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 challenge you by asking, what are the fifth and sixth principles of our founding fathers when they established our Constitution? Last week, I reviewed the scope of our website, which catalogs these radio broadcasts, these podcasts, and that website is americastruths.org, americastruths.org.

And I at least had intended to cover principles five and six of the fantastic book, The 5,000-Year Leap, the subtitle being A Miracle That Changed the World. The 5,000-Year Leap by the great scholar, Mr. Skousen. And I did not end up getting around to principles five and six. I apologize for that. But today, we are going to do that.

We want to unpack just the 28 principles of the 5,000-Year Leap that established our Constitution and saw just a fantastic exponential growth in knowledge, in liberty, in freedom that the deep state is trying to squash right now, but will not be able to because, indeed, we the people, as the Constitution begins, have established a constitutional republic. And what it has done is revolutionize and transform the world. So I want to unpack principles five and six of this constitutional principle that has revolutionized the world. But just briefly, let me review the first four.

Now, you can access those broadcasts of the first four principles of the 5,000-Year Leap over August and September of 2021. Go to our website, americastruths.org, and access by year 2021, and look at the months, August and September of 2021, which cover the first four principles of the 5,000-Year Leap. And let me just review those just very briefly, first of all. The first principle was the only reliable basis for sound government and just human relations is natural law. The only reliable basis for sound government and just human relations is natural law.

Oh, such a profound principle to study. And the second principle that we looked at was a free people cannot survive under a Republican Constitution unless they remain virtuous and morally strong. Virtue and morality are at the center of a free people and a Republican, that's a small r, Republican Constitution. And the third principle that we looked at then was the most promising method of securing a virtuous and morally stable people is to elect virtuous leaders. Boy, doesn't that make sense.

If you're going to have virtue in a republic, you must have virtuous leaders. And we must begin looking to that as we elect our representatives, our magistrates in a republic. And the fourth principle that we covered is without religion, the government of a free people cannot be maintained without religion. And the religion that the Founding Fathers had in mind was indeed the religion of biblical Christianity. Without religion, the government of a free people cannot be maintained.

So those were the first four principles. You'll see them expanded in August and September broadcast of 2021. And I urge you to go to those on our podcast website, which is americastruths.org. But let's look at Principles 5 and 6 now. We've been examining these 28 principles upon which our founding fathers framed our Constitution.

And there is something basic about these 28 principles that resonates with our past. Many of us who have heard these things in bits and pieces or maybe in classes so long ago in our childhood, and that's for the gray hairs like me, because government and civics classes and classes on the Constitution are not taught anymore. But I remember them. Sometimes we miss these principles when interacting with an increasingly socialist and tyrannical government. We may say to ourselves, I know something's not right, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

Well, what these 28 principles do is assemble in a very brief compass, the length and breadth of our Founding Fathers worldview and philosophy, so that we can put our fingers on just what is wrong with things as they are, and more importantly, so we can put our finger on precisely the way things should be if we are ever again to recapture our constitutional republic. And all these things and more, we elucidate for you as we uncover the 28 basic principles upon which our Founding Fathers established the Constitution.

And let me acknowledge right up front the book from which so much of this is drawn that is the 5,000-year leap, written by the late W. Kleon Skousen. Get this book. Okay, returning to our 28 principles, let me articulate principle number five. That is, all things were created by God, and therefore upon Him all mankind are equally dependent, and to Him they are equally responsible. Principle number five, upon which our founders established the Constitution, all things were created by God, and therefore upon Him, the God of the Bible, all mankind are equally dependent, and to Him they are equally responsible.

Now, as foreign as this may sound to the average man on the street, it was an assumed given at the time of our founding. The God of the Bible was there, and He was watching the sons of men. There were no absolute Darwinians disparaging the reality of our Creator, asserting that all things we see around us are nothing more than matter plus time plus chance. No. Atheists were not commanding our public school systems and university facilities and scientific research institutes.

No. Science and the Christian religion were seen to be entirely compatible. In fact, the true scientific genius of the 18th century, who was Isaac Newton, whose theory on gravity held the field until the advent of Albert Einstein, well, Newton arguably wrote more on the Christian religion than he did even on scientific matters. In addition, one of the great philosophers of all time became a favorite of the founding fathers, and his name was John Locke. And he became known as the philosopher of the American Revolution because of the profound impact which his writings had on men like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.

