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 18 and 19 of the 28 principles of the Constitution? We have been tracking with the founding principles that shaped the most incredible advance of human progress in world history, and that's not an overstatement. Because of the conditions established by our founding fathers in the Constitution, Americans found opportunity to prosper and flourish as no other people in recorded history.

In this brief span of 200 plus years, we have gone from horsepower in horse flesh to many multiples of horsepower in steel and fuel. We have gone from gazing at the moon as a romantic figment of our imagination to walking on it. We have gone from marginal living in subsistence farming to a well-fed, well-supplied people that lacks nothing and, as a matter of fact, has to deliberately go without in order to stay fit and trim, right? That's most of our circumstances now. Well, no nation in human history has prospered more or achieved more than the United States of America, living under a free constitutional republic.

Such was that progress that Kleon Skousen could call the relatively short period of time in which this took place the 5,000-year leap, hence his title for the book, since Americans seemed to have leapt over generations of other races and peoples in their quest for liberty and prosperity. And so we have the title of the book in which these 28 principles of our founders is summarized. The 5,000-year leap. Get this book. Read it.

Absorb it. Teach it to your children. Well, with this in mind, let's articulate principle number 18. And principle 18 of the 5,000-year leap is the unalienable rights of the people are most likely to be preserved if the principles of government are set forth in a written constitution. A written constitution.

The essence of this principle goes to the heart of human memory and human deception. It is the nature of the people to forget. It is the nature of government to deceive. In honor of Biden's election, I recently re-read George Orwell's classic 1984, which is, of course, the grim tale of futuristic oppression and tyranny, and the abiding principle of Big Brother's euphemistically named Ministry of Truth, right? Oh, Ministry of Truth, where they are of deception and lying is perfected entirely for government ends, is that of doublespeak.

Yes, the basic principle of Big Brother is doublespeak. In doublespeak, two entirely opposing truths can be asserted at the same time and both be equally true according to them. One day, as he gives example, one day we can be at war with country A and at peace with country B. The very next day we can be at peace with country A and at war with country B. And not only this, but Big Brother goes a step further and insists that not only are we at war with country B now, but we have always been at war with country B and at peace with country A. Oh, and every good citizen will not only say that this is true, but will actually believe it or else.

Oh, the way that this, excuse me, the way that this state of affairs is perfected so that people actually believe doublespeak is to have an army of government bureaucrats actually rewriting the objective record of newspapers and documents and photos. And we do it with AI now, don't we? In fact, this is the job of Winston, the main character of 1984. There is power in truth and historical truth is embodied in the historical record. This combined with the easy forgetfulness of the human mind makes it easy for tyrants to manipulate, alter, and distort the truth.

And of course, this is even more true now with AI, artificial intelligence, is it not? Our founding fathers knew this trait of human nature, forgetfulness of the people and the tendency of government to tyrannize. That in the nature of the people to forget the nature of government to deceive. Our founders examined history themselves and discovered even among peoples with strong traditional rights stretching back for centuries that under the right conditions, those rights could be lost.

The Anglo-Saxon tribes came under particular consideration by the founders because these peoples had a tradition of unwritten, unwritten, importantly, understood rights that were known by the whole people. As Dr. Colin Ries Lowell puts it, or Lovell puts it, he says, and I quote, the law applied by any one of these Anglo-Saxon assemblies was customary. Until the Anglo-Saxon conversion to Christianity, it was unwritten, and like all customary law, was considered immutable, unquote.

But when the Normans invaded England and conquered them, those rights were degraded, lost, and forgotten by subsequent generations precisely because they had never been encoded in written form. And it took centuries to recall and regain those rights. But even then, these liberties were ensconced in written form in an almost ad hoc, haphazard way. We see this throughout English history. Famously, for example, we have the examples of the Magna Carta written down, transcribed in A.D. 1215, where the nobles wrested property rights and civil rights from King John.

We have the petition of rights in A.D. 1628, where King Charles I was forced by Parliament to grant a wide swath of civil rights to the English people. And then we also have the English Bill of Rights written down in A.D. 1689, where William and Mary willingly granted further rights in what was called the Glorious Revolution as they ascended the throne of England. For all of these, the people paid dearly. And additionally, they were only those liberties that they had enjoyed in the first place for generations prior to the Norman Conquest, but finally reduced to written form.

