Reading from Joshua chapter 8, and we're going to be finishing off the chapter today, Lord willing. Joshua 8, beginning at verse 30. Now Joshua built an altar to the Lord God of Israel in Mount Ebal, as Moses, the servant of the Lord, had commanded the children of Israel, as it is written in the book of the Law of Moses, an altar of whole stones over which no man has wielded an iron tool. and they offered on it burnt offerings to the Lord and sacrificed peace offerings. And there, in the presence of the children of Israel, he wrote on the stones a copy of the Law of Moses, which he had written. Then all Israel, with their elders and officers and judges, stood on either side of the ark before the priest, The Levites, who bore the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord, the stranger as well as he who was born among them, half of them were in front of Mount Gerizim and half of them in front of Mount Ebal, as Moses, the servant of the Lord, had commanded before, that they should bless the people of Israel. And afterward, he read all the words of the law, the blessings and the cursings according to all that is written in the book of the law. There was not a word of all that Moses had commanded, which Joshua did not read before all the assembly of Israel, with the women, the little ones, and the strangers who were living among them. And Father, we acknowledge this to be your Word, and we want to tremble at your Word, and reverence it, and grow through it, and find joy in it as well, and security and stability. And I just pray that you would bless this people with increased sanctification as a result of going through this passage of your Holy Scripture. In Jesus' name, amen. Well, if you compare the list of grievances that the founding fathers of America wrote against King George, and you were to compare it to a much longer list of grievances that we could have against every branch of government today, I think you would begin to realize that our country really is at a crossroads. There is not a better time to begin looking at the beauty of biblical civics than today. Hardly a week goes by where there is not yet another outrage against God. against the people, against the Constitution. Even liberal Christians are concerned that we have a government that really has indeed gotten out of hand. And so what's happening is people are writing books to try to counteract it. There's secular books that are trying to remedy this problem. There's a host of Christian books that have been written claiming to be a Christian. The problem is that these so-called Christian books reject, explicitly reject, God's blueprints as given in the Bible. They opt for tradition, or natural law, or the author's love, or some older system. And if they do quote scripture, many times they quote it out of context. They'll quote a scripture that's given to an individual, or to a family, or to the church, and they apply it to the state. And that's mixing jurisdictions, OK? So watch out for books that claim to be Christian civics but reject the law of Moses. That is a misuse of the name of Christ. There are actually books advocating for Christian socialism. I'm not kidding. Evangelical books advocating for Christian socialism. The only civics Jesus is interested in is the one that he gave in the Holy Scriptures. He is not a socialist. He is not an anarchist. He's not anything in between. And even Christian nationalism hasn't fared much better. It is all over the map, and I will say that Torba and Nisker's book is actually fairly good. But Stephen Wolf's book, Christian Nationalism, is a collectivist recipe for Christian tyranny. Just read it, and I think you will agree. They've got the state, it's a huge state that they're advocating for. It's horrible. So there's a pretty wide spectrum of people who claim to be Christian nationalists. And because of all of the controversy that's been swirling around what it takes to be a Christian nation, I have parked a little bit longer on these six verses than I ordinarily would. But my goal is to give enough presuppositions that you can very easily recognize the counterfeit lies that are out there and the ideas. Obviously, there are other passages that go much more in-depth than this one, but at least this passage gives the basic contours of a Christian nation. Now two weeks ago we did a deep dive into what it means to have the gospel of Jesus Christ transforming every level of culture and for God's grace to impact everything we do. Last week we looked at the agents of a Christian nation, and we especially focused on the four covenanting units of self-government, family government, church government, and the various branches of civil government. And today we're going to finish off by looking at a collage, and it really is a collage, it's not necessarily grouped in any order of importance, but a collage of the remaining essentials of a Christian civilization. And the first essential element for any nation to truly be a Christian nation is that every level of society must consciously see itself as being in covenant with God. I think that's really important, the covenant of God, especially the state. Many times people leave that out. Everyone agrees that the nation of Israel was covenanting with God at this location, but it wasn't just the state that was doing so, it was the whole nation. And by the way, that was the way it was with some of the pagan nations like Nineveh. Everyone in that nation repented of their own sins, turned from their sins, submitted to Yehovah. So let's start asking by what is involved in a national covenant? was our nation in covenant with God. Ray Sutton summed up the five elements of covenant with the Greek word for God, theos, and I think it's actually a pretty nice summary. The T of theos stands for transcendence. Gary North says transcendence is just a big, highfalutin word that means who's in charge of this joint, is the way he words it. And here it's clearly God. The word Lord in verses 30, 31, and 33 is the covenant name Yehoah, and Yehoah is declared to be the God of Israel. There is no ambiguity. It's not some generic God as you may conceive of him, but Yehoah, God of the Bible. And down through history, many