His primary works, which were Essay on Human Understanding and Essay on Civil Government, became the very textbooks for government for our founding fathers. And Locke made good use of several of the classic arguments for the existence of God. For example, three arguments for the existence of God that he used were, number one, the teleological argument for the existence of God. The teleological argument. This is the classic watchmaker argument.

That is, if one were to find a watch on the side of the road without any previous experience of a watchmaker, he would nevertheless have to conclude from the existence of such a finely crafted instrument that a watchmaker actually existed somewhere and made the watch. So for Locke, the intricacies and sophistication of the human body and the marvelous balance of nature, it was proof an all-wise, all-powerful watchmaker or creator made them all. The end or purpose for creation is and always has been in the mind of such a creator. The second argument that he used was the ontological argument for the existence of God. The ontological argument.

That's a big word for existence, right? The ontological argument. Locke held with other Christian philosophers that there cannot be a creature or something about which a greater being or creator cannot be predicated. A creature in the midst of a creation necessarily demanded a perfect creator in whom resided the complete omniscience, power and good to make such a creation. And the third argument that our founding fathers used indeed to establish the existence of God was the anthropological argument for the existence of God.

The anthropological argument. That is, man is self-evidently distinguishable from the inanimate life around him, like rocks and air and sunlight, right? He's also distinguishable from animal life in being a sentient creature. That is, a thinking, rational, feeling creature. None of these arise from nature apart from a being greater than that creation.

This can only be God. Man has the faculties of compassion and love, and thus God must also be a God of love and compassion. Man also has a refined sense of justice in his dealing with his fellow man, reflecting God's own sense of justice. And man also has a sense of beauty in his surrounding world, delighting in and enjoying the balance and harmony of nature. And this reflects God's own character and nature and sense of beauty.

These things transcend brute nature and therefore must point to a being transcending nature itself, that is, the God of the Bible. Therefore, when a man like Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, he noted that all men are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, the creator he had in mind was that outlined by John Locke in his essay on human understanding. See the connection? No founding father could even conceive of fashioning a constitutional republic without predicating it upon the prior assumption of a personal sovereign God, to whom we must all give an account.

Furthermore, this God was not some aloof, distant being who made us and then left us alone to fend for ourselves. No, rather, this God was the personal God of the Bible who gave us his revealed law by which to live. This was not new to our founding fathers either. It was the basis for law for Western culture since the days of the Christian Emperor Justinian, for example. Emperor Justinian, who ruled during the latter fifth and early sixth centuries A.D., and he reduced the principles for biblical Western law to three, all derived from the Bible and the teachings of Jesus.

Those three basic principles for law were, number one, live honestly before God and your fellow man. Number two, hurt no other of your fellow man. And number three, render all that you owe to God and your fellow man. All the three principles for biblical Western law derived by Justinian established in the Justinian code. From these three principles, Justinian extrapolated all of the code of law that has come down to us as Justinian's code.

Without that accountability before God for these, in this life and the next, what reason does the ruler or the citizen have to be good? They don't have a reason. All other Christian princes since Justinian have built upon these premises, all the way down to John Locke and our founding fathers. At the very center of all law was not some human view of general consensus, but rather absolute, unchanging law given by God himself and revealed in the Bible. So, what you must have clearly established in your mind, old listener, is the drastic difference between law with and law without the God of the Bible.

Law without the God of the Bible depends upon men being sovereign over other men, creating and enforcing laws of their own making unequally. Law with the God of the Bible depends upon God being sovereign over men who then live under those laws equally. Or, law without God, without the God of the Bible, demands a shifting consensus of principle depending upon what men in any given time and place decide. But, law with God demands an eternal, unchanging principle depending upon his revealed word in the Bible. Increasingly, we are seeing the United States of America morph into a nation of men rather than laws.

Ah, when will it be indeed that men like, um, men like, um, men like, um, Biden, right? Men like Hunter Biden are held to the same standard as every other man in this country. Unlike our baseless politicians in our own day, our founding fathers thought and acted like statesmen, reflecting wisely on the role of God in America's history. As Dr. Skousen puts it in the 5,000-year leap, he says, our founding fathers considered the whole foundation of a just society to be structured on the basis of God's revealed law. These laws constituted a moral code, clearly distinguishing right from wrong, unquote.

