Decision Making in the Voting
Booth
Lesson #4
The early part of the 1600s, when a colonist first came to establish
British colonies on this continent, it was a standard procedure in local
assemblies, in colonial assemblies, and down through the decades and centuries
up to the early part of the 20th century to have what was known as
an election sermon. Not dealing with the biblical doctrine of election
but dealing with the fundamental issues that faced lawmakers, that faced a
society, a culture, a nation. In these sermons, the local pastors would
be invited to the assemblies to address a sermon from the Word of God, not some
10 or 15 minute emotional devotional, but these were often very challenging,
forthright sermons that revealed a tremendous amount of courage on the part of
the pastors as they truly did challenge, did attempt to correct what they
perceived to be flaws in governmental policy down through those ages.
This tradition of the election sermon, along with other sermons that
were standard in most churches throughout this era, has sort of fallen by the
wayside. We do not always have these kinds of specials, and I thought it
was important to address what the Bible says about fundamental issues that we
can and should go to the Word of God to find a frame of reference in order to
evaluate the candidates we select to govern our nation. This has
precedence biblically and historically.
We understand also that the Word of God, as the revelation of the one
who created all things, addresses all things. If God says anything about
anything, He says something about everything. That is something that is
bedrock truth. We can go to God’s Word, and while He may not be
addressing a political treatise in some place or economic treatise in some
place, the groundwork, the foundation of the parable, the laws are grounded in
certain principles which are embedded in those laws or those parables.
Those stories, those parables, those principles that are being elucidated by a
prophet or by the Lord or by an apostle in the New Testament do not work unless
there is the assumption of the validity of the political and/or economic
principles underlying those particular assertions.
I have a series of rationales last week that led to three conclusions.
First conclusion was that “all Christians who are citizens of the
“Therefore, the
A foundational verse for our study is Proverbs 14:34 “Righteousness
exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach [disgrace] to any people.”
Understanding that righteousness is something that is available, in terms of
experiential righteousness and in terms of law, to any nation not just
There is one issue that is foundational to any election process,
especially a national process, because it involves thousands of appointments to
the judiciary. There is a fundamental issue that faces the entire
legislative/judicial process today, and that is the issue of
interpretation. The same issue you face in much of theology, that is, do
you interpret the Bible literally, historically, grammatically as the writers
intended or do we assign some new meaning to the text that did not even enter
the thinking of the original writers.
With the advent of liberal philosophy and theology as a result of the
Enlightenment shift that occurred in the 17th and 18th
centuries, theology in Western Europe and America shifted in the 19th
century rejecting literal interpretation and original intent of the
authors and replaced it with modern man’s ideas, assuming that modern man knew
more, understood more, and could interpret things better than the original
authors.
This did not only affect theology but affected things across the board,
including the interpretation of law. Justice Clarence Thomas in a speech
a week ago said “Let me put it this way; there are really only two ways to
interpret the Constitution – try to discern as best we can what the framers
intended or make it up.”
That is the same issue in biblical hermeneutics and across the board
that when you read a real estate contract, your contract with the credit card
company, do you interpret it as they intended or do you just make it up.
We almost intuitively realize that original intent is significant.
This quote is from Senator Obama at a Planned Parenthood conference, who
addressed the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Gonzales v. Carhart, which
upheld a ban on partial birth abortion. “The Constitution can be
interpreted in so many ways… We need somebody who’s got the heart, the
empathy to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the
empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay,
or disabled, or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be
selecting my judges.”
See the contrast. Thomas says interpretation is based on original
intent, and Obama says it can be interpreted in so many ways. Just like
liberal theologians think that you can interpret the Bible in all kinds of
ways. There is a connection between liberalism in politics and liberalism
in theology. Obama is saying that the criteria are not legal education
and ability to understand the law in terms of its original intent, but
feelings. Emotion, feeling and empathy now become the criteria for him
for interpreting law rather than what the text says.
We move on to look at the basic criteria which were embedded in the
thinking of the founding fathers. And that comes from the Divine
Institutions, which provide a framework for thinking about society and culture
and making decisions. Whenever you make a decision and go into the voting
booth and select the candidate, you are making a determination that this person
or that person is good, better, best or the other person perhaps is bad or
worse. You make these value judgments, and whenever you make a value
judgment, you are assuming that there is an external standard by which you can
evaluate a candidate’s positions and beliefs. If you are going to say
this person is better or that person is worse, you have to have some sort of
guideline.
