Decision Making in the Voting Booth
Lesson #6
We started out with certain assumptions that relate to our understanding of who we are as believers, that everyone who is a citizen of the U.S. has an inherent responsibility to be involved in the process of government, at the very least to vote and at times to be able to do more than that. As Christians, we should take all of our responsibilities seriously, including those related to our responsibility as citizens. That means we should vote wisely and intelligently to preserve and defend the Constitution. We should elect leaders that believe in the Constitution. Our ultimate goal as believers is to do this to the glory of God.
As U.S. citizens, in order to vote intelligently and wisely, we must understand the thinking that is embodied in the Constitution. Even though there are various strands of other thoughts that pop up here or there, the primary thought, the framework that influenced and shaped the thinking of the founders and the very government that they established comes directly out of Scripture. They understood it that way. We went through numerous quotes from founding fathers indicating that they understood that it was the Bible that was the bedrock of truth on which this nation would operate. In order to vote wisely and intelligently to preserve that Constitution, we must understand the thought that goes into it. By understanding that biblical framework, we can then vote in a way that helps preserve and protect the Constitution and its freedoms.
What underlies this is the doctrine known as the Divine Institutions. Five Divine Institutions that we have outlined are true for every human being – believer and unbeliever alike. Cultures, societies, nations that adhere closely to these Divine Institutions will have prosperity and success, they will accumulate wealth, they will make an impact in the world, and they will have stability. Nations that drift from these or try to change these will eventually fall apart. God embedded these in the very social structure of the human race.
We stand in a conflict down through the ages between God’s will and the will of Satan and the will of man in rebellion against God, and that produces many worldviews all under the nomenclature of paganism, which is a technical for any non-biblical concept or worldview. These various pagan views - Marxism, Darwinism, Freudianism – come out of the 19th century and are directly opposed to biblical truth. We live in the midst of this culture war that has been coming to a head for the last 40-50 years in the U.S.
The first three Divine Institutions (individual responsibility, marriage, family) relate to one another. They are all established before the Fall. The fourth and fifth Divine Institutions (government, nations) deal with post-Fall and are established after sin. We saw that the pre-Fall Institutions were designed to promote productivity and advance civilization, whereas the last two were designed to restrain evil.
The sixth issue in decision-making for leaders has to do with Israel and how the nation, the government views Israel.
The first Divine Institution, individual responsibility, is broken down into three areas. In spiritual accountability, each individual is accountable to God for his eternal relationship to God. Secondly, we saw that this involved in the garden before the Fall responsibility where labor was not toilsome or laborious in a negative sense. Man was to enjoy its fruits. The founders understood that man was to work, and the fruits belonged to the one who did the work. Those fruits – the wealth that was developed from that – were private property, and man had a right to private property.
This is seen in a statement by Thomas Jefferson: “To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry [in their terminology, this was labor] and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.” That is what he is referring to in terms of the first Divine Institution. The founders understood the importance of the first Divine Institution. It was not just something related to spiritual responsibility to God but to labor.
This runs completely contrary to the worldview that is espoused by one of the presidential candidates. In fact, it runs contrary to a lot of the thinking both candidates have. Both of them buy into a certain degree of socialism and the idea that government is to supply the needs for people. One candidate, McCain, is not nearly as extreme as the other. Obama borders on pure Marxism in his statement “share the wealth,” which he is very proud of. He is saying those who do not have and have not worked and have not accumulated need to be provided for on the basis of taking from those who have worked, have risked, have taken 20, 30, 40 years building a business, developing income, risking and sometimes losing their fortunes two or three times. And when they finally get there, the government comes around and takes it from them.
If you are not aware of this, this is just a little preview of coming attractions if we get a Democrat-controlled Congress and White House. People risk their money in their 401Ks, and the government just cannot let people risk anymore. They must protect us from our own bad decisions. What they are investigating is having a new program where they are going to basically confiscate the money in everybody’s 401K and put it into the social security plan. Then everybody gets to designate approximately six percent, I think, of their income to go into a “retirement plan” that is government-run and government-controlled.
The American people are willing to trust anybody, other than have to work it seems. When we have 44 percent of the population on the dole, not paying taxes, not contributing to the support of the government, then they are not putting anything at risk. It is interesting that the same percentage of people in this country that are not paying taxes is the same percentage of people who responded affirmatively in a poll that they did not think socialism is all that bad.
