with a moment of truth where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith. Today, why have Americans given up the constitutional republic bequeathed by our founding fathers for the tyranny of a kingship like the days of old? In the old days, kings were lavished with magnificent carriages and castles, just as the president is with Air Force One and the White House. In the old days, the king staged magnificent dinners and went fox hunting with other kings, just as the president does in state dinners and rounds of golf with other kings and heads of state.

In the old days, kings declared wars of conquest and raised money for them by squeezing the people of his realm, just as our president does with the War Powers Act recently given him and the Federal Reserve. In the old days, kings were protected by an elite guard and had killed whomsoever they willed by those whom they felt threatened, just as our president does with the Secret Service and drone strikes, the CIA and other clandestine military units.

In the old days, kings made proclamations and decrees throughout the land, which had the force of law promulgated often in various ministries of the state, just as our president does through his executive orders and the federal bureaucracies. Many of these kings had the fig leaf, additionally, of institutions that on paper represented the people, just as Julius Caesar did with the Roman Senate or Henry VIII did with the Parliament of England and Adolf Hitler had with the Bundestag of Germany. But these were, in reality, weak and docile puppets of the king, even as our Congress has become a docile puppet under President Obama.

President Obama now has more legislative power in his pen and phone than does the entire legislative branch of the United States government, that is the Congress. Now, we observed last week how fellow tribesmen often elected their ancient pagan kings, sometimes for a term of office and sometimes for life. They did so with great trial and fanfare, making a spectacle of both the process and the elected kings tribes did in the past in various ways by demonstrating abilities to make rain, the candidates did or halt plague or call upon the spirits of fallen warriors in the past to aid in battle.

And they also displayed great fanfare in their inauguration into the kingship. Days and weeks of feasting and ceremony and religious ritual. These are all trials and ceremonies through which our American kings now must pass. This crass and garish primary season does not so much reveal the policy and wisdom and trustworthiness of the prospective candidate as it does in his ability to inflate his own image and destroy the image of his opponent against whom he competes as king. No two people better epitomize this behavior than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, both of whom are known for their abilities to personally destroy opponents.

Our candidate for king must boast and brag of the wealth and jobs he or she will create, the enemies he or she will defeat, and they must also, parenthetically, swear fidelity to those ancestors and their values that first made the tribe great, whether they adhere and abide by those values or not. This kind of sensational image-making or voodoo spellcasting, as archaeologists call it, but it's the same thing, image-making and voodoo spellcasting, is only amplified in the actual presidential contest.

Americans are no longer persuaded to vote for a candidate based upon policies and character, or but rather upon empty promises and vague feelings they may have for the candidate. The candidate no longer scores points for how little he can do, but rather for how much he can do for the people. The candidate no longer scores points for his willingness to stay out of our way to be our own success, but rather scores points to be our way to success. The candidate no longer scores points to find creative ways to shrink government as in the way, but rather scores points to grow government as our only way.

In the final analysis, there is very little difference between Democrat and Republican on this particular issue, that of growing government. Both will grow government, Democrat or Republican. Democrats swiftly, Republicans may be at a slower pace, but both will grow government. Democrats may highlight social services, and Republicans may be military defense, but in the end, budgets, deficits, and debt will all increase under either administration.

Every president since Calvin Coolidge has done so, even Ronald Reagan, who told us government is the problem and not the solution, managed at the end of eight years to expand government rather than shrink it. The federal government continues to burgeon and grow into a leviathan, a beast, an evil, self-serving parasite that will eventually kill its host, that is the people. But of course, parasites like our federal government do not stop to consider their own eventual demise. They're parasites, and they keep on sucking the lifeblood of its host until both it and they perish. It is up to the host, rather, to pry the parasite from off its body.

And Washington, dear listener, is not broken, by the way. We hear this from candidates all the time. Washington is not broken. It rather is chugging along very nicely, thank you, doing precisely that for which was intended by our floundering fathers, not our founding fathers. We have a set of floundering fathers who have steered our federal government on another course.

As we will document for you very carefully in weeks to come, Washington, D.C. is structured to act as a whirlpool, a black hole, if you will, of forces that direct the wealth and power generated by the people to a handful of banks and power elites. We observed this most recently in the collapse of the housing market in 2008. The six major banks that comprise the Federal Reserve made bad housing loans at the direction of the federal government. And although warnings were there aplenty, the housing market collapsed nevertheless, and so too did the fortunes of most of us, the average American.