The Scripture says that it is the only guideline, the only framework for
a believer to use in evaluating anything in life. While the Bible is not
a political science textbook, there are crucial passages in the Scripture that
address political theory. It is not an economic textbook, but there are
crucial things in the Scripture that have been understood throughout the years
to make certain economic assertions and implications. These have been
systematized and understood in terms of this category of the Divine
Institutions.
Let’s make a couple of observations by way of review. The term
“Divine Institution” has been used by Christians and theologians to speak of
absolute social structures established by God and embedded within the social
structure of the human race from its inception. Thus, these are for the
entire human race – believers and unbelievers alike. These are
unbreakable realities. Once you go in and try to start changing these
things, there are all sorts of negative consequences.
In contrast, modern paganism or human viewpoint thinking views them as
byproducts of man’s psycho-social evolution or “cultural conventions.”
Conventions can be changed, but institutions cannot be changed. These
Divine Institutions are, therefore, embedded in the Scripture.
As we look at these Divine Institutions, I pointed out that there are
five. There is a 6th criterion, and that has to do with how
any Gentile nation relates to the nation
Second, we have the establishment of two more Divine Institutions after
the Fall and the Flood. Government and judicial responsibility are
delegated to man in the Noahic Covenant, and then nations, the distinction of
nations, and national identity are established after the
The first three are pre-Fall, and they are designed to promote
productivity and advance civilization. When these three are working
together in their most efficient way, then that society or culture is going to
be advancing and is going to be productive. The second two, which come
after the Fall, are designed to restrain evil so that one, two and three can
function efficiently. There is a real limitation there when you think of
government and nations being designed to restrain evil so that individual
responsibility, marriage and family can be promoted and go forward.
The first Divine Institution, individual responsibility, comes out of
God’s initial mandates to Adam after He had created him (primarily Genesis
Genesis
In Genesis 2:15, God places Adam in the garden to tend and keep
it. The word “to tend” is the Hebrew word “to work,” and the word “to
keep” is the Hebrew word shamar, which means “to keep or to protect or
to guard.” I believe that the idea here is he had work to do to serve the
Lord; it is not laborious. A lot of people just stumble over this because
they think that Adam sat in the garden and twiddled his thumbs until he
sinned. But that is not what happened. He had responsibilities to
carry out. This is the foundation for the doctrine of responsible
labor.
In a post-Fall environment, we cannot get past the idea in our little
experience-oriented brain that work is laborious and that labor is
toilsome. But before the Fall, labor was not toilsome, and work was not
difficult or hard. That happens only as a result of sin when there is
antagonism set up between creation and the creature outlined in the curse of
Genesis 3.
Under individual responsibility, there are three key ideas that are
developed from this. The first is spiritual accountability and
authority. Man is under the authority of God, and every individual is
accountable to God for what he does with the resources that God gives him.
The second thing that comes out of this is man is responsible in the
area of labor to take care and protect the garden. As he takes care of
the garden and does what God has told him to do, a result of that is that it
develops wealth. It would develop numerous products as a result of
responsible labor done correctly, and this then would lead to private property.
If you go back and read many of the early writers, such as Blackstone in
his Commentaries on the Laws of England, John Locke, or any number of
other thinkers that came out of that period, they go back and locate the
principle of private property in Genesis 1 and 2. They understood that
private property and individual responsibility were foundational to the whole
concept of liberty.
Last class I pointed out that there are several principles that are
articulated again and again in the Scriptures and are embedded within the
teaching in the Scriptures.
In Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 20:1-16 on a parable related to
stewardship, this is a situation where a landowner is going out to the local
labor pool and hires various people to work on his project at different times
during the day. He promised them at the beginning a denarius for a day’s
work, and then each one after that, he just says he will do that which is
righteous. He hires the last ones about
At the end of His discourse, Jesus makes the statement “Is it not lawful
for me [the landowner] to do what I wish with what is my own? Or is your
eye envious because I am generous?” A business owner has the right to do
what he wants to do with what are his assets. He has the right to do that
without interference of government regulation telling him what kind of
insurance he should have, how long the workers should work, or any of the other
things that hinder business and destroy capital today. It is very
strongly in favor of the employer, the landowner.
The second passage is in Matthew 18:23, which emphasizes a steward who
owes money to his employer. This just emphasizes the fact both of
personal accountability of each one to the landowner (who in this case is God,
so it reinforces the first Divine Institution) and of prerogatives of the
employer to do what he will make the decisions to do.
The third passage in Matthew 25:14, we looked at the parable of the
talents. You have three different servants, each given a different number
of talents. The first two invest them and make a profit. The third
one is afraid of his master, so he is lazy and does not do anything with the
talent and buries it in the ground. When the master comes back, he digs
it up. Those who made a profit are praised and are given more. The
one who was lazy is called wicked and lazy, and what he had is taken away from
him.
