James I is the cousin of Elizabeth. He is the daughter of Mary, Queen of Scots, who was imprisoned at the time of the Scottish Reformation, ultimately sent out of the country in prison in England because she was involved in a plot to capture the English throne herself. Finally, after several years, beheaded by Elizabeth, but her son, James VI of Scotland, became James I of England. Alright, James I is was raised by Tudors, because his mother was exiled, taught the Reformed faith. He was supposed to be the Protestant king. And he was a bloody tyrant that persecuted the Protestants everywhere he found them. So in the reign of James I, the English had been unsuccessful in establishing a permanent colony to this point. Virginia was divided into two districts, northern and southern. And then Jamestown was established finally in 1607, still with the Christian intent. Now in 1620, the separatist group, later known as the Pilgrims, embarked for the northern part of Virginia, but they were blown off course and found themselves beyond the geographical boundaries of Virginia's authority, of the charter of Virginia. So being outside of any chartered governor a government granted by the king, they pen what is the Mayflower Compact. And I'm going to read just a little bit. In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign Lord King James, by the grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland king, defender of the faith, etc. having undertaken for the glory of God, an advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia. Due by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and of one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the Enzaphroset. and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices from time to time as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. And witness whereof we have hereunder subscribed our names at Cape Cod the 11th of November in the year of the reign of our sovereign Lord King James of England, France, Ireland, the 18th, and of Scotland the 54th, Anno Domini, 1620." Now again, this is seen as one of the first model constitutions, but it is a covenantal document. It is a document that recognizes God and His authority. What we do, we do in the name of God. And we are combining ourselves into a civil body politic. And the only way they thought to do this was because they were not within the boundaries of the jurisdiction of the charter that had been granted already for Virginia. So immediately when they did this, then they sought legitimacy for this compact, sent back to England to obtain a patent from the king to do this thing. They sought legitimacy from the king. for the compact that they made, and that's an important aspect of the thing, too. Now, what I'm pointing out to you, or I'm trying to point out to you here, is the implications of the metaphysical aspects of what we see in Genesis. If God created the world and all things, then the questions of civil polity and of authority and the adjustment of the relationships of men have to do with God in the first place. And there was this outworking of the recognition that civil governments were under God. That's the covenantal aspect of this thing. So when they came together to create civil governments, there was a testimony that God was God and what we're doing, we're doing in the name of God because he has revealed to us that this is what should be done. That is, he is fully engaged in their thinking as far as what transpires with respect to civil government. Now that is the implication of the biblically revealed aspects of creation and man's position under God. And if you reject that, you begin framing civil governments without reference to God. God is not in your thinking when you start talking about civil polity and civil governments and what all this means. So far we've talked about the Charter of Virginia in 1607, you know, We've talked about the Plymouth Colony in 1620, which eventually was swallowed up by Massachusetts Bay Colony. Now, those are two of the parent colonies. What happened is, colonists from these areas migrated out, and in the colonial areas where other colonies were settled, they were settled basically by migrants from these parent quote-unquote colonies, the parent colonies. The other parent colony was Pence. of the Quaker William Penn, who in payment for some debts owed him by the king was granted a charter in an area in which he would govern. So in 1682, William Penn framed a frame of government for Pennsylvania. He wrote a frame of government for Pennsylvania. I'm going to read you part of the preface. When the great wise God had made the world and all his creatures, it pleased him to choose man, his deputy, to rule it. And to fit him for so great a charge and trust, he did not only qualify him with skill and power, but with integrity to use them justly. This native goodness was equally his honor and his happiness. And whilst he stood here, all went well. There was no need of coercive or compulsive means. The precept of divine love and truth in his bosom was the guide and keeper of his innocency as he was created. But lust prevailing against duty made a lamentable breach upon it. and the law that before had no power over him took place upon him and his disobedient posterity, that such as would not live conformable to the holy law within should fall under the reproof and correction of the just law without in a judicial administration. This the apostle teaches in the verse of his epistles. The law, says he, was added because of transgression. In another place, knowing that the law was not made for the righteous man, but for the disobedient and ungodly, for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers, for whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, and for man-stealers, for liars, for perjured persons and company. a little farther, but this is not all. He opens and carries the matter of government a little farther. Let every soul be subject to the higher powers, for there is no power but of God. The powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power resisteth the ordinance of God. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Will thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same. He is the minister of God to thee for good, wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but for conscience sake. This settles the divine right of government beyond exception, and that for two ends. First, to terrify evildoers. Secondly, to cherish those that do well, which gives government a life beyond corruption and makes it as durable in the world as good men shall be. So that government seems to me a part of religion in itself, a thing sacred in its institution and end. For if it does not directly remove the cause, it crushes the effects of evil. And as such, though a lower, yet an emanation of the same divine power that is both author and object of pure religion. The difference lying here. The one is more free and mental, the other more corporal and compulsive in its operations. But that is only to evildoers. You understand? Now, that is simply looking at the Scripture and saying, well, now, I'm going to have a frame of government for Pennsylvania. What's government all about? And what does he do? He goes back to Genesis. He deals with man as created in