America 250: The Declaration of Independence

1. 0:00 So let's do this. All right. Good evening. Welcome to Christ Church Miami. My name is Kent Keller. I'm the teaching pastor here at Christ Church and it's my pleasure, my privilege to bring something to you tonight that I think is going to surprise you.
2. 0:16 In fact, may amaze you some of the things that I have learned over the last 16, 17 years. I've done a very deep dive into American history, not because I had to, but just because I started into it, I found it so fascinating that I just kept reading and reading and reading.
3. 0:32 And the more I have learned by consensus, how many of you, your high school teachers and your college professors were really, history professors, how many of your teachers and history professors were really, really interesting? Okay. A few of you. I didn't have any of those teachers or those professors and they made history so dull.
4. 0:51 I thought history was dull until I started reading it on my own. And I have been so fascinated by what I've learned. Hopefully tonight, what I have to show you will help you learn some fascinating new stuff and help you have a great new appreciation for our country.
5. 1:07 On this, our 250th anniversary of our founding as an independent nation. Amazing what God has done. And it is a providential miracle what God has done. To begin this in earnest, I want to turn it over to one of the most, one of the best men, most patriotic men, and my good brother, Pastor James, chaplain America, Captain James Drake.
6. 1:29 And Pastor James begins with a word from the Middle East. Hello, friend, Pastor Drake here from the Middle East, wishing that I could be with you tonight to hear from the Dr. Kent Keller on the Declaration of Independence. What an incredible treat that you're going to have tonight hearing from a man who loves freedom, is quite the history buff, and is going to teach you things that you might have never heard before.
7. 1:53 In fact, if you've been told that America is a secular nation founded by a deist, tonight it's going to be hard to hear. But you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. Let me ask you a question just to kick things off tonight. True or false? Was America's independence founded in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?
8. 2:12 If you think it's true, raise your hand. If you think it's false, keep your hands down. The answer is true. How about that? Yeah, 1783, the Treaty of Paris records that our nation's independence was recognized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
9. 2:29 So there's a fun fact for you, and there's going to be a whole lot more tonight that might blow your mind. But here's the reality. Jesus died on the cross to set us free. Our founding fathers had a high view of scripture, and they tried to embed a biblical worldview in our founding documents.
10. 2:46 And because of that, we are truly one nation under God that has defended life and liberty for all. So I hope you're ready because you're going to be on a great adventure tonight, and I can't wait to hear what you've learned. In fact, I've asked Kent to send me the notes himself because I can't wait to read all the notes that you're going to be covering this evening very soon myself.
11. 3:07 All right, with that, let me pray for us, and then we'll get things kicked off. Heavenly Father, thank you for the freedoms that we enjoy in this great country that you have placed us. We don't want to idolize our nation. We want to keep you as the central focus and the only one who is worthy of our ultimate allegiance and affections.
12. 3:30 We are first and foremost citizens of heaven and then citizens of this great land. But we recognize that your word has really established liberty and freedom in ways that no other nation has experienced or enjoyed or extended to others.
13. 3:45 And so I pray that you'd help us to understand these things, that we would understand what a sacred gift freedom is, the freedom to worship you, the freedom to proclaim you, and the freedom to live a life worthy of your name. And so I just pray that you would bless our study tonight, use Kent mightily to help us understand these truths so that, again, we might defend them and pass them on to the next generation.
14. 4:10 I pray all these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you all. Can't wait to hear about what you learned tonight. God bless you. Thank you, James. And we're looking forward to hopefully his soon return, maybe, maybe as soon as the end of July. We hope and pray so.
15. 4:25 Please keep James and his family and all these men who are deployed in your prayers. We just want to see them all come home safe and sound. So let me make a couple of disclaimers or a couple of explanations first. I'm sitting here in our sanctuary surrounded by a lot of Americana, American flag, replica of the Declaration of Independence and so forth.
16. 4:48 I love my God and I love my country. I worship my God. I do not worship my country. I believe my God to be perfect in all his ways. He is the sum total of all perfections. He is all the omnis that you may know.
17. 5:04 He's omniscient, all-knowing, omnipotent, all-powerful, omnipresent, present everywhere. He is all holy, all loving, all just, all right, and so forth. My country is not perfect. My country makes mistakes. It's made many in the past. It will continue to make them in the future.
18. 5:20 So I don't worship my country. And we don't confuse the American flag with the cross of Christ. So please don't misunderstand the symbolism here tonight. We worship God. We don't worship this country. But I do believe that this is the greatest country in the world. Not only that, the greatest nation in the history of the world.
19. 5:37 Probably most of you would agree with that. But for those who might not, I'll give you some ammunition for them for your future consideration. 250 years ago, a providential miracle occurred that shocked the world. And its shock waves reverberate throughout the rest of the world still to this very day.
20. 5:57 It was on July 4th, 1776. A new nation was born unlike any other that had ever existed in all of history, conceived in liberty, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. This was the beginning of the greatest nation on the face of the earth and the greatest force for good that the world has ever seen.
21. 6:21 250 years ago, right now, 56 men were gathered in the Pennsylvania State House. We now call it Independence Hall. How many of you have been there? If you've never been there, it's definitely worth a trip. It's as close to hallowed ground as you can find in a country like ours.
22. 6:40 And so they gathered there to hammer out a document that would be either the birth certificate of a brand new nation or their death warrant. These 56 men knew that putting their name to that document was going to go one of two ways because that document amounted to nothing less than outright rebellion against King George III of Great Britain.
23. 7:04 Gathered together in that room was the greatest collection of political statesmen and philosophers ever in one room in the history of this planet. And the amazing thing about it is, gathered in that room from the oldest, Benjamin Franklin, down to the youngest, from South Carolina, I've forgotten his name, 23 years old.
24. 7:26 These men all lived within the same lifespan and within horseback ride or horse-drawn carriage ride of Philadelphia. The only word for that is providential. The United States of America was and is still to this day a providential miracle.
25. 7:44 And a lot of the reason for that is contained in the words of this document, our National Birth Certificate, the Declaration of Independence, is what author Walter Isaacson calls the greatest sentence ever written. If you can't see it up there, I've got a copy of it here.
26. 8:02 And he does a fair job of explicating what's in that great sentence. We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. And among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He says that's the greatest sentence ever written.
27. 8:19 I would beg to differ. I can think of at least two that I would put above that. One is Genesis 1.1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the other is John 3.16. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever would believe in him would not perish but have everlasting life.
28. 8:38 I would put those sentences above what Thomas Jefferson wrote. But as far as a strictly man-made document, a man-generated sentence, I would agree Thomas Jefferson's sentence is the greatest ever. Now, you need to know this about me.
29. 8:54 I'm not a trained historian. I'm not a legal scholar. What I am is I am a Christian who is so grateful to God to be born in this country. I'm a husband. I'm a father. I'm a grandfather. I'm a patriot. I'm the son of a man who served this country as a career Air Force officer starting when it was the Army Air Corps in World War II.
30. 9:14 He fought for and darn near died for defense of this country. Also flew in Korea. And he was like millions of others of that greatest generation who, when they were faced with the greatest threat the free world had ever seen up to that point, they signed up, they stepped up, and they showed up.