nations have covenanted with God in a similar way to what happened in Joshua chapter 8. Various kings of Judah did so, but so did Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon in Daniel chapter 4. You can read that for yourself. It's covenantal language. So did Darius the Median king in Daniel chapter 6. So did the king of Nineveh in You know, in the book of Jonah, some books spout the ridiculous idea that only Israel was ever in covenant with God, and so we cannot be in covenant, that's just for Israel. No, that's nonsense, a very strange idea. Now granted, each of the various national covenants in the Bible were eventually broken because if nations do not keep pressing into the Lord, you mentioned abiding in the Lord, nations have to abide in the Lord as well, they tend to slide away from the Lord within a few generations. And that is what has happened to the Christian nations known as the 13 colonies of America. They explicitly covenanted with the God of the Bible, and they submitted themselves to him unreservedly. There is some glorious history back there, and I read you some examples last week. But gradually, their constitutions morphed. And I'll just use one state as an example, North Carolina. In 1663, it established the Church of England as being the official civic religion of that state. 113 years later, in 1776, it changed the Constitution slightly to disestablish the Anglican Church, but went on to establish generic Protestantism as the official religion all the way up to Well, that means until 1835, North Carolina absolutely prohibited Jews, Muslims, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, or anyone other than an Orthodox, had to be an Orthodox Protestant, not a liberal, from holding any public office. Let me read you the exact wording. that no person who shall deny the being of God or the truth of the Protestant religion or the divine authority either of the Old or New Testaments or who shall hold religious principles incompatible with the freedom and safety of the state shall be capable of holding any office or place of trust or profit in the civil department within the state. This provision remained in force from 1776 to 1835. So you can see there's a huge long history of this state being a Christian state. In 1835, the word Protestant was amended to Christian, which opened the way to allowing Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox to be able to be in civic office. In 1876, the establishment of Christianity was replaced with an establishment of belief in God. And thus, from 1876 to the present, it forbids, and let me quote from the current Constitution, it forbids any person who shall deny the being of Almighty God from holding office. and you can look at their wording on their Constitution. Even this looser wording is a kind of establishment, but it's so loose, the only people that it actually prohibits from serving are atheists and agnostics. And so the point is that North Carolina over, you know, close to 200 years, over a period of time, it began to gradually dilute the tea of transcendence. The Lord of North Carolina is not a real Lord anymore. I would say the Lord of North Carolina that they have put in there obviously doesn't care what kinds of things happen in that state. They have broken covenant with the true Lord as the rest of our nation has. And the result has been predictable. Every vile thing has been exalted in the state of North Carolina. It just goes with the territory. You cannot reject the Bible and be able to consistently resist perversion. It's just impossible. You can't. There is no logic to such a rejection. Covenanting with the God of the Bible should be explicit. And so that brings up the question, was America as a whole ever truly in covenant with God? Some people say no, and I will admit that not all five points of this covenant were solidly in place. This point might have been, our money still says in God we trust, and the Pledge of Allegiance still says one nation under God. And even our Constitution's last paragraph calls Jesus the Lord of our nation by dating it in the year of our Lord, our Lord, right? But all of this is way, way less explicit than the Bible calls any state to affirm his lordship. Some of our founding fathers actually spoke out of both sides of their mouth right from the get-go. John Adams is one example. When he was talking to American citizens, he would refer to this as being a Christian nation and even a Calvinistic nation through and through. But when he signed the Treaty of Tripoli with the Muslims, that treaty, which granted was not written by him, but he signed it, it was written by Joel Barlow, it says, as the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion, unquote. And that was unanimously ratified on June 7, 1797 by Congress. So really, there's evidence on both sides. Right from the get-go, we were in trouble. But I do lean in the direction of saying that this first point was at least in some way in place early on. The Supreme Court, in the case of the Holy Trinity, when you read through that court document, they just give massive amounts of evidence that this has always been a Christian nation, and every branch of government before and afterwards has said so. So I will grant them this first point. The H in theos refers to hierarchy, and it answers the question, to whom do I report? And as we saw last week, it really depends on which government you're focusing on. Self-government reports directly to God without any intermediaries on some issues. But it reports to the patriarch of the family on other issues, and through that patriarch to the Lord. Within the church, there's God, there's the elders, the heads of households, there's the members of families. The same is true within the state. It never leaves out the heads of households. And we looked at, in detail, at those agents of Christian civilization today, last week. So I'm not gonna look at it today, but they are essential to a national covenant. I do want to briefly comment on our American Constitution because people have had questions about that. America really was a unique experiment where the hierarchy was different than in England. Granted, this has been interpreted