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 United States] should vote wisely and intelligently.  It's part of our responsibility as a citizen to do a good job of being a citizen.  As

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 U.S. citizen should understand the thinking that's embodied in the U.S. Constitution.  Unfortunately most of us weren't educated on this as we were coming up through public schools.  So if we're going to perpetuate the Constitution we must appreciate and understand what went into it and then we need to vote in leaders who are going to perpetuate that system because all the blessings that we have are the fruit of that kind of thinking. 

 

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 Israel as a way of evaluating candidates.  Not too long ago when I was telling my good friend, Tommy Ice, about this, he said, “You know when I was a happy hippie holy roller...”  You didn't know that's what Tommy was.  He was a charismatic liberal back in the early 70s.  He got hold of some of Charlie Clough's material on the divine institutions and said, “I listened to that tape once and I became a diehard conservative because I understood what the Bible taught.” 

 

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 Egypt, Joseph had the dreams of the seven good years and the seven lean years and so he told the Pharaoh to store up a percentage of crops in the seven good years so they would have resources to survive the seven bad years.  Toward the end of the seven bad years, they were running out of resources and the people were going to the Pharaoh and asking him to feed and care for them.  The Pharaoh then began to buy up their land.  When it was all over with, the Pharaoh owned all the land in Egypt.  He owned all the means of production.  At that point all the people become servants or slaves. 

 

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 November 5, 2008, when President Obama is officially elected into office, our company will install a few new policies in keeping with his new inspiring issues of change and fairness.  Number one: All sales people will be pooling their sales and bonuses into a common pool that will be divided equally among all of you.  This will serve to give those of you who are underachieving a fair shake.  Number two:  All low level workers will be pooling their wages, including over time into a common pool, dividing it equally among yourselves.  This will help those who are too busy for overtime to reap the rewards of overtime with those who have more spare time and can work extra hours.  Third, all top management will now be referred to as the government.  We will not participate in this pooling experience because the law doesn't apply to us.  Fourth, the government will give eloquent speeches to all employees every week, encouraging its workers to continue to work hard for the good of all.  Fifth, the employees will be thrilled with these new policies because it's good to spread the wealth.  Those of you who have underachieved will finally get an opportunity.  Those of you who have worked hard and had success will feel more patriotic.  Sixth, the last few people who were hired should clean out their desks.  Don't feel bad, though, because President Obama will give you free healthcare, free handouts, free oil for heating your home, free food stamps, and he'll let you stay in your home as long as you want even if you can't pay your mortgage.  If you appeal directly to a Democratic Congress, you might even get a free flat-screen TV and a coupon for free haircuts.  Little humor there. 

 

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 United States.  Back in 1963, the goals of the Communist Party for destroying America were read into the Congressional Record.  They listed 45 different tactics that the Communist Party in America thought were necessary in order to wipe out and destroy the nation.  Some of these are pertinent today.  Number twenty-five was “break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.”  Number twenty-six was “present homosexuality, degeneracy, and promiscuity as normal natural and healthy.”  This was in 1963.  Helpful to look back, isn't it?  Twenty-seven: “Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with social religion.  Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a religious crutch.”  Number twenty-eight:  “Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the grounds that it violates the principle of separation of church and state.”  Number twenty-nine: “Disparage the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.” 

 

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 Friday, October 24, 2008.  It's on their editorial page.  This was in section A18 on their Opinion Page and the headline, down toward the bottom reads, “Big Labor Does Gay Marriage”.  Here's a pop quiz.  Who's donated the most money toward an effort in California to defeat Proposition 8.  If you pass Proposition 8, then you're supporting traditional marriage.  If you defeat Proposition 8,  then you are in favor of homosexual marriage.   Is it a) gay advocacy organizations  b) civil rights groups or c) the California teachers association?  The answer is c) the California teachers association has given the most money. 

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 Israel.  Both Old and New Testament condemn homosexuality along with numerous other sins, such as adultery, false witness, arrogance, pride, gossip, slander. 

 

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 Hunter College in New York only 3% of the population is homosexual.  You thought it was much greater than that, didn't you?  Second, traditional marriages last for twenty years or longer.  The average sodomite relationship is a year and a half.  There's no stability there.  Most married couples are faithful to one another but a study in Holland among homosexual “marriages” there found that committed homosexual couples had an average of eight sexual partners a year.  Also, homosexual and lesbian couples had the highest level of partner violence.  Lesbians are four times likely to be the victims of violence in a domestic relationship than married women in a traditional marriage.

