By
Pastor Roger Anghis
January 1, 2012
NewsWithViews.com
This year our Declaration of Independence celebrated its 235th birthday. Arguably it is the most successful document ever written by man. However it has its roots in several other documents and we need to understand what those documents are to fully understand our Declaration of Independence. To understand a little of the background of Declaration of Independence I would like to quote from my book, Bring America Back To Her Religious Roots concerning this document.
When our nation attained freedom from Britain we can see all of the Biblical teachings come into play in the developing of our Constitution and the laws of our land. The Declaration of Independence is the most successful document in the world.
No other nation has been governed by a document longer than we have by the Declaration of Independence. Political scientists tell us that our Constitution was based on the same book that was used to write the Declaration of Independence and that book was The Two Treatises of Civil Government by John Locke. The revisionist historians of today say that he was a deist, but he was actually a theologian. He wrote the first topical Bible. He did a book on a verse by verse study of the Bible. He wrote a book titled “The Reasonableness of Christianity” and he helped write the constitution of Carolina. John Locke’s book, The Two Treatises of Civil Government, was the basis for the most successful government document ever written, the Constitution of the United States. Is it any wonder that our government has been the most successful in the world? John Adams - “The general principles for which we achieved independence are the general principles of Christianity.”
The influence of the Bible was so instilled into the hearts and the minds of the Founding Fathers as well as the people that it is no wonder that when drafting the Constitution we find its influence all through the document. An independent study was done by the University of Houston and they wanted to determine what was the biggest influence in drafting the Constitution. They gathered documents from the founding era, 1760-1805, documents that led to the establishing of our Declaration of Independence and what gave us our Constitution. They wanted to see who our Founding Fathers read, quoted and who they were influenced by. They collected 15,000 documents and from those documents they found 3,154 quotes. It took them 10 years to document these quotes as to where they came from and they discovered that the most quoted source was quoted four times more than the second most quoted source. The most quoted source was the Bible.
The basis of the Declaration of Independence was the Biblical principles that the Founders lived and governed by. It was actually a time when revelation was being seen in scripture that not many had ever seen before. No nation at that time elected their leaders, allowed for private ownership of land by anybody. A government of the people for the people and by the people was unheard of. The entire world watched to see how long it would last. Most thought it wouldn’t last more than a few years.
Our Founders based the Declaration of Independence on what John Locke called ‘natural law’. This law extended beyond man’s laws and was based on God’s law. In a quote from my book Discovering America’s Exceptionalism:
John Locke ‘perfected’ the concept of social compact. He explained it in this way: “Men. join and unite into a community fir their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another in a secure enjoyment of their properties an d a greater security against any that are not of it.” 24 Locke’s theory of social compact was manifested in the Declaration of Independence phrase that governments “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Locke also believed that successful governments could be built only upon the transcendent, unchanging principles of natural law that were a subset of God’s law:[1] “The Law of Nature stands as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others. The rules that they make for other men’s actions must. be conformable to the Law of Nature, i.e. to the will of God.[2] Laws made by humans must be made according to the general laws of Nature, and without contradiction to any positive law of Scripture, otherwise they are ill made.”[3]
It could be said that the reason the Declaration of Independence was so successful was not who wrote it but what it was based upon. As a Christian nation our Founders could only use scripture to guide the laying of the foundation of this nation. Scripture was what they lived their lives by. It was what determined the way they did business. It was what developed their character. So many of our Founders put such an emphasis on character specifically the character of those who we put in authority over us. Our Founders took the advice of scripture that states: Exodus 18:21 “Moreover thou shalt provide out of all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over them, to be rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens:”
When you look at who we have in elected office today, this character of person is very hard to find. This last week 93 Senators voted on a bill that blatantly violates our constitutional right to due process. We have heard a Representative from California, Pete Starks, state that they pay no attention the Constitution when they write laws. The Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank is an open homosexual as is Colorado’s Jared Polis. These people would never have been elected by our Founders because they lived by the laws of nature and natures God. I have been in State Legislature hearings where an elected so-called representative of the people wanted to overturn a statute voted on by the people simply because she didn’t like the law showing no regard to the will of the people.
