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. And today, I want to continue to challenge you with what we began to look at last week, and that is, what is the 5,000-year leap? The 5,000-year leap. Some years ago, Dr. Cleon Skousen wrote a book called The 5,000-Year Leap.

And in that book, he maintained that in the last few hundred years of the American Republic, we have made such great advances that we can call it a leap over the last 5,000 years of recorded history. And we have given you four reasons, four reasons why we can call this leap. We were on number three when we closed last week. And just for brevity, we will skim over the first three, which I gave you in detail last week.

And I just encourage you to check back with last week's broadcast to see the first three of the revolutions that have occurred within the last 250 or so years of American history, by which we can say we have made a leap in terms of progress over the last 5,000 years. And it's due, in large part, to the context of the American Republic, the American Constitutional Republic, which has given liberty to the people. And those revolutions, number one, was the liberty created by our constitutional form of government made possible the culture for the Industrial Revolution. You may remember we covered that last week.

And then the second revolution, the liberty created by our constitutional form of government made possible the culture for the Transportation Revolution. Oh, previously, the fastest a man could go on land was as fast as a horse or a team of horses could take him. But now we can break the sound barrier on land with machines, right? The third revolution then, of course, was the liberty created by our constitutional form of government. And we saw Alexander Graham Bell, of course, with his telephone or Samuel Morse with the telegraph.

Oh, we can finally communicate with each other across continents because of the liberty created by our constitutional form of government. And number four, then, we look at the fourth revolution. The liberty created by our constitutional form of government made possible the culture for the computer revolution. So much of what we've been reflecting on, that is the business climate of a free market, the capitalist system or the free modes of expression, and the principle of exponential growth and development, too. That's all wrapped up warp and woof with a 5,000-year leap.

All of these converge in this one revolution. That is the revolution of the computer. The lords of computer history, for example, Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak of Apple and Bill Gates of Microsoft, who is now dictating to us about vaccines, of all things. Literally, they began their ventures in their garages. They epitomized the American dream, though, too.

And then within a decade, men like Steve Jobs would become one of the richest men in the world, and their products would revolutionize every facet of life, wouldn't they? The huge, unwieldy mechanical computers that once filled a room were increasingly shrunk through the genius of storing information digitally in electronic chips rather than mechanically and retrieved by tapes or cards, right? And soon, through the process of exponential reducing rather than exponential growth. Isn't that the irony? Many multiples of storage capacity were shrunk to where they could fit in a computer on a desktop, right?

And soon, it was not only IBM and the Pentagon who owned computers, but now possible for every American to have a personal computer of his own at home on his desktop, and now, lo and behold, in a cell phone. And with the invention and development of the internet, thanks to you, Al Gore, right, who takes credit for it, it was not only the New York Times and the Washington Post who could determine all the news that's fit to print, which was the motto of the New York Times, and now they're no longer fit to print anything.

But now, with the advent of the internet, any old geek sitting around in his pajamas in his mother's basement could create his own blog or web page and determine for his or herself what was news and what was not, the invention of the PC and then the internet has single-handedly revolutionized how we acquire, disseminate, and digest information. And that's largely been accomplished in one place and in one environment, and that is the free market, the capitalist system of free America, whose culture and way of life have been made possible by our written Constitution.

Of course, it would be arrogant and presumptuous if we were to take credit for all of this ourselves, as if it were we who made us ourselves and not the God of the Bible. Our Constitution is only the outward covenant document that serves as a framework for a godly people. A godly people must beat out their lives and exercise their faculties as free men, and the Constitution provides that opportunity. No system in and of itself will guarantee prosperity and fulfillment if the people who live in it are corrupt and immoral.

In fact, as we will explore in great detail in subsequent lessons as well, the kind of liberty and freedom provided under our Constitution is destructive to a people who do not have the first requisite of government, and that is self-government. Self-government is the first requisite of a governing people. It is God alone who can bring a sinful, spiritually dead human being to life in himself and give that person the power to live what the Bible calls a sanctified life. That is a life that willingly pursues holiness and a purpose and direction for God.

Such a person does not destroy himself with lies and deceit about the world, and he does not destroy others by lying and stealing and coveting and robbing others through, for example, sexual debauchery. Sexual debauchery not only destroys yourself, but it robs others as well. This is the kind of person for whom our Constitution was created. Such freemen who could be trusted with a limited, borrowed power in the government of a republic because they could first be trusted to govern themselves. What we see before us today is a swath of men and women in government who cannot control themselves.