The authors of our Constitution had all of these documents and more at their elbows when they set about to create a new government in America. They were committed to developing a single comprehensive document that would give the American people an objective source to which they could appeal when their rights were challenged. No more ad hoc piecemeal liberties, no. And they had several examples from the colonial period in America, too, as models. One of the finest, my favorite, is the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, which were written down in A.D. 1639, composed by the founder of that colony, Thomas Hooker.

It gives glory to God and sets out a purpose to serve God and the people, but conspicuously absent from it was any reference to a king, prince, or dread sovereign, as so many previous charters felt obligated to include. So, instead of Charles I being the ordainer of the Fundamental Orders, the document cited we the people of Connecticut, right? Does that sound familiar, we the people? Well, it was the first written constitution known to modern history that created a government, and it marked the beginnings of American democracy, of which Thomas Hooker deserves more than any other man to be called the father.

All of the charters of the colony shared many of the same characteristics, whether the Mayflower Compact for the Pilgrims or the Pennsylvania Charter composed under the oversight of William Penn. The chief thing that they shared in common was that they had the liberties, rights, and form of government written down in an objective instrument, not a set of assumptions, passed along by word of mouth, liable to reshaping or replacement by a tyrant. Such has always been the case with great ideas in the West, as exemplified by the greatest document of our culture, that is the Bible.

Yes, the spiritual traditions of tribal peoples are generally transmitted via word of mouth and various ritual practices, and oftentimes they die when the culture dies. In contrast, although ancient Israel is long gone and the first century culture of Jesus' day is gone too, well, the Bible and its religious truth in revealing redemption for mankind through Jesus Christ, well, it lives on and has never been stronger. In fact, it can be argued that this one book, the Bible, has done more to create new cultures, societies, and nations than any other single book.

Almost every Western nation has, as one of its resources for law and government, the Bible, and principles derived from it. As we have documented elsewhere, this is especially true of America, where the Bible has a unique top-to-bottom impact on our constitution. The reason for this consistent influence is because the ancient languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek communicated the grand truths of the living Bible in not only the spoken medium, but also in the objective medium of the written word. The written word. Very important.

And so, the truths of salvation could be referenced and checked and handed down consistently from generation to generation without error. Well, the importance of having crucial information in writing was highlighted for me several years ago when I re-shingled my roof. I gave clear verbal instructions to my son to order 40 pallets of shingles, 15 pallets of ridge caps, and three rolls of torch-down paper, right? Well, the next day I came in to find that the company was preparing to deliver 15 pallets of shingles, three pallets of ridge caps, and 40 gallons of roofing tar. Oh my goodness.

I stopped the order, and in order to teach my son a valuable lesson, sent him back. This time with written instructions for the order. The second time around with the information in black and white, the order went off without a hitch, but it had to be written down. Well, extrapolate this circumstance to the larger canvas, if you will, of our liberties and rights, which are far more important than an order of roofing shingles. Does it matter whether Congress shall have power to declare war or the president?

Which was it the founders intended? How long can the human memory be trusted to make this distinction? If anyone cares to know, we have it in writing in the Constitution. Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 11. Congress declares war.

It is important to assert that the Supreme Court, too, has jurisdiction over cases that come to it, with the exceptions, as the Constitution says, with such exceptions and under such regulations as the Congress shall make. Oh, this harkens back to the abortion controversy. Were you aware that Congress could accept all cases referencing abortion from the court's purview if it had the guts to do it? Well, dear listener, we have written down for us our mode of government with its attending Bill of Rights. I have it before me as I write.

It was not written in some, it was not written, excuse me, in some exotic long dead language that we can no longer decipher. No, it's written in plain English. It is not filled with technical language designed to obfuscate the perspicacious. No, rather, our Constitution is composed of everyday terms and words that the average high school graduate can understand with the aid of a Webster's dictionary for some words if need be. And you can pick up a copy of our Constitution and its amendments and make sense of it in one reading.

You can do this in under an hour at most and be better informed than most of our congressmen. Oh, for example, the famous ignoramus Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Have you ever heard her comments on the Constitution? For example, she articulated three branches of government all right, but she named them the executive, Congress, and the Senate. Oh, ignoramus-Cortez.

Or she said that the Supreme Court shouldn't have power to review congressional legislation. Oh, are you kidding? That's written into the Congress and is part of the balance of powers. Yes, Alexandria Ocasio or occasional cortex, as some people call her. Well, I'm convinced that one of the agenda items for many progressives is to deliberately keep the average American as ignorant as AOC, as ignorant of our Constitution and the liberties to which we are entitled.

