So God comes down, confuses the languages, and the people scatter into language groups that turn into nations. Nations were God's invention to postpone a one-world government. But every generation, you have some king that wants to conquer other nations. And if he didn't die, he'd have been happy to keep conquering until he conquered the whole thing. And in other words, any one of them would have been happy to be the Antichrist. You know, you've got Attila the Hun, and Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar, and Genghis Khan. And as the centuries go on, these kingdoms keep getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, because with the latest military advancements, the kings can kill more people. So instead of Cain killin' Abel with a rock, they can kill with a bronze weapon, or an iron weapon, or a big long phalanx spear the Greeks had, Alexander the Great, or a scimitar sword that the Muslims had, or gunpowder that the Chinese invented. The weapon improves, but it's that same selfish nature of Cain killin' Abel. It's just magnified through the latest technology. And with technological advancements, kings can track more people Around 2 BC, Augustus Caesar wanted to have a worldwide tracking system. It was called the census tax enrollment. If he could have had 5G and cell phones and facial recognition software, I bet he'd have been tempted to use that. Right? And it's an interesting... In other words, Death was a blessing because these dictators would die off and the devil would have to start from scratch and raise up another selfish guy to be the gang leader. But he'd have the advantage of the latest military and technological advancements, but then he would die. But if they hadn't died, any one of them would have been happy to be the Antichrist. And interesting, when the devil took Jesus to a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, in a moment of time and said, bow down and worship me and all this will be yours because they've been delivered to me and I can give them to whoever I want. And you think, that's pretty audacious of the devil. When did he get them all? when Adam sinned. Adam was in charge of the garden. We know that because he named everything. Naming something means you have authority over it. You have kids, you get to name your kids, you have authority over your kids, right? Adam named everything, he was the authority. But then there's a verse that says, to whomever you yield your members, servants to obey, to him you are a servant. In other words, the moment Adam obeyed Satan, he was posturing himself as the one taking the orders and the devil as the one giving them. And so from that point on, the devil became in charge of the world system, what was called the cosmos, but this world system. And one common trait of dictators is fear. They all rule through fear. Just like Nimrod wanted people to fear him rather than God, the government's ultimate threat to motivate people is fear of killing them. And so Jesus said, thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. But then Jesus is talking to his disciples, and he says, the kings of the Gentiles rule over them, but it shall not be so among you. He that is greatest among you shall be the servant of all. I am among you as he that serveth. So we're talking kingdoms, we're talking kings that rule through fear, and Jesus says, okay, I got a kingdom, but my kingdom is ruled bottom-up through love, through service. So one is a top-down kingdom, the other's a bottom-up kingdom. So these kingdoms keep getting bigger and there's different dynamics. So I put it together in a book called Change to Chains. I thought, well I'm gonna, not just take it as a word, I'm gonna actually spend a year or two, and I went through every single century of recorded human history to find out what the most common form of government is. And so you have around 2500 BC is where you have the story of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, or Iraq. And Gilgamesh was the first one to build the wall around the city. The oldest story ever written in any language is the Epic of Gilgamesh. And it's written about a thousand years before Moses. And the story of Gilgamesh goes on a long journey to meet this old guy who survived a global flood. calls it a global flood, and this old guy had built a boat, covered it with tar and pitch, filled it full of animals, it landed on a mountain, and they got off and repopulated. It's the story of Noah. Over a hundred ancient civilizations have flood stories in their ancient past. It's like, gee, maybe there really was a flood. I believe there was. And two-thirds of the world is sedimentary rock, which is rock laid down in water, right? So, So then you have Sargon of Acadia, 2250 BC, he conquers a bunch of walled cities from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. And then you have Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus of Persia, and then Persia is conquered by Alexander the Great, and they keep getting bigger and bigger, until finally the King of England had the biggest. The sun never set on the British Empire. They had India, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, British Guiana, Canada, Barbados, Bermuda, Jamaica. I mean, the King of England was a globalist. He was a one world government guy with him at the top. And America's founders didn't like one world government guys. And so they broke away