Greetings. This is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith. Today, what are principles 13 and 14 of the Constitution in our book, The 5,000-Year Leap? Now, if you've been tracking with us over the last few weeks, you know what I mean by these terms. The book, The 5,000-Year Leap, is a work that does the best job that I have seen of summarizing the thought and worldview of our founding fathers.

How can we possibly distill the main points of our Constitution and why men like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison made it in the first place, this Constitution? If you're looking for such a work, well, The 5,000-Year Leap is it. What this book does is boil down all the eloquence and vast body of speeches and books, all of which are worth reading in themselves, into 28 principles and how we need to hear those principles today.

Humanity has experimented with government for over 5,000 years, and thus the title of The 5,000-Year Leap, and come up with all kinds of horrible, disastrous forms of government, a monarchy, where a single king is judge, jury, and executioner, and which is so susceptible to tyranny, or a democracy, where the mob rules in all of its irrational passion, and is equally susceptible to tyranny, or a socialist state, where a kind of bait-and-switch is performed on the people who are promised that all power and property is held in common, but which in reality is manipulated by a few men, often called the dictatorship of the proletariat by philosophers like Karl Marx.

Well, it's no surprise, here, as well, the socialist state, as we're seeing in our own day, is just as susceptible to tyranny as others. Well, after studying very closely all these forms of government, our founding fathers distilled the best from history into what we now know as the American Constitution. Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, oh, they were all close students of the history of governments, and they found that a constitutional republic was the best form of government to match human nature and its weaknesses with Christian renewal and its strengths.

Well, with this in mind, what are the 13th and 14th principles of the 28 principles of the American Constitution? The 13th principle is a constitution should be structured to permanently protect the people from the human frailties of their rulers. Very important to understand. A constitution should be structured to permanently protect the people from the human frailties of their rulers. How utterly critical this principle is to our own age.

Nowhere is the gap between the sober, realistic worldview of our founding fathers in starker contrast with the soft, naive, saccharine worldview of our progressive age. In our own day and age, who will admit that there are any human frailties against which citizens need protection? Of course, unless it's Donald Trump, right? In which case you need an exorcist. When it was actually Nancy Pelosi who invited an exorcist to her own home to exorcise the demons there.

Oh, in any case, our founding fathers saw human nature as fundamentally fallen and corrupt, needing renewal and regeneration, if ever things were going to improve for mankind. Modern psychology and spirituality and evolutionary theory refused to see the truth of human nature, convincing itself that human nature is basically good. They hearken back to men like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that, and I quote him, man is naturally good. I believe that I have demonstrated it, unquote.

While this demonstration is really nothing more than an observation on his part that man occasionally behaves well in order to get something he wants from a fellow man, and thus a man may punish a thief because he does not want to be stolen from himself. A man may give to a needy soul in hopes that he may get something when he is in need himself. Well, he expresses this, Rousseau does, as, and I quote, an exercise of virtue by which a man commits himself to practice while learning to understand it, unquote.

But this is really nothing more than the old discredited theory of enlightened self-interest in which men supposedly treat other men well in order to be treated well by others themselves. This is at the heart of evolutionary ethics, so-called, whereby evolutionists try to account for morality in humans on the basis of species survival, on the basis of species survival alone. Richard Dawkins, prime example, a notorious British scientist who is as militant and atheist and evolutionist as you'll find. Well, he tries to do exactly this in his book, The Selfish Gene, The Selfish Gene.

In this book, he asserts that men practice the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, only because it is conducive to survival, because your chances of survival increase if others can be convinced of this thing too. He also tries to make evolution account for the rise of the family, because if one protects his own relatives, then his own gene pool is increased and like traits to his own are propagated, right? Well, outside of this, for him, human nature has no reason for morality. He's not inherently weak or sinful or fallen from a previous righteous state.

According to evolutionists, modern progressives refuse to acknowledge any human frailties or faults whatsoever. But besides, being a series of very weak arguments for powerful and biblical forces, evolution has utterly failed to account for the rise of Christianity and self-sacrifice for not only one's own immediate survival, but also for others outside of one's own immediate gene pool. This is precisely what the Bible means when it talks about, for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life. That's, of course, John 3, 16.

