Greetings, this is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith. Today, why all the hype? We have entered yet another presidential election cycle and our media is hysterical with hype, snipe, and tripe. Our constitution stipulates that we are to elect a president every four years. At least a full year prior to that time, the hysteria begins to build.

The media, especially cable television and the talk show circuit, breathlessly interview and analyze every potential candidate who might throw his hat into the ring, whether it be your local notary public or someone from our American aristocracy, like a Kennedy, a Bush, or those demonic pests, the Clintons. And from there on in, it's 24-7 news coverage that is surreal. Sensationalized and Media Circus. Some wag quip that politics is Hollywood for ugly people and the presidential confest is handled as if it were a Miss America pageant. Wait a minute.

One of the guys in it this year owns the Miss America pageant, doesn't he? And he's conducting himself as if he were Miss New York. Oh, never mind. Truth seems stranger than fiction in this case. But if you know how the United States operates in reality and not just on paper, you know that our elections are no more significant today than your old high school elections for class president were.

This president may get you or you may get to choose the class colors. He may get to choose the class colors and be prom king, but it's the administration really in high school behind the scenes that runs the school. Your vote for president does no more than if you were to elect your captain on your next flight or cruise. While it is important to have a competent captain in control of the craft, someone else, I submit to you, has already determined its destination and course.

In fact, I would say, if I can extend the analogy, enemies have hijacked this craft, this ship of state, and you're not even headed towards the destination you signed on for, dear listener. So despite all of the hyperbolic rhetoric of doom and gloom, this is the most important election in our lifetime. It will determine the fate of our republic. I submit not much will change. You could go away for four more years and live in a cave in the Middle East in return, and the United States will be more Marxist and socialist than it is today.

If a democrat is elected, it will be a good deal more so. If a republican, perhaps a little less so, but still more Marxist and socialist than today. And there is a reason for this. You no longer have a constitutional republic, but an institutional repugnant. Our country and its people and its form of government have changed over time.

And this is true in particular of the office of president. But the presidency is emblematic of this change in so many ways, and thus it is worth studying to find out what has happened. I would like to pose these questions to you. What is the constitutional office of president precisely? Secondly, what has it become?

And then thirdly, why are Americans obsessed as they are with the presidency? Well, first, number one, what is the constitutional office of president? Well, the founders, number one, crafted the presidency to execute the laws of the land, not preside as king of the land. The constitution succinctly gives the role of the president, and it says in article two, section one, the executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America. Now, his prime directive is the execution that is putting into effect the intent of Congress, the execution of the laws of the land legislated by Congress, not him.

This severely prescribed role was intended to be his sole function under the second article of the constitution. The president was never meant to be the tyrannical demigod that he is today, unchecked by a Congress that cowers in fear that if they contradict the president, they'll get blamed for shutting down the government, and they'll lose their precious perks and privileges when they get voted out of office next election cycle by an ignorant and brainwashed electorate that cannot distinguish lies from local weed.

Our present Congress, rather than being the chief prince of government as was intended, our present Congress has been cowed and browbeaten into submission like a battered wife, and in this they are not unlike other legislative bodies who have succumbed to tyrants in history like the Roman Senate before Julius Caesar, prime example, or the French Estates General before Louis the 14th or the German Bundestag before Adolf Hitler. All of them were weak and cowering institutions by the time the tyrant arose. The founders rather intended the presidency to come second to the Congress. Many examples of this, many shining emblems of this.

For example, the preamble declares the supreme representatives of God's covenant are, we the people of the United States of America, ordain and establish this Constitution, and of course the people is embodied in the Congress. Also, the first article of the Constitution in priority is that which establishes the legislative body, that is the Congress. It is the lengthiest article and bestows the widest and most comprehensive powers of the federal system. Even the architecture of Washington, D.C. is given prominence.

That is, Congress, the people's branch, sits on the highest point in Washington, D.C., and is the most elaborate and extensive of any of our federal buildings. The president was meant to be exactly as Article 2, Section 1 made him, an executive. While these men are important to any corporation and any organization, executives execute policy made in consultation with others, not determined unilaterally, as all of our dictators have done in recent history in any other age but our own, Obama would have been impeached and convicted and thrown in prison for his crimes against our Constitution and its laws.

Obama has violated his oath of office with impunity and holds its principles in contempt. No branch of government will hold him accountable, and the people refuse to demand accountability from the gutless geldings in Congress. The president was supposed to execute the will of Congress through enforcement of laws passed, not executive orders that have the force of law, and he was to serve as commander-in-chief of the armed forces in wars declared by Congress, not by him.