This is why our public schools have dropped government, civics, and history requirements in order to graduate. And so, when your average high school graduate is asked about the Electoral College, for example, he looks at you quizzically. He comes up clueless. All he knows is that he has never attended the Electoral College, right? No, the progressive knows that the more this average American knows about his Constitution and its founding principles, the less power will be a resident in the government, and the less power will be in the hands of the socialist progressive to shape and mold America to his agenda.

I am also convinced that the more the average American knows about his Constitution, the angrier he will be that he's been cheated of as God-given liberties for lo these many past decades. Dear listener, I urge you to pick up your Constitution and read it and take charge of your political destiny. Ah, the sweeping powers being assumed by the present administration and the now-present tyranny of the American people could never happen to an informed, aroused citizenry. Yes, our Congress is too weak and timid and beholden to special interests to stop this trend.

And if anyone will check the growth and debt of big government, it will have to be you and me, the average citizen, well-informed and spiritually renewed. But in order to be well-informed and spiritually renewed, we'll have to avail ourselves of the two written objective documents given us for these ends, that is, the Bible for spiritual renewal and the Constitution for our American renewal. As Principle 18 states, the undeniable rights of the people are most likely to be preserved if the principles of government are set forth in a written Constitution. And this has been done for you, listener. It is there for your reading and study.

But that written Constitution must be read and acted upon for it to be effective. Well, Principle 19. Principle 19 now also enunciates a very important idea held dear by our Founding Fathers, and that is, only limited and carefully defined powers should be delegated to government, all others being retained by the people. Oh, very important principle here. This is consistent with all of the other principles we've unfolded for you.

If all power is created and finds its ultimate ground in God, and he in turn has vested civil power in the whole of the people as its original source, then it stands to reason that civil power is the people's to delegate to representatives at their discretion. The people giveth and the people taketh away. Clever representatives may try to trick and fool the people into thinking that political power is theirs, the rulers, and not the people's. Knowing the tendency of rulers to clutch after power, the people will be parsimonious in lending that power to those they choose to govern them.

Well, unlike our present populace, our Founding Fathers were acutely aware of the menace of unlimited power in the hands of a few men. They had grown up under the ever-expanding power of the kings of England and parliament that taxed and legislated for them unrestricted by a voice or a vote by the colonists. The soothing fatherly voice of the English government speaking so reassuredly of their love for and good intentions toward their childlike colonists. Oh, it sounded so good at first.

They traded English goods with the colonists and gave them protection from aggressors, even fighting a war on their behalf for the American colonies and the French and Indian war that ended in 1765. But the soothing fatherly voice soon became the shrill, harsh rant of a tyrant as the British government laid increasing taxes on the people, courted soldiers in the citizens' homes, arrested and detained colonists without trial or charge, seized property at will without full compensation, and in a thousand and one ways transgressed the rights and liberties of the colonists.

The first blush of being good English subject of the crown wore off as government does what it always does when there's no one and nothing to stand in its way, and that is it tyrannizes the people it governs. As Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist paper number 15, Hamilton said, and I quote, there is in the nature of sovereign power an impatience of control that disposes those who are invested with the exercise of it to look with an evil eye upon all external attempts to restrain or direct its operations. Yes, unquote, your federal government looks with an evil eye on you if you try to restrict or stop their operations.

In other words, those in power don't like to be told what to do, especially by those that govern. When compared to the wisdom and insight into human nature possessed by our founding fathers like Hamilton, how pitifully ignorant and foolish seems our present generation of leaders and citizens. Oh, instead of jealously guarding the power resident in the people, we cede more and more of it to government, naively trusting like silly Pollyanna that government only wants to help when in reality they only want to help themselves and not the people.

We are suckers for smooth-talking politicians who soothe us into thinking they have our best interest at heart. Like snake oil salesmen in the old west, our politicians sell us government programs where we think we'll get government health care, for example, for free or a bailout check or tax rebate check or inoculation when in reality all government money printed must be backed up eventually by real wealth created by us people. Like naive children who surrender a dime for a shiny nickel because the nickel is bigger, we are exchanging our liberties and freedoms for ostensibly free money and security and getting something for nothing.

