Decision Making in the Voting
Booth
Lesson # 5
As we've gone through this series I've laid out three basic principles
that sort of under gird everything I'm talking about. The first is that
all Christians [citizens of the
Christians we should do it even more conscientiously because everything
we do should be done to the glory of God. We should do all we can to vote
wisely and intelligently to preserve and defend the Constitution for this
glorifies God.
Secondly, in order to vote intelligently, the
The third principle is that by understanding this Biblical framework
that informed the founding fathers we can perpetuate that same system. We
start off with three basic ideas related to this. The first is the
concept of values. As I said before, and I'll say it again and again
because somebody always wakes up about the fifteenth time, is that whenever we
make a decision we're always deciding something that's good or better, bad or
worse, or something in between good and bad. But it always necessitates a
value system, some sort of structure or thought that gives us the categories,
the norms and standards, the values that we need in order to make those kinds
of judgment. That implies some sort of broader, all-encompassing, system
of thought, that we can then use to apply to these
kinds of decisions.
The Bible provides such a framework, the thinking of Christ, as it's called
in 1 Corinthians, chapter 2. God, as the Creator of all things, has given
us enough information where we can begin to wrestle with the Scripture, put
things together, and develop an understanding/framework for every area of
life. This necessitates, as I pointed out, these values. The one
question that has to be addressed that is never addressed as we have moved more
and more into a 'secular' society and there has been the attempt to divest and
fence off any kind of religious thought outside of the sphere of civil
government is the question: are there still values that are being taught and
promoted within the framework of government? Where do those values come
from? Are the values going to dominate in the civil arena, values that
are consistent with the Word of God? That's the question Christians have
to ask. They're either going to be Biblical values or non-Biblical
values. A Christian cannot be expected to somehow divorce himself from
his Christianity, to compartmentalize it to Sunday morning only, and not use
that framework of doctrine to evaluate candidates.
If you are a candidate, you should use that Biblical framework as the
basis for legislation. It's absurd but we've created, coming out of the
19th century and the influence of the epistemological, philosophical
shift that took place in the arena of ideas, an attack against Christianity and
against the thinking of this nation which was Christianity. The idea
arose of compartmentalizing and separating the religious from everyday
life. That's been very effective because most of us have grown up in a
culture where the ideas about God, theology, are not believed to be at the
foundation for everything else that is in society.
Very few of us, if any, thought in terms of Biblical thought in college
[except for the few who went to a Bible college or university]. Whatever
the field is in you are studying, whether finance or economics, science, or
business, how many times have you sat down and said, “Okay, what does the Bible
say, what does it teach about the general field of study that I'm going into
and what are the parameters, framework, guidelines that the Word of God is for
this area of life?” That just shows that we are brainwashed by this
distinction between the secular and the Biblical.
As we continue this, we're looking at the idea of how values relate to
the framework and then coming to the application of that framework to a
specific situation. I have always used this system based on the Divine
institutions plus
The Divine institutions synthesize what Bible-believing theologians have
taught about the early chapters of Genesis for centuries. That is, they
taught that God built certain social structures within the very framework of
the makeup of mankind, as being in the image and likeness of God. I
pointed out that this is fundamental to understanding this. In the
Trinity you can look at the social relationships among the three members of the
Trinity and the economic relationship, that is, how they work, and what their
different responsibilities and roles are. Yet they're
interconnected. You can't divorce the economic from the social. You
see the same thing happen when God creates Adam and the woman and places them in the Garden that there is an economic
responsibility and a social aspect.
Adam is first alone but he needs a wife as an aser
so the role of the wife is to help the husband; she is the assistant, the
helper, the one who comes along aside to help him fulfill his God-given
role. I pointed out, as man is created in the image of God,
God puts into him the divine institutions. They're not changeable.
They're basic, social structures for establishment principles which God embeds
within the human race. Modern paganism thinks they're just developed
secondarily or pragmatically. They believe as man faces certain
situations he decides that basically this is a good way to go to solve a
problem.
Once we start getting into different kinds of social engineering
experiments, they are always going to fall apart and they're going to have a
range of unintended consequences and eventually cause collapse in a
culture. One of the ways in which we've seen this that is tangential to
this is in this whole collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market and its
relationship to Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. It goes back to the social
agenda of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal back in 1933 when he first
had Fannie Mae established. You can trace through the whole history.