his innocency, unfallen, wouldn't need this thing. When lust prevailed against duty, He was to be compelled from that point on, and then he gives you a philosophy of the powers of government based on an exposition of the scripture. Now that's covenantal thinking. That's thinking with respect to God. Remember we talked about the two circle, one circle universe, Cornelius Van Til's little description, because he had a blackboard, he could draw a circle. He said, well, this is a big circle. Well, that's too small. But that's God. That's uncreated being. And everything else is created being. That's another circle. So there's a creator-creature distinction. That's the metaphysical reality of our world. Beyond the physical world, we see there is God who is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable. You see? and what our world is has to do with Him. Now, if we're going to manifest that reality with respect to civil government, we've got to base our civil government on the fact of God. What is it in God? What is it in God's plan? How should we think about it? That's exactly what these men were doing in the colonial period. when our institutions were founded, when the colonies were founded, when the governors governed in the colonies in the way they viewed these various things. They operated in terms of the metaphysical reality that God is. And their thinking is a reflection of that. And again, I'm not going to argue Pence right in his situation. When he says, government seems to me a part of religion itself, that is, to have government set upon true foundations, it has to be reasoned from the revelation of God. It is a thing sacred, meaning not secular, from God in its institution, and from God in the purposes that are legitimate for government to do. That's William Penn, the Quaker. In 1638, three towns that had been under the prior government of Massachusetts Bay organized themselves under the fundamental orders of Connecticut. For as much as it hath pleased the Almighty God by the wise disposition of His divine providence so to order and dispose of things, that we the inhabitants and residents of Windsor, Hartford, and Withersfield are now cohabiting and dwelling in and upon the River of the Connecticut, and the lands thereunto adjoining, and well knowing that where a people are gathered together, the word of God requires that to maintain the peace and union of such a people there should be an orderly and decent government established according to God, to order and dispose of the affairs of the people at all seasons as occasion shall require. Do therefore associate and conjoin ourselves to be as one public state or commonwealth, and do for ourselves and for our successors, and such as shall be adjoined to us at any time hereafter, enter into a combination and confederation together to maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus, which we now profess as also the discipline of the churches, which according to the truth of the said gospel is now practiced among us, as also in our civil affairs to be guided and governed according to such laws, rules, orders, and decrees as shall be made, ordered and decreed as follows." And then they go on with the laws. Now my point to you is all this is, again, just to repeat myself, a manifestation of the metaphysical reality. of our world. And that is the way we ought to think about civil polity. It is a creation of God. It is revealed by God for us. It powers the law that it is to enforce. and the things it is to apply itself to are all revealed by God. And unless we are thinking from Scripture about civil polity and what it is to be, unless we're going to the Scripture, then we're simply instituting our own reasoning about what should be, which is the satanic program from the Garden. God has ordained civil magistrates to be under him, over the people, for his own glory and public good. And we have to ask, what has God revealed about magistrates? What is the purpose of civil government? What are the powers of civil government? What law is it to enforce? How is it adjusted? What are the relationships of powers? Is there one king? Are there lesser magistrates? What are their duties? Unless we're asking those questions, unless we're reasoning from the Scripture about this civil polity, then we're going to be in bondage. Because again, without the Son, there is no liberty. If the Son makes you free, you'll be free indeed. If you're not leaning upon the Son, if you're not looking at the Scripture, if this is not done in faith, you're not going to have a free country no matter how hard you try or imagine it. And I forgot to say, they all say we're a free country. China is the people's republic, don't you know? There's no country that ever says, yeah, we're a slave country, you know, and pulls up on their banner. The Caribbean slaves, you know, the slaves of Brazil. Brazil slave culture, none of this. Nobody ever says they're a slave. They always say they're free. They always say they're for the people, and this is the People's Republic, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. And it's pure tyranny. Don't give me the language of liberty and tell me it's a free condo, we're free. Without Christ, we're going to be in bondage. And unless we hold up the word of God to the society around us, we're going to be in bondage. OK, now, liberty, I want to go back to one point with respect to covenantal arrangements and drive this point home maybe a little bit more for us to properly understand. But, you know, if I say to you, well, the scripture talks to us, you know, about relationships among people. If the Scripture establishes an institution, let's take another example, let's say marriage. Now, when we go out to find a wife, what is it that are the guidelines for finding a wife? Let's take a husband, because I can quote the Scripture directly. Let her marry who she wants, only in the Lord. One of the main prerequisites for the marriage partner that you're going to take is that he or she is a Christian. Now that has to do with the covenantal structure, that you're going to make an agreement with this party here. But there's a standard that you must apply in making the agreement with the party. We're not to be like, remember Samson, Samson's the example of this, the lust of the eyes with respect to choosing a wife. So he sees a woman of the Philistines or whatever, and he says, I like that one, get me her. All through his life, he sees beautiful women and he wants them. And so that's how he starts out, taking a wife. Get me her, I want her. Are there no women of the daughters of your people that are accepted? Never mind, get me her. So on and on it goes with his life. He sees a woman, he's in bed with her. He sees a woman, and he's laying in her lap, talking to her about his great strength. Next thing you know, what's the judgment of God on Samson? Remember what the Philistines do to Samson when they finally catch him? put out his eyes. God's judgment is, Samson, your problem is your eyes. I'm going to take matters into my own hands. No more eyes. And Samson gets a period of time to think about that. before he brings that palace down on the Philistines and dies in the process. So a little bit about Samson and the lust of the eyes. That's not the way to pick a wife. The lust of the