Jesus stands as heaven's greatest argument against evolution and its theory of morality, because Christ transcends all of the convenient, handy categories of survival of the fittest theorists. Christ has sacrificed and given of himself for far more than self-interest or his own immediate gene pool, right? The Apostle John says, Christ is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. The reason this sacrifice and death was required, which is all too often forgotten, is because of man's sinful fallen condition. The Bible paints man as a corrupt, fallen sinner.

The Apostle Paul says, none is righteous, no, not one. No one understands, no one seeks for God. All have turned aside. Together they have begun worthless. No one does good, not even one, unquote.

Not a single human being can escape this condition. This is what theologians mean when they talk about original sin. Original sin is that state of man whereby he inherits a flawed nature just by the mere reason of his being born. Original sin. Man cannot help but be a sinner.

It is as natural as breathing. He's so from his very birth. David the psalmist says, behold, I was birthed in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. Dear listener, do not be deceived about this. The Bible presents mankind as fatally flawed.

Though he may do things that appear good once in a while, from a human perspective, we constantly pat ourselves on the back, congratulating ourselves that we've done this or that. That's perfect and good and righteous before God. But know this, though men do things that appear good to one another, they are corrupt and full of sin from God's perspective. Solomon said in the Proverbs, there's a way that seems right to a man, but its end is a way of death. From God's perspective in heaven, man's righteousness on earth is nothing but sin.

Isaiah puts it this way, we have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like filthy rags." This natural state of man is precisely why words like salvation and redemption are used to describe what must happen to man before he is actually good and righteous and true. It is the very reason for the name of the Savior. You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. So, dear listener, know this.

Although modern progressive America refuses to acknowledge the flawed state of human nature, our founding fathers knew it only too well. And because of this flawed nature, man had to be watched and controlled, especially those who were in government over us and had power over us. If all that we have said about human nature is true of our fellow man in society in general, how much more so is it true of our fellow man in government? Our founding fathers felt that nowhere is man less to be trusted with his natural instincts than in governing his fellow man.

How do you think George Washington felt about government power and its potential for harm? Oh, there were those who wanted to make him king, giving him unlimited powers, beginning the perpetual cycle of monarchy and tyranny all over again, only on this new continent. Heaven forbid, thank God that Washington had the foresight and character to refuse a king's crown. In fact, he said, and I quote Washington, government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master, unquote.

Yet there are those in our own nation who would make of a charming, charismatic president a king. Though he may not yet bear the title of king, what is the difference if a single man commands the economy can fire and hire corporation presidents in the private sector and Congress does his back and call? It frightens me as a student of history at just how ignorant so many Americans are of the divine science of government, as our founding fathers called it, made so by our public school system. Like millions of Pollyannas, our students are ready to follow the first charming government magistrate into the dark wood of tyranny.

Times are hard and we look for saviors and problem solvers. The temptation to exchange our hard won and rare liberties for so-called solutions to our problems like housing or medical care or jobs in a time of crisis, it's that temptation is so strong. But we must not be fooled by such appearances, dear reader, dear leader, dear listener, though ever so benign, as Madison puts it, for it is a truth which the experience of all ages has attested that the people are commonly most in danger when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those toward whom they entertain the least suspicion. Unquote. Naive Pollyannas we are.

Dear listener, though millions of fellow citizens around us are naive and ecstatic about a political messiah. Stay cool. Keep your wits about you. Although things like liberty and rights sound abstract and ethereal, when you are short of the concrete realities of life like food, shelter, and a job, do not fall to the temptations of trading them in for those things. No.

The very reality that makes fallen man tyrants is that once they have your liberties and rights, there's no incentive to provide you with what you lacked before that is food, shelter, and a job. Our founding fathers constructed the constitution to protect us from the human frailties of our rulers. Man is not basically good. Untouched by the regenerating power of God, man is fallen and wicked and susceptible to the vagaries of his fallen nature. The temptations of power over the other man is irresistible.

It's godlike. It is fatal to a free people. Understanding man's true nature, our founding fathers built into the constitution guards and safeties for our rights. The concept of separation of powers, for example, or checks and balances, both of which and more will be studied in detail in the future, are premised on the fact that man's fallen nature is constantly unrelentingly tempted to power and tyranny over his fellow man. This would not be true if men were basically good.