31. 9:33 And in four years, millions of young men and women, four years, stepped up. And along with our allies, Great Britain, they took down the Nazis and the Axis powers to the east, and then the rising sun to the west.
32. 9:51 Four years. I would just say consider the way we fought wars ever since then. And just all credit to the men and women. That greatest generation, as I often say, it's not like they did much. They just saved the world. I would like to also say that all of our current and veteran service members, we owe you all a great debt of gratitude.
33. 10:16 Those of you who either are in current service or have served, would you guys stand up, please, so we can recognize you? If you serve, yeah. Yeah. So, humanly speaking, you are what has kept this country strong and free for 250 years.
34. 10:35 It's the grace of God and the men and women of the United States Armed Services that have kept us a strong and free nation that we are today. Without you guys, without the men and women of the United States military, we would be easily overrun by hostile forces like the Communist Chinese, the Russians, even other countries who just want to do us in.
35. 10:59 And we'll be taken down. But they know we have the greatest military force in the history of the world. And that's what keeps them at bay. That, again, and the grace of God. So, again, I just want to say to all of you, thank you for your service. We're forever in your debt. Larry Arn, the president of Hillsdale College, says this country has come through three great crises.
36. 11:19 First is the struggle for independence. Second was the American Civil War. And the third was the challenge of progressivism. And I add slash secularism because progressivism leads to secularism. War for independence, civil war, challenge of progressivism.
37. 11:38 Progressivism got its main foothold in with President Teddy Roosevelt, but it was really elevated to an unbelievable level with President Woodrow Wilson. And what that means is if you don't understand progressivism, we're not going to talk too much about the Constitution tonight, but the United States Constitution was set out to codify what's in the Declaration of Independence.
38. 12:01 And that document, the Constitution, there is a copy of it out in the lobby as you leave. Don't take it. It's mine. But the Constitution was there to say, here's what the government can do and no more. Beyond these boundaries, the government has no right to intrude in your life.
39. 12:17 This is what the government must do and no more. Progressivism says, well, the founders got it all wrong. What they should have done was written the document to say, here's what the government can and should and will do for you. You all have heard Ronald Reagan's famous, the nine most terrifying words in the English language, I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
40. 12:38 Well, progressivism says that the Constitution should have stated what the government must do for you. And you can see a huge difference in those two schools of thought. So there's the war for independence, civil war, challenge of progressivism and secularism.
41. 12:54 I would add, now today, two more. And they're consistent with those already, but I would take them further. On the left, we have the progressivism's illegitimate offspring, which is wokeism. I define wokeism very simply.
42. 13:11 Whatever is good and right, let's see, that's my left, your left. Whatever is good and right and has traditionally upheld this country, they hate it and they want to destroy it, including the Bible and our Judeo-Christian values. They repudiate all of it.
43. 13:27 Along with the progressive secular wokesters in this country, on the right, there's the challenge of radical Islam. And they make no secrets about the fact that they would like to destroy us. They would like to bring the United States of America down and wipe us off the face of the earth.
44. 13:46 So we face those two challenges today. And then I was just thinking as I prepared for this again tonight, I guess I'd have to add a third one. And that third challenge is that we're raising a generation that knows nothing of our history.
45. 14:01 And what they do know of our history, they have been given a false view that we are the worst country in the world, the worst country in the history of the world, that we're nothing but a bunch of white supremacists, a bunch of oppressors, colonizers, and so forth. And that's what they think of this country.
46. 14:16 And so they hate this country. A country that hates itself cannot and will not survive. A country that hates itself won't defend itself. Why would you? So a lot of what I'm doing, I look at what my father did and his generation as they fought the very real threats of Nazism and the rising sun and saved this country.
47. 14:39 I didn't serve in the military. I wish I had now. But what I think my part in this to do is to help educate people like yourselves so that you are prepared to defend this country and to educate your children and grandchildren and to disabuse them of the nonsense that they might be getting in their schools.
48. 14:56 Side note, if you've got a kid going off to college, please don't send them to a college that's going to teach them to hate this country. It's hard to get them back. I digress. So my role is to try to help prepare and equip you to help speak the truth against the lies of these challenges to our nation.
49. 15:14 The great historian Will Durant said this, History is to a nation what memory is to a person. Without memory, a person is unknowable to himself and anybody else. So our younger people have no knowledge of our history.
50. 15:32 I'm generalizing. I know that. But to an alarming extent, they have no knowledge of our history and what they know is false. And so they don't like this country. In fact, they hate it. You know who doesn't hate this country? All the people from all those other countries who are here for the World Cup.
51. 15:48 They love America. They can't get over how great this country is, how beautiful it is, how wealthy it is, how nice the people are. I was at the Marlins game with our group a week ago last night. Ran into a lot of Scotsmen.
52. 16:04 You've never seen people who are so happy to be in America. They're easy to identify. Some of them had kilts. They were all sunburned and fair-skinned and fair-haired. Easy to recognize. Welcome to Miami, folks. Welcome to America. And they love it here. And you've seen the footage of the Norwegians doing the rowing chant and the people from the other countries.
53. 16:24 They know now America is not what they've been told by the mainstream media here and abroad. So, again, I'm trying to do my part to serve my God and my country. For the Americans, the Declaration of Independence is our national birth certificate.
54. 16:40 And if I can put this in a preacher's frame of reference, for American citizens, the Declaration of Independence is our Genesis 1. It sets the parameters for how we are to understand what this nation is and what it should be the Declaration is our Genesis 1.
55. 16:59 The Constitution, then, for an American citizen is our Bible. It explicates and codifies what's in the Declaration and tells us what this nation, how it was founded, how it was framed, and how it's due to continue to this day. So, if I could use a construction analogy, back in a previous life, I led a lot of mission projects to countries south of the border and other places where we had a church in a developing area and we would go into these areas with a team of unskilled high school and college students, strong backs and weak minds, and typically what we'd do is we'd build a concrete block building for a church group that was already meeting but didn't have a place to meet.
56. 17:40 And we'd have a slab poured for us and then we'd lay the blocks and put a roof on so that the church in those areas would have a place to meet, have a place to teach their children, have a place to have school, have a place to go when the hurricanes come because their concrete block buildings are a whole lot safer than shinies made of wood and so forth.
57. 18:00 And we'd have unskilled labor but we'd also have one contractor with us who knew what he was doing and the contractor would put down that first block on the slab, that is the cornerstone. That cornerstone had to be right. So, no amateurs did that, the contractor did that.
58. 18:19 And then tying that wall together with the one that's perpendicular to it, you put up a stack of blocks called the corner stack. We'd have the contractor make sure that that was right too because if that cornerstone is off, even a centimeter at the beginning, the rest of the wall is going to be way off at the end.
59. 18:37 If that corner stack isn't right and true, those walls are going to be off all over the place. Genesis 1 is our, I'm sorry, the Declaration of Independence is our cornerstone for this nation and the Constitution is that corner stack and if we don't get that right, then the rest of the country is going to go wrong.
60. 18:55 And you notice when people want to attack this country, where do they start? They attack the Declaration and the Constitution. They want to tear them both down because if you can do that, you can get rid of this country altogether. So part of our job is to make sure that they don't. What Thomas Jefferson put on parchment in the Declaration of Independence was something so radical, so revolutionary, that it was an ideological and philosophical equivalent of a nuclear bomb and it set off shock waves that still emanate and reverberate throughout the rest of the world.