and they flipped it and they made the people the king. And so the word citizen is Greek. It means co-king, co-ruler, co-sovereign. And so instead of top-down rule by kings through fear, America is an experiment of a government rule bottom-up by we the people. And so it's a revolutionary idea, and I talk about it in this book, Who is the King in America? And then I trace, well, where did America's founders get this idea? Well, they got it from the New England pastors that founded Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, right? And these pastors were Christians, but they had a form of government that was congregation focused versus the hierarchical structure that the Catholics and the Anglicans and others had. And so the idea is when the Reformation happened, you had kings that you had to believe the way the king told you to believe. What the king believed, the kingdom has to believe. And if you don't believe what your king does, it's called treason. And so remember Nebuchadnezzar, when I blow my trumpet, you bow to my statue. And here's Henry VIII, he has William Tyndale burnt at the stake, because he's not believing the way King Henry does. And he has Sir Thomas More, you know, executed, and so you gotta believe the way the king does. But when the Reformation happens, you have large percentages of countries not believing the way their king does. And the kings don't like that. And so they want to wipe out these people. And so there's religious persecutions. And so one was in the year 1572, and Spain controlled the Netherlands, and the king Philip II of Spain sends the Iron Duke of Alba to Antwerp, Holland, and he kills 10,000 Dutch Reformed Protestants. It's called the Spanish Fury. And just because they were believing something other than the king. And then that same year, 1572, the Queen of France, Catherine de' Medici, She does not like the fact that 10% of France is Huguenot Protestant. And she arranges a wedding of her daughter Margaret with the main Huguenot leader, Henry of Navarre. A couple days after the wedding, she has her soldiers pull chains across the streets so the carriages cannot go out of town. And she sends her men house to house. They kill 30,000 of these Protestant Huguenots. And so you have a struggle of what to do with Romans 13. Let everyone be subject to the governing authority, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God." It's like, yeah, but what if the authority that exists wants to kill your wife and kids? Are you supposed to submit to that? Okay, here they are, kill them. And so in the French-speaking area of Switzerland, you have a guy named John Calvin. And he writes in his institutes, he says, we are subject to the men who rule over us, but subject only in the Lord. If they command anything against him, let us not pay the least regard to it. It's sort of like Ephesians 6, children obey your parents. But what if there's a bad parent who tells the kid to sell themselves into prostitution and kill the neighbor? Is the child supposed to obey that parent? No, the child obeys the parent as long as the parent's telling them to do something that lines up with God's word. You obey the government as long as the government's telling you to do something that lines up with God's word. Why would God tell you to do something in his word and then tell you to submit to a government that tells you not to do what he just got done telling you to do? And it's exactly what Martin Luther King Jr. writes in his letter from the Birmingham jail, 1963. He said, one may well ask, how can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others? He said, the answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws, just and unjust. We have a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, we have a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. How does one determine if a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. So you obey the government as long as the government's telling you to do something that lines up with God's word. And so these Calvinists developed a way to have a government without a king. So the default setting for human government is gangs, a gang leader with enough weapons we call a king. And you can have a good king, but his kids can be bad. I mean, here's David, the best king. His oldest son, Amnon, rapes his daughter, Tamar, and then gets murdered by another son, Absalom. You know, you have the great king, Josaphat, his own son, Jehoram, who he married to Athaliah, the daughter of Ahab and Jezebel. But anyway, Jehoram turns around and kills all of his siblings, right? I mean, you could have a good king followed by a terrible king. Here's Hezekiah, a great king, all right? And he's gonna die, and he prays, and the sundial goes back. He lives another 15 years, and in that other 15 years, he has a son born named Manasseh. who's wicked, wicked, wicked, killing kids. So you got a good king followed by a bad king. So the challenge is how do you get a government without a king and resist this rubber band pull to go back and get another king? And so it's called a covenant form of government. And it's what the Israelites had for that first 400 years out of Egypt before King Saul. So we talk kings, King, Pharaoh, Caesar, they keep getting bigger and bigger, but there's an anomaly. It's ancient Israel. Around 1400 BC, they come out of Egypt, and for 400 years, there's no king. It's a unique system that