eyes. You can marry who you want, but only in the ward. And that is the relationship that you enter into horizontally between man and man. to use the creation term for woman, between man and man, is predicated upon her knowing God, being in relationship with God, and you knowing God and being in relationship with God. That's a simple principle. So you don't marry someone who's not in that same covenantal relationship. She's a believer. She knows Christ. She's in that relationship with Him. You're a believer. You know Christ. You're in that relationship with Him. And then you have the basis upon which to form a collateral relationship, a horizontal relationship. She knows Him. You know Him. That's the way to have a successful marriage. Both are connected to the power, the source, the knowledge of Christ. Now what happens when you have a problem with her? Or she has a problem with you? You go to Scripture. You go to God, you go to Scripture, you adjust the relationship based on the Word of God, and that's the source and standard for solving whatever problems come up in marriage. You know, well, honey, let's look at the Scripture. She says, well, honey, let's look at the Scripture. Well, you're not doing this, and here's what the Scripture says. Well, you see, then it's not her saying to me, I don't like what you're doing. There's an objective standard that she is applying to me when I'm not doing right, or I'm applying to her when she's not doing right. And we can sit down together, and since we're both committed to this Word, we can work out our problems. The reason I trust her, that she's going to love, honor, and obey me when she says that is because she's a Christian and not a liar. If she was a liar, all men are liars, but if she was a liar, I don't know if I would believe that or not. And she don't know whether to believe that. You know, we can't have this horizontal relationship and have a stable relationship if we serve two different masters. Now, I'm giving you that simple application. to say, look, that is the covenant for civil polity that's revealed in the Scripture. My text is 2 Kings 11 and verse 17. Now, this is one of those. We could have gone to Deuteronomy. We could have gone to Deuteronomy 28 and looked at the ratification process. Let me do that. Let me just back up to Exodus. There is a consent process in Exodus 19 and verse 3. But Moses went up unto God, for the Lord had called out of the mount unto him, saying, Thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob, and tell the children of Israel, Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I carried you upon eagles' wings, and have brought you unto me. Now therefore, if ye will hear my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be my chief treasure above all people, though all the earth is mine. Ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation, These are the words, God speaking to Moses, these are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel. Moses then came and called for the elders of the people and proposed unto them all these things which the Lord commanded him. And the people answered all together and said, all that the Lord hath commanded will we do. And Moses reported the words of the people unto the Lord. And the Lord said unto Moses, lo, I come unto thee. in thick cloud, that the people may hear while I talk with thee, and that they may also believe thee forever. For Moses had told the words of the people unto the Lord." I'll stop there. What happens next? Well, what's going on? This is a proposal on God's part. God, the Savior of Israel, proposes that if they will agree to this, He'll be their God and they'll be His people, and they'll be a peculiar people unto Him. Later on in 1 Samuel 8, when the people ask for a king, Moses is displeased with the whole thing. And what does he tell the people? You know, you've sinned in asking a king when the Lord was your king. This is the offer of God to be the king of Israel. And the people consent to this situation. So there is the operation of consent in ratifying the fact that God is their king, and then he gives them his law. So they consent to him as king, first he delivers them, then they consent to him being king, and then he gives them the law. They're to live by. And so, of course, that's in a covenantal relationship, there is the operation of consent, agreeing to have God as their God, and then ratifying His law. And you'll see that in Deuteronomy later on when you have these two classes of people, and there's blessing and there's cursing related to the law. When God gives a law, then you ratify it. You swear to it. And they're all the same. Cursed be the man. turns away from these precepts, and then along with that, blessed is the man who keeps it. And so it's this kind of a thing. Well, that's in relationship, God to man, when God offered himself as King of Israel and was voted in. In 2 Kings 11 verse 17, I'm going to show you now a covenantal structure between man and man with respect to God. Jehoiada made a covenant between the Lord and the King and the people that they should be the Lord's people, likewise between the King and the people. Arcing back to the little story on marriage. You've got a three-way covenant here. There's a covenant between the Lord and the King. That is, the King is God's man. And the king understands, believes in God, and accepts the responsibilities that God places upon him as king. He says, look, I'll do the job. I recognize you as my God. I will do the job as a king. There's a covenant between God and the king. There's a covenant between God and the people. We recognize you as our God. We take you as our God. We are your people, and we will obey and be the people of God. And on that basis, between the king and the people, there's your covenant. If you don't have these, you can't have this and expect anything good to come of it. And that's also a problem in our society. We are taking men who are not covenantally related to God and putting them in civil office. And I don't care whether they call themselves Christians Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, or anything else. It's not calling yourself a Christian. You know, the Presbyterian, the great Presbyterian president was Woodrow Wilson. And his statement, if you want to characterize Wilson, all we progressives ask is that the Constitution be interpreted in accordance with Darwinian principles. Now, I don't care whether he's a church member. He's satanic to the core. That is the devil's lie in the garden. He is an evolutionist. And he will bring in an evolutionary doctrine of civil society and law, though he's called a Presbyterian. And you guys, Baptists, you had Bill Clinton. And the Methodists had the Bushes. And we can go all around and find these guys. They're all church members. Obama's a Christian, right? Sure, tell me about it. In sum, that United Church of Christ is the most liberal, unbelieving denomination perhaps on the face of the earth. It's right there with Unitarian Universalism, as far as being an apostate thing. But don't tell me about church membership. I'm talking to you about the principles of Christianity. And we have to have a believing man in covenant with God in order to trust Him when He swears allegiance to the constitutional document that is to