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, what are Principles 9 and 10 of the 28 Principles of the Constitution? Now, we've been methodically working our way through these 28 Principles as they are found in the landmark book, The 5,000-Year Leap. Our Founding Fathers had a core base of principles upon which they shaped and crafted the specific provisions of our Constitution.

It's not a document that came floating down from heaven in the hands of an angel, nor was it transmitted telepathically by space aliens to Thomas Jefferson's pen. No, rather the United States Constitution was the product of some 5,000 years of thought and wisdom and experience, cold from decades of reflection by philosophers and common men, too, who crafted the Constitution. And they all saw themselves as statesmen who had an opportunity to give the world a system of government that was the best the millennia of human experience could offer, tempered by what the Bible revealed and philosophers thought.

What the book, The 5,000-Year Leap, has done is summarize all of what men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton poured into the formation of the Constitution. Written under the supervision of Dr. W. Kleon-Skousen, in conjunction with several other fine scholars, is perhaps the best primer on the Constitution that is available. And so, if you like what you hear on this program, and I've drawn much of what is heard here from those resources, well, I urge you to buy this book. In addition, maybe another book from the National Center for Constitutional Studies, The Making of America.

You can buy these books and others on their website, nccs.org, nccs.org, the National Center for Constitutional Studies. Well, the ninth principle articulated in the 5,000-Year Leap is this. To protect man's rights, God has revealed certain principles of divine law. Yes, to protect man's rights, God has revealed certain principles of divine law. Well, as we saw last week, God has endowed man with certain unalienable rights, and these rights are God-given.

They're original, and they cannot be altered or broken by man. Every man has the duty to protect these rights in himself and his fellow man. Crucially, however, in order to do this, these rights must be guarded in the practical sphere by a surrounding fence, if you will, of law. Yes, the unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is fine in the abstract world of ideas. But if it is to mean anything in the real world of everyday experience, they must be guarded and protected by practical laws, knowable to all men.

This is what we mean by the principles of divine law that protect man's rights. What are the laws that protect man's rights? Well, first of all, we must recognize the most fundamental, the most fundamental, excuse me, set of laws ever revealed by the Creator, the God of the Bible, and those are the Ten Commandments. And when those are adhered to, those commandments not only express that which God always at all times expects from man as religious behavior, but it also expresses that which protects our rights as we live amongst one another.

The first table of the law, according to Jesus, is love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. But the second table of law is equally important. And our Lord goes on to say, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Indeed, if we love our neighbor as ourselves, then we will labor to protect his rights as well as ours. Ever since they were first promulgated from the top of Mount Sinai to the people of Israel, the Ten Commandments have had a profound and lasting impact upon the cultures and law codes of every civilized society in the world.

In fact, our Constitution is what is in large part because of them. Yes, the 19th century Supreme Court Justice David Brewer, he notes for us in his notes, our laws and customs are based upon the laws of Moses, that is the Ten Commandments, and the teachings of Christ, unquote. This particular point is important to me personally, because I, in the past, have preached through the Ten Commandments in our church pulpit for the last years. Well, no matter how minute, then, every fine point in the book, in the Bible, can be related to the Ten Commandments in some way, shape, or form.

Another way of looking at it is that the Pentateuch, for example, is an expansion of the Ten Commandments. A good example is in the area of criminal justice. Right now, our system of criminal justice is based on the punitive system, where a criminal ostensibly pays his debt to society for breaking the commandment, thou shalt not steal, by going to jail for a specified period of time. And behind bars, he's supposed to be rehabilitated while serving, quote-unquote, time for his crimes. But in reality, that criminal is far from rehabilitated.

So far, that prison becomes a school for crime, where he is warehoused with hardened criminals who teach him the finer arts of his trade. Also, he's introduced to the weight room, for example, where he beefs up to some fearful proportions, able to overcome his guards. Ah, some states are pondering doing away with the weight room, because it presents such a threat to those who guard them. Well, in short, the average first-time offender goes into prison, a frightened, scrawny, pencil-neck geek who's repentant, maybe, and amenable to change.

But he comes out a few years later as a hard-hearted criminal, wisened to the ways of his newfound peers, looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and his body covered with newly acquired muscles and tattoos. He is thus ready for a newer, higher level of crime, just the 180-degree opposite of why he was sent there in the first place. Our modern 21st-century socialist system of criminal justice is producing more criminals, not fewer, than why we sent him there in the first place. Well, the biblical model of criminal justice labors in an opposite direction. Instead of punitive justice, the model is that of restitution or restorative justice.