worked because everybody was taught the law and accountable to God to follow it. So you think of it, okay, everybody's taught that God is watching you, God wants you to be fair, and God is going to hold you accountable in the future. So you're about to steal. Nobody's around. And then you think, God's watching me. He wants me to be fair. He's going to hold me accountable in the future. Maybe I should hesitate stealing. And it creates something in your head called a conscience. If everybody in the country believes this, you can maintain complete order with no police, with no king. You can get rid of the king and not have the rubber band snap back because everybody's taught it's a triangle. Everybody's taught that there's a God, he's watching him, wants to be fair. So I'm going to be nice to you because I'm accountable to God. I'm going to be generous to you because I'm doing it as unto God, right? And so this covenant form of government worked. It's called the Hebrew Republic. And it was studied by John Calvin and all these reformers so much that the Puritans were nicknamed Christian Hebraists. I mean, they studied this period. It's the Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 Samuel. It's all the way up until the people asked for a king. So you have this 400-year period where there's millions of people and no king. Everybody's taught the law and personally accountable to God to follow it. It was studied by these reformers, and those were the ones that settled America. And so, in Israel, though, they had the priests neglect teaching the law. And you think, what? Yeah, here's Eli, the high priest, his own sons are sleeping with women in the very tent where the Ark of the Covenant is. This is the high priest's sons, right? And then there's another story in the book of Judges of a Levite in a house of a guy named Micah, and he has a silver graven image. And he says, hey, Levite, you can be a priest to me. And then the tribe of Dan comes along and steals this graven image and tells us, Levite, come along with us. You can be a priest to our whole tribe with this graven image. And you're reading the story saying, isn't that one of the commandments? You're not supposed to have graven images. And here's a Levite with one. So the Levites hadn't been neglecting teaching the law. And then there's a terrible story of a Levite with a concubine. The law says the Levites to marry a virgin of his own tribe. Here he is with the woman he's not even married to, so he's not following the law. They're traveling and their house gets surrounded by sodomites. Something about that behavior that appears at the last stages of a people ruling themselves, this casting off of self-restraint, this abandonment of passion, They raped the poor concubine to death, and by the time you're grossed out with the story, you read this line, every man did that which was right in their own eyes. Why? Because the priests had stopped teaching them what was right in the Lord's eyes. They lost the fear of God. They lost the knowledge of the law. All they had was their selfish passions. It turns into this chaos. They all go to Samuel the prophet, and they say, we want to be like the other countries. We want a king. Samuel cries, and the Lord tells Samuel, they did not reject you. They rejected me. So God's original plan for Israel was to not have a king, have everybody be taught the law, everybody have a personal relationship with God and realize that they're accountable to God. And God even arranged it because He knew everyone would sin. And rather than them walk around the rest of their life awaiting judgment, once a year they would have the Day of Atonement. The high priest would bring the blood of the lamb into the holy of holies, sprinkle it on the mercy seat, and everyone's sins in the entire nation were forgiven, and they all started the new year off with a clean slate. And obviously, that is foreshadowing Jesus. And he is our atonement, and we're forgiven of our sins, not just for the past year, but for our entire life and for all eternity. So the Israelites ask for a king and then there's this story of King Saul pouting that his son Jonathan became friends with David and he turns to his soldiers and he goes, none of you soldiers care about me. You know that my son Jonathan is friends with David and you're not helping me. And one soldier, Doeg the Edomite, says, King, I'm your friend. I saw David go to this town and the priests in that town gave him some bread and the sword of Goliath that was stored there. And Saul says, bring those priests to me. Well, they show up. He turns to his soldiers and says, kill them. The soldiers hesitate. Doeg the Edomite goes out there and kills them all. What just happened? The soldiers were operating under the old system, where every person is accountable to God to follow the law, and the law says you need two or more witnesses before you condemn somebody to death. There's only one witness that's still that guy. And so the soldiers are like, okay, King, you're telling me to kill, and I'm accountable to God, and God says there's gonna be two witnesses, and they're hesitating. They still have a conscience. Doeg says, King, I'm gonna surrender my conscience to you. You tell me to kill, I'll kill. Tell me to kill the baby in the womb, I'll kill it. Tell me there's no more male and female, fine. Tell me you can go any bathroom, you can be a fuzzy, whatever, I'm