Historians have documented, too, further, the gradual accumulation of power by the president over what he now considers his rivals, that is, Congress, the courts, and the people. Well, secondly, that's what the presidency was supposed to be. What has it become? What has the presidency actually become? Number two, the presidency has become, in reality, the ancient office of priest-king of tribal paganism.

Yes, I submit to you, and I will demonstrate that the presidency has become, in reality, the ancient office of priest-king of tribal paganism. In his campaign for the presidency, Obama made these messianic promises. He said, I will revive the American economy single-handedly by cutting the deficit in half in four years, but instead it was five times what was projected, that he would bring five percent economic growth by 2012, but actually it was only 1.6, that he would cause the unemployment rate to drop to six percent or lower when it actually went up over eight percent. He also said this upon his nomination. Listen to this hubris.

He says, this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal. And then he went on to say, this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation. Barack Obama's sweeping, unrealistic promises sound eerily like those of ancient pagan priest-kings of tribal societies. I urge you to look at this book, a book by James George Frazier, that is, The Golden Bough, A Study in Magic and Religion, a classic. And this book, The Golden Bough, documents how men in ancient pagan cultures used to worship shaman and priests who could manipulate the environment or the weather to make the tribe prosperous.

The first tribal kings, for example, according to Frazier, were rainmakers who could ostensibly make rain to fall on their crops and ensure fruitfulness and prosperity for the whole tribe. For example, the fruitfulness and fecundity of the tribe, they could prosper via productive soil, sky, and womb. It is what today we call the economy or peace and prosperity. The shamans also used to promise an orderly progression of the seasons and the weather and the environment or climate change, as we call it today.

The shamans also used to claim that they could heal the sick, make the blind to see and the deaf to hear, or provide universal health care, or Obamacare, as we know it today. It was not considered too much for these magicians to do all of these things in those days. It was believed that they were in touch with the forces and the energy of nature, or the money, as it is known, resident within the rocks, the trees, the sky, and the animals. And by their sacrifices, rituals, incantations, prayers, visions, feats of wonder, these shaman and magicians could manipulate these forces and energies to the advantage of the tribe.

The priest kings of the Bantu in Africa, for example, could ameliorate the harsh effects of the rainy season, and they could also find sources of water in the dry season. The Teutonic kings of the Visigoths, the Astragoths, and the Vandals could direct the migration of herds, they could ensure the fecundity of animals and humans, and they could invoke the spirits of long-dead warrior kings in battle. They combined the roles of magician and king. In fact, Roman emperor worship was of this variety. We discovered this very precisely in the Beast of Revelation, and especially the great whore of Babylon.

The Roman emperors predicated their supremacy on the very same principles, that is, that the Roman emperor was to be worshipped because he had triumphed and brought the Pax Romana to the known world. He was the supreme priest-king who had manipulated the forces and energies of nature to its greatest effect. Behold, he was Roman emperor, wasn't he? He, therefore, deserved to be worshipped. Well, this president, I submit to you, is one who seems to have a fully developed messiah-king complex, where he sees himself as some sort of priest-king.

He basked in the glow of worship after his nomination when women fainted at his rallies, and the media treated him as some sort of savior. In fact, the actor Jamie Foxx called Obama our lord and savior, Barack Obama. Now, Foxx was only being explicit about what so many others felt. And a CNN political commentator, I remember this distinctly, spoke of Obama in 2009 as, quote, sitting above the rest of us as some sort of god. And this was in reference to his speaking in his cool demeanor and the so-called reasoned response to various issues.

Well, Obama takes it all in as the expected response to his divinity. Obama is also fully persuaded that he has begun to heal our planet through his global climate change initiatives. He's in touch with the forces of nature, and then other minor priests, that is, the so-called climate scientists, help him to perform magic through carbon reduction. And although it is called science, it has been proven again and again that it is not. It is pseudoscience.

It is the height of hubris to think that we can significantly alter our planet's weather, whether for good or for ill. And those who think they do or can are but self-appointed priests of hocus-pocus magic. And Obama is their political enabler, the president king. Obama also regularly expresses his contempt for the constitution, his preference for kingly powers. When he was a so-called constitutional professor at an Illinois college, he disparaged the constitution as a document of negative rights. Oh, sounds so bad.

That restricted government from interfering with the people rather than the constitution being what he preferred, a document of positive rights that liberated government to provide goods and services to the people. But this is pagan in nature, rank paganism. The tribal priest king was reputed to supply positive rights to his fellow tribesmen in the form of supplying all their needs, albeit at the price of their liberty. And of course, as our founding fathers understood to their core, what the government provides, it can also take away what it provides to the people.