Greed and lust possess them, and we see this constantly around us, the Bidens being exhibit A of this. When a limited government with a great deal of freedom is peopled by the godless and the immoral, then destruction and death and tyranny are the inevitable outcome. We see this transpiring before us today, do we not? Benjamin Franklin puts it this way. He says, only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.

As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters, unquote, Benjamin Franklin. Oh, we have need of masters because we are corrupt people this day. It's increasingly the case in our own country. The more bestial our people become, that is, crime-ridden and lazy, wanting the government to bail them out of problems, or sexually promiscuous and perverse and corrupt, right? The more need these people will have for a beastmaster, that is, someone to crack the whip and save them from themselves before they utterly destroy both us and them.

And in this case, it is no wonder that our culture and society is moving so swiftly from a limited free constitution to a dictatorial socialism. Only when we recognize this state of affairs and appeal to the God of heaven will we be ready once again to live under and restore constitutional liberty. Only when we recognize that it is the sovereign God of the Bible who can work within us to call us to repentance and reform, only then will we call upon him to forgive us for abandoning him and call upon this God to renew and restore us.

And this begins, first and foremost, at the level of the individual, dear listener, and it begins with repentance and reform in your heart and in my heart, and then and only then in the hearts of those around us. Jesus, in fact, said, no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. No one comes to Christ unless the Father draws that person. So, dear listener, look to your own heart first before you seek to change the world. First, take the log out of your own eye, Jesus says, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.

This is as true for preachers like me, too, as it is for everyone listening today. Repentance and reform begin at home in our own hearts. Life in Christ begins with a new birth within the individual soul, and the consistent Christian walk begins by first guarding our own steps so that we do not stumble and fall before we presume to direct the steps of others. Then and only then will we be a virtuous people, as Adams exhorts us to be, prepared for freedom and not needful of masters, as Franklin puts it.

May this be the case with every one of you out there this day, and soon for every American who lives yet under the gracious shade of the tree of liberty provided by our Constitution. Oh, all of this 5,000-year leap that we've been talking about and more can be traced to the environment created by our founding fathers when they made our Constitution, didn't they? It is as if the pent-up creative power of the human race for 5,000 years was finally unleashed as Americans found liberty to strive for and achieve what they could only dream of doing before those profound words were penned, we the people of the United States of America.

When you ponder the history of nations, I'm a student of history. I'm a history major. When you ponder the history of nations, you quickly realize that great men define the nations of the world and not great people, with the exception of the United States of America. Our Constitution begins, we the people of the United States do establish and ordain this Constitution, right?

Whereas the other nations of the world throughout history, if they had a written Constitution, would begin something like, well, I, Pharaoh Necho of Egypt, do establish and ordain, or I, Julius Caesar of Rome, do establish and ordain, or maybe I, King Louis XIV of France, do establish and ordain, right? The history of nations is so often the history of great men. The people in all of these other nations that we're talking about were merely the fodder and the fuel for tyrants, upon whose backs these people, upon whose backs and blood these great men built their empires.

In the United States of America, however, finally, the people had opportunity to govern themselves and overthrow tyranny, and that was emblemized for us in King George III of England, tyranny. Will we, the people, be able to keep this precious heritage, dear listener, or will we lose it to the constant human tendency to give it over to tyrants again? The moment we feel threatened by a pandemic, maybe, or economic, or military, or cultural downturns. Oh, right now we are giving up our liberty and our freedom to tyrants because they have driven us like cattle to fear an invisible virus.

Oh, this fellow American is the challenge of the hour for this generation. So it is, I continue to outline the 28 principles of our founding fathers encapsulated in our founding document, that is, the Constitution. Once more, let me also take this opportunity to give full credit to the book and the organization that has put together so much of the information that I'll be sharing with you, and that is the National Center for Constitutional Studies, located in Utah.

And the great lion of this organization was Dr. W. Cleon Skousen, who was a teacher and mentor for so many students of the Constitution today, over the last few decades for that matter, even President Ronald Reagan, as I mentioned last week, said of the NCCS, the National Center for Constitutional Studies is doing a fine public service in educating Americans about the principles of the Constitution, unquote. And the books from which I will be drawing my information, two volumes, The 5,000-Year Leap, and then also The Making of America, both by Dr. W. Cleon Skousen. Get these books. Go to the NCCS's website at nccs.net.