Our poverty was then compounded when Congress voted to guarantee the loans and repay the banks via the taxpayer in the Dodd-Frank bill. So not only did we get stuck having our property taken from us, but insult was added to injury in our having to fork over additional taxes to insulate the banks and their cronies from damage. Oh, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, they should be in jail for this. None of this happens, however. All that I've detailed for you does not happen without the consent of the people.

That is the governed, as Thomas Jefferson put it. This is true throughout history. The governed have always been more numerous and powerful than the governors, but generally the governed, the people, have been ignorant of the science of government, as Madison calls it. They have been untrained to wield it. They have been unarmed to defend themselves.

And the people have generally been too busy and or complacent to exercise their inherent power. But the United States of America changed all that. Our founding fathers gave us a fine-tuned constitutional republic that required all of these factors, that is wisdom and knowledge and arms, and the actual exercise of our powers, our inherent power, required all of these factors to be at a high level of efficiency among the people. Washington observed, for example, I quote him, the power under the Constitution will always be the people, unquote. Washington also underlined the necessity of education and knowledge amongst the people.

He said, and I quote, knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness, in one in which the measures of government receive their impression so immediately from the sense of the people as in ours. Knowledge is essential, unquote. The knowledge of which Washington spoke was the relatively sophisticated understanding of how a constitutional republic worked, why it is the best form of government yet devised by man, and whence it came. Therefore, our founders launched a program of education to ensure that citizen government would be an informed government.

Washington also said, and I quote, 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, unquote. Our last several generations, however, have been consciously, deliberately kept ignorant of the science of government. Almost every president since Woodrow Wilson, who, of course, invented the League of Nations, which fortunately failed, but almost every president since him has nudged or pushed us towards world government and centralized power, that is tyranny, and a constitutional republic gets in the way.

Instead, Americans have been on a steady decline towards the default setting of the human soul, and there is a default setting of the human soul since the fall of Adam and Eve, and that is ignorance of God, paganism, and tyranny. Last week, I showed you how the revolting obsession with these presidential primaries is identical with the ancient tribal rituals of selecting shaman kings. The tribe would be swept up in wonders, wizards, and worship for however long the process had been determined. We have been caught up in wonders, wizards, and worship in these primary elections for the last few months, have we not?

Well, in ancient pagan tribes, the shaman who could deliver the most, things like rains in season, or the fruitfulness in the field and the farm, or perhaps success in war, this particular shaman would be crowned king and chief. This is what we expect from our presidents today. They are our modern equivalents, and we are willing to lavish our worship and our wealth upon them in return, and Obama is exhibit A in this regard. Those of us who call ourselves Christians are just as susceptible to this madness. I hear this kind of thing all the time.

Oh, but pastor, this is the most important election of our lifetime. It will determine the fate of our constitutional republic. Oh, flapdoodle, poppycock. In the first place, you have already succumbed to the pagan tribal mentality if you think that one man can make this difference. One man can make a tyranny.

Make no mistake about this. One man can make a tyranny, which Obama is doing by fundamentally transforming America. But the very definition of a constitutional republic is that the states and the people make it. And most importantly for us at this point, the states and the people keep a constitutional republic. It is a complete contradiction of principles and definition to say that one man, a president who in a true constitutional republic is but a severely circumscribed executive, it's a complete contradiction of principles and definition to say that one man is going to save us.

If this is what you think as a constitutional conservative, then you have been swept up in the king shaman hysteria and you have been deceived. Such a man is just a republican side of the coin of tyranny to which the democrats are the other side of the same coin of tyranny. Oh, the most important election of our generation. Oh, the election that will save us or make or break us as a constitutional republic. That happened a long time ago with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

While many other presidents expanded the power and the tyranny of the federal government. For example, Abraham Lincoln, who is certainly no favorite president of mine, or Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson, all of these. No one appeared upon the scene as a shaman king with deliverance in his powerful right hand, as the Bible says, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The hagiographies that constitute his biographies note his nicknames. He had two big nicknames, Boss Franklin and King Franklin.

That was the one that was used most often. King Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt earned these titles by the sweeping powers that he assumed in order to bring us out of the Great Depression. Ostensibly, he was supposed to do this. And of course, historians say in hindsight, that his measures during the Great Depression rather retarded a recovery.

But Roosevelt successfully created the illusion of doing something by creating government programs that seem to help people like the Works Progress Administration or the Civilian Conservation Corps, and of course, Social Security. But always the price of free stuff is freedom. And with FDR, the illusion was greater progress, but the reality was greater tyranny. Once more, it was the people who made FDR king. They made him king three times.