The second Divine Institution is marriage. The founding fathers understood the principle of marriage being between one man and one woman, and that this was a bedrock institution that could not be changed. James Wilson, who was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and one of the first associate justices on the Supreme Court, said “The most important consequence of marriage is, that the husband and the wife become in law only one person… Upon this principle of union, almost all the other legal consequences of marriage depend.”
What we have today, though, is this desire to change the very nature of what marriage is. An editorial in the Investor’s Business Daily stated the consequences of this. “The slippery slope has been greased. If two men can marry, why not more than two? Are laws against polygamy also a violation of our constitutional rights? Was the Texas cult legal? [That is a reference to the fundamentalist Mormon sect that they had a problem with last spring.] There you had a lot of people in a committed relationship raising a lot of children. Heterosexual marriage is not some Right-wing plot to deny homosexuals their rights. It’s an institution sanctioned [not invented by, but recognized and affirmed] by all successful nations and cultures because of a compelling interest in a stable, growing society with heterosexual marriage providing a sturdy framework for both procreation and the orderly upbringing of children – the future of any society.”
That gets into the third Divine Institution of family. The role of family is training and teaching children. The responsibility of family is to teach children, not the public government-run, government-financed school, not the church school, not even the Sunday School. It is the responsibility of parents to teach these things to the children and to train them. They are the ones who are going to be held accountable. When you are before the Judgment Seat of Christ, the issue in terms of your parental responsibilities is not going to be what kind of school you sent your kids to. It is going to be what did you do to train your kids to walk in the way of the Lord.
The article goes on to say “Opponents of the decision will try to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot in November. [That is a reference to that decision made by the State Supreme Court in California.] That may be the only way to ensure that activist judges don’t further unravel the fabric of society and that government of the people has not become government of just four people.” Judicial tyranny.
That is exactly what Thomas Jefferson recognized. When you have people who have worked hard and have accumulated possessions and wealth, and then the government comes in and redistributes that to anyone, that is tyranny. To put that into other terms, that is criminality; that is just thievery. It is one thing to have a right to tax in order to supply the needs of the government – highway construction, support for the military, support for government officials and the operation of the government – but to have as a government agenda an economic policy of redistributing money (to take from those who have to give to those who have not) is nothing more than tyranny and robbery.
The biblical foundation for government is in Genesis 9:5-6. At the very core is the idea of the judiciary and the delegation of the responsibility to judge and to carry out criminal penalties to the degree of taking a life in a capital crime, such as murder. “Surely I will require your lifeblood; from every beast I will require it. And from every man, 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.”
To do that, that entails thinking through the entire judicial process. How are you going to determine who is guilty, whether it was justified killing or premeditated homicide? That is what the commandment means in the 10 Commandments; it does not mean “thou shall not kill.” The Hebrew word is a word that means “murder.”
It was a couple of hundred years after the Flood that you had the first use of the word “kingdom” in the Bible. Nimrod, who was a descendant through Ham, decides to establish his own kingdom over against God. It is religiously oriented. This is the beginning, as we see in the Bible, of the kingdom of man: man’s attempt to establish peace, prosperity, happiness, economic stability, “share the wealth” from these early days over against obedience to God. God’s mandate coming off the ark was to scatter, multiply and fill the earth. Man failed to do that. The kingdom of Babel set up this tower in Shinar, and it had a specific agenda against God. It had a religious orientation; it was a response and reaction to God because of the judgment at the Flood. They were going to build this tower high enough to reach heaven. The idea is that somehow we will protect ourselves from this mean, nasty God who is going to interfere with human history and kill everybody who resists Him.
The Tower of Babel was internationalism; it was all of mankind coming together against God. God judged them by confusing the languages because up until that point, everybody spoke the same language, so everybody could communicate. God divides the languages, and the result is it is going to force people to go off into their separate corners of the world with just those people that they can understand and communicate with. This is the beginning of nations, the beginning of separation of tribes and clans which eventually developed into nations.
Man keeps thinking that he can resist God by establishing a unity of man against God. We have been studying in the book of Revelation that this is exactly the kind of thinking that will come about in the end times under the leadership of the Antichrist, a one-world government that will be united against God. We see the hardness of the heart when we see how the earth dwellers continue to resist God. They shake their fist in the face of God no matter how much judgment God pours out, and they just refuse to accept the truth, and their anger is irrational and palpable. You just cannot understand how these people can be that way.