And one of the sources from English tradition that our founding fathers consulted was the giant of English law, William Blackstone. From 1723 to 1780, he lived. And Blackstone established classes for the first law school at Oxford in 1753. And his lectures began to be published in 1765, just before our own revolution. In his commentaries on the laws of England, he observed, and I quote Blackstone, when the supreme being organized the universe, he organized it and impressed certain principles upon that matter from which it can never depart and without which it would cease to be, unquote.

Blackstone would go on to articulate a standing principle among all jurisprudence developed in the West since the founding of Christianity and the development of science. And that principle is there were two kinds of law, the laws of human nature and the laws of the physical universe. The laws of human nature were those revealed in the Bible, while the laws of the physical universe and nature's God, as Jefferson called him, were to be sought out through scientific investigation. Blackstone himself concluded upon these two foundations, the law of nature and the law of revelation depend all human laws, unquote.

The entire enterprise of the Constitution was crafted with this understanding, that a good God who had revealed the basic principles whereby men shape the institutions by which they govern themselves was superintending the Constitution's writing and formation. God oversaw the composition of our Constitution. Each of the founding fathers was intently aware of the presence of God amongst them at every stage of our early nation's founding.

One biographer of George Washington, for example, documents 67 different occasions when Washington acknowledges that he would have suffered disaster if not for the intervention of God in our struggle for independence. In his first inaugural address, in fact, Washington himself says, and I quote, no people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand which conducts the affairs of men more than the people of the United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token a providential agency, unquote.

Unlike so many of the politicians of our own day, the statesmen of our founding fathers' generation knew principle number five to their toenails, and that is, all things were created by God, and therefore upon him all mankind are equally dependent, and to him they are equally responsible. Dear listener, do not ever, ever again let our mass culture deceive you or your children into the false notion that our founding generation attempted to establish our constitution on a secular, irreligious basis. Nothing could be further from the truth.

They walk consciously with God, not only in the church sanctuary, in the marketplace, the workplace, home and hearth, but also at the courthouse, the White House, and the Congress. May you do so as well, and may you urge our elected officials to walk unafraid with God in all of those venues, too? Well, principle number six. Principle number six, establishing our constitution, is one with which mass culture is familiar, maybe on a superficial level, for we hear it glibly tossed off frequently, and that is, all men are created equal. Principle number six for the establishment of the constitution, all men are created equal.

Principle six. A thing taken for granted, even abused in our own day, it was truly revolutionary in the 18th century for millennia. One class of men would oppress another class of men by asserting some inherent superiority of themselves over their brothers. The Egyptians had the eternal order of pharaoh, priests, and commoners. Hindus had the eternal caste system, which divided men into ironclad classes of brahmin, priest, and untouchable.

In the West, the nobility had one set of laws by which they lived, while the common man had another disadvantaged set of laws by which they were expected to live. The mere existence of the House of Lords, which represented nobility by birth, and the House of Commons, representation by vote, that is, in England, is testimony to this inequality by institution. And all of this was justified by birth, rank, and privilege. Revolutionary thinkers like John Locke changed all that. No, ideas that had been germinating and taking root for centuries now sprouted, and were about to blossom in our constitution.

Our founding fathers drank deeply from Locke, or a man named Algernon Sidney, in his Discourses on Government, or the French philosopher Baron Charles de Montesquieu, and his Spirit of the Laws. Oh, these men and others you may never have heard of before, but they were important to the thinking of our founding fathers. These men articulated this principle, all men are created equal. Plus, many others will be unfolding in weeks to come.

You'll hear me refer to them often in the future, and these were no mere academic ponderers in ivory towers, tossing out impractical ideas from their ivory towers to see who would pick them up and run with them. No, they lived these ideas in the marketplace of ideas. In fact, King Charles II beheaded Algernon Sidney in 1683 for asserting this principle that all men are created equal, and that there was no divine right of kings to rule over other men. Once again, do not let this get out to our ruling class of politicians in Washington, this D.C., the beheading.