different ways. I'm not going to be dogmatic on this, but the original signers of the Constitution saw an accountability that the federal government had to the states and vice versa. And even the most centralist of the signers of the Constitution, Gouverneur Morris, he clearly affirmed the right of states to secede from the Union if the federal government broke the covenant. So he actually suggested it one time. The last paragraph of the Constitution certainly supports their interpretation, since it states that the powers of the federal government listed in the Constitution are granted by the states in unanimous consent of the states. So it would seem that that would make the Christianity of each state define the God that was over the nation as a whole. But again, it's been hotly debated, and I wish that the H of Thoth had been more explicit, just like it was in the states. The E of theos deals with ethics or the rules that govern those in covenant. And if you look at verses 31, 32, 34, and 35, it is clearly stated to be the written law of God as given by Moses, okay? Now, sadly, our Declaration of Independence, in trying to rope in as many supporters as possible, opted to submit to the laws of nature and of nature's God. And granted, some people interpret the and in there to say, well, he's referring to natural law and biblical laws being one and the same, which we would say, well, if that's the case, that would be true. But they had no problem with biblical law, and one illustration of that is that they accepted the biblical definition of sexual crimes rather than the Greek definition of sexual crimes that would be in their natural law. And anyway, it's, you know, the Greek natural law did not rule out pederasty, bestiality, homosexuality, any of those kinds of things, and yet it was a crime in early America. But it was very poorly written as a propaganda piece, and later generations exploited that, weakened America's position on ethics. By failing to explicitly affirm written biblical law, I think our nation weakened its national covenant hugely. I'll sort of give America credit for this point, sort of, sort of. Not very well, but the states definitely did. The O in theos stands for the oath before God that calls down blessings or cursings for keeping or breaking the covenant. Now, obviously, verses 33 to 34, are calling down the curses and the blessings of Deuteronomy 27 through 28 to be upon them. And the early constitutions of the states had this to some degree, but the federal government did not, other than the oath of office that presidents took, and traditionally, you know, but it was optional. They did it placing their hand upon an open Bible and saying, so help me God, when they took their oath of office. But it was very deficient. The S of Thaos stands for covenant succession, answers the question, does this outfit have a future? Well, the law referred to, which was the book of Deuteronomy, told them they had a bright future if they would cling to God, and they had a very scary future if they would not refer to God or cling to him. And other scriptures apply this to any nation. Proverbs 1434 says, righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people. And I believe that America, despite our deficiencies, was prospered by the Lord more than most other nations because, you know, for the most part, it was a Christian population anyway. But there's no nation that's exempt from covenant curses when it rebels against God. In Jeremiah, God says three times, shall I not avenge myself on such a nation as this? And on the other hand, lest you give up on America, let me quote Jeremiah 18, seven through eight. It says, the instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom to pluck up, to pull down, to destroy it, if that nation against whom I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I thought to bring upon it. He's talking about any Gentile nation. So that gives hope. Our nation has broken covenant with God, but if it repents, if it produces the fruits of repentance, God will restore it. But when we re-covenant with God, should there be a revival that God sends in America, I would say, let's push for having strong five points of the covenant, you know, all points of that theos. Okay, second thing that characterizes a truly Christian nation is that civil leaders deflect worship and devotion to God, not to the state. Okay, statism does the exact opposite. But look at verse 30. This verse says, Now Joshua built an altar to the Lord God of Israel in Mount Ebal. He built it to the Lord, not to himself. And in verse 33, they are congregating around the throne of God, the Ark of the Covenant, making him central, devoting their allegiance to Yehovah God. In contrast, the demonic religion of communism recognizes no god higher than the state and demands unreserved devotion to the state. Mao Zedong sought to destroy loyalty to even the nuclear family. He certainly opposed loyalty to church or any other institution. He demanded worship of and devotion to the state. He wanted no competitors. In 1961, Carl Jung, who was no paragon of virtue himself, but he said this of communism, The state takes the place of God. That is why, seen from this angle, the socialist dictatorships are religions and state slavery is a form of worship. The policy of the state is exalted to a creed, the leader or party boss becomes a demigod beyond good and evil, and his votaries are honored as heroes, martyrs, apostles, missionaries. There is only one truth and besides it no other it is sacrosanct and above criticism Anyone who thinks differently is a heretic and we're getting to that place in western civilization If you question the kovat lockdowns not too long ago You were considered their version of a heretic and worse up in canada They seized the bank accounts of those peaceful truckers, you know who protested honking their horns um, and Rush Dooney pointed out that when God is rejected as Lord, the state automatically takes the highest place in a person's life, automatically. And it begins to act as if it is the highest power like God. As we mentioned last week, the state begins to take on attributes of omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, grace, making