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 is principle 27 of the Constitution in the book, The 5,000-Year Leap? Oh, we are approaching the conclusion of our study of the 28 principles of the Constitution found in this valuable volume. Now, my assumption is that many of you are as familiar, if not more so, with these principles than me.

But if in God's providence you have only recently tuned into this broadcast, let me preface my remarks on our topic by exhorting you to obtain a copy of this book, The 5,000-Year Leap, because it distills succinctly, I think quickly disappearing from our nation, the principles upon which our founding fathers established the Constitution of the United States of America. There are 28 of them discerned by our authors of this book, who include the late Cleon Skousen and his team of research assistants.

Now, the reason for the title is that they rightly observe that no nation or people in the last 5,000 years of recorded history have achieved so much in so short a time, relatively speaking, as has the United States of America in every field of human endeavor. History will record that it was no coincidence. The lines of our providence did not fall in pleasant places by happenstance. God has ordained us, and he ordained that we should offer the world and the future posterity of our race liberty and opportunity unparalleled in human history.

We have not become the most prosperous people because we are an imperialist conqueror, as the progressive critique of America would have it, but because our Constitution liberated the common man to take responsibility for his labors and succeed or fail. We have not become the religious haven for every persecuted religious sect of the world, because we are Christian bigots, as the progressive critique of America would have it, but because the Constitution guarantees religious liberty for all. And we have not become the nation that has literally reached for the stars and landed on the moon, eventually Mars, right?

Because we built our science and industry on the backs of black slaves, as the progressive critique of America would have it. But no, because our Constitution offers the beacon of life and liberty for the entire world. Oh, because we suppress tolerance, diversity, and egalitarianism for everyone but a privilege for the issue? As the progressive critique of America would have it? No.

But because our Constitution guarantees equality of opportunity for all, not equality of outcomes. And so, I encourage you to pick up this book. You can get it at the National Center for Constitutional Studies. That's nccs.org. Wow.

Principle 27. The burden of debt is as destructive to freedom as subjugation by conquest. Oh, this is valuable. A valuable principle today. The burden of debt is as destructive to freedom as subjugation by conquest.

Oh, the progressive. How pass say that is right? Too bad Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson are so irrelevant to the modern age. If only they had the demigod Biden and Harris showing them how to really kick off a new nation by borrowing against the future of their children to put together a multi-trillion dollars stimulus package or Inflation Reduction Act, right, and give free health care to everyone, why, we could have been consigned to the dustbin of history by 1824 instead of 2024. Oops, did I say the dustbin of history?

I actually meant we could have become the kingpin of history so much sooner as we are today, right? Huh, is that what we are? Or are we something else? Well, I'm afraid that my former mental slip is more to the point. We are fast being consigned to the dustbin of history owing to our suicidal spending habits.

Cleon Skousen notes in the book, he says, slavery or involuntary servitude is the result of either subjugation by conquest or succumbing to the bondage of debt, unquote, and how correct he was. This is a biblical principle that stretches back through the millennia of time. Solomon says in Proverbs 22, 7, the borrower is slave to the lender. Oh, how pathetic is the state of the man in debt. He is a slave indeed.

His freedom is restricted because he can't acquire the things or pursue the options of the debt-free man because he must first repay his debt. His enjoyment of life in the present is narrowed because he must first repay the debt for pleasure now long past. His liberty of choice is limited because they must meet the demands of his creditor before his own. His optimism towards the future is more clouded than the debt-free man because the indebted man has as much of his future negatively determined as the sum of total of his indebtedness.

He will engender nothing but the bitter feelings of posterity insofar as he passes on his remaining debt to them. And finally, he will experience the judgment of God because debt unpaid is nothing more than a not-so-subtle form of theft, a violation of the Eighth Commandment. For all of these reasons and more, the debtor is a slave. And this is no less a truth for the nation than the individual. As Dr. Skousen puts it, he says, the pioneers of the American commonwealth had the wisdom born of experience to know that the debts of a nation are no different from the debts of an individual.

They considered it a matter of supreme importance for the survival of a free people to get out of debt and enjoy complete solvency in order to prosper." Unquote. Now, whether we as a people realize it or not or even care about it, the United States of America is a debt slave to a place like China, for example, who is the largest holder of trillions of dollars of debt that we have incurred. Very few people realize the extent to which everything from our economic security to our national security is bound up with this debt.