It was the people who made Obama king as well. And they did it twice. And it will be the people who will make the bloviating bombast Donald Trump king, or perhaps the former Secretary of State Hillary Klingon. Make her queen. She looks like a Klingon to me.

I call her Hillary Klingon. In either case, it is no one's fault but ours. We, the people of the United States of America, ordain and establish this kingdom to the Donald or the Klingon. We, as Americans, are not exceptional in this regard, though. Perhaps you remember from your biblical history that Israel was bequeathed a tribal republic upon their conquest of the Promised Land in the days of Joshua and Caleb.

The books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, and Samuel, they chronicle those days. And in those days, God was king and ruled Israel by means of his covenant made with them at Mount Sinai. God's rule was mediated to the people through the Levites, who oversaw worship at the tabernacle, prophets who he raised up from time to time, and of course, judges who led the 12 tribes of Israel. This was the intent of God for Israel perpetually and as a model for all the world politically as well.

The tribal republic of Israel was to be a shining city on a hill, as America was for the world, for the nations to flock to, just as our founding fathers hoped the United States of America would be. And Moses points this out in his reflection on the giving of the law. He says in Deuteronomy, See, I have taught you statutes and rules, as the Lord my God commanded me that you should do them in the land that you are entering to take possession of it. Keep them and do them, for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, that is the rest of the world.

Who, Moses says, when they hear all these statutes will say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people, for what great nation is there that has a God so near to it, as the Lord our God is to us whenever we call upon him? And what great nation is there that has statutes and rules so righteous as all this law that I set before you today? Unquote. That's the voice of Moses, dear listener. What happened to Israel is that she quickly saw that she was too unique, so far different from the nations that she stood out as odd.

The impulse to conform is strong in human nature, isn't it? When that impulse is to conform to the word of God, it's good. But when that impulse to conform to the word of man, it is bad. This is the impulse to which Israel succumbed. It is when the elders of Israel, the very men who should have been mediating God's rule, the elders of Israel came to the then judge of Israel, Samuel, with a request.

They said, Appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations. Oh, what sad words, tragic words. Appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations. Does that sound familiar? That's exactly what your presidents want you to do in our own day, is appoint a president for us like all the nations.

That is, rather than a constitutional republic, we want a king to rule over us. Unique in a fallen world of tyranny, Israel possessed true liberty in a tribal republic under a benevolent, loving God. No other people on earth had such an arrangement. If Israel had persisted, they would be the evangelist nation that would convert the earth. The peoples would see the laws and statutes of Israel and the immeasurable blessings that accrued to them because of their adherence to them, and the nations would seek to come under it.

But instead of being the magnet that drew the other nations, oh, Israel became the iron filing drawn to the magnet of paganism and the fallen lost impulse for a strong man, a shaman king. Appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations, Israel said. And the great irony is that while Israel could have been the magnet that drew the nations to her creator and savior, instead, Israel chose to assume the role of a mere iron filing to be drawn to paganism and tyranny. Appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations. America is the same, virtually the same thing.

This was an outright rejection of God and the rich heritage of liberty that Israel had. God told Samuel to proceed as Moses says, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. How like Israel we are in this presidential season. Appoint for us a king to roll over us like all the nations. Most Americans may not see it like this, but this is our behavior.

Democrat, Republican, Socialist, Libertarian. This behavior is precisely that of the primitive tribal nations of long ago. We do not want self-government in America centered in the individual states in a true republic. We rather want a shaman king to rule over us. America has functionally rejected God and the model of a constitutional republic in favor of the tribal strongman, the pagan tyrant, the magical wizard who can create jobs, heal the planet, alter the weather, bring peace to the nations.

Remember the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Obama before he'd done anything? And also to fundamentally change the country. These are actions and aspirations of a pagan tyrant. While most of the Republican candidates are more modest in their claims, far less delusional and arrogant than the present occupant, nevertheless, the Republican candidates aspire to the same levers of power, and we want to give it to them. There will be no scaling back of the powers of the presidency under any of them.

We Americans have become accustomed to sweeping tyranny. We are comfortable with a president's pen and phone replacing a gelded Congress. But the Congress of the United States is impotent because the American people are ignorant and complacent. Congress is impotent because we are ignorant and complacent. If we demanded that Obama be held accountable for his crimes and the egregious violations of his oath of office, Congress would impeach and convict him.

He would be in Guantanamo Bay himself instead of trying to close it. For the way he has betrayed our national security and flooding our nation with illegal aliens, Syrian immigrants, most of whom are veterans of the ISIS war against Syria's Assad, and the funding an army of terrorists abroad. But all of them in Congress, to a man, are afraid of negative blowback from the voters who would believe the spin that we are racist for wanting to impeach the first black president. Consequently, the geldings in Congress would lose, in the next voting cycle, their privileged places and the perks that they now enjoy.