There are various articles out there on the internet how that led to different
changes made by Lyndon Johnson as part of his War against Poverty. There
were other changes that took place with the Community Reinvestment Act which
was signed by President Carter in 1977. Other changes took place in the
80's and 90's under President Clinton. All along the way you had
conservative economists in both parties who were sounding the alarm that there
were things being done that weren't right as they were trying to manipulate the
mortgage market.
Numbers just don't bend. I tried to do that all the way through
algebra in high school and could never convince any of my math teachers that
there was flexibility in the numbers. Eventually when you're trying to
make those numbers fit on a social agenda, it's going to come back and fall
apart, which is exactly what has happened. When
you get away from the way God has structured things, it's not going to
work. It may take years before we see the collapse. There's
continued arrogance on the part of government, thinking that they can prop this
up.
The first three Divine institutions are: individual responsibility,
marriage, and family. The first three were developed before the Fall and were designed to promote productivity and advance
civilization. Because of sin and because of the collapse that takes place
before the Flood in terms of man's rebelliousness toward God, God established
two more institutions: government and nations. One of the roles you
have for government is to protect those three Divine institutions. That's
why I spent so much time the other night on individual responsibility. I
added some things on Sunday and will add some tonight.
Once you get in a culture that shifts away from enforcing and
emphasizing individual responsibility somebody has to pick up the pieces.
If people stop being responsible, then what happens is that
government moves into that vacuum. People start looking to
government to do what individuals should be doing so there's a flip-flop that
occurs. When people start looking to government as the solution to all
the problems, then government becomes the problem.
The first divine institution, personal responsibility, emphasizes three
things. First of all, spiritual accountability of man
to his creator, God. Secondly, man was given responsibilities of
fulfilling certain responsibilities which we would classify as labor, although
it's not toilsome at that point. He has work to do. He has a job to
do. He is to classify the animals, work in the garden, protect the garden
which indicates the importance of self-defense, and he has the right to enjoy
the fruits of his labor so he can accumulate wealth and that wealth is
his. He has worked for it, he has earned it. Throughout Scripture we
see that God reinforces this and rewards those who work and produce and God
punishes and takes away from those who do not work.
What has happened in the last 150 years we have seen a major shift occur
in western European culture and American culture which has changed the way in
which we look at these things and how we look at the role of government in
relationship to people and to property. It's a
result of the rise of liberal thinking which came out of the European
universities in the late 1800's. I'm specifically thinking of Emmanuel
Kant and the early 19th century as a result of their rejection of
God.
Once they rejected God, God is removed and that creates a vacuum and
that vacuum has to be filled. Something's got to get sucked into that
vacuum. What got sucked into the vacuum is man. Once man takes God
out, then man became the center of all things, the ultimate determiner of
truth. So they were beginning with a mentality that man was basically
good because they rejected what the Bible says that man is basically
evil. Once God is removed, man becomes a product of his environment, and
he isn't a creature, created in the image of God. He is now the product
of chance, a biological accident so man's makeup is determined by his
environment, his social, education, economic, religious environment.
That's what shapes people.
This rejects the whole concept of personal responsibility, that you are
the result of the decisions you make. This meant that man was viewed more
and more, within certain systems, as a victim of forces in the environment,
rather than one who was volitionally responsible for shaping his
environment. That had a lot of implications for how they viewed labor and
laborers, how they viewed wealth creation, prosperity, transfer of wealth from
one generation to another, the whole idea of taking care of the poor, providing
for man's needs and so this gets shifted from the individual to
government.
That's where we're going: to look at how the Bible sees the role of
government. To do that we have to go back and show
again these connections in terms of the divine institutions.
Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand. If people are not
responsible, then they will abuse their freedom and the freedom will turn into
anarchy. So people have to have a system of ethics and accountability;
otherwise, they won't behave responsibly. Unless, of
course, they're inherently good. So the way a culture views people
as either inherently good or inherently bad is going to affect their view of
what government does. Thomas Sowell, as I mentioned before in his book, Conflict
of Vision points this out in his introduction. This is based on what
separates liberalism from conservative thought. One thing that all
liberals hold in common is a high view of man, that man is basically
good. Conservatives recognize that man is basically evil. I
f we think about these two categories of freedom and responsibility the
more the individual is responsible for his life, his future, his finances, his
planning, and his prosperity, the more freedom he is going to have. The
more you take that responsibility away from him and shift it to someone or
something else, for instance, government, the less freedom he's going to
have. So the degree of freedom then is directly related to his freedom to
succeed or fail. If he can fail and there aren't any negative
consequences, then the only reason you can put that cushion under him
financially so that if he fails, the government, like a big nanny state, is
going to come along and pick him up and carry him along, is to get the
resources from someone who has produced something. That production comes
from those who have worked and those who have succeeded. Those who are
out there working are then going to have to have some of the things they have
produced taken away from them and given to those who are non-producers in order
to protect them in the midst of their failure. This is why the freedom to
succeed is directly related to the freedom to fail.