But before we unpack those principles one by one, we should do for you a very valuable service. And that is, shatter the illusion under which you labor now as to the nature of political power, and perhaps give you the understanding of true political power that were shared by our founding fathers, they knew of this, without which they never would have been able to gain the insight needed to establish the lasting document of our Constitution. What do I mean by shattering the illusion and giving the true model of political power in its place? Well, let me give you an example that we face today.

When we speak of political differences in our own system, we speak of the left and the right, as if either end of this political spectrum defined and encompassed all that there is to political opinion. Are you on the left or are you on the right? We often inquire of people. And the left represents liberalism and socialism, and at its worst, Marxist-Communist tyranny and oppression. While on the right, the right represents conservatism and capitalism, and at its worst, fascist tyranny and oppression.

Right? But this division is, I would submit to you, a fallacy and illusion. First of all, note with me that the designations left or right derive from how political parties are seated in many European houses of parliament. The communists and socialists are seated on the far left of parliament, while the fascists are seated on the far right of parliament, and other moderate political parties are seated in the center. So, the illusion under which we labor resides in this very important distinction.

Political parties of the right and the left define themselves in terms of their party policies, while the founding fathers, on the other hand, defined governments in terms of political power and how it is applied. A vital and crucial distinction to make. When you look closely at how two supposed opposites behaved in World War II, for example, all of this comes into bold relief. We see Hitler's Germany, for example, as one extreme, a right-wing tyrannical dictatorship of the fascist mold. And we also see his chief opponent, Stalin, as a left-wing tyrannical dictator of the communist mold.

Indeed, they were mortal enemies who saw their respective systems as polar opposites to one another in terms of their politics. But our founding fathers would have seen them as little more than carbon copies of the other, with only a slight difference of shading in the carbon to distinguish them. And why would that be? Why would a man like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson have seen Hitler and Stalin as merely a difference between frick and frack? A distinction between Tweedledee and Tweedledum?

Well, our founding fathers would see Hitler and Hitler and Stalin as identical twins, because the nature of the power they exercised was essentially the same. Total! They both embodied the model of the tyranny of ruler's law, as historians call it. The tyranny of ruler's law. That's right.

The founding fathers, and all ancient thinkers, for that matter, saw all political power being distributed along a spectrum of tyrannical ruler's law at one end of the spectrum, where, when you examine the methods and techniques of both Stalin and Hitler, they were both residing there at the extreme end of ruler's law. And at the other end of the spectrum is anarchistic no-law. There's ruler's law, and then at the other end, no-law. Anarchy at the other end. And the best model for government, that is people's law, falls in the middle, and it's where and what the fathers aimed at.

This is the true model of political power, people's law, under which human government should operate, not right and left. And the truth of this model that we have just laid out for you, ruler's law, or no-law, or people's law, the truth of this model is borne out time and time again when we examine history. When you consider it, the tyrants of history all shared the model of ruler's law, where a number of features are shared in common, no matter what the name of the ruler or the name of the system. Whether the title was fascism or communism, Hitler or Stalin, these features were shared in common.

That is, power is concentrated in one or a few men. Rights are bestowed by government and not inherently intrinsically given by God. And under ruler's law, power flows from the top to the bottom, from the ruler, and then maybe a little bit to the people. And such nations are ruled by men, not by law. Dictators, that is what the man says.

So that the ruler makes the laws and is above them too. You notice that happening in our own country. Who is above all the COVID restrictions? Why, our rulers, the politicians who make those very rules. And as well, under ruler's law, the land is his property and taxes can be levered at will with no representation by the people.

These are some of the chief features of ruler's law, under which both fascist Germany and communist Russia labored. They were virtually identical in this regard. And then at the other end of the spectrum is anarchy or no law. And this situation is unbearable for a people too. And they will quickly give up their rights, their privileges, and their property to a strong man if only he will restore law and order for them.