just a bunch of mush. When you blow your trumpets, I'll bow to your statue. I'll surrender my conscience to the king. Whatever the king believes, I'll believe, right? And God is jealous. He doesn't want the government between you and Him. He wants a personal relationship with each person. We're accountable to Him. And thank God Jesus died on the cross as our atonement, so we're forgiven, right? But He wants that personal relationship. But the government always wants to get in between and tell you what to believe. And so why is this story important? Because the kings of Europe looked to the Bible for their authority, but they looked to the King Saul and on part of the Bible, the divine right of kings, God chose me, I'm gonna rule through fear, do what I say. But the Calvinist Puritans, and the Baptists, and the Presbyterians, and the Quakers that founded the colonies in America, they looked to the pre-King Saul period of the Bible. There's 400 years, millions of people, no king, everybody taught the law, and everybody personally accountable to God to follow it. So King Saul is the divider between England and America. Why is this important? Because Romans 13 is understood differently in a monarchy versus a republic. In a monarchy, subjects submit to the king. In a republic, the citizens are the king. Right? So all the people, I just gotta submit to the government. So you're gonna need to move over to Nazi Germany and just submit. You need to move over to Communist China and just, you need to, when the government blows its trumpets, you just bow, just surrender your conscience. But in America, we the people are the king. And they got their idea from ancient Israel, this first 400 years before King Saul, which was studied by these Puritans, and it turned into a covenant form of government with no king. So you get rid of a king to keep the rubber band from going back, everybody's taught the law, personally accountable to God to follow it. It first started with different style of church government. So the Catholic Church with the Pope, but then the Anglican Church with the king as the head, and it's a hierarchical system. Now God can use any system that they'll let the Holy Spirit in, but the devil will try to infiltrate every system. But it's important for us to understand the influence that church government had on our government in America. So the hierarchical form of church government, More or less, it's clergy laity. The clergy does the ministry, and the laity is lazy and watches them. I mean, for centuries, it was in Latin, and the common people spoke German and French, and they couldn't even hear, they couldn't even understand. And the altar was, the priests were facing the altar, and all you'd see is the back of the priests. And when they would lift up the hostel, they would ring the bell, and everybody would look up, you know. But it was in a whole different language that you couldn't understand. It was a clergy lady model. The clergy does the ministry, and the lady is lazy and watches. So in England, you had the king, and then you had the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Archbishop of York, and the deaneries, and vicars, and curates, and rectors, and priests. And your relationship with God is through this hierarchical structure. Well, the congregational model where Jesus said, upon this rock I'll build my church, the word church in Greek is ekklesia. E-K, ek means out of, and klesia means a calling, a calling out of. And so in the city of Athens, they had 6,000 citizens. and they would call them out of their homes to the Agora marketplace, and they would all get involved in taking care of the city. We need to fix the walls, we need to get our navy going, we need to take care of the kids, we need to get the food, right? And everybody had a part, and Jesus chose that word to say, upon this rock I'll build my ecclesia. Now, they translate it into Latin into the word church, but in William Tyndale's Bible, The word church does not appear. Ekklesia is translated congregation or assembly. And it goes back to that first 400 years out of Egypt before King Saul. The congregation or the assembly of the Israelites. And so in the congregational model of church government, the pastor saw his role as to help each person get their own direct relationship with God the Father through Jesus Christ that died on the cross to pay for their sins. And then the pastor coaches each individual to become a mature Christian. You get in the habit of reading through the Bible yourself. Right, the printing press was invented in 1454, so Reformation starts in 1517, so now Martin Luther translates the Bible into German, right, William Tyndale translates it, and so now you can have your own copy of the Bible. So instead of you having to go through this hierarchical structure for them to interpret, you can read it. And so the pastor coaches each individual to become a mature Christian, and then, filled with the Holy Spirit, tells them to get involved doing something. Nursery, children's first, junior high, outreach. And so the pastor trains the saints to do the work of the ministry. So instead of you watching me do it as a spectator, the pastor teaches you to do it. And so these were the two styles of church government, and the king did not like the congregational model. And King James said, I will make them conform or I will harry them out of the land. And so you had, during