China can dictate to us our economic policy at home and abroad, owing to their ability to manipulate the amount of free capital flowing into our economy based upon the rate of repayment of the debt owed them that they demand. Can we levy tariffs on Chinese goods dumped at low prices? Low, because these goods are subsidized by the Chinese government? Oh, no, we cannot levy such tariffs because China can threaten to stop buying our debt and call in the chits that are already out there.

On and on the restrictions go, all the while being manipulated to the advantage of the Chinese by the Chinese, while we go on lavishing present dollars on frivolous programs created by the Biden administration to be paid for by our children in days to come. In the meantime, this present generation goes on spending their children's inheritance like mind numbed prodigal sons, oblivious to the effects of this spending, like a crystal meth user who can only think about his next high, ignoring the slavery and death he is building up for himself in the future.

America is no longer free, dear listener, and Thomas Jefferson would be appalled by this state of affairs. Jefferson said, I place economy among the first and most important of Republican virtues and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared, unquote. Our founding fathers were conscientious about economy and debt, laboring for both personal and public prosperity, with the ledgers filled with black ink, not red ink. They cherished thrift, and they abhorred profligacy.

Our present politicians do not have a conscience when it comes to public debt, but can only see what is immediately in front of their noses, whether it be health care, or the next election, or a inflation reduction act, or money for illegal aliens. Our founding fathers had scruples about piling up debt for the next generation, and our present gang of politicians has no scruples about enslaving their children to debt.

Jefferson, once again, says, that we are bound to defray the war's expenses, that would be the Revolutionary War, that we are bound to defray the war's expenses within our own time, and that we are unauthorized to burden posterity with them, I have proved already, we shall all consider ourselves morally bound to pay them ourselves, and consequently within the life expectancy of the majority, unquote. There is this moral component to debt that is missing in the deliberations of the band of immoral politicians who presently rule us.

A seared, cauterized conscience characterizes people like Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, all of them, and the Republicans who preceded them were little different. So many people I know have little time for these matters. They're going about their daily lives in utter oblivion to what is happening to their country, and yet this matter of the national debt has perhaps a more direct impact upon their daily lives than any other issue. What would be the national debt, for example, if America were an ordinary consumer?

Let's pretend for a moment, huh, that suddenly the entire spending budget of the United States government were condensed to your single household budget. Poof! Voila! Ha! Magic!

And just for the sake of simplicity, we'll just say that your income is for 2024. It will be $75,000. And the federal government estimates that it will take in just over $2 trillion, excluding the money that we'll borrow. Some of you listening today will say, well, I'd give my right arm to make $75,000 a year. Others might say, I couldn't live for 75 days on $75,000.

Well, that's the beauty of America, that every man has the opportunity to earn and acquire as much as his skills, ambition, and God's providence will take him, right? Well, let's just say that your credit card statement comes in. You're making $75,000 a year, and your credit card statement comes in, and our national debt, parenthetically, our national debt is recently topped $35 trillion. I can't even imagine what $35 trillion is. Some economists say that the numbers have been fudged, really, and it's much closer to $41 or $42 trillion that this country has piled up in terms of its debt.

But for the sake of argument, we'll use the figures put before us that our national debt is some $35 trillion and climbing. Well, your individual credit card statement would come in with $104,563. That would be your statement just for this month. Oh, our national debt can easily be likened to the average household credit card debt since we spend so much on what we want rather than what we need. And we have no qualms about running it up without regard to paying it back, do we?

Oh, I hope this simple illustration shows you the desperate straits into which our nation has sunk by its profligate spending and blind borrowing against the future. What would happen to such a family in the real world? Huh? What would happen to such a family in the real world? What would happen to you if by the end of 2024, your credit card debt came to almost $105,000?

You would be forced, of course, by your creditors to go into bankruptcy if you weren't thrown in jail. All of your assets seized and sold at dimes on the dollar and your family forever disgraced and impoverished. This is where we are headed, my dear fellow American. This is it. Welcome to government spending, Washington style.

What would happen, right? What is going to happen to the United States of America? All of the receipts, I learned this recently, all of the receipts of the United States government coming in this year, that includes everything the IRS takes in, that includes taxes on imports and exports. All of the receipts of the United States government go to pay the interest on the debt, not even the principal on the debt. We can no longer even service that debt.

What happens then? Huh? What happens when we can no longer even service that debt? That is a prescription for bankruptcy. And especially if the dollar loses its status as the world's reserve currency, that's the only thing that's buoying up the dollar at the present time.