 

 A study in Scandinavia where they've recognized same sex marriage for over ten years, marriage is virtually disappearing.  The vast majority of children are born out of wedlock and there's a complete breakdown within the home.  The same trend is happening in the United States as we've gone through the whole transition coming out of the sixties where people don't get married or they just live together; those born to unwed parents are seven times more likely to end up in poverty.  That's the economic consequence of not having a law addressing the social, ethical issue.  They also represent 70% of the prison population.  When we get our laws away from ethics and righteousness and when we allow these things to be shaped by a social agenda, there are horrific economic consequences. 

 

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 United States.  But in the Mosaic Law we see one instantiation, or example, of how God's character is worked out within a human government structure.  In Deuteronomy 4, Moses says that as they obey and implement the Mosaic Law, then the peoples around them [second half of verse 6], who hears these laws will say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.”    Most people who look at the Law today say, “how restrictive, how domineering, how it destroys liberty or freedom; it's just a moral straitjacket.”  But God says that if you implement this it produces a prosperous culture so the nations would look at them and think this is a wise and understanding people and what a great nation is there that has such statutes and judgments and righteousness as this one. 

 

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 21, a passage that deals with parents and rebellious teenagers.  Remember the idea of a teenager or adolescent is basically a construct that came up after the Great Depression.  It's a 20th century American phenomena.  Through most of world history, you were a child and then you became an adult.  There wasn't this transition period when you got to be responsible and follow your hormones wherever they led you.  This is a unique American phenomenon.  What they're talking about here is a child that's passed bar mitzvah, older than thirteen and no longer a child.  A child who has not learned to respect authority in the home will not respect authority in the state so this is a child that has grown up, reached adulthood and is incorrigible.  He has demonstrated time and time again a complete failure to be oriented to authority so the parents recognize that if this child is released onto society, he will be horrendous.  This child is going to turn into a psychotic serial killer or serial rapist so they bring this child before the assembly.  They accuse the child and then the child is to be stoned and the parents forgiven.  It is something that is extremely serious.  It was designed to protect the nation and to preserve the family.  The emphasis here as we see from the Bible is that the parents are accountable.  They are responsible under divine institution number one for training their children. 

 

As most of you know, we have various bills that are always being passed by educators, under their influence in Austin and in Washington, that constantly break down the rights that parents have to oversee the education of their kids.  When we look at these two presidential campaigns, Senator McCain supports parental rights in education, that parents have a right to supervise and to permit or not permit certain things to be taught to their children.  Obama, on the other hand, opposes parental rights.  He is in violation of divine institution number three at this point. 

 

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 13:22 says that “A good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children but the wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous.”  The Bible values passing on an inheritance.  In fact, it was illegal under the Mosaic Law to have an inheritance tax so that wealth could be accumulated generationally through the families.  This is reiterated in 2 Corinthians 12:14 where it says children are not to lay up for their parents but parents should lay up for the children.  Parents should accumulate wealth so it can be passed on to the next generation.  This comes out of a proper view of divine institution number one and number three. 

 

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 tower of Babel.  They are distinguished because they are separated in time but the way we experience them they work together.  These two divine institutions were both formed after the Fall and after the Flood in order to restrain evil, in order to prevent evil from attacking the first three divine institutions.  So that one of the roles of government is to protect individual responsibility, individual ownership of property, protect the accumulation of wealth, and to protect the spiritual accountability of every individual so that they have the freedom to decide what they're going to do in terms of their relationship with God. 

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 tower of Babel, God breaks down the language barrier by confusing the languages and this is going to force the human race to divide up into tribes and clans and eventually nations.  God has established these boundaries.  In Acts 17:26 Paul mentions this and says, “God has determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitations.”  The inference from this is that there are nations that have legitimate boundaries and God has established these and these nations have a right to protect their sovereignty.  These nations have a right to protect their national identity and their national distinctions and have the right of self-protection against any other nation that may be attacking them. 

 

This is something we're going to play into the last principle we'll be looking into: our nation's relationship to Israel because this brings in this whole issue of Zionism.  Is Zionism correct?  Incorrect?  Is it legitimate for Israel to have a state and is it legitimate for Israel to do whatever it takes to protect their national identity?  I would say yes it is and it flows out of this same principle for every nation.  Every nation has the right to protect their national sovereignty.  So when we come to this last part for government we'll see some very interesting things when it comes to examining our candidates.  So we'll wait and finish this up Thursday night.