The Constitution

GV1B

Lex Rex

John Witherspoon

Of course, you wouldn't want to believe some offhand kook of which there are plenty. We're talking about a writer that is established by reputation, training, and knowledge to be a reliable source. You can say, "This man I believe." You know very well that you and I believe people all day long on the basis of what they know and what we expect them to know, and to be responsible and reliable in what they tell us. When you need information, you go to people who are in the know and you can trust their judgment. When you find you can't, you don't go to that person. You go to someone else. When you find that you can't trust your medical doctor, you go to someone else whom you can trust. But when you think he knows what he's doing and what he's talking about, it is perfectly legitimate for you to listen to him and to give you the benefit of his background and training without your having to say, "Now just a minute. How do I know that you know how to take out my appendix? I must go and learn all this and study all this so that I know it for myself." You may wake up dead before you are ready to know how to take the appendix out. You must rely upon reliable sources of information.

So we are quoting to you, passing on information which indeed reliable historians and analysts have brought together information on the historical background of the American freedom system. Government, we pointed out, is a covenant. It's an agreement between the rulers acting under God's law and the people in subjection to those authorities. Since all men have a sin nature, they are all created equal by God in reference to the law. The Constitution was that kind of a covenant. It was a specific agreement between the governed and the rulers under God. Don't forget that--between we the citizens and the authorities that we elect under the authority of God. The Constitution was therefore designed with fixed meanings and fixed statements. It was not designed to be elastic, to be flexible, or to be a document which could have a variety of meanings. It needed change and the change was provided by the amendments. That's how you changed it. The process of amending the Constitution is the process of making change as is necessary, but it was not written by the framers with the idea that it can mean anything to any number of people. That is not so. Don't be deceived by that argument.

Now you are going to get a lot of flak when you resist that because the humanist liberal mentality realizes that if it can't get you to swallow that hook, it's going to have a hard time controlling you. Today American freedom and its prosperity are under threat because the judicial system has been divorced from the governing authority of the Bible. When our freedom is under threat, your ministry as a Christian is under threat. Your life as a Christian is under threat. Your property and possessions are under threat. Your family is under threat. The Bible today is viewed as a religious document, so it is considered an improper authority under the supposed concept of separation of church and state. I labor under a lot of frustration because there are so many things I should stop and explain and give you a perspective on but I don't have time to. However, this one is too important to skip over.

The Separation of Church and State

School Prayer

Madalyn Murray O'Hair son, who is the boy who was involved who at the time in the hands of his atheist mother was the instrument used to remove the concept of prayer from the public schools has now become a genuine biblical born again believer. He is going around seeking to undo what he feels was a great tragedy that he was partly instrumental in bringing about through his atheist mother on the American scene. On the radio the other day, he gave a very excellent explanation of what is at issue. Here is a man about which some might say, "Who is this idiot? He's a distant person who doesn't know anything about it." Don't you believe it. This is a man who is at the heart of the battle. This is a man who knows his ins and outs. This is a man who constantly debates this issue and is under the gun of the liberal legal system all the time. I guarantee you that they would shred him and shoot him full of holes the first time they got at him if he did not know his ground and he could not establish it on documentary evidence that could not be refuted.

He pointed out more than I'll take time to tell you, but he brought the thing into perspective in a way that I think would be helpful. He said what Senator Helms is trying to do is to reestablish the fact that the Christian concept of prayer to a God who is there can be performed on public property. If two students sitting next to one another in a public school classroom bow their heads before lunch and one of them leads in prayer, that is illegal. That's what the Supreme Court outlawed, as well as saying all of you must recite this particular prayer. That was self-evident, which they shouldn't do anyhow. What the Supreme Court outlawed was more than one person praying silently on public property. Then he cited one case, and I'll just give you this, although he cited others.

There was a school that had a bus stop on school property. A group of the students who rode the bus from that bus stop were Christians. They formed the custom of gathering together and holding a prayer meeting at the bus stop before they boarded the bus. The matter was brought to the attention of one of the leftist groups, like probably the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the school was brought to suit. The school was brought to court because they were permitting a group of students to pray on school property. The court ruled against the school, and the school was told to cease and desist, and to see that those students did not form a prayer group on public property.