Perhaps we see a little glimmer of that kind of hardness of heart and blindness to the truth in the way numerous people in this election cycle have aligned themselves on one side of the political spectrum, and the anger and resentment that are there if anyone tries to question their candidate and bring up any kind of questions other than just lobbing softballs at him. In fact, it was appalling to watch a vice-presidential candidate being interviewed by a news person out of Orlando, FL. When she started asking very good questions about how he could support the socialist agenda of Senator Obama, he just got angry with her. He would not answer the question and said, “Who is writing your stuff? Who made this up? These are silly questions.”
There is a debater’s technique that the Obama camp is masterful at – minimizing, ridiculing the other side. They do not answer the questions; they just turn it back. For example, last night in a speech, Obama said, “How can McCain call me a socialist?” He does not answer the questions and does not say he is not a socialist. He just says how can he do that, ridicules that position, and demeans and minimizes the opposition that way, which is a very effective technique as part of passing the big lie.
In the end times, we are going to see this reunification idea of mankind in terms of internationalism. We see that even today. For example, in Europe you have the EU (European Union). Their translation headquarters in Strasbourg, France, which was self-consciously built to picture the unfinished Tower of Babel, according to the architect. It is to depict the idea that they are going to change and reverse the course that God started at the Tower of Babel.
This idea is nothing new. We have the same kind of theological or religious underpinnings in the UN (United Nations). Outside the UN building, we have this quote from Isaiah 2:4 “…they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” Isaiah 2 says that that condition is brought about by the Messiah Himself, the Lord Jesus Christ, when He comes to establish His kingdom in Israel. But you have the UN and the EU coming in and saying this is what they will do. People need to understand that there is a religious agenda at work behind these organizations. We do not need anybody that supports the UN.
On a scale from 1-10, 10 being the ideal candidate who despises the UN and would have an agenda to get out of the UN, and 1 being someone who is totally in bed with the UN, I think that we would probably classify McCain as about a 4 and Obama as a 1. The problem is that we do not have any conservative leaders in Congress or anywhere who are willing to take a stand against the UN. They continue to accept a certain legitimacy to internationalism.
As far as Senator Obama is concerned, he supported Senate Bill 2433 that came up for a vote in February and was entitled euphemistically The Global Poverty Act. It was designed to end global poverty. What it would have required was various nations give a certain percentage of their gross domestic product to the UN. For the U.S., it would have required 0.7% of the GDP to go to the UN, which have been 845 billion dollars over 13 years. If you are going to cut taxes, as he claims to do, you cannot pay these kinds of bills. You cannot fund all the social programs that he has. This would have been a mandatory federal tax that the nation would have had to pay to the UN, basically putting us under the authority of the United Nations.
On September 17, 2007, in a speech Obama outlined his plan for Iraq, which was to have the U.S. leave Iraq and be replaced by the UN peacekeeping force, including troops from Syria and Iran. Of course, that would have been extremely helpful, don’t you know!
When we look at Scripture and develop a biblical view of government, you start in Genesis 9. The next place to go is in the Mosaic Law because in the Mosaic Law, God is going to give a constitution, a law code to the nation Israel that is going to embody these Divine Institutions as the foundation, so we get to see one way in which that is put into practice in a national law code. Does that mean that every nation should imitate that? No, but it means that this gives us a pattern, a model on which to build, which is what the early fathers of this nation did. This is why it is such a historical aberration, a revisionism to take displays of the 10 Commandments out of the courts; it is a denial of our history.
The Mosaic Law says certain things about the role of government. One thing we pointed out is in taxation, there were three different tithes. A tithe was a 10 percent tax for the support of the bureaucracy, which were the Levites and the priests because it was a theocracy. Theocracy means that it is a government that is ruled by priests who stand in the place of God.
The third tithe was to be taken up only once every third year, and that was to provide for widows and orphans. It is not that the government should not have some sort of safety net out there for those who just cannot work or cannot provide for themselves, but it is minimal and not done on the backs of the wealthy. That tax was like an income tax that was 10 percent, a flat rate, and did not assess a higher percentage from the wealthy and a lower percentage from the poor. Everyone, rich or poor, had to give 10 percent.