this period, after the Reformation, in England, you had different groups starting. You had the Puritans that thought that, when King Henry wanted another wife. So King Henry was married to Catherine of Aragon. She was the daughter of the King of Spain. And Spain was the most powerful empire on the planet. They had all the new world, they had the gold from Inca Peru, they had all this wealth, and the King of Spain's army in 1527 invaded Rome and imprisoned the Pope for six months. So the Pope didn't want to get on the bad side of Spain. And so after 18 years, Catherine of Aragon, the daughter of the King of Spain, she does not have a son. So Henry VIII decides to divorce her. The Pope won't recognize the divorce because she's the daughter of the King of Spain. And so the Pope says no. And Henry VIII says, you know what? I'm just gonna declare myself my own Pope. He starts the Church of England, puts himself on as the head, and then he goes on to have six wives. Divorced, beheaded, died. Divorced, beheaded, survived. So Henry VIII was not a really nice guy to be married to. His advisors suggested if he was serious about breaking from Rome, he needed to stop using the Latin Bible. Martin Luther has his German Bible that helped Martin Luther to break away from Rome. You need to get yourself an English Bible. Well, Henry VIII had William Tyndale burnt at the stake a few years earlier for what? For translating the Bible into English. But now, Henry VIII divorced Catherine of Aragon, and he's gonna marry Anne Boleyn, and he's got his advisor saying, okay, if you're serious about breaking from Rome, you need an English Bible. So Henry's like, great, get me one. They basically take William Tyndale's Bible, and polish it up with a scholar named Matthew Coverdale. And they printed, and it's called the Great Bible. And Henry VIII likes it. And he orders a copy of it put in every church in England. And he dusts his hands and he goes, that's it. We broke it from Rome. We got our own English Bible. We don't have to look to Latin anymore. But something unexpected happened. People actually began to read it. and began to compare what's in this Bible to this king divorcing and beheading his wives, claiming to be the head of the church. And so a group starts that wants to purify the Church of England, and they're nicknamed the Puritans. And, oh, thank you, Pastor. Oh, bless you, bless you. Is this interesting? And so the Puritans want to purify the Church of England, but the king doesn't think he needs any purifying, so he persecutes them. So one of the things, the Puritans felt like they should get rid of the cassocks, the black robes, and the king's church said, no, we want to keep them. And so when Oxford and Cambridge were seminaries to train priests, they would keep them wearing the black robes. And then when Harvard and Yale were started, they originally were seminaries to raise preachers. So they would wear the black robes, and then they would graduate, they'd wear the black robes. And that turned into every college doing it, and then it turned into every high school doing it. So that's why today in high school graduations, you have kids putting on black cassocks. It goes all the way back to the priest. So the Puritans thought that they didn't separate enough from Rome. And so they were persecuted. The King of England decided to cancel them. And he compiled a list of all the leaders in England and had an O or a P by their name. O for Orthodox and P for Puritan. And the Puritans were canceled from academia. They couldn't teach at Oxford and Cambridge anymore. They were like ostracized. They would lose their positions and their royal appointments and everything. And then you had Scotland. And Scotland agreed to acknowledge the king because King James was Scottish. But they didn't want any bishops. And the word Episcopal means bishop. So they didn't want any bishops. And the king said, no, no bishop, no king. He says, if I can't have bishops to oversee these congregations, I'm not in charge anymore. But the Scottish developed something. When William Tyndale translated the Bible, he took this Greek word and instead of translating it priest, he translated it elder. And so the Presbyterians would have the church body elect elders. And they had their covenant form of church, but they didn't want any bishops overseeing it. But then you had another group, they were called dissenters, non-conformists, and we call them Baptists. And they didn't want the king in charge, they didn't want bishops, they wanted independent congregations where the only ones who came were the ones who were drawn by the Holy Spirit. And the pastor would train them for the work of the ministry. And so one of them was John Merton, one of the founders of the Baptist faith in England, and he was arrested and he was put in jail, but they did not feed you in the English jail, the Newgate prison. You had to have some friend that missed you and would bring you food. which is still the way it is in Mexico today and other countries. And if your friend brought you some money, you could bribe the guard to put you in a different cell where nobody was dying of smallpox. And so they obviously wouldn't give John Merton anything to write with because he was writing these pamphlets that talked about not having a king and not having bishops. And so a friend brings John Merton a bottle of milk, but instead of a cork, it had a wad of