Instead of being separated from society and set apart to a culture of fellow criminals in a prison society, the lawbreaker is immersed in his own kind in civil society, where he is expected to make restitution to the victim of his crime and thus learn obedience so that he might be restored to the community as a law keeper. He is not lost to his friends, family, neighbors, but rather kept among them during this period of restitution. The values and principles of his community are reinforced, not undermined in this fashion.

And the Bible outlines in a number of places where the thief, instead of being sent to prison, is sent back into society to work to pay back his victim such that not only the original value of the thing stolen is paid back, but also everything the victim may have lost by putting that thing of value to work that might have brought him, right? So, in other words, if your little neighbor Johnny steals your car one night in a fit of rebellion, he's not sent to prison to learn the ways and wanderings of other hardened criminals and become a permanent criminal himself.

No, rather he is sent back into the working world of your community to pay you back for the car, plus everything you might have lost in the meantime by not having that car at your disposal. And so, little Johnny is kept in the matrix of those people who are good and strong. He'll have a positive morality reinforced to him. Well, if the thief is so incorrigible as to be unreliable to do this very simple thing well, then he's useless to both God and man and is put to death as an incorrigible criminal.

And by these means, not only is the victim satisfactorily compensated, which is a thing so very unsatisfied in today's criminal justice system, but also the perpetrator is either restored to his community as a productive member or he's eliminated as a hardened criminal who would otherwise victimize others over and over again. How often has that been replicated in our culture, right? Well, right now, our society tolerates and rewards hardened criminals, don't they? Allowing them to live and prosper to victimize the innocent again and again as they are allowed to live and go on committing crime after crime.

The victim is often victimized again and again in the criminal justice system. On top of that, the biblical model refuses to allow this. The biblical model insists on restitution for the victim and rehabilitation for the perpetrator or else. Well, we see also how revealed law protects man's rights in that it emphasizes unalienable duties as well as rights. Oh, horror of horrors, duties.

How can you speak such an unspeakable word as duty? Yet this is a word which must be spoken in today's world. As unsavory as duty may sound to the average American ear. We owe the protection of another man's rights in the courts and streets of America as much as we own the personal protection of our own rights. And if we refuse to protect another man's right to speak publicly or assemble freely or own a handgun or practice his religion freely, then we should not be surprised to discover that we fall short of the freedom to speak or assemble or shoot or say amen in the congregation.

Jefferson himself observed, and I quote him, man has no natural right in opposition to his social duties. Oh, that's a good observation. Man has no natural right that's in opposition to his social duties. It's a biblical principle, dear listener, ingrained into the Western mindset over millennia of experience. God has always matched individual rights with individual duties.

As the law says, once again, the law, you shall not see your brother's donkey or his ox fallen down by the way and ignore them. You shall help him to lift them up again, unquote. That's an example of how we should behave towards our neighbor. Those of you that remember your Bible history, you know the story, for example, of the Reubenites, the Gadites, and the half-tribe of Manasseh, for example, who found promising land and settlement on the eastern shore of the Jordan opposite to what God had promised Israel.

Nevertheless, God gave them this land on the condition, and I quote from Joshua, all the men of valor among you shall pass over armed before your brothers and shall help them until the Lord gives rest to your brothers as he has to you, unquote. In other words, those tribes had a duty to help their fellow citizens secure their rights to land and inheritance. Their own happiness and security had to be postponed until their brother's happiness and security was obtained. Time and time again, throughout the Bible, we see this principle reinforced. Divine law insists that we perform our duty to our fellow citizens.

Just a few examples of these commonly held duties expected of every citizen include, for example, the duty to support law and order and to keep the peace. The duty to become self-sufficient so that one is not dependent on the resources of his fellow man, becoming a burden instead of a boon. We have the duty to maintain the integrity of the family structure, one husband, one wife, in the context of many children. We have the duty to perpetrate the race that is to have children and pass on a heritage to the next generation. Oh, we have the duty to support personal and public standards of common decency.

That is, to make sure that behaviors like pornography and prostitution and drunkenness and homosexuality and gambling do not become commonplace. All of these and more were expected of every citizen as a simple duty. As Colin Ray's Lovell puts it in English Constitutional and Legal History, he says, To most Anglo-Saxons, the law was either divinely inspired or the work of their ancestors being of such antiquity that it was unthinkable that it could be changed, unquote. Oh, the law was the law was the law. There was no negotiation as to whether one could compromise and say, well, maybe we can say gay marriage can be legalized.

No, eternal standards of decency demand that any other than monogamous husband and wife marriage be condemned. This was God's eternal will, and such laws were eternal and immutable, even as you shall do no murder or you shall not steal were eternal and immutable. That's the sense of the ninth principle. To protect man's rights, God has revealed certain principles of divine law. To protect man's rights, God has revealed certain principles of divine law.