Of course, if you did not make much and only made $10,000 a year, you only give 10 percent and only give $1,000 a year. But if you make a million dollars, you have to give $100,000. You give a lot more if you are wealthy than if you are poor, but it is the percentage that makes it just and righteous. When you have a progressive tax system, as we have in this nation, it is unrighteous. We have seen passages in Scripture that the goal of government is to function in a righteous manner.
In terms of the executive, there was an understanding in the law that there would eventually be a king. There are requirements for the king laid down in Deuteronomy 17:18-19. “Now it shall come about when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself a copy of this law on a scroll in the presence of the Levitical priests. It shall be with him and he shall read it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, by carefully observing all the words of this law and these statutes.”
The kind is under a higher authority. It is not this divine-right idea that you had developing in Europe in the 1500s and early 1600s. The king is under the law and under God. This was seen in the fact that every king in Israel had to be anointed by the prophet who was God’s representative. The king is not an autonomous authority. The government is not autonomous; it operates under the authority of God.
This was an idea that was understood and developed by the Puritans in the 17th century in England. A very famous and influential book entitled Lex, Rex was written by Samuel Rutherford. The title means that the law is king. The king is not the law, but the law is king, and the king serves under the law.
Samuel Rutherford was a Scottish Presbyterian theologian, and it was Scottish Presbyterian ideas to a large degree that influenced the thinking in the American colonies. There was this huge migration of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians that first were in Scotland and then for awhile in Ireland and then migrated to North America in the 1600s and 1700s. There was an enormous wave that came in the middle period of the 1700s. Many of them went into the South and had a phenomenal impact on Southern culture. The influence of these ideas is that law is over the king.
In 1 Samuel 8, we have our next key passage as a warning from God on the abuse of power that can come from a king. This happens when Israel finally gets to a point where they have rejected God as the King. They no longer want theocracy as originally set up by the Mosaic Covenant; they want to have a king like all the other nations. Samuel took it personally and went to God. God said do not take it personally because they were not rejecting Samuel but were rejecting God. God wanted Samuel to go tell the people what they are going to get when they get centralized government.
1 Samuel 8:11-12 “He said, ‘This will be the procedure of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and place them for himself in his chariots and among his horsemen and they will run before his chariots. He will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and of fifties, and some to do his plowing and to reap his harvest and to make his weapons of war and equipment for his chariots.’ ” He is going to build a bureaucracy and a large government.
What is going to run the government? The government is not productive. People of industry are out farming in agriculture. They are the ones who are productive and are producing the wealth in the culture, not the government. The government just sort of sucks the wealth out of those who are industrious, which is what this is pointing out. The larger government grows, then more of a demand it puts on people. One of the issues is how big is government going to get under this particular president? It is predicted on the basis of all of his plans that under Obama the government would see its largest expansion of government ever in the history of the U.S. This is extremely dangerous. The larger government gets, the less freedom and liberty that people have.
It is still going to grow under McCain because that has been the direction that government has gone. I think many conservatives were extremely chagrined, disappointed and angry with the current president because of the way he allowed government to grow under his administration. We thought we were going to get somebody who would go for limited government, and we got just the opposite. I have very little hope and confidence in either one of them in this area, but at least theoretically, we know that McCain is not nearly as bad as Obama.
1 Samuel 8:13-18 continue to talk about how all of this is going to expand. It talks about how this becomes such an overwhelming burden to the people when the government expands.
What we see in summary is that the responsibilities of government biblically are very limited. They are designed to promote righteousness. Government is to protect people from criminality, to protect people from injustice from those who would abuse the system and abuse others, and to protect the state from outside enemies. That means they have to provide for national defense and to understand the nature of the enemies that are around us.
This is one of the major issues that we are facing today. We have the rise that we have seen over the past 30 years of radical, fundamentalist Islam, and this, I believe, is inherent to the teachings of the Koran. It is not something that is inconsistent with the Koran, but violence to promote Christianity is inconsistent with the Bible. So people cannot go to the Crusades and say you have Christians that get violent as well. That is an aberration.