Now that's what the prayer amendment is all about. Don't let any idiot come along and say that it was trying to prevent us from making everybody in the classroom recite a certain prayer or something of that nature. It is only that those who want to pray can pray, and those who want to gather together can do so. What we're talking about is like when my number two son was a student in high school. A bunch of other Berean kids were there, and they fell into the pattern that at lunchtime, they all had lunch at the same period, and they sat at the same table. And they formed the custom to call on one of their number to lead the table in prayer. There were a bunch of these variant kids sitting around a table in prayer. That's the thing the Supreme Court has outlawed, and that's the thing that cannot be permitted now. The judicial system has come to this position because it has been divorced from the governing authority of the Bible. Make no mistake about it. The Bible is an alien book.

One person came up to me and said, "What do you mean by the fact that we live in a post-Christian era?" What we mean by that is that the Bible no longer is a book that is considered authoritative in our society. The Bible is no longer a book that has to speak to our day, and we have to obey it. The Bible is no longer viewed as the voice of God in our society. We are over on the other side. We're now into other sources of authority as we have been studying in eastern mysticism. The Bible is viewed as a religious document, and it's an improper authority.

My number one son, who is a lawyer, told me that he had a very tough case. The man that was on trial was accused of something but the witnesses to that were limited. I think it was just the person involved. So my son walks into court with the concept that he bring the Biblical principle that a person under God's law as explained to Israel in the Old Testament could not be accused of a serious capital type of crime except on the testimony of two or three eyewitnesses. And he walks into that court with a bible under his arm. The opposing attorney saw it, looked at it startled, and said, "Are you going to quote from the Bible?" The judge looked down and said, "Are you going to quote from the Bible counselor?"

Now what was so astounding about somebody coming into a court of law to argue a case and quote from the Bible? What if he could have come up with something that the Bible laid out as the law of God that applied just exactly to that case? How is the jury going to feel? Most people on the jury will still be a little reticent to say, "Ah, that's just that Bible bunk. I don't have to believe that." That's going to impress them. If the Bible says it, you know that's going to impress them. That's a pretty tricky shady lawyer deal--bringing the Bible into the picture. Who's going to cast aspersions on the Bible? The judge might say, "Well that's true. The Bible does lay out this principle but I have a new view. I'm going to rule against the Bible." That doesn't sound good at all, especially if he has to stand for re-election. So there's a little panic here because the legal system says don't bring the Bible in. It's a religious instrument. It has no bearing upon the court of law.

Because of this, the future is bleak. Americans do not understand the doctrines and principles of the Word of God, so they tolerate these violations of God's laws by politicians and by judges. They tolerate violations of God's laws by what politicians do and by what judges decide. So the future is bleak for our freedom and our prosperity unless the disease of secular humanism is fought and removed.

William Blackstone

Blackstone was obviously a devout biblical Christian who believed in the concept that the fear of the Lord was the beginning of wisdom. So Blackstone began his commentaries with a careful analysis of the law of God as it was revealed in the Bible. Can you imagine a law student going to school now, and taking a law book and the first thing it does is explains the basic concept of law in terms of what the Bible teaches? That's how Blackstone's book began. Blackstone said that the law was a rule of action prescribed by some superior which the inferior is obliged to obey. One of the things he said in his commentaries in terms of the basis of law as follows: He said, "The doctrines thus delivered we call the revealed or divine law, and they are to be found only in the Holy Scriptures. Upon these two foundations, the law of nature and the law of revelation, depend all human laws. That is to say no human laws shall be suffered to contradict these." Now that, folks, is what students of the law begin with. That is the frame of reference that they started with. Students of the law, first of all, understood that all law was a matter of what God had revealed in Scripture. Blackstone considered it self-evident that God is the source of all laws found in the Bible or as seen in nature, and these were the guide to man-made laws.

Now Blackstone's view of the law was based on the belief that there did exist a personal omnipotent God who worked in and governed the affairs of men. Now if you don't believe there is an omnipotent personal God out there who does work in and does govern the affairs of men, you have no problem in dismissing this. But if you begin with the premise that there really is a God out there, and He really has spoken, and what He has said will be enforced, whether through a venereal disease punishment or whatever else, then you have to say I must consider what the Bible says before I start making rules for governing people. Man, therefore, in Blackstone's view was to be bound by God's laws which were a system of absolutes governing God's creation.

Here's the way he put it. Blackstone said, "Man considered as a creature must necessarily be subject to the laws of his Creator, for he is entirely a dependent being; and, consequently as man depends absolutely upon his Maker for everything, it is necessary that he should in all points conform to his Maker's will." What he meant by that was that he must conform to the laws of God. Furthermore, Blackstone in his commentaries taught that the cultural mandate to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:26-28 was the divine law for the possession of private property. He based the principle of private ownership upon the cultural mandate, and very rightly so because that's exactly what God was telling Adam and Eve to do--to possess property in their private possession; to prosper it; to make it profitable; to expand it with profit; and, then to pass it on to the children in the family.