The tenth principle outlined in the 5,000-year leap is one ensconced in the preamble to the Constitution, and that is, the God-given right to govern is vested in the sovereign authority of the whole people. Yes, the whole people. The God-given right to govern is vested in the sovereign authority of the whole people. The preamble to the Constitution, of course, begins with those famous lines, we the people of the United States of America, in order to form a more perfect union, and then goes on to say, do establish and ordain this Constitution. We the people.

Oh, how are our neighbors? And we need to relearn this principle down to our toenails again, dear listener. If we understood the history of mankind, we'd understand exactly how brief is the window that has opened for liberty by this insight into political philosophy.

For the vast stretch of recorded history, some five millennia, the model of human government is that of a pyramid where God is reputed to channel power from himself to one man that is a king or a lord, or perhaps a small class of men at most, and this power would then flow downward to an increasing number of men in other classes like priests or nobles or princes, until finally it trickled down to the common peasant. But by then, of course, about the only power left to the peasant was to choose between gruel and oatmeal, gray wool or brown wool, and maybe sleep on his right side or his left side.

Such was the pyramid model of power in the ancient world. Well, this model was known as the divine right of kings. That is, the king has the God-given right to rule the rest of us. Power to do so is vested in him by God. Only in a few isolated, liberty-loving places was the true biblical model practiced.

And our founding fathers identified these brief shining moments of history, and they seized on them to model our own constitution. For example, early in Israel's history, God was lord over his people, and power resided directly with the people. They would choose, in the spirit of a true republic, representatives for 10 citizens, another to represent 50 of them, another to represent 100 citizens, and another to represent 1,000 of them. This is called the early tribal republic of Israel. The early tribal republic of Israel.

Well, on and on, this pattern would be replicated throughout the 12 tribes of Israel. And from time to time, God would raise up a judge who would lead them into battle or mediate in disputes between tribes. But it was always understood that there was only one king in Israel, and only one lord and prince, and that was God himself. He was in their midst, and the origins of political power, that is, the ability and authority to form policy for the welfare of all, that power was vested in the whole of the people, not in one man.

And our founding fathers understood this ancient biblical principle, and it was colony-wide at the time of the revolution. No one had to shake a dependent, slavish, socialist populace awake, like we have to do today, and tell them that power was vested in the whole people, that God was the only king given among men. No. The hardy colonists on the frontiers of the 13 colonies and in the growing cities, they knew this because generations of Christian men and women had been living it.

In fact, one exasperated governor of a colony, frustrated because he was loyal to King George III and believed in the divine right of kings, he noted in a letter back to England, he said, and I quote, if you ask an American who is his master, he will tell you he has none, and no governor but Jesus Christ, unquote. Isn't that telling? Isn't that a damning commentary on our own day? Most Americans, even if they say on the surface they're Christians, are afraid to confess Jesus as anything but a good friend and maybe their savior, but to confess him as their only king? Well, that's a bit embarrassing.

Certainly not politically correct. We are willing to confess President Biden as our king, maybe, with star-crossed eyes, but not Jesus Christ. How the heart and mind of the average American has turned. In fact, the rallying cry of the revolution was, no king but King Jesus. No king but King Jesus.

The direct assertion in this cry was that King George, the third, had no divine right to rule, that the only true king of any man was in heaven, and his name was Jesus Christ, and that true political power on this earth was vested in the whole people. The whole people. And so, every colonial individual understood intuitively when he reached for his musket to march with the militia against the redcoats. He knew this to his toenails.

Point this out to the average man on the street today, and all you get is a blank, empty-eyed look staring back at you, as if you are from another planet, and instead of hearing, no king but King Jesus, you get parroted back at you, oh, change we can believe in, or some other nonsense, as if this socialist mantra repeated ad nauseum by cultural zombies actually means anything. No, the worm has turned in the hearts and minds of several generations of, I'm afraid, and our fellow citizens have, for the most part, reverted to the default setting of the human heart, which longs for a human king in the flesh. We're slaves.

True liberty, which embraces the truth that God-given right to govern is vested in the sovereign authority of the whole people, is swiftly disappearing from the very shores where it was birthed in its fullest flower. The frailty of this principle, the brevity of this open window in which the fresh breezes of freedom flowed, is demonstrated by what happened in Israel. Eventually, Israel looked around her at the other nations like a child looks out its window, and he sees kids in the neighborhood sandbox, and suddenly that child feels lonely, and he longs to be like them.

Israel looked around herself at the neighboring nations, and behold, they had great and glorious kings in the flesh who sat in regal splendor on thrones of gold, wearing crowns of jewel-encrusted gold. They had great ceremonies of pomp and circumstance with large retinues of servants and princes and princesses. They wore silks and linens of beauty and finery, and the king looked so glorious in his chariot, his brass armor glinting in the sun as he led his troops into battle. All Israel had war. All they had in Israel were frumpy old judges who raised a staff in the air and called out something like, behold, the Lord your God mighty in battle.