bind us as a people to Him. And if He's not in that relationship, and for that matter, if we are not either, then you're beating your head against the wall to try to think you're going to live in a free country. It's not going to happen. It's an apostasy. departure from God and from truth. And again, I'm trying to flesh out for you the principles involved in the metaphysical aspect of this thing that we looked at, just the fact that God is, and there's a difference between the Creator and the creature, manifests itself because when the creature comes to questions of authority, questions of civil polity, he puts God at the root of what he's thinking about when he begins to think about civil society, like William Pendon. And that's the situation we're dealing with. Now, what do we have? We've got a couple of minutes. How did we get there? Social contract theory. Remember, that was mentioned by Daniel J. Eleazar. That's the secularization of the covenantal idea And I make a distinction in my teaching. I didn't mention this, but I'll mention it now. I make a distinction. When I say founding fathers, I'm talking about William Penn. I'm talking about Oglethorpe. I'm talking about the Cotton Mathers and the William Bradfords and the men who were the colonial founders of institutions, English colonies on this shore. And I distinguish founding fathers in that sense from what came 180 years later with the Constitutional Framers. So Founding Fathers are back here, 1607, 1620, 1684, and the other dates of those early colonies. Founding Fathers, that was their view, a Christian view, from Constitutional Framers in 1787, 1789. And so I make that distinction. I think it's helpful. Well, how do we get from this situation of a view of civil authority that is based on the Word of God that finds its standards and its idea about civil government and everything else in the Word of God? How do we get from that to the secular society that we have now? Well, again, it's English history. And you've got to go back to English history in order to understand, first of all, America, there's nothing original that's going on in America in our day. We are not an original people. We don't have an original thought. We're simply the outworkings of English thought, of European thought from hundreds of years ago. And we're the battleground and the testing place where this works itself out. So if you think we're special and we're really wise, You're working out Locke and Hobbes and Spinoza. You're working out apostate ideas of past erroneous Christianity on these shores. Well, social contract theory. Let's give you the English history of this thing. The problem with Christian thought in 1603, well, I'm picking James' Ascension to the Throne, James I. It mirrored Roman Catholic thought. Now, James was almost a closet Roman Catholic. In other words, he didn't want to go back to Roman Catholic authority in England, but his commitments were to the theology and the ideas of Roman Catholicism. Now, Rome has a particular view of government. And it sort of works like this, okay? God has put me in authority, now you listen to me. Okay? And anything I say goes, and you particularly don't have any place to question me. I answer to God only, not to you. Okay? Now that is to say that there are no adjustments that people have on the authority of the king, Nobody can call him into account. Well, that's the Pope. That's the papal curia. Nobody can question papal decrees. Nobody can question statements that are encyclical statements. Nobody can question the authority of councils and so on and so forth. You are required to believe. You are required to obey. And that's their basic idea of authority. So, God appoints me in a position And then I only answer to him as far as what I do and how I do that. My sense, my ideas, you're not to adjust it at all. Well, when the Roman Catholic Church was kicked out of England, nothing changed in the view of authority with respect to civil polity. Henry VIII was exactly the same thing. In fact, Henry was trained to be a bishop in the Roman Catholic Church. He only became king because his brother died. And he married his brother's wife, Catherine of Aragon. And then Henry was the king. But now he was trained and viewed himself as a great Roman Catholic philosopher and wrote treatises and attacked the Protestant reformers in writing as king of England. You know, viewed himself in this way. Same view of authority. Whatever I say goes. And if you cross me, it's off with your head. That's the basic idea. When James I comes to the throne, same view. The view took on a light in his writings, and again, viewed himself as a great philosopher, as a great king, and this view became known as the divine right of kings. The king rules by divine right. The king is only answerable to God, and that's it. You don't get to say anything. Now, the English just didn't lay down and die over the divine right of kings. There was warfare over it, sort of, you know, battles back and forth with Parliament and with the king. And James died, and his son Charles I came to the throne, and Charles was a tyrant but held the same view, and finally Parliament executed Charles I. And Cromwell, Oliver Cromwell, came into civil authority as the president, as the protectorate, and under the protectorate, the English had more civil war. And so, the end of this thing was the glorious revolution of 1688. So you have James I, Charles I, the protectorate, Charles II, James II, And then you have the Glorious Revolution, where they kick the stewards out and invite William and Mary in, in 1688, it's called the Glorious Revolution, it was bloodless, the king was exiled, James II exiled, and they invited someone else, I think Ashford, to come and reign in England. Well, at this point, the question is this, what do we replace the English monarchy with? And we've beheaded a king. And even though we invite later a king back, and now we're rid of the stewards entirely, and now we go, but what is the adjustment of civil society supposed to be? And the English are going to answer this question. Well, on the one hand, we have James Harrington, the Commonwealth of Oceania, which is this mystical, well, it's like a utopia, I guess. society in which here's how it's all adjusted. And on the other hand, we have John Locke in the first and second treatises on civil government. And without going into all the answers that were offered, Locke's answer captured the imagination of the English people. And I do have, I think, some time to read some of Locke. To understand political power right and derive it from its original, we must consider what state all men are naturally in, and that is a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other men. a state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another, there being nothing more evident than the creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature. use of the same faculties should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and maker of them all should by manifest declaration of his will set one above another and confer on him by an evident and clear appointment an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty. This equality of men by nature that judicious Hooker looks upon as so evident in itself and beyond all question that he