Things like free food and free housing, free health care, jobs, free college education, all these things, they must be paid for by the people eventually through taxes, inflation, and borrowing by that same government, which is a far steeper price in the end than if they had earned it themselves. So while positive rights sound so much more appealing than negative rights, the regular practice of positive rights by any government leads to tyranny and oppression and tribal culture. This was the consistent state of being for pagan tribes under the benevolent care of their priest kings of our ancestors. Well, thirdly then, why is this so?

And why have Americans become this? Well, number three, Americans have moved from becoming informed, educated, self-reliant citizens to ignorant, superstitious, and dependent slaves of the state. Washington's observation on the value of an informed citizenry is still applicable today. In reflecting upon how liberty is to be preserved in a constitutional republic, Washington said, and I quote him, a primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important?

Washington asked. And he went on to say, and what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country? Unquote. Education. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French philosopher who traveled in early 19th century America, noted in his 1835 diary, Democracy in America, he noted that every American could converse in an informed manner on all issues pertaining to government and politics.

In fact, de Tocqueville said that the average American was eager and willing to do so. It was the principal topic of conversation in every village and hamlet of the country. Oh, how this has changed for the great mass of un- and ill-educated Americans. It is a well-established maxim that our public school system no longer educates, but rather indoctrinates. Johnny may no longer be able to read his diploma and be competitive, but he will always think and vote progressive.

This is by design, dear listener. Critical thinking, government and civics, U.S. history, they've all been deliberately dropped from course requirements in our schools and revised and distorted when they're offered. The average American has been deliberately dumbed down such that we have regressed to the primitive tribal state that Sir James Fraser so aptly describes. What a tragic irony. The 12 to 16 year period spent in government institutions that was supposed to educate and prepare the citizen to think freely and independently has been used rather to make him a dependent and politically correct one in his thought and feeling.

As a consequence, we are entirely open and suggestive to look upon the president, not as an executive of a severely limited and prescribed branch of a federal system, but rather as a kind of god-man whose supernatural powers entitle him to act as a king. This is true not only of Obama, but is becoming increasingly true of the office in general. One has only to look at Donald Trump, the Donald Trump phenomenon, seen as some sort of messiah able to deliver us in the most important election of our lifetime, yada, yada. This is enough to confirm my thesis.

Fraser notes three characteristics of the primitive magical thinking characteristic of the people of our age. Number one characteristic of that magical thinking, the primitive man sees the forces of nature as subject to conscious will and personal agency, manipulated by conscious will and personal agency. The money of which we spoke, that spiritual energy or life force or invisible entity that inhabits all of nature, this is all susceptible to conscious will, Fraser asserts, conscious will. And so you have the Luciferian maxim, do what thou will. The stronger the will, the stronger the magic.

And this is why Obama is so adamant and unrelenting in his agenda. He will not compromise, bend or flex, because he sees himself as having a strong magical will and wills to get things done. Well, conscious will and also personal agency that is the more or less developed and practiced human actor in magic. The primitive man sees the forces of nature as subject to such a one, or ergo a president. The modern American is surprisingly swift in his declension from reason and the Christian faith.

Someone once said that superstition and tyranny are only a generation away, especially if we neglect the teaching of that next generation, which we have. And there are two very important current issues that illustrate this for us. First of all, no president can create jobs. Get this through your head. No president can create jobs.

This is magical thinking, pure and simple. Presidents and governors incessantly point to their records as having been creators of X number of jobs, when in reality, presidents do not create jobs. Only the private sector can do that. Even when a president expands the government with more bureaucrats, he does so at the expense of the private sector, since it is the private entrepreneur and individual taxpayer whose taxes must pay for those government jobs. Government has never in its history created one nickel's worth of wealth.

It can only feed off of the private sector. The best a president can do is ensure that government gets out of the way of the private sector. The president can reduce tax burdens. He can increase incentives for businesses to thrive. Perhaps he can create a favorable climate for the private sector to create jobs.

But that the public thinks that a president can create jobs is a nice bit of magic performed on them by politicians. Secondly, no president can heal the planet. Oh, here is where propaganda and pseudoscience intersect to foster magical thinking. That Americans seriously think that President Obama has helped to ease global climate change and heal the planet through his various initiatives is egregious magical thinking. Primitive magic at its best or worst, depending on how you look at it.

Scientists and politicians with a vested interest in seeing a crisis with global warming have created a pseudo-crisis with pseudoscience so that they can foist an expensive population-controlling pseudo-solution upon us all that will eventually drain our wealth and restrict our lifestyles. But in the end, this solution will solve nothing for a problem that's not there and will be declared a success, too, I predict, by a priest-king who has no power over it in the first place. Well, secondly, we must also see that the supernatural forces of nature can be frightened and manipulated and coerced into doing the will of the magician.