61. 19:29 The ideas that Jefferson was writing about were not completely new. He and the other founders and framers, they drank deeply from the wells of history. They knew their history. They knew political theology, political philosophy, political statesmanship to an amazing degree and they had it in their heads.
62. 19:48 They didn't have phones to look it up. They didn't have the internet. God hadn't created the internet yet. They knew this stuff because they were so well-educated, brilliant men, flawed men, all of them. All of them. All people are flawed, great people have great flaws, and they were no exceptions, but they were brilliant, and what they gave us was a document that was just anything like what the rest of the world had ever seen.
63. 20:10 They particularly imbibed deeply from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's social contract, and also John Locke's Second Treatise of Government. I've just read both of those, they're not easy to read, but I could see where a lot of Jefferson's ideas came from. However, the ideas were out there, but nobody had ever tried to found a nation on those ideas, and that's what was so new.
64. 20:34 So, the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, you all know Thomas Jefferson, but the other four that advised him were Roger Sherman, Robert Livingstone, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin. Especially Adams and Franklin were helped to advise Jefferson on how to write the document.
65. 20:53 His original draft was much longer than the document we have. When it went on the floor of the convention, they shredded it. Jefferson just sat there and let him. I want to read to you just a couple of paragraphs from Richard Dreyfuss. Yes, that Richard Dreyfuss, the actor, the one who was in Jaws and American Graffiti, you know.
66. 21:10 He wrote a book called One Thought Scares Me. It's a decent book. He doesn't have the theology right, but the rest of it's pretty good. Let me read you a couple of paragraphs from what he says in that book. If you create pride in the hearts of your children when you tell them of your nation's stories, don't forget to give them the best reasons to love their country.
67. 21:29 Don't tell them we are exceptional unless you can tell them why in realistic terms. We are not exceptional simply because of divine providence, that's where he gets part of it wrong, or because of our military prowess, or because we're south of Canada. It's because we freed the intellect of the human race and rewarded mankind with freedoms and responsibilities once reserved only for kings and dukes.
68. 21:53 America is more than a nation. It is a state of mind that is optimistic and willing to take risks. It is a work in progress that has unfortunately frequently taken steps backward, ignored sins as big as our soul, but attempted from its inception to lean on the belief that the potential of the least among us was to be cultivated and made capable, and that we could prevail on the basis of that assumption, which is why the American Revolution so horrified the ruling classes of the world.
69. 22:26 With the revolution, we fired the monarchy and aristocracy for fraud, handed out sovereign power to be spread among all classes. What had been deliberately cruel, what had been was deliberately cruel and unfair. What could be once the world knew of the document our founders created was history's longest step forward for moral progress and incomparable.
70. 22:49 America is, and I use the word America, I realize America is more than the United States, but I'm using those interchangeably. It's easier to say America than the United States of America every time. America is the greatest country in the history of the world, but we do have our flaws, our greatest flaw, human slavery, when former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calls our national birth defect, there's no excusing it, there's no papering it over, there's no covering it.
71. 23:16 These men should have known better, many of them did know better, and they didn't deal with it at the outset. But before we're done tonight, I hope you'll give me just a few minutes to come back and talk about why the slavery issue played out the way it did. The people of this country, when this country was founded, were overwhelmingly professing Christians.
72. 23:37 The country at its inception was 98% Protestant, smattering of Roman Catholics and Jews and just a very few other what they would call free thinkers. The 56 men that gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, 54 of them were members of mainstream Protestant churches.
73. 23:57 I am not saying they were all born-again Christians. God knows and I don't. I'm pretty doubtful about some of them. 54 were members of mainstream Protestant churches. Charles Carroll of Maryland was a Roman Catholic. Benjamin Franklin was not a member of any church, although he supported many of the churches in Philadelphia.
74. 24:15 Even Thomas Jefferson, who's known as the least religious or least biblically oriented of all the founders, he was a vestryman in the Episcopal Church in Virginia. And this is basically analogous to our elders. So, no, he wasn't an Orthodox Christian.
75. 24:32 No, he didn't believe the Bible. Certainly not the way we do. But he was a member of a mainline church. So don't let anybody tell you these were just a bunch of deists. They were not. I'll say more about that in a bit. Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian and philosopher, observes in his book called Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, the equality of humanity is not self-evident.
76. 24:56 Here's what he writes. The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, that all souls are equal before God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian, what he calls the myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are equal?
77. 25:18 According to Harari, who writes as an atheist, Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas, and chimpanzees have no natural rights. And he goes on to observe that Christianity teaches that all men and women are equal before God.
78. 25:35 We often forget that the opening chapter of the Bible describes humanity as being created in the image of God, the climax and glory of God's creation. This will be a review for some of you, but it needs to be put out for everybody to see. The Bible has basically three principles of civil government most succinctly stated in Romans chapter 13.
79. 25:56 I'm not going to read Romans chapter 13, 1 through 7 to you. I encourage you to read it on your own. But basically it says this, civil government exists to do three things, promote the common good, restrain evil, and punish evildoers. Got it?
80. 26:11 Three things, promote the common good, restrain evil, punish evildoers. Note, civil government does not exist to provide for all your needs and wants. Civil government does not exist to guarantee equal outcome no matter what you do.
81. 26:29 Civil government is there to do those three things, promote the common good, restrain evil, punish evildoers, and to guarantee equality of opportunity, not outcome. The founders knew this and it helped even the ones who weren't big Bible believers or big Bible scholars.
82. 26:47 They knew the Bible well and they embraced those principles that that's what the government is supposed to do and that's a lot of what informs our system of government today from its founding. They also knew the Westminster Confession of Faith.
83. 27:03 If you're a Presbyterian, I hope you know it. If not, please make yourself acquainted with it. I would give out copies of it tonight, but I gave them all away. And so you can go online and look this up. If you never have, just type in Westminster Confession. By the time you get to the C-O-N-F, it'll show you Westminster Confession in the larger and shorter catechism, the founders knew the Westminster standards very well.
84. 27:29 And in fact, it was quite common in this country for the Westminster Shorter Catechism, which is 107 words, 107 questions with one sentence answers. Many of the sentences are very long, but it gives you a pretty good systematic theology and overview of what the Bible teaches about the Bible, about God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, about Christ, the offices of prophet, priest, and king, about Christ, the Redeemer, the mediator, about what the Ten Commandments teach, about what is in the Lord's Prayer, so forth and so on, about the sacraments.
85. 28:01 They use those to teach their children. You look at the Westminster Shorter Catechism online, and you'll be impressed with the depth of it. It was a document to teach children at the time of our founding. These people were incredibly well-educated. I would encourage you especially, please do this, to go online, look at Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 23, of the Civil Magistrate.
86. 28:25 I'm not going to read it to you. It's long and it's dense, and those of you who are still awake, you'd be asleep by the time I get done reading it. But it really informed what our founders believed about how the people should relate to the government, and especially how the church should relate to the government.
87. 28:41 More on that in a bit. But they knew their stuff about their history, about the Bible, about the Westminster Standards, and they used a document to teach their children that I'll leave up here, I hope you'll look at it later, called the New England Primer. I want you to look at this, please, sometime tonight before you leave, and see what our children were expected to know.