Now the same view was held for the authorization of all human rights. In the view of Blackstone and those who founded the United States, every right, or law, comes from God. If that is not so, then the words "rights," "laws," and "freedoms" have no meaning at all. If they're not based upon a solid anchor point in the Word of God, they have no meaning. Blackstone's viewpoint is clearly seen in the Declaration of Independence which uses the words "the laws of nature and of nature's God." Blackstone himself had written the words upon which that phrase was based. He put it this way: He spoke about, "The will of the Maker is called the law of nature." "The will of the Maker is called the law of nature." The men had been trained in the legal system of Blackstone who wrote the Declaration of Independence converted that to that expression "the laws of nature and of nature's God."

It was Blackstone's view that law was the basis of the colonists' claim to the independence of equal station among nations. The colonies were not just a bunch of wild-eyed rebels who had no ground for what they were doing. They actually had a claim to independence, and it was based again on the Word of God. In seeking independence therefore from England, the American colonists declared to the world their belief in a personal infinite God, their Creator, who had endowed them with certain inalienable or absolute rights. Never forget, and I say again, that while many of these men were not Christians in the biblical sense--some were, some powerful ones were--they were all functioning from a Christian frame of reference, either through the secular philosopher Locke or through the influence of Lex Rex. They were all operating on the same Christian basis, whatever their personal status of salvation was. That is important to realize. To the framers of American independence and the Constitution, it was self-evident that if there were no God who had revealed Himself in the Bible, there could be no absolute human rights.

The French Revolution came on shortly after the American Revolution but in a very different way. The French Revolution deliberately said, "We are sick of the Roman Catholic Church. We're sick of religion. And they made the mistake of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. They threw out the Bible. They said, "Only reason is the source of enlightenment." And you know what happened in the French Revolution. It very quickly devolved into a terror system, so totally different from the American Revolution which was based upon the rights of human beings delivered to them by God. The French revolution turned into a nightmare of terror, and the people found themselves under greater tyranny than they had been under the monarchy. Finally a young artillery officer by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte set up his artillery pieces in strategic places; blew a few holes in some rebels; and, took over as the new tyrant in France and brought the night of terror to an end. That's where throwing God out of the picture had brought the French.

So what are the implications for today? The Declaration of Independence is structured on a Judeo-Christian base. It professes faith in a Creator who works in and governs the affairs of men in establishing absolute standards to which men are held accountable. Man is viewed in the Declaration of Independence as a fallen creature with a sin nature, and therefore he cannot be his own law giver and judge. He has no access in himself to absolute truth. It has to come from outside of himself. So the laws of American society cannot be simply what a judge or a government leader says it is, but it is what God says it is. That's where we come today. Our legal system is telling us that laws are what the judges say they are. The Constitution means what the judges say it means. It is not an absolute statement based upon an irrevocable absolute in the laws of God. So the only people qualified to hold government office and to act as judges are really those who possess the thorough knowledge of Bible doctrine. That is our problem. How in the world are we going to reverse it? How in the world are we going to, out of our churches with their nonsense programs and their nonsense instruction, how are we going to find men in the legal profession who are immersed in the Word of God so that doctrine is at the tips of their brain cells, and therefore they understand what those Scriptures refer to as justice? That is what God dispenses--justice.

That's why our courts in the early days used to be called courts of justice. They were based upon the authority of the Word of God. You know what they call them today? Courts of law. Because they are now based upon what the judge says is the truth. What he says is the right or wrong, immaterial of what God may have said. Wouldn't it be something if an organization could be put together of Christian lawyers who knew the Word of God and who knew the deception of the legal system, and were able to rise above their own legal training and recognize the deception that was in it. It's hard. It's like a preacher who's been trained in a liberal school and in the liberal seminaries to suddenly come to a knowledge of the truth and then try to be a man who is a man of Scripture and who is a man of accuracy in the Word of God. It is very difficult for that man because he bears the brand and the stamp of the school that trained him. It takes a lot of personal development and personal training to ever break the back of that delusion and get out of it.

The obvious problem is how are we going to find Christian politicians? We have a congressman that said, "Hey, let's sell the technology to the Russians for their pipeline. Somebody else is going to sell it to them if we don't." There is no honor. There is no stand for principle. There is no stand for the fact that it is right, and I don't care who wants to do what is wrong, I will not participate in it. I heard the same argument from people who are in the saloon business who are Christians, and I heard it more than once. They say to me, "Listen, I know what I'm doing is not the best thing. I mean I'm dealing in something that is a potential viper. I'm dealing in booze. That really hurts a lot of people. But if I don't sell it to them, somebody else is going to do it." And they justify themselves on that basis and decide that they might as well profit by it.