its own whole definition of holiness. When you see unthinking loyalty to a church, Unthinking loyalty to a party, a candidate, a state or a country, watch out. True Christian leaders will always deflect loyalty and devotion to God alone. It's an unhealthy country that fails to do so. Okay, the next essential in this collage of ideas that we're wrapping up with is that civil leaders must operate with an open sunshine policy and with written guidelines that can be known by all. Without such a policy, you have no accountability and tyranny automatically begins to happen. Verse 32 says literally, and there before the face of the children of Israel, so it's public, before the face of the children of Israel, he wrote on the stones a copy of the law of Moses, which he had written. And again in verse 34, we see a written law code that anyone could read. You didn't have to guess at what the laws were. In contrast, so many modern governments operate secretly behind closed doors. Who knows what plans are being concocted by world leaders at the World Economic Summit? Okay, little bits and pieces of it have been exposed, but most of the decisions these world leaders are making for us are shrouded in secrecy. There's a recent expose of this push toward a one world government with communism at its core. It's called a Plandemic Three, The Great Awakening. And I think it's actually a very helpful documentary that illustrates this power. Well, America started with an open sunshine policy. For the most part, you could count on the government following the Constitution, and when it did not, there was immediate pushback, very clear pushback. Were there some conspiracies right from the beginning? Yeah, there were, and I'll just show my hand and the early debates. I would have been one of the anti-Federalists in my opposition to what the Federalists were secretly trying to do. They smelled a rat. But anyway, for the most part, I think they operated in the open. But over time, people began to not care, and now we've come to the place where almost every page of my copy of the Constitution is being violated, starting with Article I, Section 1, which has just completely been thrown out the door. What in the world has happened to article 1 section 8 last paragraph which states? Unambiguously that Congress has no powers to do anything than the specified powers that have been listed in the previous paragraphs It's ignored whatever happened to article 1 section 10 Which says no state shall make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts It's ignored First sentence of Article 2, Section 1, has been violated by presidents left and right. If the written covenant of America can be ignored and added to, you never know what the various branches of government are going to do. And at the World Economic Summit, I heard them saying, in one of their speeches, that in order to solve the global problems, there needed to be a global reset of all politics in every nation and of all economies in every nation and every country. And almost verbatim, this reset rhetoric has been repeated by Biden, Trudeau, up in Canada and numerous other heads of states, the goal is a one world government with one economy, one system of politics, and an unhindered ability to implement its plan to perfect man. And they mean perfect man on every level, even genetically. They're talking about how do we introduce new genes into the population to perfect man. As Yuval Harari worded it at the summit, science is replacing evolution by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design. Do not think intelligent design by some God above the cloud, but our intelligent design. Now, of course, because most of their meetings are secret, we have no idea what that design is, you know, until it gets unveiled in all of its glory some day down the road. But no, God had a better plan, an open sunshine policy where everything is written out so that no citizen is in the dark. Sin, deception, and conspiracy hides. God's representatives should always be open book. Now, Villex, a little piece in this collage of remaining pieces is also very opposed to the World Economic Summit. It says, both anarchism and collectivism are rejected by God in favor of the biblical interrelationships, mutual responsibilities, and clearly defined authority structures of God's covenantal units of individual, family, church, and state, verses 30 through 35. And I would just refer you to last week's sermon to see how clearly God defined the structures that make for maximum liberty and maximum capacity for dominion. The individual is not swallowed up by the other three governments. I think it's just a beautiful balance. Now, of course, this can only be achieved by God's grace, which is the next essential of a true Christian civilization. It cannot be called a Christian nation if the gospel is not at the foundation of that nation, period. Surprisingly, Christian two-kingdom advocates leave the gospel out of civics, okay? They say that the gospel of grace only applies to invisible things. That is absolutely false. And let me illustrate with four words that are used to define the gospel. Now, the Bible applies the word redemption to politics in Exodus 6-6, to the land in Leviticus 25, to a person's house and animals, Leviticus 27, to our dead bodies being redeemed out of the ground in various scriptures that I won't give to you right here. I've got listed here. And in Ephesians 1-7-10, redemption is applied to everything in heaven and earth. Okay, I think redemption is a pretty core part of the gospel. If you look up the word grace, you will see that it too is applied to everything we do and everything we have. Same is true of the word gospel. Colossians 1 applies it to everything in heaven and earth. And likewise, Colossians 1 applies the word reconciliation to all things that have been created in heaven and on earth. So to me, it is no wonder that down through history, any people who have had this radical two kingdom approach have really not been able to accomplish much for Christ. Christian, they call it Christian nationalism, whatever. They've jettisoned the power of the gospel of grace from what they do in politics. But