88. 29:02 The average high school or college student doesn't know this stuff. And they gave it as a didactic guide for children. It's an amazing document. And don't just settle for the front part of it. Flip all the way through the back and see the kinds of things that we expected our children to know back in the day.
89. 29:20 The founders were also well-versed in the thoughts of the other great political thinkers and philosophers of the ages of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, of Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius, of Augustine and Aquinas and Rousseau and Locke, I mentioned already.
90. 29:37 And they really knew a lot about the theology of John Calvin. I've said this many times, and I'll stand on it. George Washington is the father of our country. Well-deserved. John Calvin is really his grandfather because it's his thought, it's his theology that informed the worldview of most of the people who came to this country, period.
91. 29:59 And it also informed the world view of our founders. They were overwhelmingly Calvinist, even if they weren't all particularly professing Bible-believing Christians. John Locke, in his Second Treatise of Government, and again, I've just finished it, not an easy, short read, not an easy read.
92. 30:16 John Locke, in the First and Second Treatises of Government, uses 102 Bible references in what he writes. So don't let me tell you these are completely secular people and that God had nothing to do with the founding of this nation. It's not true at all.
93. 30:31 The founding fathers, in their writings, cite the Bible. About 34% of the citations in their writings are from the Bible, far more than any other source of Locke and Rousseau and Montesquieu and so forth. And again, of the 56 signers, all but two members of mainline Protestant denominations.
94. 30:51 So the Declaration of Independence is not only our national birth certificate, but it is our national covenant. It is a covenant between the people of this country and God Almighty. Two nations in the history of the world have been founded upon covenants.
95. 31:07 Old Testament Israel, the United States of America. And in my humble opinion, which you know is true, the United States is the greatest nation in the history of the world, has been by far the greatest force for good. And I would say Old Testament Israel is the second most because of what they gave us in the Mosaic law and the writings of the Old Testament.
96. 31:28 So I might say ancient Greece with a high group philosophy could be, but I believe that those two nations, the two covenantal nations are the most important and the most benevolent nations in the history of the world. I want to read to you just a couple of quotes about the founding.
97. 31:51 First is from Chief Justice John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The glorious revolution, distinguished by so many marks of the divine favor and interposition in a manner so singular, and I may say miraculous, that when future ages shall read its history, they will be tempted to consider a great part of it as fabulous as in a fable.
98. 32:14 Will it not appear extraordinary like the emancipation of the Jews from Egyptian certitude? They really did have this idea that the people leaving the old world, sailing across the Atlantic and coming to the new world, they were just the modern iteration of the people of God fleeing slavery in Egypt and going to their promised land, through the Red Sea into the promised land in Canaan.
99. 32:40 They saw themselves that way. Our national symbol, the eagle, Thomas Jefferson wanted, I'm sorry, Benjamin Franklin, again, not the most orthodox of our founders, he wanted our national symbol to be Moses parting the Red Sea and the people of Israel leaving Egypt and going to the promised land.
100. 32:59 That's how they saw the founding of this country. They saw it in terms of those kind of covenantal terms with an agreement with God. From Ralph Waldo Emerson, you know him as the writer, America is another name for opportunity.
101. 33:14 Our whole history appears like a last effort of divine providence in behalf of the human race. Now you need to know, the war for independence did not start on July 4th, 1776. It had been brewing for some time as Great Britain had gotten increasingly heavy-handed on the colonies, imposing taxes on them and taking other liberties with them that they didn't do with the citizens in Great Britain, but they did with their colonists.
102. 33:42 And so finally, it erupted on April 19, 1775 with the battles of Lexington and Carcord. And then a couple months later, on June 17, 1775, the battles of Bunker Hill and Breeze Hill. And now the war was on.
103. 33:57 So it still took over a year for these men to come to the conclusion that there's not going to be any going back. Great Britain, King George III, they don't respect us. They're not going to give us equal rights. They're not going to treat us as equal citizens.
104. 34:13 So the only thing we have left to do is to take up arms. And again, when they did that, they were signing their own death warrant. As Benjamin Franklin famously said, will these all hang together or we will all hang separately? And the chances are they would have been hung for treason against the crown.
105. 34:30 So in the Declaration of Independence, we're going to look at the actual language of it here. In fact, I don't know if you can put up the body of the Declaration. I know you won't be able to read it where you are. But if you put up the body of the Declaration, I want to just tell you that there are in this document four references to God.
106. 34:46 Four references to God. In the first paragraph, the laws of nature and nature's God. Second reference comes that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator, capital C, with a certain unmanial rights. Concluding paragraph, we therefore, the representatives of the United States of America and General Congress assembled, appeal to the supreme judge of the world capital S-J, supreme judge of the world, for the rectitude of our nations, of our intentions.
107. 35:17 And the closing sentence reiterates the belief in God as the cosmic judge. Congress pledges, quote, its firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, capital D, capital P, knowing that they are proving wrong, they will lose their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
108. 35:35 So now I want to unpack those statements and show you some things about them because we just take them for granted. When in the course of human events, first paragraph, when in the course of human events becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands, the political bands, which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate but equal station to which the laws of nature, and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
109. 36:08 The laws of nature, and nature's God. What Thomas Jefferson put there was for the first time in human history a founding document for a nation that brings together reason and revelation. Reason and revelation.
110. 36:24 The laws of nature, reason. Nature's God, revelation. The enlightenment held the supremacy of reason, but the Bible gives us the supremacy of God. Thomas Jefferson brought them both together in that founding document for the first time ever as part of a national covenant.
111. 36:42 Goes on to say, we hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator over certain unalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We need to talk about worldview for a moment.
112. 36:59 We're hearing a lot of things today about pluralism, how we should be tolerant of other worldviews. Of course we should be tolerant of people. There is not another worldview extant in the world today or before that will give you that sentence other than the Bible and Judeo-Christian values the Christian faith itself particularly.
113. 37:20 Let me explain. Atheism has no God. So of course that creator won't give you unalienable rights. Deism. If you're not familiar with that, deism is a belief there's a God, he's a creator, he put creation into motion, sat back and said, let's see what happens.
114. 37:35 God of deism will not give you unalienable rights or anything else. He is totally disconnected from his creation. Hinduism. Hinduism and all other eastern mysticisms. For Hinduism and the other eastern mysticism, God is not separate from his creation.
115. 37:52 God is part of his creation. God or gods or goddesses or whatever don't give you unalienable rights because he's not separate from his creation. It's not separate from his creation in order to do that. It's a very impersonal God altogether.
116. 38:08 Buddhism really isn't a religion, it's a philosophy. True Buddhism doesn't believe in God. Buddha, if you see a faithful representation of the Buddha, he'll be in the lowest position with his eyes closed because he said, there's nothing worth seeing out there.
117. 38:23 The only reality is in here. Buddhism will not give you that. Islam most certainly will not give you the sentence. The word Islam, if you don't know, means submission. Not freedom. Not liberty.
118. 38:38 Not the right to pursue life, liberty, or happiness. Islam is totally antithetical to the founding documents and belief system of this country. And I don't want to get too political tonight. Actually, I do want to, but I'm not going to.