When a government steps in to limit the consequences of failure, then it
must also limit the positives of what an individual can enjoy through
success. Thus, the freedom to succeed which entails risk and reward is
directly proportional to the freedom to fail. When the government steps
in and seeks to wipe out all these negatives it's going to borrow from the
wealthy, the achievers, those who work, those who risk, those who labor, and
give it to those who don't have anything. This is called socialism today
although in earlier eras, it wasn't necessarily called socialism.
You can think back to our study in Genesis a few years ago. In
Genesis, chapter 45-47, when you have the famine in
That's what happens under socialism and Marxism. When the means of
production is owned by the government, the people become slaves. That's
why socialism is always a move toward less freedom and greater slavery of
people to the government. But there's greater security because the
government promises to take care of everything. That's why the government
call it the nanny state.
It's amazing today that many people really don't understand what
socialism is. I don't know if it's because they were never taught that as
they were coming up under government-owned schools. They didn't want them
to know what socialism was so they couldn't identify it. It must be so
because we have a senator running for president right now who sat under a
Marxist pastor for twenty years and couldn't identify what Marxism is. So
we will have a president who can't identify Marxism. No different from
people who can't identify socialism
((CHART))I have a couple of cartoons that illustrate the principle of
socialism. Here's the first one. It's Halloween so this has a certain timeliness to it. Kids come up to the
house. The man says, “Look how much candy you have. I'm going to
take half and give it to the kids too lazy to go trick-or-treating for
themselves.” One of the little kids says, “Oh darn it. A
Democrat.” These kids were working hard; they had put on their
costumes and were going from house to house to get all this candy. When
it's over, someone comes along and says, “Okay, you can't have all this candy
you went out and got. There are some kids here who just were too lazy to
go out so we're going to give them half your candy.” Now how does that
work? It doesn't work very well. It's a good illustration to use
with children if you want to illustrate to them what socialism is compared to
free market economics.
There's another e-mail that came across my desk today that also
illustrates this for those who are a little bit older. This is a notice
to all employees. “As of
What's interesting is to recognize that what is happening today has been
clearly seen to be precisely what has needed to be done to ruin and destroy the
If you haven't heard it, get with someone who has a computer and listen
to the interview Senator Obama gave to a radio
interviewer in 2001 where he clearly stated that he believed the basic flaw of
the Warren Court, which was the radical court back in the 1960's, was that they
didn't try to redistribute the wealth and to pass the wealth along. He
goes back and he says some extremely damaging things related to his view of the
Constitution. He thinks the Constitution is basically flawed. Now
how a man who is running for the highest office in the land who has to swear
that he's going to preserve and defend the Constitution can question the
Constitution at its core is beyond me. That's what happens as a result of
post-modernism. So he has already made statements discrediting the
Constitution along with numerous other liberals. Number thirty:
“discredit the American founding fathers. Present them as selfish,
aristocrats who had no concern for the common man.” Thirty-one was to
belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American
history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the big picture.
Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communist took over.
Thirty-two says to support any socialist movement to give centralized control
over any part of the culture: education, social agencies, welfare programs,
mental health clinics, etc. This is all part of the plan.
Now I have something that was given to me on Sunday from the Wall Street
Journal on
Back to point thirty-two above, “support any socialized movement which
gives centralized control over any part of the culture, education, etc.”
Here we have education supporting homosexual marriage and the breakdown
there. So you can read that editorial later. They make some very
important points.
What we have today is a modern equivalent to what the ancient world had
under certain kinds of monarchy and totalitarian governments in the modern
world. Our modern forms are socialism and Marxism. At its core all
these systems of government have a belief that there is a
ruling elite that has the wisdom to determine how much money, affluence,
or success a person ought to have. How much is too much? Most
people didn't realize is that wealthy was only $250,000. Most people
thought wealthy was five million, ten million, fifty
million. Now it's getting closer and closer and reaching into the middle
class. Who has the right to determine how much money, influence, and
success a person should have and tell them they have to give the vast majority
of what they have after that to somebody else?