Christian politicians need God's grace to oppose the demonic in our capitals. They will never succeed against the demonic without the gospel. They need God's grace to have courage to stand for truth. But most importantly, Evangelism has to always pave the way for a Christian civilization. That's what the Great Commission is all about. We preach the gospel, and then as nations become Christian, we disciple them in how to live in everything as a Christian nation. We cannot impose Christianity from the top down. We'll have to evangelize a disciple from the bottom up. Now, God can. I guess he has on occasion brought the gospel from the top down, but normally it's the slower bottom-up approach. Now, during times when Israel apostatized, they also threw off God's law, and they also lost the liberties of God's law. Why? Because they lost the gospel. When they came back to God, they came back to God via the gospel, and once they're at peace with God, then the law's no longer producing cursings, it's producing blessings in that nation. But two weeks ago, I delved much more fully into the practical implications of God's gospel of grace. True liberty can only be achieved as more and more people sincerely believe the gospel. So I think evangelism is absolutely essential. But what do individuals do once they're saved? They begin seeing their lives becoming more and more conformed to God's blueprints as God's grace transforms them. Verse 32 says, and there in the presence of the children of Israel, he wrote on the stones a copy of the law of Moses which he had written. And we looked at this earlier under the five points of the covenant. But the point is God's grace empowers us to keep God's law, enables us to do so with joy. And I should say that the early states, if you read their legal codes, which I have, A lot of times he even had footnote references from the Bible. I mean, they did uphold biblical law. Our Constitution only tangentially did so. Now it's true, Justice Story and Associate Justice Brewer have written extensively on why it's a Christian nation. And they said, they all assumed that biblical law was at its foundation. Assumption's not enough. It needs to be explicit. When revival comes, we'll have the opportunity to make it explicit. The next part of this collage has already been hinted at, so I'll be brief, but it says that every level of society must be centered around God's lordship, not the lordship of any other. God declares that He alone is sovereign when He established His throne, which is the Ark of the Covenant, in the midst of Israel. No other government is sovereign. There is no sovereign individual. I keep running across people who say, I'm a sovereign individual. I've seceded from the United States of America. I don't answer to anybody. No, in the Bible, there is no sovereign individual. There's no sovereign patriarch. There's no sovereign pastor. There's no sovereign anything except for God. And Romans 13 declares, the state must be God's servant doing God's will for the nation's good. So in verse 33, the Ark of the Covenant was in the valley, surrounded on all sides by the people, and I think it cannot be more obvious that their Lord was in their midst. In contrast, when Christ and His Word have been explicitly rejected from the classrooms, the courts, and various branches of civil government, you know we're no longer a Christian nation. We can't pretend to be. The next part of the collage is a very important one. It states that God alone defines what is cursed, disgraceful, or hateful, which is the meaning of the Hebrew word kilala in verse 34. Okay? Let's consider what it means for God to consider something hateful and for demon-possessed individuals to consider the exact opposite to be hateful. We are living in a culture where pro-lifers are beat up, are cursed, considered hateful and disgusting, even though pro-lifers are the ones who are doing the loving thing. They're rescuing the perishing, right? Putting their lives out there. They're sacrificing. Theonomy is considered disgraceful, even though God says he loves his law. If you defend your Second Amendment rights, you are sometimes called a terrorist. Even though you're agreeing with the Constitution, you're agreeing with the Bible. Calling sodomy a sin is considered hate speech. You've probably, by now, run across the phenomenon where they're even saying you're a racist if you say that mathematics is always true. It's really weird. Just look it up on the web, you'll see a bunch. I'll just be brief here. A Brooklyn college professor of math education, Lori Rubel, argued on Twitter that the mathematical equation 2 plus 2 equals 4, quote, reeks of white supremacist patriarchy. I don't know. Rubel's tweet was retweeted, promoted, defended by several academics at universities and colleges around the country. Now, it's not just our country. The Ontario Mathematics Coordinators Association says that 2 plus 2 equals 4 is no longer objectively true because instead of being a mathematically proven equation, it is a white supremacist dog whistle, whatever that means. Anyway, it's a very interesting accusation that has arisen. Why I find it interesting is it could be taken right out of the pages of George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984. He says, eventually they're going to say this, right? Well, they are. They're saying exactly this. And the list of things that violate community standards of speech or that constitute hate speech is growing all the time, so much so that one editor said, hey, if everything's becoming hate speech, then nothing is hate speech. There are no distinctions. So definitions, what makes your idea of what is hateful right and mine wrong? And the point is, it is inevitable, and Rashtuni says this, it is inevitable that a society will consider some things to be cursed, Disgraceful or hateful, again, the meaning of that word in verse 34, the Kilala word. God considers certain things cursed and hateful, and Satan considers the exact opposite to be cursed and hateful. So don't be surprised at the vitriol of demon-possessed LGBTQ protesters at a rally, and don't be surprised if they take it out on you. Not believing in God, they cannot leave judgment