One of the reasons listed in the Declaration of Independence was that the king tried to force the people to “relinquish the right of Representation in the legislature”. Today we have our elected officials literally refusing to represent the people that elected them. We see this mostly in the Democrat party but is happens in both. In the State of Colorado we elected a Governor that ran as a pro-life, pro-family man, Bill Ritter, but the first three laws he signed were anti-family and anti-life. He even signed a bill that allowed men to use women’s showers, while the women were in there, if they felt a little feminine that day. Today we have a Governor that refuses to enforce the laws of the State of Colorado concerning sanctuary cites. He simply ignores the laws.
We, as voter, are responsible for this. We don’t vet the candidates. We simply vote along party lines without giving any thought to where these candidates stand on certain issues. Even MSM won’t vet the candidates unless they are pro-life, pro-legal immigration, pro-gun, pro-constitution and so forth. We have almost 70 members of Congress that belong to the Democrat Socialists of America and almost no one knows this. Why are we electing people that want to destroy our system of government. They ignore most of our laws and simply do what they want.
Advertisement
Attorney Eric Holder is a perfect example of this. He won’t prosecute the Black Pathers for voter intimidation because they are black! He sues any state that enforces immigration laws and uses Obama appointed judges to stop the implementation of those immigration laws. Now evidence is coming forth that he was involved in the supplying of the materials to Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and is involved in the cover up of the governments involvement in that bombing.
We have five sitting members of the US Supreme Court that have used internation laws and treaties to decide cases that have come before it. They are sworn to up hold the Constitution not international laws. The Supreme Court of California is reviewing Proposition 8, a voter initiative on homosexual marriage. Courts have no jurisdiction over voter approved bills. They only have jurisdiction over what is passed by legislators. This happened in Colorado concerning the same type of bill voted on by the people and our Supreme Court overturned the vote of the people. Why do we allow our courts to legislate from the bench? They have no constitutional jurisdiction to do so. They decide cases they have no right to hear.
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are only valid if we the people demand that they be followed. We have to rise up and demand that these documents are followed and when they aren’t we have to recall any and all that refuse to adhere to those documents.
As far back as Woodrow Wilson we have seen presidents begin to ignore what is the foundation of America. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, stated in an interview published in the December 2011 issue of Imprimis said this about Woodrow Wilson: “Woodrow Wilson and the founders of modern liberalism call these doctrines of limited government that appear in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution obsolete. They argue that we now live in the age of progress and that government must be an engine of that progress.” It is obvious that Wilson did not like the restrictions placed on government by these documents. He did not like the fact that the Founders fully understood the need to keep government under the total control of the people. In the Federalist 51 James Madison explained why these controls were placed on government: “What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angel, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”
Human must be governed, because of our nature. Without a government we would fall into anarchy. But because man makes up the government it must remain small or it will become as we are seeing it become today, tyrannical. To be able to control government take men and women of high character. We do not see that in today’s politicians. Most seem only concerned about themselves and how much money they can make. Our Founders never paid members of Congress. I don’t think they should be paid much at all. Benefits nil. No carrier members of Congress. Washington set the example of two terms and Congress should stick to that.
| Subscribe to the NewsWithViews Daily News Alerts! |
Congress isn’t about the people any more it’s all about power, the governments power over the people. The only way to change that is to change the people we put in office. The election of 2012 could be the most important election of America’s history. If we don’t begin to turn back to what the Founders designed, we may see the American experiment disappear, forever.
We live in the greatest nation ever devised by man. We can elect our leaders. Most nations can’t do that. This means that we can determine where our nation goes. Will we go the way of the USSR, Cuba, Venezuala, China? Or will we rebuild America to its former greatness? What will you tell your grandkids that you did? I will tell mine that I did everything I could to rebuild America.
Footnotes:
1-
David Barton, Original Intent (Aledo: Wallbuilders Press 2005) p. 218
2-
John Locke, Two Treatises, Book II, p. 285, Chapter XI, § 135.
3-
Locke at p. 285, Chapter XI, § 135 n., quoting Hooker’s Eccl.
Pol. 1. iii, sec. 9
� 2012 Roger Anghis - All Rights Reserved
Share
This Article
Pastor Roger Anghis is the Founder of RestoreFreeSpeech.org, an organization designed to draw attention to the need of returning free speech rights to churches that was restricted in 1954.
President of The Damascus Project, TheDamascusProject.org, which has a stated purpose of teaching pastors and lay people the need of the churches involvement in the political arena and to teach the historical role of Christianity in the politics of the United States. Married-37 years, 3 children, three grandchildren.
Web site: RestoreFreeSpeech.org
E-Mail: editor@restorefreespeech.org