What gives the government the right to be that tyrannical and
domineering? That's what at the essence of socialism and Marxism, to take
freedom away. These systems always emphasize something about security and
providing security for people. They say they need to give up their
freedom and their options for true success in order to have real security.
They're going to take what true achievers make and transfer it to those who
aren't willing to work and aren't willing to succeed. Remember the
parable of the talents. When Jesus got to the third one who didn't do
anything, he said, “You lazy and wicked servant.” In socialism that's not
politically correct so Jesus is such a bad, evil capitalist. The wealthy
become demonized and class warfare is encouraged.
All of this began with taking away the emphasis on the individual rights
and responsibility and the right of the individual to work and enjoy the
benefits of his own work. Then from there we went to the second divine
institution: marriage. Marriage is defined Biblically as between one man
and one woman. Polygamy was never endorsed by God. The few instances
of polygamy in the Old Testament were never approved or endorsed by God.
In fact, he warned kings against that in Deuteronomy 17:17. It was never
something that was normative in
All of these are prohibited because they are destructive. First of
all they violate God's character and secondly, because they are destructive to
social relations. They also bring about a tremendous economic price when
they are allowed to run rampant. All the founding fathers recognized that
this was true. You couldn't separate ethics from the social and the
economic. They were all interconnected. This was true up until the
early part of the 20th century. A lot of things begin to
change. In the mid-sixties, there was a rise of political influence from
the homosexual lobby and this has become more and more dominant as they have
raised more and more money over the last forty years. We've seen a
tremendous change come about of their place in our culture. This has been
part of the pattern of assault on the founding vision of this nation.
We have all been effectively propagandized by the media in relationship
to homosexuality. Here are some facts you may not be aware of. In a
2008 poll by
A study in
You can't separate the social policies, the economic agendas, into two
separate areas. One hundred and twelve million dollars is spent in
dealing with problems caused by out-of-wedlock births. Social policies
result in economic consequences. We have to remember that homosexuality
is not being singled out by Christians as something to target and to focus
on. It is the homosexuals who have come out of the closet and made an
issue out of everything. What Christians are doing is standing up for the
traditional law of the land embedded in the Constitution and the divine
institution standpoint as provided in the Scripture.
Part of what is driving the homosexual agenda is that they understand
something most Christian couples don't understand and that is that the family
is the engine of education. This is what the Word of God teaches.
The Psalms teach that children are a blessing of the Lord. “Blessed
the man whose quiver is full of them.” The image there is of a
warrior there who is shooting his arrows into an enemy. The more arrows
you have, the more effect you're going to have on the enemy. That is
analogous to parents who raise children up in the admonition and nourishment of
the Lord and then send them out to do battle in the human viewpoint pagan
culture. But too many Christian parents over the last generations have
just shunted their kids off to public, government schools to be educated and
brainwashed in secular humanism and they have completely failed in their job as
parents to teach and train these kids to think Biblically and interact with the
culture on a divine viewpoint framework.
You go back into the Old Testament and you see this is one of the
primary emphases in the Mosaic Law for families. The family is the
training arena for children. These homosexuals understand that so they
want legitimate marriages so they can adopt these children and can instill
their values into their children and send them out into the society in order to
change and affect the culture. As a result of that, they want to redefine
marriage, they want to redefine family and they want to portray traditional
families as aberrations, such as “Ozzie and Harriet” were nut jobs and the
“Cleavers” were psychotic and that's not normal. They want to go back and
change everything, saying, “It's really more normal to have two men or two
women raising kids than a man and a woman.”
Let's look at a couple of things in Scripture. The reason I go to
the Law is because in Deuteronomy 4: 5-7 it says the Law is righteous.
It's not that we're trying to take the Mosaic Law as a pattern for every other
nation or impose that on the
As related to families, verses 6 and 7 give us a core mandate.
“This Word which I am commanding you today shall be on your heart. You
shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in
your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down and when you rise
up.” Now that doesn't mean you're giving a Bible class 24/7. This
is a mandate to parents that you are supposed to have your soul so saturated
with the Word of God that as you go through life, at the grocery store, at your
working place, when you're out in the garden somewhere, or when you're gong to
school or the kids come home and tell you what they heard in school, you're
able to set out at that moment and just talk about whatever the issue is from a
Biblical viewpoint.
I've never forgotten the first time I was exposed to evolution. I
think I was in the sixth grade. I had a wonderful teacher, my favorite
teacher of all I ever had. She was a Christian and she was reading from a
story one day about how the solar system evolved, how the moon came out of the
earth. I came home and told my mother about it. She said, “Let's
sit down and read Genesis 1. Is that what the first chapter of Genesis
says?” That's just a great example of how parents are supposed to
operate. Parent's primary task is to train children to think
Biblically. Not to give them twenty options.