Do not let your politicians and social scientists soothe you with the lie that our natures are fundamentally neutral, as an animal in nature would be, or fundamentally good, as religious flatterers try to paint humanity in order to win you over. When I go to a doctor for a checkup, I expect an honest diagnosis of my health. If he flatters me by telling me I'm such in fine shape for a man my age and that I have a clean bill of health, when in reality I have a cancerous tumor beginning to grow in my chest, well that doctor is a liar.

I may go skipping out of his office that day, feeling good about myself, delighted in my new doctor, but I will soon be sick and dying, wishing the first diagnosis had been true and honest. But by then, it's too late to do anything, right? So it is. We have many in our culture giving us a false diagnosis of human nature, that your leaders can be trusted with immense power, and that they have your best interest at heart, and that politicians, right, like Joe Biden, are basically good people who only want to exercise power for the public interest. Oh, this is a lie, a false diagnosis of human nature.

Give me rather the good doctor of the Bible, the great physician himself, Jesus Christ, who gives me the first, the right diagnosis, and then the right prescription. Our founding fathers understood this from the Bible as well, and applied it to the realities of the political world around them, and thus they put no confidence or trust in man in his unregenerate natural state. In fact, Thomas Jefferson says this about the heart of man, it would be a dangerous delusion or a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights. That confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism.

Free government is founded in jealousy and not in confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power, that our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no farther, our confidence may go. In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution, unquote. Jefferson understood human nature. Only when you have a correct diagnosis can you prescribe the correct cure, and our founding fathers correctly diagnosed human nature as fallen and corrupt.

It's called total depravity. And thus, they were able to prescribe the right political cure, a limited Constitution. Only the chains of the Constitution could tie down the dreaded beast of tyranny. It's unfortunate and dangerous that many Pollyanna people in our country are naively untying those chains today, believing the lie coming from the beast's mouth that the men of our choice are basically good, and putting confidence in those men that they only have our best interest at heart and only want to serve the public interest. Oh, we persist in this on this course.

Oh, make no mistake about this. Man's nature is fallen and corrupt, not basically good. And our founding fathers developed our 13th principle in light of that truth. That is, a Constitution should be structured to protect the people from the human frailties of their rulers. Well, the 14th principle is bound up very closely with the 13th, and that is, life and liberty are secure only as long as the right to property is secure.

The 14th principle of the Constitution, found then in the 5,000-year leap, is life and liberty are secure only as long as the right to property is secure. Unbeknownst to most Americans and most American Christians today, this is also a biblical principle. Some Christian sects and denominations and individuals had developed a faulty, pietistic view of property and possessions. Pietism was a movement of the 16th and 17th centuries that reacted against the materialism of the age by retreating into a false spirituality that saw all things material as evil and all things invisible and spiritual as good.

This and thus, property and inheritance and wealth were by definition evil, and those of property must be somehow evil and wicked, right? Attractive quality clothing, bad. Sackcloth and rough wool underwear, good. A safe, warm, large home, bad. A cold, rickety room in a monastery, good.

A large estate with land and inheritance, bad. Homelessness and wandering the countryside, good. Well, the ideal was that a man behaved with Christian piety, that he looked exclusively inward to his soul and meditated on the things of the Spirit with very little action in the real material world. And much of this kind of attitude lingers in the life of the church today, like a bad hangover. Oh, the pietistic view of the world is not the biblical view of the world.

The biblical view is that we do not neglect the inward world of the Spirit, but that the inward world of the Spirit is brought to bear in the real world, in the real world of other people, and the material of the objective world, too. The subjective reality of the life in Christ is always made real in the objective life of Christ's creation. It is in that creation that we are commanded to take dominion and fill it with a regenerate humanity. Be fruitful and multiply, the Bible says. Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over it.

The taking dominion of the earth by necessity and definition means acquiring property as land is taken and cultivated, and the rich produce of the land brings prosperity. By being fruitful and multiplying, family is created, and property shared with it, and an inheritance passed down through generations. And so the Bible always looks at property as familial. This is utterly crucial to understanding the nature of property. Property is familiar.

I'm sorry, is familial. Pardon me. Property is familial, and why life and liberty are secure, only as long as the right to property is secure. We see this principle inculcated again and again throughout Scripture. Father Abraham was wealthy, though without landed possessions, with the exception of the land he bought at Machpelah to bury his wife Sarah.