And if that goes away, America will go into receivership. As George Washington puts it, I entertain a strong hope that the state of the national finances is now sufficiently matured to be able to enter upon a systematic and effectual arrangement for the regular redemption and discharge of the public debt, according to the right which has been reserved to the federal government. Unquote. That was the attitude of our founding fathers. This ambitious effort was taken on by succeeding generations after Washington, such that by 1835, the national debt had shrunk from $75.5 million to $33,733.

Can you imagine the national debt being at that level today? It had taken them some 45 years, but they had virtually paid off the national debt. Does any mere politician in our present administration have the personal integrity to place this as a chief priority? The same pattern repeated itself after the Civil War, too, when our national debt had mushroomed to $2.6 billion. Yet by 1890, that number had shrunk to $1.5 billion.

As administration after administration labored to reduce the debt, it has really been since the radical administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that no one has looked back at the national debt. Now no one takes an interest in subtracting from the national debt, but only adding to it. Oh, after World War II, for example, the pattern of conscientiously attempting to pay down the debt incurred during war was reversed. Now we see an ever-increasing growth of spending and borrowing such that the $258.6 billion deficit in 1945 has now only grown and never decreased until we began to speak in terms of trillions of dollars, not billions anymore.

Do you know when we crossed that threshold? Do you, dear listener? Do you know the year, the exact year we went from billions of dollars in deficit spending to trillions of dollars? Oh, it was in 1981, under Ronald Reagan, of all people, that we went from spending 900 of billions of dollars to thousands of billions, which is a trillion dollars of deficit spending. Oh, finally, we could pride ourselves in outspending our founding fathers in numbers that they would only shrink from in horror.

We certainly could not outdo them in wisdom and integrity. So I suppose that what I've come to call our floundering fathers, that is, those who wittingly or unwittingly seek to undermine the 28 principles of the Constitution, that they should take great pride in their having outspent all of their predecessors combined. Remember, it took America from 1791 to 1985, 190 years, to incur our first trillion dollars in national debt. Oh, but it only took until 1986, that is five years, to reach two trillion. And now, oh, estimated just to rack up 36 trillion dollars in 2024.

Now, these are not mere academic numbers, dear listener. A man's credit and debt ratio is an index of his character and integrity. Is he a borrower or a lender? Does he have more money working for him as a creditor, or does he have more money working against him as a debtor? If he is conscientious and hardworking, it will be the former, of course.

If he is shiftless and lazy, it will be the latter. Proverbs 10, 4 says, a slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich. Oh, right now, we have a class of rulers who are following leftist progressive agendas that have nothing to do with what has made America great in the past. Industry, mining, agriculture, the creation and invention of products and services to make a profit have made America great in the past. Our Constitution provides the widest possible liberty for these kinds of things.

Instead, the Biden administration is pursuing worthless pursuits that only suck the financial air out of the room. Things like climate control legislation for the discredited theory of global warming or government-run health care or money for the evil wars and inflation reduction, so-called, that only ends up increasing inflation. All the things are worthless pursuits that only add to the national debt and do not subtract from it. Proverbs 28, 19 says, whoever works his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows worthless pursuits will have plenty of poverty.

America is headed for plenty of poverty, as Solomon puts it, because it chases worthless pursuits. And as it does this, it sinks further and further into debt slavery. Very few people realize it, but the very same path we trod towards destruction has been trod before by the Roman Empire. The scholar Lewis C. West, in his article, The Economic Collapse of the Roman Empire, asserts that the desperate economic policies of the decadent emperors contributed significantly to the collapse of the empire. All nations who pursue them will come to the same end.

There were three policies, in particular, that destroyed the Roman economy, three that always do, and three that tyrants pursue in destroying the worth and the labor of their people. And that is reckless spending, confiscatory taxation, and hyperinflationary borrowing. First of all, Rome was guilty of reckless spending. Reckless spending propels the spender into ever-spiraling debt.

In the same spirit as our own emperor, Joe Biden, or Kamala Eris, the Roman emperors felt compelled to outdo their predecessors in giving the people free housing, which is really little more than flea-infested hovels, or free food, which is little more than stale bread, and circuses. That is, lots of government holidays with free tickets to the gladiatorial games. Well, legendary among their own generations were emperors like Commodus from 180 to 192, Domitian, even Nero. Each of these were wildly popular with the masses for a time because they taxed quite heavily the upper classes and distributed as bread and circuses among the masses.