This is a second principle of magic. While primitive magic is democratic in that its powers are generally available to all, and we can see that in the ubiquity of astrology, for instance, which is magical thinking for the common man, while the skill and ability, nevertheless, of some is greater than others, especially in the one who develops and practices the secret science of magic to perfect his control over nature and his fellow creatures, for that matter. The priests and magicians of tribal societies used the phenomena of nature to, as Fraser puts it, frighten, manipulate, and coerce his fellow man.

Knowledge of the precise occurrence of solar and lunar eclipses, for example, could be used to frighten and enthrall the people into submission and make it seem that the magician had brought them on. The same would be true of the annual rains in the Middle East or the floods of the Nile. The pharaohs did this for millennia. Indeed, the tribe saw the priest king as manipulating these forces of nature for the benefit of the tribe, and thus then the tribe rewarded him with their worship and riches.

Governments have been perfecting this aspect of magic or propaganda or the ministry of information or the press secretary, and they've been doing this for centuries. Artificial or exaggerated threats are thrust before the people who then rely upon the magician king to dispel them. Our federal government, for example, creates arms and protects the very groups that then become ISIS and then sends out the alarm when ISIS turns and threatens us. Obama steps in as the savior from this danger, or an artificial danger from climate change is manufactured from pseudoscience, and then the magician king offers himself as a solution to it.

Or an artificial crisis crisis from the nation's health and well-being is created and alarmed, and then the magician king steps in to relieve it with Obamacare. In all of these instances and many, many more, the magician creates the illusion of a threat, or perhaps a real one, such as ISIS, and then offers a solution. That is a solution which invariably increases the wealth and power of the magician at the expense of the tribe. And Frazier is so good at documenting this in history. I urge you to pick up his book, The Golden Bough.

He does this very well. Well, thirdly, the tribe ineluctably elevates the skilled magician to the status of a god king. Yes, in tribal societies, in magic, the tribe ineluctably elevates the skilled magician to the status of god king. Frazier notes the state of things in virtually every primitive tribe. We're wired in our souls for this.

I quote Frazier now. He says, As the gods are commonly believed to exhibit themselves in the likeness of men to their worshipers, it is easy for the magician, with his supposed miraculous powers, to acquire the reputation of being an incarnate deity, thus beginning as little more than a simple conjurer, the medicine man or magician tends to blossom out into a full-blown god and king in one. Unquote. From Frazier and his book, The Golden Bough. An excellent read.

Well, this describes the change in the American presidency exactly over the intervening centuries of our nation. The greater our ignorance and superstition which has been cultivated by our institutions, oh, the more susceptible we are to the conjurer. The more ready we are to ascribe a godlike status to the president and concede and grant him kingly powers over us. This is happening before our eyes. We have degenerated from the informed, impassioned citizen who is skeptical of his civil servants.

We have degenerated to the state of ignorant, passive servants ourselves, superstitious towards and in awe of our god king, the president. We showed him worship after his nomination, didn't we, when women fainted at his rallies and the media treated him as some sort of savior. Jamie Foxx, our lord and savior, dear Barack Obama, and that CNN political commentator who spoke of Obama in 2009 as sitting above the rest of us as some sort of god. Oh, it really is time to return to a realistic perspective on the office of the president, dear listener.

He is a mortal executive and he is susceptible to the same faults, foibles, and failings as all of us. The president is not a god king. We are not electing a god king this November, and he should not be exalted as one, but he is virtually so, is he not? This will not happen, however.

This will not change until we as a people first return to the true god of the founding of America, the true god of the Bible, and then and only then in the light of his worship by us and our own understanding of our own nature then in the light of his book, the Bible, only then will we be able to see what a president should be again in the light of the Constitution. He should be a simple executive like Calvin Coolidge, not a demigod like Barack Obama. Temper the hype. I urge you then, dear listener, temper the hype and hysteria of this presidential season with this knowledge and pray for the spiritual reformation of America.

Only then, then and only then will we return not only to the god of our fathers, but also to the understanding of the Constitution and the proper role of president, Congress, and the courts in their proper perspective with the president as an executive and not as a king priest. Only then will we begin to understand these things and return to our founding roots. Dear listener, this has been Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and I just urge you to go ahead and contact us. Come out and visit us too. Perhaps you've been sitting in the shadows for a while wondering what New Geneva is like.

I urge you to come and visit us and see what we are, what we preach and teach, not only the things we have here on the radio, but other things from the Bible. So I would just encourage you to cross our threshold here in the near future. Come visit us, see who we are. You'll have a warm welcome and you'll also be edified and built up in your Christian faith. And I hope that this message has done that for you.

We meet for holy worship on Sunday at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street on the corner of 1st and Boulevard. Call us at 523-0196. 523-0196.