paper. And when the guard wasn't around, he unfolded the paper, took a splinter, dipped it in the milk, and he wrote out his pamphlets. The milk dries, it's clear, and then he folds it up, sticks it in the empty bottle. The guard takes it, his friend takes it home and unfolds the paper and holds it above a candle. And the heat of the candle turns the milk brown. And they could see what he wrote, and they typeset it, and they print the pamphlets. And the government's like, how's he getting that out of the prison cell? And so the early Baptists called it the milk of the word, because he actually wrote the pamphlets in milk. But he would say things like, no person should be persecuted for their conscience. And if the government can stand there on the day of judgment, believe whatever the government tells you. But if the government's not gonna be there on the day of judgment, you're accountable to God for your own conscience. The king didn't like you having your own conscience. He wants you to believe what he tells you to believe. And one of the other Baptist founders was Thomas Helwise. And he dies in the Newgate prison. And then another Baptist founder was John Smith. Now, not the Pocahontas John Smith, this was another one. And John Smith had a church. and who attended his church but William Bradford and William Brewster and then they branch off to have their own church and we call them the Pilgrims. And they were meeting in William Brewster's house. He was wealthy. He had a position in the government with the postal system or whatever, but he had like a manor in Scrooby, England. And the separatists would meet in his house and some neighbors would snitch. because everybody's going to his house and the police would raid this house and they would arrest them and put them in jail, put them in stocks. So some of these separatists decide to sell everything and go down to the port and buy passage on a ship and sneak away to Holland. Holland was, or the Netherlands, it was seven provinces. Flanders and you know, and together they were called the Netherlands. And they were fighting an 80 year war of independence from Spain. And Spain was doing, remember I told you about the Spanish Fury and the killing 10,000 of these Dutch Reformed in Antwerp, Holland. And so the, the seven provinces, they didn't always believe the same thing, but they hated Spain so much they were willing to get along with each other. And so the Netherlands had the most tolerance of any country in Europe. And it was good because you could believe what you wanted, but it also meant there was some more immorality that was tolerated. Sort of like the internet today, right? You can do great Bible searches and get information, but then you fall off the cliff and there's pornography that you don't want to go there. And so these separatists get on the boat, and right before they take off, The captain robs them, turns them over to police, and they're put in jail for heretics, not believing the way the king did. Well, another group of these separatists arranged for a Dutch ship to come up the coast of England, and they would be waiting in their little rowboats, and they would hurry up and row and get on the Dutch ship and sail to Holland. The pilgrims show up a day early, and they're in their little boats, and they're in the waves, and it's rough, and the kids are getting sick, and these hours are passing, and the women say, can we just wait on the shore with the kids? And then the men say, okay. Well, then the Dutch ship shows up, and the men row out there, and they're storing everything on the ship, and somebody saw the Dutch ship, and they tell the police, and the police come over the hill, and they capture the women and children. And the Dutch captain says, I don't have any army with me. And he pulls anchor and sails away with the men. And you can just imagine these women and children watching that boat getting smaller and smaller and disappearing over the horizon. And for two years, they passed those women and children from one court and prison and jail to another to another for two years. Finally, a judge says, you really didn't do anything wrong, go home. They go, duh, we sold our homes years ago. And so just to get them out of their hair, they put them on a boat, sent them to Holland, and they asked questions and they figured out where, and they found out where their husbands were and they reunited. So there was a happy ending to that chapter. And they were in Holland for seven years. 12 years, and the Spain threatened to attack again, so that's when they decided to flee. They were gonna go to Guyana, because they heard of the perpetual spring, but then they heard of what the Spanish did to the French Huguenots in Florida, around Jacksonville, Fort Caroline. The Spanish came and butchered the entire French Protestant settlement in 1565, and so the pilgrims say, well, let's try to go to Virginia, started 12 years earlier, It was a king-run colony, and so they knew it was Anglican, but it was 3,000 miles away from England, and they figure we'll be able to do our little pilgrim stuff and nobody will notice. And they get blown off course, and they land in Massachusetts. They try sailing south, but off the coast of Massachusetts, it's really shallow, and you could be a quarter mile out to sea, and it's only six feet deep, and the boat hits the sandbar, and the waves, they get smashed, and so the pilgrims almost