119. 38:53 Any city, any state, any representation, congressional district, that elect somebody who is a practicing Muslim is committing suicide. Because if that person is consistent with his or her beliefs, they must work against the best interests of the United States of America.
120. 39:14 And when they take that oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, they either are terribly inconsistent or they're lying. Because their faith will not allow them to do that. Sharia law is completely antithetical to our system of justice.
121. 39:30 And why any city or any municipality would allow that is just beyond me. You're basically swallowing poison to see how long it will take it to kill you. Back to the document. I would do this.
122. 39:45 I said I'm going to not wax political, but I'm going to do this much. When candidates run for office, I would ask them, do you believe what's written in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution? if you do not, state clearly where you disagree or where you take exceptions.
123. 40:05 Because you're going to take an oath, and I would not allow them to do it on the Koran. You're going to take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. You're either going to be an inconsistent whatever your other faith is, or you're lying.
124. 40:22 I would also ask, same thing of the man who's sworn in, the person who's sworn in to be president. The presidential oath of office, I do solemnly swear or affirm that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.
125. 40:43 I would ask that man, do you have any points of disagreement with that statement? Do you? If I were king for a day, and I know this is totally impractical, it'll never happen, when anybody is sworn in to office, or maybe before that, I'd put them all on a lie detector test, and I would say, have you read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution you're about to swear to uphold?
126. 41:05 And if they can't say truthfully they have, I'd kick them out. They're gone. How can you swear allegiance to a Constitution you've never read before? I would empty out Washington. I know that. And probably half the judicial branch too. I'm not king for a day.
127. 41:21 All right. Going on. Then the next part of the Declaration reads, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the government. There you go. The government doesn't exist to give you rights.
128. 41:37 The government doesn't exist to do things for you. It exists to secure your rights. Your rights, if you don't remember anything else I say tonight, please remember this, and please teach this to your children, your grandchildren. Your rights come from God. They do not come from the government.
129. 41:54 We do not have to ask the government for the right to freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of the people to peacefully assemble, or to petition the government for redress of our grievances. That's all of the First Amendment, and it comes from God.
130. 42:12 Not Washington. Not Tallahassee. Not Dinner Key. Not the capital of wherever you live. It comes from God. But we don't ask the governing officials for those rights. They are ours. They must not take them away unless we forfeit our rights by committing crimes or whatever.
131. 42:30 Okay? Our rights come from God to us. They are given to the people from His hand. And the government exists to secure our rights. We are not subjects. People in Washington, the people in Tallahassee, the people in New York, they are not our overlords and our masters.
132. 42:48 They are, if they understand their rules, they are public servants. They are accountable to us. We allow them to have a certain amount of political power for a certain amount of time. If they execute their offices faithfully, we might let them have it for another two or four or six years.
133. 43:06 And if they don't, then we can recall them through election. Praise God, we don't have to go to violent revolution every time we want to change people in the government. Which again, when Thomas Jefferson handed the, I'm sorry, when John Adams handed the government over to Thomas Jefferson and left town quietly, it was the first peaceful transition of power in the history of the world.
134. 43:28 When one man who had power willingly gave it up for you. Yes, Washington had done it before Adams, but that was not a transition. Adams was his vice president. So, it goes on. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.
135. 43:47 If our government gets too big for us britches, then we have the right to alter or abolish it. Again, I am not advocating for violent revolution. That is not my role. I am advocating for the people to rise up and realize the government belongs to us. It doesn't belong to the individuals in office.
136. 44:04 And we can call them back and we can take them out and we can replace them with others and we should often in my humble opinion. Goes on. Accordingly, I am going to skip the rest of it because I am aware of the time here. Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former system of government.
137. 44:26 Goes on to list the abuses of the king of England, king of Great Britain, George III. There are 27 specific grievances in there. You all know taxation without representation. That is a big part of it. There are so many other grievances and abuses in those 27 objections and more than one of them has to do with freedom of religion.
138. 44:47 The founders of our country had all come from, I am going to talk a lot more about this on Sunday. The 56 men in that room had all come from countries, their ancestors, their fathers, their grandfathers and so forth, excuse me, had all come from countries in Europe that had state churches whether they were Roman Catholic or Lutheran or Reformed or whatever.
139. 45:12 They all had state churches and the founders wanted no part of it because they saw the abuses thereof and so they specifically did not set up a state church in this country and I think they were very wise not to do so. Again, I'll talk more about this on Sunday but when the government owns the church and tells the church what to do, the church is emasculated and feckless and worthless.
140. 45:36 When the church owns the government and tells the government what to do, the church becomes terribly corrupted with power. So no, we need to keep church and state separate in terms of the power and the influence they have but the church exists to hold the government accountable for what it does and again, I hope you'll be here Sunday and I'll tell you a whole lot more about that.
141. 45:54 So our rights come from God not the government. Amendment 1 gives us those specific rights we don't have to ask for them and should there ever be another COVID type situation I hope the people of this country will respectfully rise up and say no you may not tell us we can't go to church on Sunday.
142. 46:12 Now we shut down here because we thought it was the best thing to do for our congregation for seven months and we were never told not to meet thank God but if we had been I'm saying this I know it's being live streamed I will disobey because I have a higher authority in the United States Constitution and the First Amendment and a higher authority in God they're given to people from God's hand and government has no right to interfere with those.
143. 46:37 Imagine if all our elected and appointed leaders understood this. Imagine if they understood that you're not the you're not the boss of me you're a public servant we're not your subjects we're citizens and you're accountable to us I dare say very few in the current government understand it.
144. 46:56 Now let me show you something that I virtually guarantee unless you heard from me you've never heard this before I'm very fortunate to have had a great seminary education from two different reformed seminaries and I'm particularly indebted to Reformed Theological Seminary Orlando and my Old Testament professor Dr.
145. 47:14 Richard Pratt he was my best professor most anybody that's had Richard Pratt for a class will tell you he's the best professor they ever had and he showed us some things about the Old Testament that were just astounding I really fell in love with the Old Testament when he did that one of the things he showed us again there's two nations in the history of the world founded on covenants one of the things that he showed us in our Old Testament classes is that there's a very standardized form of ancient Near Eastern treaties stay with me in the ancient Near East there's a standardized form of treaties or covenants and they go as follows hopefully you can see this on the board on the screen here they go as follows there's a there's a statement of the participants in the covenant there's a prologue in the historical section there's stipulations and obligations fourthly there's provision for public proclamation fifth there's an invocation of divine witness and sixth there's a there are blessings and curses and then there's ratifications by the people that's structure of covenant simply preamble prologue stipulations blessings and curses and a vow I had read the declaration of independence I don't know how many times through before it began to dawn on me the declaration of independence follows the ancient near eastern covenantal format declaration has statement of who the participants are we and God prologue historical section when in the course of human events the prologue and historical I'm sorry then the preamble we hold these truths to be self-evident then there are the stipulations and the regulations here's all the abuses that you've committed against us fourth is a provision for proclamation of public good then there's the blessings and the curses if we win we're free if we lose we die and then there's a ratification by the people and here's the amazing thing about that what I just told you about the structure of ancient near eastern covenants we did not know until the 1950s and it wasn't made real well known until a man by the name of Merida Klein wrote a book called the treaty of the great king yeah this book came out I think in 1963 or so but we did not know that until the 1950s and yet Thomas Jefferson and company wrote our national covenant following that format how did they do that they didn't know they couldn't possibly have known nobody knew for almost 200 years later see will see there is there and yet our national covenant follows the same covenant you find in the Bible.