At one point, the Bible tells us, all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel, Samuel, excuse me, and said to him, behold, appoint for us a king to judge us like all the other nations. Oh, like America. Oh, the tragedy of this request. Oh, the absolute squandering of centuries of liberty in this childish demand. Israel soon paid dearly for it, too.

And be careful what you wish for, dear American, because they got a whole series of tyrants who eventually sold them into captivity. The human heart and mind is so utterly fallen and slavish since the Garden of Eden and will quickly trade its God-given liberty to rule himself for a tyranny of a king, even as Esau traded his birthright for a pot of stew. Oh, American, you see all around you today fellow citizens who are operating on this age-old principle of the divine right of kings, selling their birthright for a pot of stew. Though they may not be able to articulate it as that, but that's what it is.

It is deeply rooted in the human heart and mind and not easily dislodged. The modern socialist progressive in America looks out at tyrants like Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Fidel Castro of Cuba, Kim Jong-il of North Korea, and they look enviously around them like kids in the sandbox, and they cry, Behold, appoint for us a king to judge us like the other nations.

The average American on the street, schooled for generations in public schools without a single course in civics or government, gazes upon a man who offers him free health care, guarantees him a college education and a house and a job, and he looks around him enviously like a kid in the sandbox, and he cries, Behold, appoint for us a king to judge us like all the other nations. Ah, know this, O fellow American, it has not always been thus. It is time to reclaim a quickly fading heritage. Our founding fathers drew upon the rich traditions of Israel and other peoples, including the Anglo-Saxon tribes of the British Isles.

And although these tribes had a king, our word is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word for king, singning, excuse me, sinning, or kinning, he was the only one among equals in the elected councils of the tribe. However, the power to govern was always seen to reside in the whole body of the people and not in a king. One of my favorite philosophers of the revolution who understood this principle, one who in fact articulated it, as no other, was a little known man named Algernon Sidney. And he was well known, thoroughly studied by the founders.

In his work, Discourses on Government, Sidney asserted, I say that those who place the power to govern in a multitude, that is the people, understand a multitude of free men who think it for their convenience to join together and to establish such laws and rules as they obliged themselves to observe, unquote. Now we take this principle so for granted today that the power to govern oneself is resident in the multitude of freedmen, that is, that we fail to realize how radical that idea was in former days.

In fact, so radical was it to the entrenched idea of the divine right of kings that the kings of that day found it dangerous to their thrones if it caught on. And so they made it a dangerous idea for anyone to hold. And Charles II found it so dangerous he beheaded Algernon Sidney. Oh, this is the seriousness, dear listener, for this principle. The God-given right to govern is vested in the sovereign authority of the whole people.

Our founders found it to be a dangerous idea too. That's why they had to take up not only their pins to right of liberty, but also their muskets to defend their lives, property, and families. Studying very closely Israel or the Anglo-Saxons and thinkers like Sidney and John Locke, our founders crafted our constitution. Alexander Hamilton puts it this way in the Federalist Papers, the fabric of the American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of the consent of the people. The streams of national power ought to flow immediately from that pure original fountain of all legitimate authority.

Unquote. Dear listeners, it's time to wake up the sluggish hearts of our fellow citizens. Just because you can vote for a president every four years does not mean you're free. They do this in Iran and North Korea and Venezuela too. As one pundit articulated recently, he said, Americans are free one day every four years when they vote for a president.

Then they go right back to being socialist slaves to that government. Unquote. Only when we know to the depths of our being that God has turned that power pyramid upside down and that power no longer flows from a human king downward to the people, but that God has ordained that power should flow from the people to elected representatives who hold that power for only brief periods and only in severely limited spheres of power, only then will we begin to act as free men again. Instead of mouthing empty-headed socialist slogans like change we can believe in, we must take back the power that is rightfully ours.

The Massachusetts Proclamation of 1776 puts it this way, it is a maxim that in every government there must exist somewhere a supreme sovereign, absolute, and uncontrollable power, but this power resides always in the body of the people, and it never was or can be delegated to one man or a few. The great creator has never given to men a right to vest others with authority over them, unlimited, either in duration or degree. Unquote. We must rediscover this again, dear listener. This has been Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with the Moment of Truth.

New Geneva meets for Holy Worship on Sunday at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard. Come, cross our threshold, find out who we are, and listen to the gospel as it is preached from the scriptures. New Geneva meets for Holy Worship on Sunday at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard. Call us for more information and feedback at 208-523-0196. 208-523-0196.