makes it the foundation of that obligation to mutual love amongst men on which he builds the duties they owe one another. And from whence he drives the great maxims of justice and charity." And then he quotes Hooker. But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of license. No man in that state have an uncontrollable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself or so much as any creature in his possession. That all men may be restrained. I'm skipping ahead, but I'll give you an idea of what this is all about. All men may be restrained from invading others' rights and from doing hurt to one another and the law of nature should be observed. which will it, the peace and performation of all mankind, preservation of all mankind. The old English, the F's and S's, and it's a small print, so I'm not perfect tonight. We talk about the execution and it is, as it is in the state of nature, man has or comes by a power over another, but yet so absolute or arbitrary power to use a criminal when he has got him in his hands according to the passionate hearts or boundless extravagancy of his own will, but only to retribute unto him so far as calm reason and conscience dictate. You're not to take it out on him when you catch him. In other words, he's got his... He's got his basic situation of civil authority like this. We're all born into a state of nature. Nobody is superior to anybody else. We're all born in a state of equality. And in a state of nature, if something unjust is done to us, there's a law of nature, which is human reason, and that teaches us what to do to the criminal. And in a state of nature, we have the authority to punish the criminal. Now that's how God created all mankind into a state of nature. So rights are natural to us, and law is within us, in our minds, we reason to it. And we each individually have authority to punish transgressions of the law. Now, where civil society comes from is, well, that's not the best situation. You know, somebody's stronger than somebody else. You know, there are inefficiencies in the state of nature. So where civil government comes from is that we all get together and we agree by compact to give up certain functions that we have in ourselves originally to this group of, to this government over here. We divest ourselves of authority that is original with us in order to overcome the imperfections of the state of nature, which is a state of equality where we all do these things. That's where civil government comes from. Now you notice, you notice God's in the picture? Way in the background. And we're not reasoning from His Word. This is a philosophic system of thought. Remember, Al-Azhar saying, well, Spinoza came along and he cut out the cross from the covenantal system. We're going to divorce it from Revelation. We're going to divorce it from theology. So the idea is, we've got a system of thought in Locke, who was, well, he's an Armenian Christian, he's a Pelagian Christian, he's a heretic. I mean, he writes a book on, of knowledge that has man as a tabula rasa, blank slate, and everything about him is learned. He's not originally a sinner. So Locke is a heretic. And a philosopher. And a political philosopher. And his political philosophy came on the scene, his first and second treatises, I think second treatise is 1689, Glorious Revolution. Here's the way we ought to think about civil society now that we've rid ourselves of the divine right of kings theory of government. And this is what captured the day. And when the American Revolution was fought and we were arguing against Britain, the columnists were, believes in the social contract theory, they believe Locke's. So our columnists use that as the argument why we should, why we're justified in the things that we're doing. We have never given you authority to do these things, you see. Now I'm not saying that they were wrong on certain British constitutional issues, but the philosophy that undergirded their thinking was Locke's social contract theory. Baptized with few scripture texts. God's sort of in there, kind of in the background. Nobody's looking at the Word of God, the scripture, to find out what's true. Colonial clergy. I have three books of anthologies of colonial sermons. J. Wingate Thornton's The Pulpit of the American Revolution. Alice Baldwin's The New England Clergy and the American Revolution. Sandoz, Ellis Sandoz, and I forget the title of his work, but it's these anthologies of colonial sermons in the revolutionary period. Locke, Locke, Stock and Barrel. It's all Locke. That's what they're arguing. That's what they're preaching from the pulpit. They're preaching a philosophy of civil government that is based on, not the scripture, But human reason, remember the problem with the fall, satanic approach to life, where our reason is sufficient, we don't need the scripture. Locke gives lip service to scripture, to God, as being there, but God has created us all in a state of nature, this is the way we ought to think about civil government, and this explains the circumstances, and so our rights are derived from the condition that we were created in, and that's how we should think about it. Let me give you, in a minute or so, R.L. Dabney's critique of this. R.L. Dabney is a Southern Presbyterian theologian. He was adjutant to Stonewall Jackson in the Valley Campaign in 1862. One of the greatest theologians, I think the greatest American theologian, probably, that we've produced. brilliant and practical in his brilliance. That's what I love about him. This is in his Systematic Theology on the Doctrine of the Civil Magistrate. The duty of the Christian citizen to civil society is so extensive and important, and so many questions arise as to its limits in nature, the propriety of holding office, the powers exercised by the magistrate and company, that the teacher of the church should well be well grounded in the true doctrine of the nature of the commonwealth. Hence, our confession has very properly placed this doctrine in its 23rd chapter. It is emphatically a doctrine of scripture. Two opposing theories have prevailed among nominally Christian philosophers as to the origin and extent of the civil magistrate's powers. The one traces them to a supposed social contract. Men are to be at first apprehended, they say, as insulated individuals, separate human integers, all naturally equal and each by nature absolutely free, having a natural liberty to exercise his whole will as a lord of creation. But the experience of the exposure, inconveniences, and mutual violences of so many independent wills led them in time to be willing to surrender a part of their independence in order to secure the enjoyment of the rest of their rights. To do this, they are supposed to have conferred and entered into a compact with each other, binding themselves to each other, to submit to certain rules and restraints upon their natural rights and to obey certain ones selected to rule in order that the power thus delegated to their hands might be used for the protection of the remaining rights of all. Subsequent citizens entering the society by birth or immigration are supposed to have given an assent, express or implied, to this compact. The terms of it form organic law or constitution of the commonwealth. The reason why men are bound to obey the