146. 50:03 The Bible has at least seven specific covenants enunciated. There's some smaller ones. If you want to see a covenantal ceremony, read Genesis 15. The entire book of Leviticus is written according to that format I just showed you.
147. 50:19 That structure appears over and over in the Bible, but we didn't recognize it for almost 200 years after the declaration was written. And Thomas Jefferson, for all his brilliance, and he was an incredibly brilliant man, maybe probably the smartest man that ever occupied the White House.
148. 50:36 For all his brilliance, he had no use for the Old Testament. I doubt he ever read it. He had no use for most of the New Testament. The letters of Paul and the others, total garbage to him. The only things that Jefferson liked in the Bible were the sayings of Jesus.
149. 50:52 Not the miracles, not the supernatural claims, not the healings, the sayings of Jesus. He thought Jesus was the greatest moral philosopher in the history of the world. In his so-called Jefferson Bible, he's a collection of the sayings of Jesus, the moral philosopher, the sayings of Jesus.
150. 51:09 So Thomas Jefferson wasn't reading the Old Testament. Thomas Jefferson didn't know this, and yet, providentially, God caused him to write our Declaration of Independence, independence following that form. Now, I can say a whole lot more about that, but I want to be mindful of the time here, and you may have questions and comments you want to make.
151. 51:27 So they write the Declaration according to that format, and they call on God as witness. We appeal to divine providence for protection, and they sign their names to it, and then they throw it out to the colonies, the 13 colonies, and they wait little by little.
152. 51:45 Some of them came in at once. Some of them took a long time to do it. And finally, the colonies ratify it. And then you've got our National Covenant, our National Foundation. Now, I said I would deal with the issue of slavery, so let me take at least a few minutes to do that.
153. 52:00 Slavery, again, is our original sin. It is what Condoleezza Rice calls our national birth defect. To put this in context, I looked it up, and almost every culture or civilization, every people group in the history of the world has practiced some kind of slavery.
154. 52:18 So these men were just creatures of their time and culture. I'm not excusing it. I'm just putting it in context. Today, we have more slaves, more people in slavery, today, approximately 50 million around the world than ever in the history of the human race.
155. 52:35 That's why our church is so engaged in the battle against human trafficking here in Miami. It is an obscenity. It is an outrage before God. We're doing what we can to try to help stem that tide. Ninety-four countries today have no laws in slavery.
156. 52:51 All of which is to say, again, no excuse for what they did. They knew better. They should have known better. Many of them did. And yet they let slavery go for a period of time. And they shouldn't have done it. But it's not like they were the only ones or really the only country that practiced slavery.
157. 53:10 Also keep in mind, from 1619, when the first slaves came over from Africa to what would become the United States, from 1619 until 1776, the colonies were under British rule, spots here and there under French and Spanish rule.
158. 53:28 So the slavery that existed from 1619 until 1776 is on Great Britain and the others, not on the colonies. They didn't have the authority to outlaw it. From 1776 until 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation, the fact that slavery existed in the United States is, again, our grossest national sin.
159. 53:52 There's no excuse for it. Jefferson, who was a slave owner, wanted to write in the declaration to outlaw slavery. They couldn't do it because if they had, the southern colonies would not have signed on to the document.
160. 54:07 We would not have had a unanimous declaration of 13 United States of America. We would have had two different countries. So in order to keep the union together, the northern colonies and the people who knew better, they swallowed the bitter, bitter taste of slavery and allowed it to exist.
161. 54:26 But they sunsetted it when the Constitution was ratified in 1787. They said, 20 years from now, slavery needs to be non-existent. Unfortunately, 20 years went by and the southern colonies all said, says you. And they kept slavery going.
162. 54:42 Jefferson himself is such an enigma. Let me tell you something about Jefferson you probably don't know. You know he was a slave owner. You probably know that he is almost certainly to have fathered six children by a slave named Sally Hemings.
163. 54:59 It is possible that there's another Jefferson male that was alive at that time could have could have fathered Sally Hemings' six children. But nine months before all those children were born, he was with Sally Hemings. Archaeologists have found out that Sally Hemings' quarter were adjacent to Thomas Jefferson's bedroom.
164. 55:20 Thomas Jefferson's first wife, Martha, died. Died young, I think after the birth of their third or fourth child. Sally Hemings was Martha Jefferson's half-sister. Martha Jefferson and Sally Hemings had the same father.
165. 55:38 Two different mothers. So Thomas Jefferson kept as a slave his wife's half-sister. By the way, she is three-quarters white, one-quarter black. How he justified keeping her as a slave and her children, his children, his slaves.
166. 55:54 For a brilliant man like that, he is an enigma to me. But he did it. And even after his death, he emancipated those six children. He didn't emancipate Sally Hemings, although he made it clear that if she wants to leave, she can.
167. 56:09 He didn't emancipate all his slaves. Don't ask me to explain how a brilliant man who knew what he knew could do what he did, but he is a moral and ethical enigma to me. I think still a great president, but not always a good man.
168. 56:25 So, again, the fact that we had slavery for that long is our original sin. You should also know that the United States is the only nation in the world that got rid of slavery in less than 100 years after our founding.
169. 56:40 It would take, it would take, I was going to give you the numbers from other nations, how long it took them. It took other nations centuries to get rid of slavery. It took us less than 100 years. We are the only nation that fought a civil war to free black men and women, to free the slaves.
170. 56:58 And it's such a horrible cost. 625,000 men died fighting over slavery to emancipate the slaves of this country. So, for what it's worth, even though it should never have existed, it was not exactly unique to the United States, not at all, and we got rid of it faster and at a higher cost than any other country in history.
171. 57:21 You should know that, of course, as of today, we've had a person of color as our president. Today, in the Congress, 26% of our elected representatives are people of color. So, I think it's fair to say the United States has not totally gotten over.
172. 57:40 We're not completely colorblind yet, and there are some people who don't want us to be colorblind, but we've moved on past the racism and the bigotry of our earlier days that would allow something as horrible as slavery to exist.
173. 57:55 So, again, it's inexcusable, but it is explainable, and that's what we need to keep in mind when people tell us. There are people, young people today, who think we're the only country who ever had slavery or that we were the worst. Far from it.
174. 58:10 It was an obscenity. It should never have existed, but we paid the price to get rid of it when we did. We're the only nation in the world to do that. Here's the numbers. It takes the United Kingdom nearly 900 years to abolish slavery, and again, I told you, there are 94 nations in the world today that still have no laws against it.
175. 58:30 So, let me wrap up there and ask, do you have questions or comments? If you do, I'm going to repeat them so that people who are with us by live stream might be able to hear your comments and your questions. If not, then we'll wrap it up here pretty quickly. Comments or questions on your part? You're also dazzled by my brilliance.
176. 58:49 You have nothing to say. Yes, sir. Red? Red, yeah. What's going on with the radical about the the so many the Democrats that are that are talking about making our city governments and how what they're doing.