Even then, the nation surrounding Canaan respected this purchased land throughout the generations, right down to the days when Israel came into possession of the land. Property rights were respected, and only when they are can man be said to be truly free. Israel herself divided up the promised land by familial tribes. The 12 tribes descended from Abraham. Clans further divided these tribal lands right down to the individual families.

So committed is God to seeing property as familial that even after generations had passed and land bought and sold many times, after 49 years of this process, there would be a year of jubilee in which all land would be reset to its original state of possession among the original families that owned it in the first place. Oh, borders would go back to their original lines. Families that may have lost property due to hard times or the conniving of their fellow Israelites being cheated, well, they would have the original family inheritance back again.

God saw this as right and good and fair because property is right and good and fair, a foundational principle of creation. Property is meant to be developed and prospered in families. The year of jubilee was meant to be a time of true liberty because land previously held in bondage by non-families would be freed, returned to its original possessors. Goodbye, Black Rock, right? The year of jubilee was meant to be a time of true rejoicing.

Thus, our word to be jubilant because God's original plan for subduing and possessing the land was respected and honored. Christians today little understand this commitment to property and its relation to the creation mandate and its foundation in families and thus its relation to true liberty and freedom. There's a direct line that can be drawn from the principle inherent in the year of jubilee to constitutional liberty because in the liberation of property to its original possessors, we have the right to property respected and honored by God himself. Oh, he made provision for it in the constitution of Israel.

Ever since then, God has insisted that man cherish and respect not only his own property but that of his neighbor. Oh, that's the whole purpose of the injunction, thou shalt not steal. Property and freedom are bound up with one another and the man who does not understand this does not understand either the Bible or liberty. Is it any surprise then that our founding fathers understood this principle to their toenails? It was one of John Locke's recurring themes in his essay concerning civil government.

Excuse me. He wrote an essay concerning civil government and all of our founding fathers had well-worn copies of this in their libraries. The man who fulfills this principle of subduing and taking possession of a portion of creation that has exclusive rights to that which he gives his labor. It's his. He has earned it.

And Locke puts it this way. Whatsoever a man removes out of the state of nature, he has mixed his labor with it and joined to it something that is his own and thereby makes it his property. Unquote. Very well put. What you work for is yours.

It is your property and no one has the right to take it from you and give it to someone else. In fact, the very reason for the creation of government in the first place is to protect the property of the private individual and keep it in his family. Our founding fathers saw the constitution they were creating as an instrument to keep property from the government and protect it in the hands of the people. The very basis of government is to keep property from the government and protect it in the hands of the people.

If the people needed to do it, they could loan or give a small part of their property to government for the betterment of the welfare of the people. Our nation has it turned around though. Today, they see all property as ultimately the government's and we only get to have it as they see fit. This is the whole point of a very important Supreme Court case recently decided in 2005. It involves the principle of eminent domain.

eminent domain. That principle asserts that a government can seize a man's private property and pay the man fair market value if the government wishes to put that property to use for the greater good of the community. This is a pernicious doctrine. Highways are built this way, as well as airports and other large public ventures. But in the Supreme Court case, Kelo versus City of New London, the City of New London, Connecticut, seized private property merely because they could get larger tax revenue from the shopping plaza that would be built there.

How trivial, how dangerous to private property rights. With this decision, no man's home or yard is safe from seizure by government. With our government now seizing and controlling interest and many private companies in exchange for bailout money, we are traveling ever swifter down the road of government tyranny over private property. Our founding fathers knew that, with man's fallen tendencies, government should be bound with the chains of the Constitution from owning property and should have as its prime directive the protection of a private citizen's property. James Madison puts it this way.

He says, government is instituted to protect property of every sort. This being the very end of government, that alone is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, or the property of which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest. Unquote. Oh, in other words, you don't take from the rich and give to the poor. You don't take one man's property out of a supposed ideal of social justice and redistribute it to the disadvantaged.

That's not government's job. No. The moment the idea, as John Adams puts it, the moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not sacred as the laws of God and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist. Unquote.

John Adams. Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist. Oh, dear listener, you have heard the 13th and 14th principles of the 28 principles of the Constitution. New Geneva meets for holy worship on Sunday at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard. And you can call us for further information at area code 208-523-0196. 208-523-0196.