to God, and they feel like they've gotta take things into their own hands and beat you up over it, right? Express their disgust to you. Since we believe God is the one who does the cursing, all we have to do is to come into agreement with the sovereign Lord in our prayers and say, Lord, you curse them. We don't have to do anything ourselves. And yet they don't believe in God, unless their God is the state, and they call upon the state to punish it, but normally they feel like they have to take things into their own hands. But what were these curses and blessings that he refers to? Verse 33 says, half of them were in front of Mount Gerizim, half of them in front of Mount Ebal, as Moses, the servant of the Lord, had commanded before. So what was it that Moses commanded them to read in Deuteronomy 27 through 28? I want to take a sneak peek at what God considers Kelilah. or disgusting, hateful, under His curse. These will show how far we have drifted from our early American roots. I'm not going to read all of it, but you can see what an indictment each of these curses are to modern America. Deuteronomy 27, 14 and following say, And the Lord shall speak with a loud voice and say to all the men of Israel, Curse it is the one who makes a carved or molded image, an abomination to the Lord, the work of the hands of the craftsman and sets it up in secret. And all the people shall answer and say, Amen. This means that blasphemy and public idolatry must be illegal, okay? And people throw up their hands in shock and they say, you can't, you can't make blasphemy a crime. But blasphemy laws are inescapable and inevitable. If God's definition of blasphemy is rejected, there will automatically be an alternative definition of blasphemy. You don't like God's law, you're going to suffer under man's blasphemy laws, okay? The new blasphemy laws are the so-called hate speech crimes, the new intolerance. As far as God's Word is concerned, a Hindu idol should be considered disgusting and hateful and under God's public curse. There can be no pluralism in a Christian nation because that pluralism is going to automatically rob you of your liberties. It has to. And while some people in a Christian society would get away with worshiping idols in secret, There's nothing in secret to God, is there? And so when you publicly say, yes, we come into agreement with your curses on these things, God will curse even that private idolatry. Now, there may be hypocrites that are out there, but a Christian nation cannot make Hinduism, Buddhism, and other idolatrous forms of worship legal. Such pluralism wars with God's claims and automatically and always undermines our liberties. If we're not willing to agree with God's curses, we will quickly lose the blessing of His liberties. Okay, it goes on. We'll be a little bit quicker. Verse 16, Cursed is the one who treats his father or his mother with contempt, and all the people shall say, Amen. Anything that strikes at the integrity of the family is considered a curse by God. This includes homosexuality, the transgender movement, egalitarianism, and any government taxes and programs that disinherit families. There is a reason why every collectivist philosophy in the world has eventually evaporated the family and the male-female distinctives, whether that collectivist philosophy went under the label of communism, Nazism, fascism, socialism, Marxism, Stalinism, Leninism, Maoism, you name it, any collectivism. Just one American example. Some people have wondered, why in the world has BLM taken such an officially strong stance against the nuclear family. Well, Gabriel Andrade explains it simple. The leadership of BLM are self-proclaimed trained Marxists, and they have self-proclaimed embraced Marxism. And Marx, like other collectivists, hated the nuclear family, and especially the patriarchal family. Andrade went on to say, Marx and Engels were by no means the first philosophers to rebel against monogamy in the nuclear family. There is a long history of utopian thought that aspires to some sort of communal life, and in such utopias, the institution of the nuclear family is frowned upon. Most of these utopian projects have been disastrous." And I agree. Let's go on to the next curse, verse 17 of Deuteronomy 27. Cursed is the one who moves his neighbor's landmark, and all the people shall say, amen. Well, almost all of the ancient landmarks set up in America have been removed by the government. Land taxation alone is a claim to ownership of the land. The communists are much more honest. They just confiscate your land. But taxation of your land is default a claim to ownership of that land. Karl Marx said that communism can be summed up in a single sentence, abolition of private property. That's in his Communist Manifesto. Well, God curses that. And he curses any other removal of God-ordained landmarks. 98% of the checks and balances, I shouldn't give figures like 98%, but it's about 98% when I've calculated all of the balances of power that have been removed from our nation. It's just astounding. Historical landmarks are important. And if removal of them falls under God's curse, then we need to take them seriously too. And I'll just read a sampling of some of the other curses. Cursed is the one who perverts the justice due the stranger, the fatherless and widow, and all the people shall say amen. Cursed is the one who lies with his father's wife because he has uncovered his father's bed, and all the people shall say amen. Cursed is the one who lies with any kind of animal, and all the people shall say amen. Cursed is the one who lies with his sister, the daughter of his father, or the daughter of his mother, and all the people shall say amen. Cursed is the one who lies with his mother-in-law, and all the people shall say amen. Cursed is the one who attacks his neighbor secretly, and all the people shall say, Amen. Cursed is the one who takes a bribe to slay an innocent person, and all the people shall say, Amen. Cursed is the one who does not confirm all the words of this law, and all the people shall say, Amen." Now, has God saved people who are in each one of those categories? Absolutely, yes. That's why Christ had to bear the curse for us. But apart