Yet, we have a sitting president today, who believes that Islam is a peaceful religion. The danger with Obama is that all of his Muslim relatives. When you have had some exposure in your youth to moderate Islam and have extended family that are Islamic, that puts a pressure on you to be less objective. We do not have government officials who are objective to begin with. Islam is the enemy; this is a religious war because they have made it a religious war. It does not have anything to do with the motivation of the West; it has been a religious war since Mohammed founded Islam. You had the initial attempt to invade Europe back in the 8th century and the defeat at the Battle of Poitiers under Charles, the Hammer. Then you have the later victory when the Moslem hordes were stopped outside the gates of Vienna in the 16th century. But they continue to push. Every time they get money and financing, they continue to try to dominate the West. I do not think they ever will. That is my opinion simply because of the prophecies related to Noah’s sons.
But we have to have a man who has objectivity and who understands the issues to promote a solid national defense. John Adams made the point that “National defense is one of the cardinal duties of a statesman.” So we have to have men who can think honestly and objectively about the nation.
A question arises when we talk about the fact that the government is supposed to promote righteousness. Righteousness is a value. Where are you going to get that value? Are you going to get it from the Bible? Are you going to have an Islamic value or a secular humanist value of righteousness? In the founding fathers’ thinking, in the nation as it existed at that time, we had a homogeneous society that was for the most part theistic in their worldview and had a strong Christian background. We do not have that anymore. That raises the whole question of what is the role of Christianity in the state?
In the late 1700s, the vast majority of Americans living in the early U.S. were Christian in a broad sense, even if they did not believe in a Trinity as Jefferson did not. He was not Trinitarian; he was Unitarian. He was not a deist. The Unitarians at that time believed the Bible was still God’s Word and believed that there was truth in the Bible. Some of the early preachers that were very influential in Boston, like Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew, were Unitarians. But the Unitarian of the 1700s is not the same as the Unitarian Universalist of today. They did understand and appreciate the value of the Bible. There were Roman Catholics, Puritans, Arminians, Methodisim (just beginning at that time), but the dominant influence in the U.S. was from a Calvinistic, Reformed background, whether it was Presbyterian, Congregational, or Huguenot.
No matter what their sectarian view, denominational view was, they all had a general agreement that the Bible represented truth, and it was that foundation that was embedded in the Constitution. They did not think of it as a theocracy. What bothers me is that you have some people today who accuse the Christian Right of wanting to impose a theocracy on the nation. To me that is historically wrong – and it is actually wrong. I have known some of these men, like Tim LaHaye, Jerry Falwell and many others, who have been influential in the so-called Christian Right, and they did not impose Christianity or a theocracy in that sense in America. They understood that if you do not keep the country going on the principles on which it was founded, that it would fall apart. That is exactly what the founders said.
A theocracy, by definition (OED or Webster’s Dictionary) is defined as a system of government where priests rule in the name of God. No one has ever thought that the Congress of the U.S. or the President or the judiciary would rule in the name of God. But they did understand that Christianity as a way of thinking, as a philosophy, as an ethical system was the only sure and certain foundation to thinking that could preserve genuine liberty. They did not see a conflict with having pastors come and address the legislature. That did not mean that whatever the pastor said, they were going to do. It just meant that they had to understand the Word of God and seek God’s thinking on leadership matters. They all understood this very clearly.
For example, we have various statements by early founders. George Washington said, “It is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor.” Some of the contemporary writers today who analyze religious statements by the founding fathers say, “This is more deistic, it is distant, it uses terms like Almighty God, Providence, Supreme God, Creator.” But that is how they talked at that time. You can go to men like Patrick Henry or Samuel Adams, who had rich, profound spiritual lives and relationship with God, and they used the same terms. To us this may seem a little distant or less personal, but that is not how they understood it.
John Adams, the second President of the U.S., said, “The safety and prosperity of nations ultimately and essentially depend on the protection and the blessing of Almighty God, and the national acknowledgement of this truth is an indispensable duty which the people owe to Him.” He and others believed that if they lost that, then the Republic would collapse.
This, unfortunately, is what we are witnessing today. Only believers really have the framework, the truth, the light to be able to understand this. We need to remember what Paul said to the Philippians that we need to live our lives and go forth as a flashing light to the Gentiles, the nations around us because we are the ones who have the truth.
