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The Constitution
GV1B© Berean Memorial Church of Irving, Texas, Inc. (1982)
This is the second segment in our series on Christian Service and Human Government. As we pointed out previously, the Reformation declared that
since everyone had a sin nature, no one was qualified to decide what was right and what was wrong. The Bible was therefore upheld as the only
absolute guide for making laws in order to govern people. And a person with the knowledge of doctrine would be capable of judging the laws that
men made, and in fact, judging the ruler himself. Human reason was seen as having been flawed by sin and the sin nature so that it could in no
way be superior to the Bible when it came to making rules for human relationships. Those who govern must do so on the basis of biblical law, or
man's God-given freedom would be destroyed by arbitrary rulers. This hardly needs to be debated. History is replete with examples of that. When
God's laws are not the basis of human laws, then a tyrant arises and man arbitrarily imposes his judgments upon others.
Lex Rex
We also pointed out that man was created in God's image. He was redeemed by Jesus Christ, and for that reason the individual human being is of
very great value before God, and he must be treated as per God's Biblical laws which have been designed to protect this valuable personality
that God has created--the individual human being. We called your attention to the fact that Samuel Rutherford, that great man of the 17th
century, wrote the book entitled Lex Rex in order to establish the principle of God's law above man's law to which all must subscribe, including
the rulers. The principle of Lex Rex was that all law begins with what the Bible says, and all human laws must subscribe to what the Bible says.
They must not conflict with what the Bible says. Therefore, the common thought of the day, the sovereign divine right of kings, was wrong. The king
was not supreme law. The word of the king was not the final word. The king's word was only valid to the extent that it was compatible with God's
Word.
John Witherspoon
We also called your attention to the fact that Presbyterian minister John Witherspoon and the secular philosopher John Locke brought into the
American Constitution the concept of Lex Rex, law is king, the concept that God's law is the frame of reference for man's law. I cannot stress
too strongly that you must not be hoodwinked by the liberal mentality in trying to tell you that this was not the basis of the American
Constitution. It was; it is; and, that is a historical fact. I want to warn you that one of the approaches to this by those who want to attack and
say that this is not so is to treat you like you're mindless. This is wrong. They will suggest that you do not have the capacity to know these
things because you are studying authorities, and that you are not in a position to know how to speak about a matter like the law of the judicial
system and the courts and the Constitution. Do not be overwhelmed when they attack you that way. That is a subtle device of logic to make you
feel that you're an ignorant idiot that cannot know the truth in these matters, and that's not true. If there's anything that is true with God's
people, it is that they can know, and they can be put in the know. You are perfectly capable of reading writers whom you have trust in.
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
The concept of separation of church and state in the First Amendment says this: The federal government cannot establish a state church and tax you
to support the church. That's all. It never meant that spiritual matters could not be involved; that spiritual matters could not be included in
influencing the government; or, that they could not be involved in the government. It never meant that the Senate, for example, could not have a
chaplain who begins the day in prayer. Not by the faintest foggiest notion was that the intention. It is just that they were sick and tired of
these churches in Europe that were sponsored by taxpayers' money, and that appointed bishops and priests, and you had to pay for it whether you
agreed with it or not. The framers said that cannot be. That is all that that means.
School Prayer
Currently, you're hearing Senator Jesse Helms being presented
as one of the biggest jackasses around because he is championing an amendment, or an approach, to reverse what has been done on the removal of the
access to prayer within public schools. Again the deception is very great. You may have heard people say that the Supreme Court has not outlawed
prayer in public schools. If a child wants to sit down over his lunch and express grace, the Supreme Court has not told him he can't do that. That
is true. That is true. You can sit in your desk and you can ask God's guidance when you're about to take a test, and that is not illegal.
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
Going back again to the historical chain, and we are the products of a historical chain. Know the link of the chain to which you are attached and
you will understand where you are now. In terms of American law, there is another great name that you should be acquainted with. His name is
William Blackstone. He was an 18th century English jurist and he was a lecturer at law at Oxford University. Blackstone wrote one of the most
important books in all of human history. He wrote a book called The Commentaries on the Laws of England. It was published 1765 through
1770. Blackstone's analysis of the law was based squarely on the principles of Judeo-Christian theism. His interpretation of the law and the role
of the law was based squarely on the Bible. Man's law, Blackstone contended, was legitimate only when formulated in keeping with God's law. In the
American colonies during the first century of independence, the Blackstone commentaries were the basic textbook for the training of lawyers. Those
lawyers who were trained by Blackstone's Commentaries, and that was about all they had, those were the men who had legal background who formed
the Constitution from the frame of reference of what they had been taught in Blackstone's Commentaries. Man can never make a law until he checks
with the higher law of the Bible before he can impose it on society legitimately.
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
One of the justices of the Supreme Court was a man named Oliver Wendell Holmes. He held that law was not the product of logic by
which he meant what the Word of God said, reasoning from the Bible, but it's the product of experience. His view was since there are no absolutes
to establish human rights, it is the will of the state that establishes those. Holmes viewed laws as beliefs that have triumphed, and no more.
He rejected the idea that God endows man with absolute rights such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That in Holmes' view was a
provision of the state. Today God and the Bible are discouraged as reference points in the law. Those with political muscle are those whose
ideas prevail over the silent majority. Here's what Chief Justice Holmes said: "Truth is a majority vote of the nation that can lick all others."
He declared that when it comes to the development of a corpus jury or a body of law, the ultimate question is what do the dominant forces of the
community want, and do they want it hard enough to disregard whatever inhibitions may stand in the way?
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
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