Wherever anarchy ascends, and we've seen this throughout history too. In the Bible, Israel in the time of the judges saw the chaos and injustice of Samuel and his wicked sons, for example, where every man did what was right in his own eyes, as the Bible says. And that's truly the bottom of what chaos represents. Everybody doing what they saw right in their own eyes. And so Israel demanded a king to rule over them, like the rest of the nations of the earth.

Or we see this anarchy as well in Europe, in the time of the Dark Ages, after the Roman Empire collapsed and all order went away. The barbarian hordes roamed the countryside, killing, raping, pillaging the churches and the towns and the people. Anarchy of a vicious and brutal kind swept across the continent and paved the way for the tyrannical system of feudalism in Europe, which feudalism endured for a thousand years. And that was after the people cried out for law and order after anarchy.

And then as well, finally, during the days of the French Revolution, anarchy ruled for a brief period, where the revolutionary committees lost control of governance, and the guillotine became the macabre and bloody symbol of anarchy in France. The ironclad rule of politics obtained here too, that is when chaos makes the people cry out, as it did in the Bible, those people will cry out for a king to make order. And so the so-called freedom of the French Revolution led inevitably to the tyrant of Napoleon. Oh, dear listener, therefore, there really is no substantial difference between left and right in our system.

Policies change from generation to generation, but the mode of governance remains consistent. Margaret Sanger, the inspiration for Planned Parenthood, hated abortion. She did. Her children in the movement these days hold it as a sacrament. On the surface, there seems to be a contradiction in the politics of those two bedfellows.

But when both Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood, what they do share in common is an approach to imposing their views by means of absolute government power. That is ruler's law or tyranny. And for this reason, one is the breastfed political child of the other. Oh, I think of one example from my own life of frick and frack or Tweedledee and Tweedledum, one being not much different than the other. Ah, the truth of this came home to me recently in a trip to Hawaii.

My wife and I spent Christmas with our kids in Hawaii, where my daughter and son-in-law are stationed as they serve in the army. And we spent one delightful evening having a picnic dinner on the beach as the sun set in the sea in the west and how beautiful it was. But my son-in-law had parked our car on the beach sand just off the highway and it sunk to its axle in soft beach sand and we were irretrievably stuck. We had to be pulled by rope from the sand by a good Samaritan who happened by. It was reminiscent to me of several times I have been irretrievably stuck in the snow in winter in the Midwest where I grew up.

I've had friends park in snow, or I've done it too, where they have gotten stuck in snow up to their axles and have had to have a good Samaritan or pay for it with a tow truck to pull them out. But in one instance, we were stuck in sand. In another, we were stuck in snow. But the net effect was identical. We were buried to our axles and unable to move.

So it is the difference between communism or fascism, right? Between the right and the left. It's that way with government. One tyrant may call himself a communist. Another may call himself a fascist.

But their philosophy of government is essentially the same. Ruler's law. So don't be fooled, listener. So much of the rhetoric that we hear from the left and the right today is shades of the same thought. You may be stuck in the political sand of the left or the political snow of the right.

But sand or snow, the net effect is identical. You are spinning your wheels. You are buried to your axle and irretrievably stuck. Nevertheless, what is essential is that we strive for the power model of people's law, which has a number of salient features that we should note with you. And we will continue those notes then beginning next week to show the benefits and the features of people's law and contradistinction to ruler's law or to anarchy.

Either of those polls are negative and will bring us to tyranny in the long run. This has been Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church. And we are a church who treasures their liberty and their freedom. And we understand and we hold forth the liberty that we have. We practice the liberty that we yet have under our constitutional system.

And we preach from the scriptures and we preach the liberty that follows from it. We also preach the responsibility that we have towards government to maintain ourselves under the covenant of the civil covenant. We have a responsibility to do that as well as the covenant of the church or the covenant of the family. And we hold these things forth. We preach them.

We teach them. And we also assemble then for holy worship on Sunday at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard. And I exhort you to go ahead and visit us then on Sunday morning. Perhaps you've been thinking about crossing our threshold. Please do so.

Also check out our websites. We have our church website, newgenevaopc.org. And then we also have our website where we have these radio programs cataloged for years and years back. And you can access those, excuse me, at omnispotestas.org. That's O-M-N-I-S dash P-O-T-E-S-T-A-S dot org.

Omnispotestas.org to access these radio programs. This has been Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church. And you can call us for more information and give us some feedback at area code 208-523-0196. That's area code 208-523-0196.