Part of the responsibility of the government is to ensure an environment where righteousness is not hindered and is equally applied to all people – rich or poor, mighty or not. Everyone is to be dealt with in equal righteousness. This extends to the poor. Deuteronomy 15:7-8 “If there is a poor man with you, one of your brothers, in any of your towns in your land which the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart [talking to individuals and not the government], nor close your hand from your poor brother; but you shall freely open your hand to him, and shall generously lend him sufficient for his need in whatever he lacks.” Verse 11 “For the poor will never cease to be in the land; therefore I command you, saying, ‘You shall freely open your hand to your brother, to your needy and poor in your land.’ ” It is up to the individual to have compassion and care to help others; it is not the government’s responsibility.
You see the same thing in the New Testament, and here it is the responsibility of the church. Gal. 2:10 “They only asked us to remember the poor – the very thing I also was eager to do.”
This is the same idea you see as part of wisdom in Proverbs 21:13 “He who shuts his ear to the cry of the poor will also cry himself and not be answered.”
In Exodus 23:3 “Nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his dispute.” And yet the very thing that we are seeing in the government philosophy, the judicial philosophy of Senator Obama is to appoint judges that are empathetic to the poor. If you have not been there and you do not understand them, then you cannot deal with justice. That is just hogwash, to put it very politely.
Exodus 23:6 “You shall not pervert the justice due to your needy brother in his dispute.” On the one hand, you do not give partiality to the poor, but on the other hand, you do not abuse him either. It is an equal standard, and you do not take into account the economic status of the individual.
Leviticus 19:15 “You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor nor defer to the great, but you are to judge your neighbor fairly.”
Proverbs 29:14 “If a king judges the poor with truth, His throne will be established forever.”
Yet Senator Obama says, “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.” That is an unrighteous and unethical standard that is going to result in tyranny because who is going to set the standard and prefer one over another?
This results in the same kind of philosophy that we have seen related to Obama that he wants to spread the wealth. He wants to spread your wealth. If you are working, he wants to take money out of your bank account and give it to people who do not work. This is consistent with his whole philosophy.
He stated in a radio interview in 2001 that the basic problem that you had with the Warren court and with the civil rights movement was that it did not break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution. Did you hear that? That the problem is that the courts did not break free from those restraints. Those restraints are what give us liberty and freedom. This is a man who is about to be elected, perhaps, to the presidency of this country, and he at the very core of his being believes that the U.S. Constitution is unrighteous and is embedded in injustice. This is just absolutely ridiculous. It is treasonous.
Cicero, a Roman statesman and lawyer, said, “A nation can survive its fools [I think that is debatable.] and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable for he is known and carries his manner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”
It is important for us to make sure that we elect leaders that are at least the closest we can find to a righteous standard. That means supporting these five Divine Institutions.
There is one more criterion we should use. That is the question of a nation’s relationship to the Jewish people and to Israel as a state. Those who are antagonistic to the Jews are anti-Semitic. Throughout history, God has judged anti-Semitic nations even when God raised up those nations, such as Assyria, Babylon, Rome, to bring discipline on Israel. God can use them in a military manner to wipe out Israel, but they did not have to succumb to anti-Semitism. When they did, then God judged them. This is grounded on the principle of Genesis 12:3 “Those who bless you [he promised Abraham], I will bless, those who curse you, I will curse.” God will judge those who treat the Jew and Israel unrighteously and unfairly.
When you bring up Israel, you bring in this whole question of Zionism. What is Zionism? Some people get the idea that if you are talking about supporting Israel, that you agree with every decision they make. That is not true at all. There are many decisions that have been made in the history of Israel and its founding that were unrighteous. That does not mean that we support that. What we support is the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland, to national sovereignty: homeland that was established by law and was given to them by law and international agreement, and they have a right to defend that.
Zionism does not say that you have to support everything Israel did. There were atrocities committed by the Irgun during the War of Independence in 1948. There have been many other decisions that have been made that we just cannot support, but that is not what Zionism is all about. Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people have a right to their own nation in the land God gave to Abraham. Guess what? This belief was held by many of the leaders in early American history.
John Quincy Adams desired that “the Jews again [were] in Judea, an independent Nation, …once restored to an independent government and no longer persecuted.”