The problem is where in today's American society are the Christian doctrinally-oriented lawyers going to come from, the judges who sit on the bench, the politicians who hold public office, who can think back in terms of the background and the basis of our American Constitution as it was found in the commentaries of Blackstone which placed God in sovereign positions and His Word above all of man's word? Christians in churches need to form political action groups. I think we probably, like everybody else, have been remiss in this. The preachers themselves can't do this. If the preachers go too far from the pulpit in declaring political viewpoints, they must always be very careful that they're conveying the fact that this was their conviction and their belief. Otherwise, the church can lose its tax exempt status by the IRS. A church can't sponsor a political organization, like a political action group. If a church said, "Hey we're going to put together some people in this congregation that are knowledgeable in political matters, and who are interested in turning this society around, and they are going to go after the juggler veins of the humanists, and we are going to put men who are oriented to God's law above man's law in public office," that church will lose its tax exempt status. But if members within that congregation on their own get together, and they consult with anybody from the preacher up within the organization, then they're safe. All the kooks are out there with their political action groups, but not the Christians. Whatever else you may say about groups like the Moral Majority, they have realized that there's only one way to turn it around, and that is to go back to putting men in office, men in positions of authority, and men on the bench who look to God.

The federal judgeships were expanded by something like 158 judges at the end of the Carter administration. President Carter, before his term was over, filled almost every one of those places. The analysis of the men that he put into office was hardcore secular humanists--activists judges, judges who want to make the laws as they believe society needs the laws by their adaptation and interpretation. Every one of them. As one man observed, President Carter went out of office having determined the direction of the American judicial system for a long time to come because they're in there for life. I'm not sure we can turn it around. I'm not sure there is time to turn it around before the Lord returns. But we should not sit around doing nothing. I hope that somebody comes along who loves the Lord, who believes that God is out there, and who doesn't want the applause or the acceptability of man or their favors or anything they can give. A group of people can get together and start influencing our society and supporting groups like the Moral Majority who are trying to influence it at the expense of great personal abuse, but trying to bring us back to where we were in the beginning of our liberties in the first place.

It was the Christians who took the pressure off of the natural evils that are in our society today by retreating into the realm of spiritual things and saying, "We don't care about what goes on out there. We're going to operate in spiritual things, and you guys can run the politics, and you can run the legal system, and we don't want any part of it. We brought it on ourselves. We retreated, and we let them put in their best shots until now we have suddenly realized that the gun is pointed at us. We Christians are the only qualified social reformers. We can think in terms of God's point of view.

So the current status of American law is that there is a basic shift. Darwin's idea of biological evolution has been applied to the law and religion. It began in the late 1870s with a Harvard Law School dean Christopher Langdell who began to teach that the law was something that evolved as society changed. That was a bombshell. That was as big a bombshell as Lex Rex was in the 17th century. When this dean of the Harvard Law School said that the law was something that evolved and changed with society, that was received with an appalling reaction and with disbelief because up to that time, the law was something that was very clear, based upon fixed statements of the Constitution attached to the higher law of God. Now what Langdell meant was that the law became what a judge said, and not what the Constitution specifically declared it in terms of a certain matter. Up to this time the lawyers were trained in the tradition of Blackstone, that God's law governed man's law. Now all of that suddenly was changed. Under the original system of training of lawyers, a student had to learn the legal principles as they were based on the Bible and then apply them in specific cases.

Under the modern system that we have today a law student is taught that the legal principles that are drawn from Scripture as the base are not absolute. There are no absolute legal principles but they are being evolved in the various courts by the judges. Today a law student is taught that there are no legal absolutes but that the law is being evolved as the judges have their finger on the pulse of society. Blackstone, needless to say, no longer influences the legal profession because the profession's schools have rejected faith in the God of the Bible. They have rejected the Genesis account of creation for evolution. They have rejected the origin of man and the fact that man has fallen into sin and is a sinful creature who therefore cannot come up truth. The end result is not courts of justice, which the Bible provided, but courts of law with evolving humanistic laws. Today Blackstone is merely an interesting antiquity that may be mentioned in the law school in the course of the professional training. The current detachment of law from the Bible has freed the courts to make decisions on the basis of what in their judgment is good for society. This is called a sociological law or what people want. Now the law is only what most people think at that point in history it should be. Thus it can be later changed when you have a new majority opinion. 51 percent decides what's right and what's wrong.