legitimate commands of the magistrate is that they have thus bargained with their fellow citizens to obey for the sake of mutual benefits. Now that is a purely autonomous view of civil society. God's out there. He created us all, but we're all equal. We all have natural rights. We're all whole numbers. Individual human integers. You know, an integer is a mathematical statement that says you're a whole number. That's what he's talking about. Whole number. I'm a whole number. Everything is in me. I'm all by myself. A whole number. I don't need anybody else or nothing I have depends on anybody else. I am me and that's it. And so now we look around, it's kind of hard to be an individual human integer among integers. We all have these wills and so let's get together and have an agreement of parties. Now, where is the covenant in this? Well, it's only between man and man. Are there any requirements of the vertical covenant in this thinking? No. And everybody, believer and non-believer, has agreed. And the sanction, the reason it's right for me to obey is because I've somehow agreed to this. Okay? Well, and then Locke spends a lot of time pleading tacit consent. He says, I've never agreed to this. I've never agreed to enter into this thing. Oh yeah, but you consent, without actually saying so tacitly, you consented to this and he spends the pages on tacit consent because how are you ever going to find this in reality? Many writers, as Blackstone, Erlemke, are too sensible not to see that this theory is false to the facts of the case, but they still urge that although individual men never existed in fact, The insulated state supposed and did not actually pass out of that state into a commonwealth state by formal social contract, yet such a contract must be assumed as implied and as offering the virtual source of political power and obligation. Blackstone, and he gives the page, but though society had not its formal beginning from any convention of individuals, actuated by their wants and their fears, yet it is the sense of their weakness and imperfection which keeps mankind together, that demonstrates the necessity of this union, and that therefore is the solid and natural foundation as well as the cement of civil society. To us it appears that if the compact never occurred in fact, but is only a suppositional one, a legal fiction, it is no basis for any theory and no source for practical rights and duties. The other theory may be called the Christian. It traces civil government to the will and providence of God, who from the first created man with social instincts and placed him under social relations. which men were few, the patriarchal, as they increased the commonwealth. It teaches that some form of social government is as original with man himself. It asks whence the obligation to obey the civil magistrate. It answers from the will of God, which is the source of all obligation. The fact that such obedience is greatly promotive of human convenience, well-being, and order confirms and illustrates the obligation, but it did not originate it. Hence civil government is an ordinance of God. Magistrates rule by his providence and by his command and are his agents or ministers. Obedience to them in the Lord is a religious duty and rebellion against them is not only injustice to our fellow men, but disobedience to God. This is the theory plainly asserted by Paul in Romans 13 1-7, 1 Peter 2 13-18. It may be illustrated by the parental state. Now, what are we saying? You understand the secularized version of the covenant model embraced by those early founding fathers? The secularized version takes God out of the picture, basically. And it says government is the contrivance of man. Man-created for man's purposes and ends, and man gets to designate the duty. To put it another way, government is of the people, by the people, for the people. And that's what Abraham Lincoln is affirming in his Gettysburg Address. Government has a human origin. Towers are adjusted by men for their purposes, human ends. Of the people comes from us, by the people we administer, we decide its constitution and origin, and for whatever ends, we purpose for it to accomplish. That's the battle lines in our day. And these battle lines are from And this is sketchy, but I'm giving you a lot. All at once, that's the battle lines since Philo the Jew. That's the battle lines since Jesus said, you know, don't be like the Gentiles. The Son must make you free. If the Son makes you free, you'll be free indeed. All we're doing is saying, look, we've got to carry forward the implications of regeneration. We're going to reject the fallen system of Satan in the garden, and we're going to carry this forward in our thinking. And that thinking, if we turn to the issue of civil polity, we have to apply the principles of the true religion, the true Christianity that are evidenced in Genesis 1 and 2, as opposed to the principles of the serpent at the fall. And what we have in our history, our political history, post-founding fathers gives the fallen principles. John Locke, the British philosopher, a social contract theory of government, a theory of government that removes God out of the picture, that tries to maintain, again, in a mixed marriage, right? You marry a pagan girl and you're saying, yeah, but God requires this. Well, I don't care about that. tries to maintain a constitutional relationship with unbelievers. Now, how are you going to maintain? Here's a law. You sit down and make an agreement with an unbeliever, and then you expect the unbeliever to be diligent and careful in carrying out the terms of that? When he's a hater of God? When he's a tyrant by nature? When he loves his own pleasure and his own perks? from the office and all, we're trying to make the Constitution of the United States work on a pending basis as the only covenant involved in the relationship. And the answer is we have to be believers in covenant with God. And the people we're related to have to be in covenant with God to make this thing stick. If we only have one, you know, just between the people and the rulers, forget it. It's never going to happen. It's never going to stick. We've got to be in a relationship with God and the rulers have to be in a relationship with God. The triangular aspect of this covenantal relation in order to make anything work out of this. Now, again, this is sketchy. I've got a lot more material, but we're an hour and 51 minutes in, so let's question and talk and, you know, we'll try to I'll try to make clear what I've skipped over or haven't made clear. The political debate in our society has to be, thus saith the Lord. And we have the basis upon which to make this claim. After all, even the Declaration of Independence gives us some, you know, I mean, we hold these truths to be self-evident. All men are created equal. Now, we can stop right there and understand that the teaching of evolution in American schools is treason against our founding principles. If you're teaching evolution, you're committing treason to the political philosophy of freedom. If you want evolution, you're not going to have freedom because freedom is only founded upon a relationship to God that we recognize with respect to civil government. Where civil government recognizes we're the people of God and respects what God