Abraham Lincoln in a meeting with Canadian Christian Zionist, Henry W. Monk, in 1863 said, “Restoring the Jews to their homeland is a noble dream shared by many Americans. He (the Jewish chiropodist of the President) has so many times ‘put me on my feet’ that I would have no objection to giving his countrymen a ‘leg up.’ ”
America had a positive view of the Jews, opened their doors to the Jews from the colonial period on and saw this as important. This was part of the whole move to establish Israel in the land. In Britain, you had British Restorationism. James Balfour grew up at his mother’s knee reading the Bible and was taught the Old Testament. He wrote a book on Christian philosophy and theology and had many high offices in the British government, including Prime Minister. He was the one who wrote the statement that was the legal foundation for Israel being granted a national homeland by the British government, coming out of World War 1. This is known as the Balfour Declaration. “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” This was voted on, and the wording was approved by the British Cabinet on October 31, 1917. On November 3, 1917, it became official policy of the British Empire.
Prior to World War 1, the Ottoman Turks had ruled the area from 1516 to 1918, and it was viewed as just part of southern Syria. It was just a district within the Ottoman Empire. There was no Palestine per se, no Syria, no Jordan, no Saudi Arabia. You did not have any nations there. Those were carved up artificially by the breakup of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War 1.
(Maps) You can see that there is just the Arabian Peninsula where you have various independent Arab states. You have Mesopotamia in the area of modern Iraq. You had Persia, which did exist; they are not Arabs but are a totally separate nation. They were not in the Ottoman Empire. You have the region of Palestine. This was just an administrative district within the Ottoman Empire.
After World War 1, you see the carving up of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Transjordan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia. During the War, there was a secret agreement made (1916) between the French and the British called the Sykes-Picot Treaty that said that they would carve up this area of the Middle East into different zones of occupation after the war. In 1918, the League of Nations gave the mandate to the French to administer the northern area, the Blue Zones, and the British to administer the southern areas, the Red and Pink Zones.
There was a mandate established based on the League of Nations from 1920-1946, and we see these boundaries here. All of this land was to be given to the Jews based on the legal document of the Balfour Declaration and the mandate of the League of Nations. After awhile, due to pressure from the Arabs because oil has just been discovered prior to World War 1, the British from there on began to fold.
They decided that they would give Jordan to the Arabs. What we need today are politicians and leaders in
America that will say if Palestinians want a homeland, it is called Jordan. That was the legally established Palestinian state – the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan coming out of World War 1. The land on the west side of the Jordan River is Israel. The UN was initially going to give them all the land to the west of the Jordan, but they backed out of that. In 1947, they had another partition plan just giving Israel very small portions of land and nothing that would give them strong, defensible area. A lot of the area, especially down south in the Negev, was just desert.
The point that I am making is that we have to have leaders who recognize the legality of Israel’s right to that land and who stand up and tell the Palestinians that they are just a bunch of liars. There is no such thing as a Palestinian homeland, state, or people. This has just been made up. Those who are not Zionists are basically anti-Semitic. There are a lot of people who want to argue that, but I have found an extremely articulate statement today defending the position that anti-Zionism is indeed anti-Semitism. Today, it is not politically correct to be anti-Semitic because of the Holocaust, so it is cloaked in anti-Zionism.
This individual wrote the following letter. When I have read the entire letter, I will tell you who wrote it.
“Zionism is nothing less than the dream and ideal of the Jewish people returning to live in their own land. The Jewish people, the Scriptures tell us, once enjoyed a flourishing Commonwealth in the Holy Land. From this they were expelled by the Roman tyrant, the same Romans who cruelly murdered Our Lord. Driven from their homeland, their nation in ashes, forced to wander the globe, the Jewish people time and again suffered the lash of whichever tyrant happened to rule over them…” The key thought is Zionism is the dream for the Jewish people to live in their own land and to defend it. That is all it means.
The letter continues: “…You declare, my friend, that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely ‘anti-Zionist.’ And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God’s green earth: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews – that is God’s own truth. Anti-Semitism, the hatred of the Jewish people, has been and remains a blot on the soul of mankind. In this we are in full agreement. So know also this: Anti-Zionist is inherently anti-Semitic, and ever will be so.”
“The Negro people, my friend, know what it is to suffer the torment of tyranny under rulers not of our choosing. Our brothers in Africa have begged, pleaded, requested, DEMANDED the recognition and realization of our inborn right to live in peace under our own sovereignty in our own country. How easy it should be, for anyone who holds dear this inalienable right of all mankind, to understand and support the right of the Jewish People to live in their ancient Land of Israel. All men of good will exult in the fulfillment of God’s promise, that his People should return in joy to rebuild their plundered land. This is Zionism, nothing more, nothing less.”