I've heard parents say, “Well, I'm not going to teach my kids about
politics. When they get old I want them to have the freedom to believe
what they want to believe.” So you don't really believe anything is worth
passing on, do you? What idiots. Parents' job is to instill
doctrine in those kids from the time they first come out of the womb.
That is the role of the family.
Another passage which is always interesting to deal with is Deuteronomy
As most of you know, we have various bills that are always being passed
by educators, under their influence in
Another type of legislation that affects this is that Senator McCain has
recently proposed a seven thousand dollar tax credit per child. Right
after World War II, one of the things that contributed to the prosperity of the
baby boom period in the fifties was that Congress passed a $600 child credit.
Now $600 per child doesn't sound like a lot nowadays but that was a lot of
money in the 40s. If you were the parent of two or three kids, then you
could get $1200 or $1800 tax credit. When this was passed the average
income of a family was probably about $8 or 9,000.00. This bill resulted
in the fact that most families did not have to pay any income tax in the 1950s
when, perhaps, many of us were growing up. This is why our moms were able
to stay at home. They didn't have to go out and get a job so it was laws
like that that promoted a strong family and encouraged a strong family.
But by the 1970s that had deteriorated. It hadn't kept up with inflation
so that the inflation at the end of the 70s, a lot of mothers, even if against
working outside the home, were forced by the economics
of government policy to seek jobs.
We're now at a point where over 50% of kids in American are born to
single parent households. Once you get the vast number of women working
outside the home that contributed to an already rising divorce rate and a
breakdown of the family. You begin to see how all the systems begin to
break down and you get into a cultural collapse.
Another area that's related to family and wealth goes back to the
inheritance tax. Proverbs
The fourth divine institution is government which is established in
Genesis 9. The fifth divine institution is nations, which is established
coming out of the episode at the
What we see also from Scripture, comparing Romans 12 to passages in the
Old Testament is that government is considered righteous. Those who are
in the government are ministers of God. They have a role and that is to
preserve righteousness within the society, that is they have to protect the
society internally from enemies from within who would take away from our
righteousness and attack the divine institutions and also to protect the nation
from external enemies, evil men who would seek to take power, steal land, steal
property, and destroy the nation.
The basis for government is laid down in the Noahic
Covenant with the death penalty. This is stated in Genesis 9: 5–6.
In that covenant, God says to Noah, “Surely I will require your life blood from
every beast and I will require it from every man and from every man's brother,
I will require the life of man. Whoever sheds man's blood, by man his
blood shall be shed, for in the image of God He made man.”
The purpose of the death penalty is not to prevent crime. It's not a
prevention mechanism. It is a protection mechanism. Look at the
analogy. If a wild animal kills a human being, what do we do to this
day? If a bear or lion or tiger gets loose and attacks and kills a human
being, what do we do? We kill it. Why do we do that? Because
we know that once it crosses that border, that boundary, and it attacks and
kills a human being, it's going to do it again. God is laying down the
same principle here in regards to murder. Once a human being crosses that
boundary and kills another human being where there's no longer a sense of restraint,
a sense of respect for other human beings because they're created in the image
of God, then that person needs to be executed to protect other individuals
[divine institution number one] from this individual who has become so
perverted in his soul that he can no longer exercise self-discipline,
self-control, and self-restraint.
So this becomes not only the basis for government but primarily for the
judiciary. Once man has been delegated this responsibility, then he has
to decide how he's going to implement this responsibility... how he's going to
properly evaluate the circumstances of someone's death, how he's going to
develop lines and rules of evidence to determine whether a murder has taken
place or whether it was simply an accident. Who's going to be the
ultimate decider, the ultimate arbiter, the judge, who is going to implement
the penalty? All of these things come to bear. It looks like a very
simple command but in order to implement it, man had to think about it and
develop all these other structures related to government. That then
develops the whole system of laws and the system of requirement that are
related to bringing about these judgments. If it's not murder, but it's manslaughter, what kind of penalty are we going to
have? If it was an accident, is there any kind of accountability?
So you see how that eventually leads to judicial decisions in every area of
life. This becomes the foundation of the whole principle of judicial
accountability within man's environment.
When you come to Genesis, chapter eleven, which is the construction of
the
This is something we're going to play into the last principle we'll be
looking into: our nation's relationship to