from Christ, they bear the curse. Basically our nation, especially many of its leaders, stand under God's curse because they support abortion, sodomy, the LGBTQ plus agenda, and many other things that God outlaws in his law. God considers their behavior hateful and deserving of His curse. And don't be surprised if they curse us for holding to the opposite. We are in a war, but we as individuals, families, and churches stand in covenant with God, our protector. Unless people focus only on the curses, I want to bring something positive here. There is positive. Both Deuteronomy and Joshua 8 emphasize that these prohibitions of the law were actually intended to bless the nation as a whole. Again, curses and blessings go hand in hand. You can't have one without the other. The moment you remove the curse of the Marxists, the Marxists will take over and they will put you under their curse. The moment you remove the curse of God from the LGBTQ movement, it will take over and it will begin to persecute you. The nation must once again despise the bondage of sin so as to be motivated to rescue people from that bondage. and bring them into the liberty of the gospel. And so verse 33 ends that sentence by saying that they should bless the people of Israel. When you look down through history, it has been as nations approximate, and none of us are, no nation is perfect, but it's as they approximate Christian civilization more and more that God blesses them more and more. I was curious to see if, Chat, OpenAI or GPT, whatever you want to call it, would try to hide this well-established fact, but it didn't. I asked which nations found blessing from becoming Christian nations. Now, I prefaced it by saying, well, blessing is a subjective concept. But anyway, he listed quite a few countries over the past 1,800 years that were significantly advanced, soon after adopting Christianity as their official religion, and it included cultural, social, and economic transformations. So I was really surprised. But if you read good history books, good Christian history books, that's just nothing. What chat open AI said. Read The Real Unvarnished History, and I gave a picture of a recommendation in your outlines. Read Vishal Mangalwadi's book. It's just one of many that documents this. It's called The Book That Made Your World, How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, and you'll be blown away with the incredible blessings of science, technology, art, and so many other blessings when countries are willing to become Christian nations. It's for their good. Now, for a fun and easy read, Read Vishal and Ruth's, Ruth Mangalwadi's co-authored book. It's a biography on William Carey. Very short, nice intro, and you'll see how one missionary, well, I guess there was a team with him, but had a profound impact on bringing blessings into the land of India in so many different areas. It's just very, very encouraging as biblical laws were beginning to be implemented. When nations begin to approximate Christianity, you see financial well-being, health, life spans, infant mortality rates going down, political freedoms, improvement of human rights, literacy improvement, you see so many blessings. So God's intention for Christian civilization is truly to bless. We need to communicate that widely, and there's a lot of good books out there that document it. The idea of a Christian nation is one that brings huge blessings. To resist becoming a Christian nation, tell people this, is to resist God's blessings and to receive His curses. That's what Christians are standing for when they say, you cannot be promoting a Christian nation. The next point says that a Christian civilization defines its existence by the entirety of God's revelation, not just the New Testament. As far as I know, In my readings, I've never yet run across a Christian civilization that was New Testament only civilization. You have to have the Old Testament because most of God's blueprints for society are found in the Old Testament. And by the way, the Old Testament was the only scripture that the early church had for many, many years. Anyway, look at verses 34 through 35. And afterward he read all the words of the law, the blessings and the cursings according to all that was written in the book of the law. There was not a word of all that Moses had commanded which Joshua did not read before all the assembly of Israel with the women, the little ones, and the strangers who were living among them. Try reading that and you're going to see that Phil Kaiser's long-winded sermons are not very long-winded. They had to sit through a very long reading there. They really did. Now, here's the thing. If every part of a civilization is truly to be Christian, it must be governed by the Word of God in all that it does, in science, civics, marketing, education, ethics, medicine, nutrition, worldview, psychology, sociology, everything. And God's Word is sufficient to provide the foundation for all of those things. Now here's the thing, Jesus said in Matthew 4,4, Every word. And people say, well, what about the ceremonial law? That's passed away. How can you live by that? Well, better find out, because Jesus said you have to live by it. How do you live by the ceremonial law when you're not under the ceremonial law? Well, there's actually several ways that you can do so. One is by realizing that it is symbolically describing the gospel of Jesus Christ and how his grace transforms everything in our lives. It's a beautiful symbol of the new covenant kingdom of grace. Second, Sir Isaac Newton pointed out how the ceremonial laws provide all the foundations needed to provide an entire system of geometry. Okay, did you ever wonder why God gave so many repeated instructions on length of curtains? and the corners, and the depth, and the height, and the rings, and angles, and bars, and clasps, and other measurements. And he intended it for us. It's a part of our canon. Why did he go into all of that detail when he intended the temple and the tabernacle to completely pass away and never again be resurrected? Well, even though the temple and the tabernacle and all that sacrificial system was done away with, The mathematics and the geometry of it endure