“And what is anti-Zionist? It is the denial to the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord all other nations of the globe. It is discrimination against Jews, my friend, because they are Jews. In short, it is anti-Semitism. The anti-Semite rejoices at any opportunity to vent his malice. The times have made it unpopular, in the West, to proclaim openly a hatred of the Jews. This being the case, the anti-Semite must constantly seek new forms and forums for his poison. How he must revel in the new masquerade! He does not hate the Jews, he is just ‘anti-Zionist’!”
“My friend, I do not accuse you of deliberate anti-Semitism. I know you feel, as I do, a deep love of truth and justice and a revulsion for racism, prejudice, and discrimination. But I know you have been misled – as others have been – into thinking you can be ‘anti-Zionist’ and yet remain true to these heartfelt principles that you and I share. Let my words echo in the depths of your soul: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews – make no mistake about it.”
This was written in a personal letter from Martin Luther King, Jr. and was published in the Saturday Review, August 1967.
In contrast to this great statement on anti-Zionism, we have the statement last week of Jesse Jackson that “Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades [will] lose a great deal of their clout when Barack Obama enters the White House.” The next day he recanted. He did not say he was wrong, but he just said he should not have said that. The question remains if Obama is not anti-Semitic, why does a leader of his stature continuously surround himself with known anti-Zionist, anti-Israel terrorists. Consistently for over 30 years, he has had relationships with radical leftists, such as Edward Said, Bill Ayers, and Rashid Khalidi. He tries to dismiss all of this, but there is a pattern here that is extremely worrisome. Not to mention the fact that recently he has been touted as the “messiah” by the head of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan.
In a journal I have here, there is a news report on what they called Saviour’s Day. “Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, spoke to amass his followers and spoke about Barack Obama. He said, ‘You are the instruments that God is going to use to bring about universal change, and that is why Barack has captured the youth. He has involved young people in a political process that they didn’t care anything about. That’s a sign. When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear. The Messiah is absolutely speaking.”
Here we have a picture of Michelle Obama at a function of the PUSH Coalition with the wife of Farrakhan, Mother Khadijah Farrakhan.
My question is: What respected American politicians have consistently and knowingly been associated and involved with known racists, anti-Semites, unrepentant terrorists, Marxists, and race-baiters like Obama has? If a white candidate had gone to a church where the pastor was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, who served on numerous boards and organizations with known white supremacists, whose wife was also connected with the same people in her business and law firm, and who had received the endorsement of the Aryan Brotherhood, the Klan, and other white supremacist organizations, he would be all but crucified and stoned in the public square.
What are we supposed to do? We must recognize as believers that God is in control. As dark as the political scene may look, the light of God’s grace shines just as bright today as it ever had. The founding fathers had wisdom for us in times like this.
John Jay said, “We must go home to be happy, and our home is not in this world. Here we have nothing to do but our duty. All that the best men can do is to persevere in doing their duty to their country and leave the consequences to Him who made it their duty, being neither elated by success, however great, nor discouraged by disappointment, however frequent and mortifying.” Jay was one of the presidents of the Continental Congress, first Chief Justice, contributed to the Federalist Papers, and was a founder of the American Bible Society.
John Hancock, one of the first signers of the Declaration of Independence and a governor of Massachusetts, said “Whilst we are using the means in our power, let us humbly commit our righteous cause to the great Lord of the universe, Who loveth righteousness and hateth iniquity. And having secured the approbation of our hearts by a faithful and unwearied discharge of our duty to our country, let us joyfully leave our concerns in the hands of Him Who raiseth up and pulleth down the empires and kingdoms of the world as He pleases.”
Samuel Adams wrote, “The man who is conscientiously doing his duty will ever be protected by that righteous and all powerful Being, and when he has finished his work he will receive an ample reward.”
Jeremiah 17:5-7 “Thus says the Lord, ‘Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind and makes flesh his strength, and whose heart turns away from the Lord. For he will be like a bush in the desert and will not see when prosperity comes, but will live in stony wastes in the wilderness, a land of salt without inhabitant. Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord – and whose trust is the Lord.’ ”
That needs to be our focus. Not on what is happening politically but on the fact that God is in control and our trust is in Him. We should be reminded as we close that “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people” (Proverbs 14:34). “When the righteous rule the people rejoice” (Proverbs 29:2).
We need to pray for righteousness in our government.