And as the empire grew and people moved from the countryside to the larger cities, the pressures on an emperor to provide these things grew, and he had to borrow more and more money to get them, even as our cities mushroom out of control. Pressures also grew to use and expand the army, which demanded greater and greater resources and an expanding military budget. Well, secondly, they also had, as policy, ever spiraling debt drives rulers to confiscatory taxation. That's the second way that tyrants oppress you financially is with confiscatory taxation.

Ah, each of the aforementioned emperors found their programs pushing the limits of available funds, and so they had to become very creative in how they seized the money of the people. In the past, as Rome conquered more and more territory, they could sell off huge tracts of the new provinces to new prospective senators, who would then exploit the territories, keeping tax revenue flowing into Roman coffers, as well as enriching themselves. But what happens when the bubble stops expanding? Each of the emperors answered with the same solution. Since it was not expedient to tax the masses, they would tax the rich more and more.

Does that sound familiar? That's exactly what the emperors above you now promise you as the masses that will just make the rich pay their fair share. Yeah, right. Well, the third way in which tyrants exploit us financially is with grasping confiscatory taxation also drives rulers to inflate the currency with borrowing. Inflating the currency with borrowing.

Do you know why they used to call Nero Brownnose? Not because of the euphemisms we have. No. He did it in their day by inflating the coinage of the Rome. For most of the history of Rome, all coins were 100% precious metal.

Gold was gold, silver was silver, copper was copper. But when you paid in silver or gold at the end of the day, you could rest assured that the coin you held in your hand was 100% of whatever precious metal it represented. But what happens when those precious metals become rarer and rarer? What happens when you need more money to finance programs to stay in power? Oh, why you strike more coins anyway, only you begin to cut the precious metal with baser metals like copper or bronze.

And so, with each succeeding generation, the precious metal coins grew less and less precious. Pretty soon, the so-called gold and silver coins were no more than copper coins with a thin gold or silver wash over them. And of course, each coin had the image of the current emperor struck on it. And the most prominent feature on any coin, it was the nose. Some were bigger, some were smaller.

But soon, the image of the emperor had a brown copper nose as the silver or gold wash began to wear away. Well, while not employing exactly the same tactics as the Roman emperors, our American emperors employ exactly the same strategy by debasing the currency that's in circulation. The net effect of inflation is that real value remains static. That is, real value is wealth produced by actual labor. Make no mistake about this, dear listener.

Every dollar rolling off the government printing presses or clicked digitally will someday in the future have to be backed by your actual backbreaking labor, not Biden's. That's the essence of the theft taking place here. While the medium of exchange expands, the medium of exchange is the money of a society, which is only a symbol of real value. So, printing more and more money, clicking more and more digital markers only waters down the real value of any economy.

Therefore, it takes more and more money to represent the real value of that economy, and thus the need to print more of it, to digitalize more of it, and voila, you have the downward spiral of inflation. And so, if we are ever to extricate ourselves from the immoral debt cycle which we presently find ourselves, we're going to have to smash the government printing presses, so to speak, yeah, and do the simple things that my father taught me to do with my allowance as a boy, don't spend more than you have, and pay your debts promptly.

Jefferson puts it this way, the maxim of buying nothing without the money in our pockets to pay for it would make our country one of the happiest on earth, unquote. It would also make us one of the most biblical and moral countries on earth. Everything our government is doing in this realm today is a form of theft, a violation of the Eighth Commandment, and therefore disobedience against God and immoral and sinful. Borrowing an impossible load of debt with no intent to repay is theft. Taxing beyond the tithe is a form of theft.

Inflating the currency robs it of real value and is a form of theft. Dear listener, unbeknownst to most Americans, our executive and legislative branches are little more than a nest of thieves without honor and integrity. It is up to us as the people to hold them accountable for this travesty. They and we will be held accountable before God for these sins. Dear listener, in many places and at many times, God has told us these things.

When a series of government officials came before the last great Old Testament prophet, John the Baptist, they asked, what shall we do in repentance? He told them nothing more than Moses or the other prophets told them, that is, to the tax collectors. He said, collect no more than you are authorized to do. And to the soldiers, don't extort money from anyone by threats or by false accusation, but be content with your wages. Dear listener, fellow citizen, taxpayer, while there is still time in America, let us work together to hold our government responsible to this constitutional principle number 27.

The burden of debt is as destructive to freedom as subjection by conquest. Before we're conquered by our own sin and lust, let us find our liberty in the God of the Bible and His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. This has been Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church. 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 or feedback at 208-523-0196. 208-523-0196.