has given us and has no authority to take that from us. The rights are God-given. They're not government-granted until you come to the post-Civil War. And then no state may abridge the rights or privileges of a citizen of the United States. And that's the 14th Amendment. That's the state saying, we define the rights. We define. We call them privileges. We'll let you do this if we decide to let you do this. It's a privilege. as opposed to a God-given right that man cannot alienate. You can't give it away, you can't give it away for yourself or your posterity, because God holds you responsible for the exercise of these things. And so you see, you've got a shifting foundation. But I'm just pointing out, evolutionary teaching is treason against liberty. And we can say that. You can say, look, the political structure of our nation was based upon the Word of God. and the relationship of civil magistrates, governors, to the governed was read and understood by the scripture. Now if you deny that, you deny the basis for liberty and you will have a slave society on the outside. So you don't like me telling you that this is the law, that this is what's required? It's too bad. You're committing treason against liberty in this country. And so when we deal with that in the debate in our society, that's what we have to press. Not, I think, I feel. Well, I think it should be this. Well, I don't feel like. No, thus saith the Lord. The Lord says this. The Lord has revealed this. It's very clear. Now, again, you may not want to have a free society. You may say, like the slave in Scripture, look, I love my master's house. bore my ear through with an awl, and I'll be a slave the rest of my life. You may want that, but I don't want that, and I'm not voting for that in my civil society. So you don't have my consent to this, and what I'm doing is screaming from the house cops that you people are carrying yourself into bondage as you try to reason and create a society on the basis of human reason. If you're reasoning, your reasoning is false. We've got to go to the Word of God. That's the standard. That tells us how to adjust all the relationships. It answers all the questions we have in our society. So again, the outworking of this is that we have reference to God in our political thinking, and we're not afraid to tell people that on the street. And I just tried to illustrate how that was the case once upon a time, and we've departed from that as a Christian church. and bought this mess of pottage about social contracts and states of nature without reference to God. Yeah, I mean, we're just applying the issue, the dichotomy from Genesis 1 and 2 and Satan's temptation taking that package and applying it to civil government. You can apply it in other places as well. Church government, you can apply it to. Before you said, for the people, what did you say before that? That was the principle underlying Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Well, it's a shift from the idea that government, civil government is the creation of God. We should say it this way. When Cain slew Abel, no one was authorized to execute Cain. God put a mark on Cain saying, look, justice is going to be a vigilante operation. He that findeth me will slay me. And therefore God put a mark on Cain. unless anybody finding him should slay him. Now, that's as much as saying that there was no one at that time authorized to put Cain to death. Not until Genesis 9 did God authorize, whoso shedeth man's blood by man shall his blood be shed. Whether it's beast or man, you know, and he instituted the avenger of blood in Genesis 9. to punish the murderer. And the point is, the power to punish murder is not original with man. And that in itself disproves the idea of the state of nature. It's totally contrary to Scripture. To say, all authority is original with me. That's like man saying, in creation all power is given to me. You know, in earth at least. No, it's not. You don't have the power unless God gives you the power. That's true of the civil government. You don't have all the power originally with you that you can delegate to the civil government as a social contract. You don't. If you remember in, well, there's several of these situations, but you remember the business with Elvad and Nedad prophesying in the camp, you know? And so they're going to choose elders. in this case, and I forget whether they're church or state at this point, but Moses tells them, you go pick them and you bring them to me. And that is, I'll ordain them, you see. Now that's again as much as saying that the individual, even the corporate body, does not have the power of ordination for these elders. They must be legitimatized by some act of God. And in this case, God's representative, Moses, was the legitimatizer of their authority. And they were to be selected by the people, but brought to Moses so that their authority, they would be invested by him with authority. And once again, you know, the people just don't go out and pick them. Okay, we pick the elders and we ordain them. No, no. You bring them to the one who is a representative of God. That applies to civil society. God has graciously given us the opportunity to select men to represent us, to govern us, and so on and so forth. But their authority does not come from the people that select them. It comes from God. And when they're brought into authority, there is a recognition that I come before God to do this authority. And they're charged in various situations that that's exactly the case. You know, the colonial clergy also preached election sermons. They preached to the people, right? You're about to go to the polls. Now, here are the biblical requirements for choosing your representatives. Now, I've preached election sermons before. you know, on that basis. You know, that's a good idea. We're setting before the people who are involved in constituting authority. What is your responsibility in making this election? Who must you vote for biblically? And what are the biblical requirements? And so, again, that's the same idea. It is the application of God's Word to the questions of state, even in the constituting of authority. And you've got to answer to the Word of God in the way you constitute authority. So whether you're one that's going to be in authority, you've got to appear before God and you get read the charges. And it will be when he sits upon the throne of his kingdom that he writes him a copy of this law in a book that is before the priests of Levites. That he may learn to meditate therein all the days of his life. And so when a guy comes in and authority is king, he gets the copy of the law, and he starts writing in his own hand, here's what it says. I'm writing it down. I'm learning. That was God's provision for this king that was going to be brought into the land. You're constituting authority. You're going to listen to what God says about this authority. And that's simply recognizing he's the source of it. The job that I have to do is related to Him. That's the application of the metaphysical reality of the two-circle universe. It's regulated. The only way that that can really be worked out, reality, has to start with the people who are already in contact with God. That's right. Because we only want to submit it to God. We only want to submit it