These men mouth this principle, all men are created equal, in order to get elected, but who then go on to rule over us as if they have a divine right to stay there and soak up the wealth, power, and privilege that's supposed to be resident in the people. God help the poor citizen who points this out to them, too. A friend of mine told me recently that in speaking with a state representative concerning a local issue, he referred to him, that public official, as a public servant. Becoming peeved and agitated, this elected servant of the people sneered, I'm actually a public official, and he walked away.

This kind of two-tiered inequality must stop. You can almost hear the beheading axis being rattled in the background, right? A functional inequality among men is bred by the attitude expressed in Animal Farm, where after the revolution, one of the new Ten Commandments scrawled on the side of the barn declared, all animals are created equal. But slowly, as memory faded and time went on, and the pigs garnered more and more wealth and privilege, that commandment morphed into, on the side of the barn, all animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others. Ha, ha, ha, ha.

Yes, the pigs began to gobble everything up. The political prophet, George Orwell, he knew his subject, didn't he? He had in mind not some nobility in unequal privilege because of birth, or in unequal privilege because of force of arms, but rather a class of men who grasped after unequal privilege, after being entrusted with it under the very premise of being equal with those they were supposed to represent. Oh, for Orwell, this was the gall of Stalin, a contemporary of Orwell. This was the gall of Stalin and his cronies in the Soviet Union in the 20th century.

And for us, this is increasing the gall of our politicians in Washington, D.C. and Boise. Oh, but in just what are we to be equal? I asked early on when I pondered this principle, what are we to be equal in? We are all born with different natural talents and abilities into different and varying life circumstances, and no two persons ever has the same amount of wealth and resources in this life, and no two persons ever seem to enjoy exactly the same measure of joy and happiness, pain and suffering, etc. How then can we all be exactly equal?

Oh, and the answer comes back, we can never be exactly equal in all things and in all circumstances. That's the grave error of the socialist expecting equal outcomes. And we'll be unpacking that error in more detail later. But for now, let us keep this truth in mind. Our founding fathers and the men from whom they drew these principles knew that all men are equal in three respects.

Number one, all men are equal before God. All men are equal before God. God judges us all by one perfect law word. While human justice, even at its best, is imperfect, God's justice is perfect, and he is a just judge. You and I and every other man or woman alive today stand equally before him, and we will be judged equally by that law word.

This is why Christians urge all men to be found in Jesus Christ, so that our sins might be judged in him and not in ourselves. Number two, all men are equal before the law. This great revolutionary principle, all men are equal before the law, is a direct descendant of biblical Christianity. If God so treats his creature man equally before his law word, ought not we treat one another equally before the law as well. This means that there's one law for the ditch digger and the developer, the plumber and the politician, the poor man and the rich man.

Oh, ought not Hunter Biden be held to equal standards as the lowly user of street drugs in Chicago, right? Oh, yes, we say that the law ought to be applied equally to both Hunter Biden and that lowly street user of drugs. It ought to be applied equally to both citizens, commensurate with the gravity and extent of their crime. All men are equal before the law. Thirdly, all men are entitled to equal protection of their rights.

Very important. All men are entitled to equal protection of their rights. As men and women of integrity before God, we have rights, one amongst the other, which we protect in one another and which the law protects as well. And among these rights to paraphrase the declaration are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We might also include the bill of rights to the constitution, as well as all the rights explicit and implicit in the constitution itself.

For example, you have a right to have your property respected and protected by the state and not seized by it. In these three ways, then, O fellow citizens, we are all created equal. Our founding fathers never intended for us to have equal outcomes. Once again, I'll treat more of that in the future. But they did strongly affirm that we are all equal before God, the law, and in the protection of our rights.

And then we see this so richly and abundantly reflected in the Bible, do we not? It will take a war between the states and generations of bitter struggle to make freedom for all men, even slaves, true for every American. But we are making this foundational principle of our founders true in the crucible of history, are we not? Oh, dear listener, if you would be a truly free man, equal before the throne of your creator, and more than that, a very son of the living God with all the rights and privileges of a son, I urge you to come to the Christian faith today through God's only son, Jesus Christ.

This has been Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with the Moment of Truth. New Geneva meets for holy worship at 10 a.m. at Sunday on 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard. And I urge you to call us for more information at area code 208-523-0196. 208-523-0196.