Actually the law is made up of a small elite group. They're the ones who make it. They're the ones who interpret it. They're the ones who overnight can alter the values of society. The law now and the Constitution are what judges say they want it to mean. Let me read you a quote. In the Watergate scandal Donald E. Santarelli was an associate deputy attorney general in the Nixon administration. He described himself as being in charge of an idea shop which worked on concepts and plans for the president. Here is what this associate deputy attorney in the federal government of the Nixon administration said: "The Constitution is flexible. Your point of view depends on whether you are winning. The Constitution isn't the real issue in this. It is how you want to run the country and achieve national goals. The language of the Constitution is not at issue. It is what you can interpret it to mean in light of modern needs. In talking about a constitutional crisis, we're not grappling with the real needs of running the country, but are using the issues for the self-serving purpose of striking a new balance of power. Today the whole Constitution is up for grabs." Very interesting.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Now Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is a big man in the human judicial system. Did you get what he said? He epitomized where we have come. It is the matter of those who have the muscle. They are the dominant forces in the community to do what they want hard enough to disregard any inhibitions that may stand in their way. Adolph Hitler could not have said it better. So consider the decision in favor of abortion, for example, by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court admitted it didn't have the foggiest notion about the status of the fetus in terms of humanity. Certainly it admitted that it did have the foggiest notion as to how God looked upon this fetus. That was the issue. It seems that not one of those people was able to put his finger on the fact and say, "Listen, if we don't know what God thinks about this fetus, we cannot say that it is nothing and we can kill it."

Instead the indication was every other way that life is continuous. It begins with conception and goes on till death whether inside the womb or outside the womb. There is evidence indeed in Scripture that within that fetus lies a human soul, and so it is human. Within that fetus there can, like John the Baptist, experience joy. When his mother bearing him in her womb came into the presence of the mother of Jesus bearing the child Jesus, John the Baptist leapt for joy. That's an emotion and you to have a soul for that. Oh there's evidence indeed that the life within that womb is a human life. The question is if there was any doubt in the minds of these men as to what God thought about it, they should have steered clear of it. But judicial activism is where we have come to. So they had the arrogance to say that a woman has privacy to her body, as if that little child in there is part of that body and you can kill it.

Now understand what we're talking about--those 12 million babies that we've destroyed. We're talking about these little kids that you see every day. That's what we're talking about. That's what they would have been. We're talking about all these little babies that you see in our nurseries. That's what we're talking about. That is what they're destroying. That is what they're killing. This is not something that was in the mother's womb that was destined perhaps to be a donkey or a fish or a dog or a cat, but something which was by its inception designed by God to be a human being. How could we have come to that? Because the courts have become activists who make the laws who decide what is good for us on the basis of what most people want and who call the plays therefore on the basis of their human reason rather than on the fact that they have justification in a higher law of God. Most of them are so ignorant of Bible doctrine, a thimble would be big enough to hold. And there they sit on the highest courts of the land making decisions as if they were equipped and qualified to do it.

The summary is this. All authority has passed in the United States to a centralized federal bureaucracy. The state, not the law, is viewed as protecting the citizen, and it is supreme in its authority. The state, not the law, is supreme. The state has assumed the role of the great provider in our society. Self-government has been wrested from the American people by a legislating judiciary. This judiciary makes the laws by the way it interprets what it wants to interpret. The door to statism with its arbitrary law and tyranny cannot be closed until the federal government, as it has gone beyond the confines of the Constitution, is taken apart piece by piece. And therein lies the rub. The federal government must be taken apart piece by piece in every area that it has expanded beyond the limitations of the Constitution which told exactly what the federal government could be and no more. There is less consent sought today from the governed than ever before.

So what we're saying is that hopefully maybe by God's grace we may move in the direction where the government of this nation can again become one of the people, by the people, and for the people under the absolutes of God's Word and God's laws. That's where we are today. Do not forget for a moment that when the activists' authorities are in sufficient power, the gun is going to be pointed right at you believing Christians, Bible-believing Christians who think there is a law above Caesar. You may yet have the opportunity to join your forefathers in the Christian faith in Caesar's arena because Caesar will view your devotion to God as treason because he views it as disloyalty to the state. Until the government is taken apart and brought back to the restrictions of the law of the constitution which was based upon the law of God, government of the people, by the people, and for the people will be a thing of the past.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1982

Back to the Christian Service and Human Government index