177. 59:17 You got it. You got it. You got it. You got it. You got it. Yeah, the comment is how frightening that the rise of so much socialism, usually called democratic socialism, how much it's rearing its ugly head across the country and we've got to do something about it.
178. 59:56 Red, the only thing we can do is try to educate people on the evil of the evil. of socialism. As you all know, socialism is the greatest system ever, except everywhere it's ever been tried. It's never worked, it always fails, and it always leads to communism and tyranny.
179. 1:00:11 Always. Every time it's ever been tried. If you have the appetite for it, read Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. He wrote in the 1930s as an Austrian who escaped Germany. He saw what was happening with Hitler and the Third Reich.
180. 1:00:27 He got out and said, this is what's going to happen. He was absolutely right. Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom. Socialism always leads to tyranny, to totalitarianism, and it always, Winston Churchill said this, he said, the virtue of, the vice of capitalism, let me start over, the vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings.
181. 1:00:47 The virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery. It brings everybody down. Read all we can do is try to educate people, hope, and pray that people will be educated enough not to make that mistake or not to make it twice.
182. 1:01:03 None of them will, Red. None of them will. Yeah, Lewis, what were you going to say? Oh, good job.
183. 1:01:18 Yeah, thanks, Ponce. Thank you. Besides slavery, what other issues were there that started the Civil War, or was slavery the only issue? I'm not an economist, so I can't comment acknowledgeably too much, but there were economic issues involved.
184. 1:01:38 The South was producing all that cotton, which was, I don't know if it was their main product or not, but it was producing incredible amounts of revenue for the slave owners, so of course they didn't want to let it go, and of course the foreign markets didn't want us to let our slaves go because, again, we're the source of cotton.
185. 1:01:55 So I know there are other economic issues and so forth, but somebody else may know better than I do about that. Use the mic, John, so people... Yeah, states rights was a big part of it, and of course it all stemmed from slavery, but it was also, you know, it was all encompassing.
186. 1:02:16 Yeah. It didn't want the federal government to mess with it. Yeah, and that part is understandable. As you may know, before we had the Constitution, we had the Articles of Confederation, and it was there to give the federal government some powers, but not much, and they was too weak to hold the states together, but they did that because they didn't want to see a central government get heavy-handed.
187. 1:02:38 Central planning never works, and so they gave it weak powers. They saw that it was not strong enough, and that's when they came up with the Constitution, which, in my humble opinion, is a brilliant balance of federal power and states power. If you don't know, the Tenth Amendment says that all the rights and duties that are not articulated in this document go to the states.
188. 1:03:02 So they limited the federal government and its power because, again, they'd seen what happened with heavy-handed central government, kings, prime ministers, princes, dukes, etc., in the old world, and they didn't want a part of it. So, yeah. And there's a lot more to it.
189. 1:03:18 I'm not any kind of a Civil War authority, but I'd say economic slavery and tied together and states' rights, you can't tell us what to do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
190. 1:03:34 Yeah. Problem is, Red, people watching online won't hear you, so go ahead.
191. 1:03:58 The Southern soldier was better at first because he came from farms and he could ride and he could shoot and hunt and do those things that the Union soldier had to learn along the way, and the South was successful at first.
192. 1:04:20 But the lack of manufacturing and the blockade to keep the cotton from going to England and Europe killed the, it strangled the South. And they didn't have the population that the North had, nor the manufacturing, and that's what, that's what hurt them.
193. 1:04:43 Yeah. And I think God made sure that the right side won. Yeah. I realize if you're a Southern, you call that the war of Northern aggression. But, yeah, thank God. Thank God we got, I think we would have eventually gotten rid of it, but it just took way too long.
194. 1:05:02 So, yeah. Thanks, Red. I forgot, I forgot I had a U.S. history teacher here in the midst. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, Ken. I'm involved with the Christian Family Coalition here and also throughout the state of Florida. We just completed Monday the interviews of primarily the judges who are running for office.
195. 1:05:24 They're elected. And before I was involved with the coalition, people would call me as an attorney and say, yeah, who should I vote to judge? Shoot, I had no idea. And quite frankly, 10,000 attorneys, I had no idea either. But I got involved with the coalition and we just went through this process.
196. 1:05:40 And one of the questions that I ask, especially the judicial candidates, is what I commonly refer to as the Elena Kagan question. And what that comes from, it wasn't my own idea, but I was watching Elena Kagan when she went through her confirmation process before Congress.
197. 1:05:59 And at that time, she was being questioned by a great congressman, Tom Cotton. And Tom Cotton was asking her about the Fourth Amendment dealing with the way to bear arms. And he picked something up with Elena Kagan because she was being obtuse and not answering the question.
198. 1:06:17 But he said, you know, he says, let me ask a much more fundamental question of you, Ms. Kagan. He says, do you believe, and he's hearkening to the Declaration of Independence. He says, do you believe that all Americans have fundamental rights that are granted to them by God?
199. 1:06:33 And she was, again, very vague as he asked the question. Finally, she answered it. She would not agree to that. And this was what her answer was. Finally, she says to Tom Cotton, she says, I believe every American has the rights that are afforded to them by the Constitution.
200. 1:06:51 Okay? And people don't, you know, really think that through, but Tom Cotton had a firm understanding. He voted against her. Because if you do believe that we do have these fundamental rights afforded to us by God, then the only one who can take away these rights is God, right?
201. 1:07:12 That's right. But if you believe as Ms. Kagan does, and she sits on the Supreme Court today, wholly unqualified, just look at her opinions, if you really believe what Elena Kagan has to tell us, that our rights only come from the Constitution, which came from man, then according to Ms.
202. 1:07:30 Kagan, I guess you can take your rights away. Man. Yeah. Right? She's dangerous. And we, a couple election seasons ago, we had 22 different judicial candidates come before, some of them sitting judges. Out of the 22, only six got that question correct.
203. 1:07:49 Wow. That's scary. And I can just say this, with the upcoming election, I want to encourage, because a lot of the problems in this country today, it's not the progressives or the homosexuals or the Democrats. The real problem today in this country are Christians.
204. 1:08:06 And it's Christians because it's Christians because we fail to live out, you know, our Christianity out in the real world. Part of that is to, you know, go to the voting booth and to vote.
205. 1:08:21 And then part of that is, you know, this voter guy who goes out there, these people are vetted by Christians. We go through a lot of effort, and we do that so that our fellow brothers and sisters have an idea, especially like when it comes to judges or tax collector or tax appraiser, you know, who do I vote for?
206. 1:08:39 And they're being vetted. And I would encourage you, because I see people here who probably go to other churches, I would encourage you, get a hold of the coalition, come talk to me, get the voter guide out in their churches, okay? Because this country is not going to change until we get ourselves back involved in politics.
207. 1:08:58 And I'm so tired of hearing pastors telling me. All right, don't preach, Max. Don't preach. Well, I understand that, but the bottom line is there's so many people out there that think there's Christians who shouldn't be involved in politics. Well, let me tell you, politics is interested in you.
208. 1:09:15 And they're at the door. By the way, they're through the door, okay? Just look around, and that's a piece. So I hope people vote. I hope you get the voter guide, give it consideration, because the information that's contained will help you. And who should vote for you?