to His authority. Because you can't necessarily expect a pagan to submit that. We don't recognize God to be God. But we have the position to do that in this country because our institutions presuppose that metaphysical reality that God is, and our history is that. So we've got the institutions, we've got the history, we can make the argument. But the main legality, though, you've got to have. That's right. I guess what I'm saying, evangelism, you've got to know that and get the church on board as well. The way you're talking right now isn't necessarily the way the majority of those who are professing believers are thinking. That's right. Absolutely. They're thinking in a social contract. Yeah, they're thinking in a social contract theory because they bought the lie, the satanic lie that's been fed down through history. And they're thinking this is right. Yeah. They're thinking it's right. I mean, it's right to worship any God, any way that you want to. That's the Christian in our society. That's what he thinks. God in Scripture commands men to be put to death for worshiping false gods. OK, Baal worshiped, you know, Jehu in Israel, kind of a fine guy, you know. You know, GQ in Israel, they had the big sacrifice to Baal. It was all the priests of Baal, you know, and all the worshippers of Baal, and let none escape, you know. Well, I'm not saying that we autonomously should do that thing. What I am saying is, if we look at script, it doesn't matter. If you want slavery, it doesn't matter. That's the first thing I say to them. If you want to live in slavery, it doesn't matter. Just ignore what I'm saying. But if you want to live in a free country, if you value what you think you have, When we say the word freedom, then I'm telling you the only way that you can have it, the only freedom is in Jesus Christ. And it is the duty of the nation as a people to covenant with God. That is to confess Christianity as the only true religion. and to confess before God that we call upon you to be our God, we take you for ours, we will serve you, enter into covenant with us, and be our God and let us be your people. It's the duty of every nation to do that. So I'm not saying that we elect some Christian guy and all this Because I'm going to be accused of that. You're not, but I'm going to be accused. The natural outworking of any nation that becomes majority Christian would be to look to God for what you would think that would be natural outworking. I was just thinking, I don't think Marvin Reagan made a quote he said, let me make sure I get this right, he said basically talking about our relationship to God. He said, I'm not necessarily saying God is on our side, but we must ask ourself, are we on God's side? And I guess the reason I'm saying that is, in a sense, we're making covenant with God, but it's not necessarily that God's making the same kind of covenant with us that He did with Israel. But we're just saying, look, we recognize the authority of what you can put in place for us to be able to be free. Right. That's right. Just like those fundamental orders, where people are gathered, the word of God requires that, you know, they're looking to God. They're confessing the truth. They're confessing the God of Scripture to be the true God and that their duties are related to his revelation. And we had any president, you think, in the United States in history that actually got this or understood the application? In the constitutional period? I don't think so. Now, what I didn't get a chance to develop is that at Cromwell, the church rejected the national covenant. See, so our problem, this rejection of the covenantal structure that we're talking about, the triangular. See, there was a national covenant that was made. Scotland had a reformation in 1560. And the Scottish reformation became the pattern that England sought to follow. So when Parliament called of the long parliament in 16, whatever it was, 42, 43, or whatever, there was a covenant signed between Scotland and England that the English church was going to be reformed after the pattern of the Scottish church. And that was called the Solemn League and Covenant. Well, Cromwell, as an independent, wanted to derail that because he saw it was going to go Presbyterian. And he, basically what he did is he sent the army to the Parliament building and turned aside the Presbyterians in assembly. And that's called the Rump Parliament, okay. And with the Rump Parliament, now it was a stacked Parliament, they went ahead and executed the king, they went ahead and did these other things. that they did, and he derailed the covenanted Reformation. So this was a covenant between two nations, England and Scotland, that were going to reform the English Church after the pattern of the Scottish Church, which is reasons from Scripture. The Westminster Confession of Faith, 1647, was ratified by the Scottish Church. Was ratified, but rejected then by the English Church. and they kept 39 articles. And then the English kings maneuvered and overthrew the Scottish church. So what you have in the Reformation is the rejection of the covenantal position, the national covenant. You have it as a rejection of England, the national, rejection of the national covenant by England under Cromwell. Cromwell is the pluralist. And this present darkness is the end result of Cromwell's pluralism, working 400 years working this out, you know, now in our day. And so we've got to say, look, it's the duty of nations to comment before God. That's why we look to the Westminster Confession as a pivotal point. where something was going in the right direction before this pluralism and independence came. And so the men got together, they put a good solid thing, they had a good mindset. And a lot of the early colonists, William Penn, understood that. He's reading from that. So it's a good, it's confessional, because we have to confess. And the government has to be Christian, confessional, covenant. Those are the things that he's going to be bringing us. It's a three-way covenant. And so does the church. So that's why we emphasize confession and covenant. And we live in a day or two, you know. I mean, I even know within our foundation structure, You know, it's hugely invading when we go to any of our conferences and things of that nature. Like, even the Manifestation of Messages, we call it, you know, a statement of faith. We want to stay away from calling it a confession, right? Because then we're bound to that confession. So, I mean, yeah, I mean, I see exactly what you're saying, but the fight is on so many more fronts than even just the... Yeah, this is not the only, because we're going to develop the other two areas and then structural areas if we get to Can I pray? It looks like we're ready to go. Let me pray. Father, we pray that as these things have been set before us, you would open our eyes and understand that we truly might understand the problems that our nation faces. And again, they come back to the errors of the Christian church in adopting non-Christian philosophies and principles and baptizing them and thinking that they're serving you by them. We pray that we would be clear on this, that it would prick our understanding, and that we would be bold to speak the truth to the society in which we live. Help us, we pray, in Jesus' name. Amen.