What we see here is the principle that those who risk and work should be
rewarded, and those who do not are condemned. Therefore, laziness is seen
as a vice, and work is a virtue. Jesus does not come back and say, “You
poor person, you were afraid of Me. Let’s take from the one who made and
share the wealth and give it to the one who didn’t do anything.” It shows
that the Bible cannot be interpreted within a Marxist or socialist framework.
The fourth principle was that those who do not work, do not eat.
Ephesians 4:28 “He who steals must steal no longer; but rather he must labor,
performing with his own hands what is good, so that he will have something to
share with one who has need.” In 2 Thessalonians 3:10-12, Paul says
that if anyone is not willing to work, than he is not to eat either. This
is reinforced again and again.
The fifth point is that in the Scripture from the beginning to the end,
there is an emphasis on various things related to taxes. Inheritance
taxes are condemned in Proverbs 13:22 and 1 Chronicles 28:8. Inheritance
taxes, by the way, were developed by Marx and implemented by Lenin in order to
prevent wealth accumulation and take wealth away from the wealthy and transfer
it to the poor.
Proverbs
In the sixth point, we saw that there are no property taxes in the
Mosaic Law because property taxes prevent wealth accumulation and imply that
the government owns the land, and the people do not have actual true
ownership. In
In the seventh point, we saw that the tithe related to the income tax in
We take these principles and apply them to our two major presidential
candidates. We discover that both of them rate rather badly on
this. Senator Obama is worse because he is still proud of his
share-the-wealth view, which he gave famously in that interview with Joe, the
plumber. When he was interviewed by some news person, he was asked if he
would still give the same answer, and he rather proudly said that he
would. Obama believes that those who have should forcibly give it up for
those who do not have.
This whole idea of a progressive income tax was first attempted in the
19th century, but the Supreme Court declared that it was
unconstitutional. It was not until 1913, with a Constitutional amendment, that
it was made possible to have a progressive income tax. The idea that we get
from socialism and Marxism is the whole theory of labor and wealth that is
contradictory to the Scriptures and to the first Divine Institution, which has
to do with individual responsibility.
That brings us to the second Divine Institution, which is
marriage. Marriage is defined in the Scripture as being between one man
and one woman. This begins in Genesis 2. What is interesting is if
we look at Genesis 2, we see the details of what happened on that 6th
day when God created man. I pointed out from Genesis 1:26-28 that God
created male and female in His image. He does not create them at the same
time according to Genesis 2. First He created the man, and then He
creates the woman. In between the creation of the man and the woman, He
gave the man certain guidelines related to his role responsibility to work and protect
the garden.
By the way, the idea of protecting the garden is a foundational verse
for understanding the right of self-protection, the right to protect your
property with whatever you deem necessary and is foundational to the whole
principle of the 2nd amendment that we have a right to keep and bear
arms. Senator Obama has a record of increasing gun control, whereas
Senator McCain does not.
The principle of self-protection and being able to have weapons, even
access to the latest technology to protect your property, is embedded in
Scripture. In Luke 22, Jesus made sure the disciples were armed with
swords when they went to the
The man was to keep and guard the garden. He gives him the
responsibility to begin to name the animals, as exercising his role to rule
over and subdue the animals. As Adam goes through this process, which God
was using to show Adam he did not have a comparable mate, he gets to the point
where God is now going to create the woman. Genesis 2:21-23 “And the Lord
God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs,
and closed up the flesh in its place. Then the rib which the Lord God had
taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man. And
Adam said: ‘This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be
called Woman, because she was taken out of
When we look at this, what we discover is that the woman is created in
order to be a helper to the man. The word that is used for the woman
being a helper in verse 18 is ezer, a word that is commonly used to
refer to God. It is a word that is even comparable to the word parakaleo
or parakletos in the New Testament for the Holy Spirit, an
assistant. This is not a lowly position; this is a very high
position. In fact, the only being that is assigned the role of an ezer
in Scripture, other than a woman, is God. It is a rather high term, as
opposed to the feminist agenda, which wants to make a helper into something
that is subservient and low and of lesser value. This is, again, just an
agenda that runs counter to what the Word of God says.
It is important to understand the basic nature of God in understanding
these things, because God exists as a Trinity, a triunity – Father, Son and
Holy Spirit. They are three distinct persons. There are two
different ways in which we can look at the Trinity. One has to do with
the essential (essence or being of God) relationship of the three persons in
the Trinity, and that is sometimes referred to by theologians as the
ontological Trinity. Ontology is just the fancy word for essence or being.