If we severely curtail the obscene overreach of the federal beast, constricting its powers to that of the constitutional executive our founding fathers intended, rather than the which Dr. King it now has, Republicans would be chagrined because they look forward to exercising the expanded powers for which Obama has set a precedent. The establishment Republicans, in particular, men like Jeb Bush and John Kasich, Chris Christie refused to call for the prosecution of people like Obama or Hillary Klingon or Lois Lerner or Eric Holder because it would put a damper on the red-hot fires of tyranny which they hope to exercise if they're elected.

Republicans cry crocodile tears for the passing of the Constitutional Republic while salivating behind closed doors in anticipation of getting dictatorial powers themselves. They tut-tut at Obama for bloating the federal government and contemptuously treading down the barriers of the separation of powers our Constitution established, but behind our backs, they support them and crowd the pig trough of power saying, we're next. What is the solution then? How are we to cope with runaway inflation, runaway corruption, and runaway tyranny?

One thing is certain, dear listener, it's not by choosing a president in the way we are doing it this cycle around. Nothing has changed in my lifetime of voting, and I do not expect that this four-year cycle will be any different. No one of the candidates, Republican much less Democrat, have a systematic plan for bringing us back to a constitutional republic, and even if they did, it would automatically be disqualified for being a one-man show. Oh, the popular definition of insanity, dear listener, is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result, isn't it?

Well, if this is true, why are we electing a witch doctor king president in the same way we have always done, but rather we're expecting a constitutional republic to come out of it, huh? We are electing a witch doctor king in the same way we always have, but we expect a constitutional republic to come out of it. Over and over again, when we do this, we expect a different result. Will this candidate really be the witch doctor king, we hope, and he'll be able to magically produce the economy, the freedom, the greatness that he promises? Well, if so, he'll be the shaman king we say we hate.

Dear listener, there are three things that we can do. Number one, there must be a spiritual reformation of the American people. Number one, there must be a spiritual reformation of the American people. Our constitutional republic, as Adam said, our constitution was made only for a moral and ethical people. Without revival, there will be no survival.

Only when a people make God their king do they stop restlessly casting about for a human deity, a tribal shaman king, like we're doing today in this presidential cycle. The human soul is wired for a king, make no mistake. It's true king, though, King Jesus. And until King Jesus is made king of our lives, we will continue to cast about for a substitute king to fill the void in our soul, even as we are doing this presidential cycle. A true constitutional republic is simply out of the question until most Americans make Christ their king.

The constitutional republic that we conservatives have come to appreciate and love developed in a Christian milieu, developed in a Christian petri dish, if you will. The capacity for self-government by a people first begins with the self-discipline of the individual believer who is able to govern his own nature and appetites after becoming a Christian. Then he will rebuild his family, his local community, and then and only then be ready to carefully construct a limited federal government. So the first thing we need is a spiritual reformation of the American people.

The second thing we need is the states and the people must reclaim their rightful place as supreme over the federal government. When this happens, when we personally are regenerated, the states and the people must reclaim their rightful place as supreme over the federal government. It was the individual states, sovereign, whole, distinct, one from another, who combined to form a union for their mutual good. In the states, the people had close and direct government of their fortunes and fates. And over the centuries, especially with Lincoln during the Civil War, the once federal puppy has morphed into the Cujo beast that it is today.

We must stand and take our place as citizens responsible for our own destinies and elect state governors and representatives with backbone and character and courage, which we do not have today, and to destroy then the federal Leviathan and return the balance of power to the states and the people. And then thirdly, we must also elect a president in the mold of a constitutional executive. Once we have our true king, we're prepared to choose a federal executive. This executive will be a servant of the people, a just man who will execute the laws passed by Congress, not executive orders decreed through his pen and phone.

And he will use the powers of checks and balances to reign in the excesses of the other two branches and not expand the powers in excesses of his own office. And he will also be commander in chief of our armed forces in wars declared by Congress, not adventures and pet conflicts of his own choosing. So in this hysterical circus circumstance of the presidential season, please step back, take a deep breath, think with me through these realities. Nothing will change until we do.

Pray with me that we not only return to the constitutional republic we once were, but also more importantly, that we return to the king who first made us that constitutional republic. This has been Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church. We meet for holy worship on Sundays at 10 a.m. at 1014th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard. Call us at 523-0196.