forever. We can live by those laws. You get the point? Third, the food laws. They're provided principles for nutrition. Some fad diets make you avoid all salt. Well, God commended salt as being good for you, okay? I'm not being a doctor up here, so if your doctor says get off of salt, don't listen to me here. But generally speaking, salt is good for you, the Bible says, or honey, or oil, or meat, or carbs. It commended those things. God just told us to be moderate. He allowed the eating of those things. So even though we aren't bound by the food laws, we know that God would not command something for Israel back then if it was bad for us. So they helped to correct fad diets. And there's so many other applications you can make from the ceremonial laws. In two to three years, I hope to provide a complete set of axioms for over 60 disciplines from the Bible. But it's clear to me that if every part of civilization is to become biblical, we will need to live by every word of the Bible. As 2 Peter 1.3 says, God's Word has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness. Not just godliness, but all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue. Okay, the next essential may seem like a strange one, but this has been a problem in most civilizations that have come under God's judgment. This essential part of the collage simply says that a Christian nation keeps God's binary distinction of male and female clear. Verse 35 says, there was not a word of all that Moses had commanded, which Joshua did not read before all the assembly of Israel, with the women, the little ones, and the strangers who were living among them. So it not only mentions women in distinction from men, but the law that they read from Deuteronomy strongly opposed transvestism, gender fluidity, or any other attack on binary genders. Now, everybody knows that Marx opposed Marx opposed the private ownership of property, but he also called for the abolition of the family with the state raising the children. Mao Zedong cut off women's long hair, forced everyone to wear the same drab clothing, just one of many ways in which he tried to force an egalitarian erasure of distinctions. And if you're curious about the speedy takeover of America by the LGBTQ plus movement, why anybody in his right mind would cut off his own body parts or recommend it to others, even children. Well, it's just the same tired strategy that demons have used for thousands of years in order to undermine the distinctions that God has set in place. The point is, one of the signs that a culture is in the last stages of its decay is the war against God's binary distinctions of male and female. And one Reformed scholar who has written extensively on the subject, and I really recommend, he's out of Westminster West, Peter Jones, And the way he words this is orthodox twoism versus unorthodox oneism. He points out that the abolition of binary gender distinctions reflects a war on the creator-creature distinction. The alphabet soup of LGBTQ holds to oneism, that all is one. There are really only two religions. Oneism worships the creation. Twoism sees God as creator and worships Him. And you'll have to read Peter Jones' stuff to see it. It's genius stuff. And the multiplication of genders is simply symptomatic of the war against God. It's actually hard to keep up with the alphabet soup that keeps getting added to genders. Some time ago, it was LGBTQIQA2+, the I being intersex, the second Q being questioning, the A standing for asexual, the two standing for two-spirit. Nowadays, people are identifying as animals and all kinds of things. None of that is considered hate speech, because it is at a war against God's dogmatic declarations. Okay? The disappearance of these features, and if you're not worried about America, you really should be. The disappearance of these features from America should call us to fall on our knees, to cry out to God, to repent for the church's failure to be salt and light, and to start influencing culture despite the dangers of being attacked. We have every indication of being near the end of a culture's history apart from God granting repentance. The last part of the collage that we see in these verses is that everyone, whether believer or unbeliever, native born or alien, must be committed to the Christian order. We looked at this last week. This covenanting ceremony included Joshua, the whole assembly, the women, the little ones, and the strangers living among them. We saw that to shut out strangers who agree with our values is wrong. But we also saw to have wide open borders to people who were hostile to America's original system just encourages the overthrow of our system. We are flooding our nation with people who have a totally different worldview than our nation was founded upon. Biblically, immigration was restricted to those who could at least outwardly conform to the laws of God. And I think it's a good policy. In any case, let's realize that having a Christian nation is impossible unless God changes the hearts of individuals within a nation. Now it can happen very rapidly or it can take a long time, but may God increase the tribe of those who believe in and who promote this within our nation. Amen. Father, we thank you for your word and the challenge that it gives to us, and thank you for setting continually impossibilities before us. Even our own sanctification is an impossibility. How do we control the motives of our hearts? How do we control all of the fleeting thoughts of our minds? And yet by your grace, you can enable that to be done, and you can enable the impossibility of seeing our country bowing its knees to King Jesus to be accomplished as well. I pray that you would raise up Christians with a voice, a voice of faith and courage and boldness all across this nation who would not compromise and who would boldly speak your truth and not be intimidated by the hate speech accusations that people might throw at them. Bless this your people. Help us to be prayer warriors. Help us to recognize each of us has different functions. Some of us will be in more supportive roles, but I pray that all of us would take to heart the need for our nation to come to Christ. In Jesus' name, amen.