You have three persons who are co-equal: They are equally righteous,
omniscient, omnipotent, loving. In their essence and their being, which
shows a society of three persons, they are co-equal. So you have one way
of looking at the Trinity, which is a social dimension related to their
essence.
On the other side, you can describe the relationship of the Father, Son
and the Holy Spirit in terms of what they do, in other words, their work or
their labor. When we look at it that way, that is called the economic
Trinity. You have the ontological Trinity and the economic Trinity, and
you cannot separate them. They are inseparably connected. One has
to do with the relationships – the social structure of the Trinity. The
other has to do with the economic structure of the Trinity.
We hear people today say they are a fiscal conservative but a social
liberal. That is the idea that you can separate the social from the
economic. You cannot do that in God, and you could not do that in man as
he was created initially in the garden. He is given an economic purpose
to rule and subdue, to work the garden and keep it, and he is given a wife
(that is social) in order to help him in the economic function. As man
and woman were originally created, they had both social and economic just as
God did as part of being in the image of God. The woman is created to
help the man. As an ezer, she is to enable him and to assist him
in the fulfillment of these God-given mandates that we have seen in Genesis 1
and 2.
After the Fall, there are problems that enter into marriage because of
sin, and only through salvation can those problems be overcome. That is
the purpose of the New Testament passages in Ephesians 5 related to husbands
loving their wives and wives being obedient to their husbands – addressing
areas of tension that result from the Fall.
What we see from the Old Testament is that God protects marriage through
various laws that we have in the Mosaic Law. The Mosaic Law is just one
instance of a legal system that reflects a higher divine standard of
righteousness. Going back to that initial verse in Proverbs
Deuteronomy 4:5-6, 8 is a crucial passage for understanding this.
God, through Moses, is addressing the people and says, “See I have taught you
statutes and judgments just as the Lord my God commanded me, that you should do
thus in the land where you are entering to possess it. [You are going to take
this law code, and you are going to implement it when you are in the land as a
nation.] So keep and do them, for that is your wisdom and your
understanding in the sight of the peoples [the nations, the Gentiles] who will
hear all these statutes and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and
understanding people.’ [They did not say, “What a rigorous, legalistic, servile
system. They are just enslaved to God.”] Or what great nation is
there that has statutes and judgments as righteous as this whole law which I am
setting before you today.”
He was defining the law as righteous. Does that mean that other
nations should just come and take the Mosaic Law whole hog and apply it to
their government? No, of course not. There were certain things that
were unique and distinct about the Mosaic Law related to
One of these has to do with the protection of marriage. There were
prohibitions against adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bestiality because
they would attack the basic institution of marriage, which is foundational to
family. If marriage and family collapse, then ultimately government and
the nation collapse. So each of these Divine Institutions we see build
upon previous ones, and when the foundational ones start to fragment, then
those that are built on them fall apart. We see that historically in our
nation for the past 150 years, the move has been away from personal
accountability and holding people responsible to work and to provide for
themselves. We have seen marriage and families fall apart, and this just
escalates from one decade to another.
In the Mosaic Law, there was the 7th commandment – you shall
not commit adultery. Within the Mosaic Law itself, there were various
other laws related to fornication, adultery, and other sins that attack
marriage. A key passage on this is Leviticus 20:10-15, and the key verse
here that relates to homosexuality is verse 13. I want you to notice that
it is within a context. In the current debate over gay marriage, same-sex
marriage, they respond to this as if it is just singled out as some heinous,
horrible sin. There is no understanding of what sin is, and that sin
includes all kinds of things, not the least of which is homosexuality. It
is not some super sin, but it is an attack against basic Divine Institutions of
both marriage and family.
Leviticus 20:10 “If there is a man who commits adultery with another
man’s wife, one who commits adultery with his friend’s wife, the adulterer and
the adulteress shall surely be put to death.” It is a capital
offense. Why is it taken so seriously? Because if allowed
permissively to continue, it will destroy marriage, destroy the family, and
fragment the culture.
Leviticus 20:11-15 “If there is a man who lies with his father’s wife,
he has uncovered his father’s nakedness; both of them shall surely be put to
death, their bloodguiltiness is upon them. If there is a man who lies
with his daughter-in-law, both of them shall surely be put to death; they have
committed incest, their bloodguiltiness is upon them. If there is a man
who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed
a detestable act; they shall surely be put to death. Their
bloodguiltiness is upon them. If there is a man who marries a woman and
her mother, it is immorality; both he and they shall be burned with fire, so
that there will be no immorality in your midst. If there is a man who
lies with an animal, he shall surely be put to death; you shall also kill the
animal.”