Most Americans who vote in favor of larger, more intrusive government are naively ignorant of the actual erosion of their liberties in proportion to the growth of that government. When will we wake up and realize that big government is not our friend but our enemy? When will we listen to the voice of our founders that echoes down the corridors of time that there is an impatience of control, as Hamilton puts it, with Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi that looks upon us, the people, with an evil eye when we try to limit their power? When will the American people realize that once government starts, it never stops?

Once it starts to tax, it never stops. Once it begins a war, it never stops the war. Once it starts to control your health care, it never stops. Once it begins to take away your guns, it never stops. Once it begins to abort a generation of babies, it never stops.

On and on it goes. Oh, Pelosi and Biden are impatient of control when it comes to enacting their big government socialist agendas. What we see with the present administration is the very thing our founders fought against with their blood, treasure, and sacred honor back in 1776. When will America wake up and revive? A sure sign that America has awoken to its true heritage is when it is suspicious, not naively trusting of its politicians, and is very stingy with the power it lends to them to exercise for limited goals.

This is what is meant in the first part of the principle that only limited and carefully defined powers should be delegated to government. Men like Jefferson and Hamilton and Adams realize that if the states were to keep their distinct identity and liberties, then the federal government be narrowly focused on its specific tasks. It is up to the people to be ever vigilant and to see to it that the federal government is carefully defined and delegated. Yes, a federal government is adept at raising a national army, for example, to defend the whole of the country. That should be supported and encouraged.

It is not meant to be a social laboratory for homosexuals in the military or women in combat, for example. On and on we could go detailing how that instead of only limited and carefully defined powers being delegated to government, unlimited and carelessly defined powers have been handed to government on a silver platter. The solution to the dilemma of how a federal government could be granted enough power to do its constitutional mandate but yet be kept in check from overreaching its limits was answered by our founders in the principle of dual sovereignty. Dual sovereignty.

Now, if you're like me, it may have been high school since you last heard of this principle, if even then. I remember it as a long line of obscure terms I had to memorize for a test and then promptly forgot. But let me be clear. At this juncture, in my studies of our liberties and freedoms, no principle was better understood nor more advocated by our founders than this one, the principle of dual sovereignty. The basic premise of dual sovereignty is that the federal government is supreme in its sphere of enumerated powers, those narrow, specifically designated powers in the constitution, such that the states cannot interfere.

While the states are supreme in all of the remaining spheres, without having to be enumerated, every other power is reserved to the states, such that the federal government cannot interfere. The founders intentionally created these two separate spheres of opposing powers in order to check tyranny by either one of them. There is intended to be a deliberate tension between the federal government and the individual states. The founders did this intentionally so that power would be checked one by the other.

As Hamilton puts it once again in the Federalist Papers, I quote him, this balance between the national and state governments ought to be dwelt on with peculiar attention, as it is of the utmost importance. If one encroaches on their rights, they will find a powerful protection in the other. Indeed, they will both be prevented from overpassing their constitutional limits by the certain rivalship that shall ever subsist between them." Unquote. The premise, the principle of dual sovereignty.

Well, dear listener, you were created by God to be a free man in a land of liberty. Our founders were biblical realists and they understood that fallen men lusted after power and control over their fellow man as they exercised political power and must thus be strictly hemmed in and controlled by the people. And therefore, we have principle 19. Only limited and carefully defined powers should be delegated to government, all others being retained by the people.

We have also observed with amazement and awe how biblical Christianity prospers and thrives because it has been transmitted to generations of Christians in the objective text of a written document, the Bible. God will be faithful to his promises and we can be certain of this because he has written as much. He says, your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom and your dominion endures throughout all generations. The Lord is faithful in all his words and kind in all his works, from Psalm 145.

Although it is little appreciated by most Americans today, we have consistent liberties and freedoms in a constitutional republic because they have been reduced to an objective form in a written constitution. Lay your hands on that constitution and read it, study it, know it. It is the charter of your liberties being swiftly destroyed and made irrelevant by leaders who keep it tucked away out of sight, telling you that you're too stupid to understand and interpret it, that it's the only the geniuses on the high Supreme Court that are smart enough to know what it means. No, no, no.

Prove them wrong as you come to know and defend your liberties, taking them back as one in whom political power originates, one in whom as a body with your fellow citizens. We, the people of the United States, do ordain and establish this constitution. This has been Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a 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 and join us and call us at area code 208-523-0196. 523-0196.