209. 1:09:30 So be that as a major, I'll stop preaching. All right, thank you. Yeah, it's my job. Yeah, and one really key thing that Max just said, don't forget, they use the word unalienable. We today would say inalienable. It means cannot be taken away from you.
210. 1:09:48 To alienate is to take away, to separate. These rights cannot be taken from you. They are unalienable or inalienable. So you're right. If the Constitution we need to take away from you. Let's pray. Thank you. giveth, the Constitution can taketh away. The only one that can give you inalienable rights is God.
211. 1:10:07 So don't forget that. And please help your children, grandchildren, people in your circle of influence, help them understand that. Alright, we've got one or two more. We'll call it a night. Maybe that's it. Okay. Well, Mr.
212. 1:10:23 Munoz, all the way from the back. Yeah, so someone whose families three generations ago made their way here, just one ancestor who's Native American, been here for a while.
213. 1:10:43 You don't have to put me on camera. It's all good. How do we as Christians in a culture where it seems very popular to say America first, how do we as Christians live a life that tell people, well, we're putting the kingdom of God first while not seeming un-American, seeming like we don't care that we're here?
214. 1:11:08 That's a good question. If I got the gist of it, how can we be citizens of God's kingdom first and still say America first? No? Wrong question? Kind of. Yeah. How do we make sure that if I have a brother, who's a Christian and he says to me, America first, which I, you know, I think is fine.
215. 1:11:34 How do I make sure I say yeah, but that does not come before the kingdom of God? Okay. Yeah, good. I put a, the blog should be up hopefully tonight, a series of quotes from our founders and others of things that they believe to be true about this country and its Christian roots.
216. 1:11:53 Again, not a Christian nation by charter, but our roots in the Christian faith. And the last thing I put in there is my kingdom is not of this world, Jesus Christ. Yeah, but I think historically, Brian, God's people have always understood we are citizens of two kingdoms, the kingdom of God, the earthly kingdom, earthly principality in which we live.
217. 1:12:14 And we should be good citizens of both until and unless what my country asks of me requires me goes against what my God asks of me. And that's where I have to say no, as the disciples did in Acts 17, we have no king but Jesus.
218. 1:12:33 Jesus is the only king we've got. Everybody else comes before that, below that I should say. And if my government tells me to do something that is blatantly against my Christian convictions, I have to say no. At that point, Dr. King said, and I would encourage you to read his letter from a Birmingham jail, beautifully written, and Dr.
219. 1:12:53 King said, if you're going to engage in civil protest, it's a little farther than your question asked, if you're going to engage in civil protest, it must be done openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to suffer the consequences. He and his followers did that, they won the argument, and it changed the world.
220. 1:13:12 Today's protesters don't have a clue. They lose the moral high ground by engaging in violence against others. Openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to suffer the consequences. And he said, basically, he got that philosophy from Gandhi who got it from Jesus.
221. 1:13:28 So, I'm not saying you all have to go out in the streets and protest. I'm not saying you can't. You have that right. But we must keep in mind, God's law first, then our country's laws. I think it's incumbent on any country to think they should put their country first in their own national interest until and unless it transgresses the laws of God.
222. 1:13:48 Good question. Oh, thank you. I've done this once or twice. Anything? Last one? Going once? Yeah, Sandro. Not too tough, Sandro. It's getting late. I'm easy, I'm easy. So, we came here from Peru in 71.
223. 1:14:04 And my dad said we came for the American dream. But he never said anything about God or freedom of religion. It wasn't the dream we were looking for, really. It was just all the other rights we had here that you don't have in other countries.
224. 1:14:20 So, people don't really think about the freedom of religion that much anymore. That was in 71, right? Sandro, it's our job to help them. Okay?
225. 1:14:35 I mean, outside of Christ, everybody's ignorant. Everybody's spiritually dead. So, it's our job as Christians to help them understand that God so loved the world he gave his only son. Whoever believed in him would not perish but have everlasting life.
226. 1:14:50 And part of our blessings in this country, those of you who were born in other countries or if you've lived in another country or if you've just spent a lot of time in other countries, I don't have to convince you how wonderful this place is. You know. You know. But maybe we don't recognize often enough that we are the greatest country in the history of the world by God's grace, God's providential blessings on us.
227. 1:15:16 And without that, we'd be another failed experiment. I mean, I don't know if I'll talk about this Sunday or not but just for a point of perspective, I was talking with the men in the men's Bibles today this morning we had the same constitution since it was ratified in 1791.
228. 1:15:33 In that amount of time, France had 15 constitutions because they tried to do the revolution without God. Their revolution was against God. Our revolution was for God. We wanted God-given rights to this country. Guys, listen.
229. 1:15:48 Thank you very much. I'm going to ask another great patriot, another man for whom I have the utmost respect. Lieutenant Colonel John Churchill served this country 22 years in the United States Army, also a fellow pastor. John, would you close us in prayer please, sir? Sure, let's pray.
230. 1:16:05 Father, we come with humble hearts saying thank you. Thank you that you, Lord, are on our birth certificate as a nation. That really was your hand and so many miracles happened during the revolution that it's clearly your hand was there and I just thank you.
231. 1:16:30 I thank you for how you've been with our country through all the years, through even a rough civil war that your outcome changed us and changed us and made right what was wrong. Lord, you are faithful. You have been faithful and we just thank you for that.
232. 1:16:48 I thank you for how you love us and how you've put us here and we're not here by mistake even tonight, Lord. You put us here. And now, Lord, I pray for each of us here. May we be good citizens of heaven, Lord.
233. 1:17:03 May we follow you wholeheartedly. May we be submitted to you and do what you would have us do. I would pray that we, Lord, would carry your message of Jesus to our country. And then I would also pray that we would be good citizens here.
234. 1:17:21 That we would take our responsibilities that you've given us here very seriously. And then, Lord, I pray for our nation. I pray, first of all, for revival. I know that you've been moving in the youth of today. Father, keep on moving.
235. 1:17:37 Move in a mighty way. I pray for hearts to be changed, that more people would come to know you, that you would use us here, the church, to reach out in our communities so people could come to know you. So I pray for revival. And then, Lord, I would just pray that your spirit would move across our land, that you would bring peace, that the hearts would change, and look to you.
236. 1:18:00 Lord, I thank you for Kent and for all the preparations. I pray blessings on him and blessing on Christ's church. And we pray that in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Thank you, John. Thank you, Colonel. Guys, as you go, there's some... Oh, thanks. There's some light bites and refreshments out in the lobby.
237. 1:18:22 Please help yourself to it. I'll bring these books down. I'd encourage you to look at them. I've got one more brilliant book right here. It's called Random Observations of an Orderly Universe. Let me see who wrote that. Well, that would be me. My book is available on Amazon. I'll have hard copies of it here next week.
238. 1:18:39 And I'm shamelessly promoting it because the money we make off this book is not going to my retirement fund. It's going to support our human trafficking survivors support fund. So please buy it.
239. 1:18:54 Buy a bunch of them. Give them to your friends and help us help some women who've been through the horrors of trafficking here in Miami. And I'll bring the other books down, too, for you to look at. With that, thank you, everybody. God bless you. Have a good rest of your evening.

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