All of these relate to the foundation in the Mosaic Law, restated in the
New Testament. Romans 1:26-27 states that homosexuality or sodomy is an
ongoing part of God’s judgment on a nation that has already rejected Him.
“For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women
exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way
also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their
desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving
in their own persons the due penalty of their error.” It is a
self-judgment.
1 Corinthians 6:9-10 lists this, but it is in the context of a grocery
list of sins. “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit
the
1 Timothy 1:9-10 “Realizing the fact that law is not made for a
righteous person, but for those who are lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly
and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their fathers or
mothers, for murderers and immoral men and homosexuals and kidnappers and liars
and perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching.”
The point that is understood from the Scripture is that these are acts
of sins. In the New Testament, they do not have a death penalty imposed
upon these particular sins of homosexuality, adultery or fornication. The
reason is that in the Old Testament that is part of the law code for a nation,
but in the New Testament, the issue is giving ethical principles that are to be
instantiated in the lives of believers. It is not related to a
nation. Does that mean that they should not be death penalty? That
depends on the nation and how they want to make their laws. The New
Testament is not making the statement that the death penalty is removed because
it is not addressing that question. It is addressing another issue and
that is the ethical foundation of what is sin and what is not sin. It is
not providing a constitution for a nation or a law code. A nation could
make them capital offenses or might not make them capital offenses, but the
principle is that marriage and family have to be protected legally because that
is the role of government. Those last two Divine Institutions –
government and nations – which are given after the Fall and after the Flood are
designed to protect the first three Divine Institutions so that productivity
can be ensured.
This was understood by our founding fathers. Zephaniah Swift, who
was the author of one of
Charles Carroll, signer of the Declaration of Independence, recognized
as did many other founders that “without morals a republic cannot subsist any
length of time.” Morals are related to responsibility, and if people do
not live responsibly, then a government based upon people acting responsibly
cannot survive, and government has to turn itself into a “nanny state.”
James Otis, another founding father, wrote “When a man’s will and
pleasure is his only rule and guide, what safety can there be either for him or
against him but in the point of a sword.” When everyone does what is
right in their own eyes (as stated in Judges), which is pure post-modern
cultural relativism, then the fabric of the culture will completely deteriorate.
The early decisions of the courts of this country upheld this kind of
thinking consistently throughout the 19th century.
Johann David Michaelis, who wrote a legal text in 1814 called Commentaries
on the Laws of Moses, wrote “For if it [sodomy] once begins to prevail, not
only will boys be easily corrupted by adults, but also by other boys; nor will
it ever cease – more especially as it must thus soon lose all its shamefulness
and infamy and become fashionable and the national taste; and then …national
weakness (for which all remedies are ineffectual) must inevitably follow; not
perhaps in the very first generation, but certainly in the course of the third
or fourth… Whoever, therefore, wishes to ruin a nation has only to get
this vice introduced for it is extremely difficult to extirpate it where it has
once taken root because it can be propagated with much more secrecy…and when we
perceive that it has once got a footing in any country, however powerful and
flourishing, we may venture as politicians to predict that the foundation of
its future decline is laid and that after some hundred years it will no longer
be the same…powerful country it is at present.” How prescient of him to
observe exactly what has happened over the last hundred years or so in the
history of this nation.
In reference to this, in light of scriptural framework and in light of
the political history of the
“Throughout my career, I have fought to eliminate discrimination against
LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] Americans. In
In another place, he writes “I support the complete repeal of the
Defense of Marriage Act, a position I have held since before arriving in the
U.S. Senate. While some say we should repeal only part of the law, I
believe we should get rid of that statute altogether. I have also called
for us to repeal Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, and I have worked to improve the Uniting
American Families Act so we can afford same-sex couples the same rights and
obligations as married couples in our immigration system.”
In 1996, Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act by a vote of 342 to
Along with this, Senator Obama supports Gay Pride celebrations and
school curricula that promote homosexuality. He also opposes parental involvement
in education where they could stop that. He opposes traditional marriage
amendments that are currently on the ballot in both
In contrast, the views of McCain and Palin are really not all that
great. Both of them hold to traditional marriage, but they have both
allowed for certain civil union benefits to same-sex partners, which just
begins to gradually eat away at traditional marriage. However, they both
oppose supporting Gay Pride celebrations and education curricula that promote
homosexuality.