sink. The captain finally gets free and says, forget going to Virginia, goes back to Plymouth Rock and says, off the boat. And these pilgrims are like, um, we have a question. Who's going to be in charge? There's 102 of us in the boat. Nobody's picked by the King to be in charge. Uh, we were going to go to Jamestown to submit to the King's government. We just can't get off the boat and be lawless. So they do something unique. They take their covenant church form of government and they make it their civil government. It's called the Mayflower Compact. We, in the presence of God, covenant ourselves together into a civil body politic. It's unique in world history, right? It wasn't kings founding colonies. It was 102 church members, right, taking their church form of government of a covenant, and they're making it their civil government. And so this became the model for New England. And 10 years later, you had the king turn up the heat. It's called the Great Puritan Migration. 20,000 Puritans flood into New England. And you had this unique situation where pastors and their churches were founding cities. A pastor, Roger Williams, and his church founded Providence, Rhode Island, and the first Baptist church in America. Thomas Hooker and his church founded Hartford, Connecticut, and the first Congregationalist church in America. There were like no non-church members among them to be lazy and let them run stuff. Everybody was involved in church. Everybody was involved in civil government. And they had one building called the meeting house. That's where the pastor would teach the Bible, and that's where they would do their city business. The word synagogue means meeting house. That's where the rabbi would teach the Bible, and that's where they would do their city business. I mean, why build a separate building just to talk about a different topic? So Pastor Thomas Hooker gave a famous sermon in 1638. The foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people. Sounds like simple, but it's revolutionary. Because in Europe, the kings did not ask the people for their consent. Could you imagine, you know, the king of Spain, king of England asking, could I do this people? No, I'm appointed by God. I've got an army and I'm going to rule through fear. But this pastor said, no, we're doing this covenant form of government and everybody gets to be involved. It's from the bottom up government, from the consent of the government, and that gets put into our Declaration of Independence government from the consent of the governed. And so The word federal is Latin for covenant. We have a covenant form of government in America where we the people rule ourselves bottom up rather than a king or a government or a president ruling through mandates and fear top down. And so our constitution was borrowed from these New England governments which was inspired by these pastors which went back to the Reformation, which went back to the Bible, what part of the Bible, that first 400 years out of Egypt before King Saul. It's called the Hebrew Republic. And so, so again, in America, the people are the king, and the majority of the people are Christian. In 1965, 93% of Americans identified themselves as Christian. 93% in 1965. It was 69% Protestant, 24% Catholic, and then 3% of the country was Jewish. It's gone down from 93% down to today it's around 65% of the country identifies itself as Christian, so we're going down. But 65% is still a majority. And since they're a Christian, that means they go to some church somewhere, which means they're listening to the pastors. And so the pastor is like a consular to the king. The people are the king. The word citizen means co-king. And in America, we have a bottom-up form of government, right? The citizens are in charge. And so the pastor, in a sense, has the king in the pews every Sunday. I was looking at one of these old famous paintings, and it was after the Roman Empire became Christian, there was an emperor named Theodosius. in 379 A.D., so this is after Constantine, and he's going to church in Milan, Italy, and the pastor is Saint Ambrose, Bishop Ambrose. And there's this famous painting of Ambrose rebuking Theodosius. But the thought is, what would it be like being Ambrose and having the emperor in your church on Sunday? That's sort of what we have in America. The people are the king, and the pastor has the king sitting in the pew every Sunday, and some pastors tell the king to go to sleep, and others throw ice water on him and say, wake up, you don't just have the right to vote in America, you're in charge, you're gonna be held accountable to God for what happens. And so it's different, so Romans 13 is understood differently in a monarchy versus a republic, In a monarchy, subjects submit to the king. In a republic, the citizens are the king, right? You're in charge. So you get to be the king of your life. All of us together are the king of the country. And we have the voluntary opportunity of submitting ourselves to Jesus, the king of kings. But Psalms 110 says, thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power. In other words, it's a free will thing. It's us voluntarily submitting our lives to Jesus, right? And even when we're in control, we're servants. We want to help people and love people. It's a bottom up thing. And anyway, so did you get anything out of this? And I don't know if we should take a break now. Is this a good time?