We named two of the three crises that the Founders considered the greatest threat to the Republic. This week we will address the third threat, which is by far the most serious: turning away from The Lord.
A major factor that forced this upon the nation was the Supreme Court, which violated the Constitution to force radical social re-engineering on the country. Another culprit has been the “pay for play” politicians that have made government the people’s god in order to take care of their needs instead of The Lord. The first two demarcations from the limits put on the government by our Constitution led to this third and most devastating crisis in our country.
As John Adams declared, our Republican form of government would only work for a moral and religious people, and is wholly inadequate for any other. Yet, for the last seventy years a major thrust of our federal government has been to remove God from public life. Correspondingly, the slide in morality and integrity has been dramatic and is now reaching levels that have proven deadly to every previous civilization.
As we see in Revelation 3:20, The Lord stands at the door of His church knocking to see if anyone will open to Him. In this age, He will not force Himself on those who do not want Him, even if they are His own church. Our federal government, mostly through the judiciary, has basically told The Lord to get out of our country. This was in direct violation of our Constitution and the will of the majority of the people. Yet, no one has effectively stood up against this, and so we’re paying a terrible price.
Again, we must have a strong and independent judiciary to have justice, and justice is one of the two pillars of The Lord’s government as we are told in Scriptures like Psalm 89:14. Our Republic will not work without a strong judicial branch, but by so drastically exceeding its Constitutional authority, this branch has become the biggest threat to our democratic and constitutional form of government. Worse, it has used this usurped authority to profoundly attack religious freedom in America. This has begun to unravel the basic social fabric of the nation.
This is not to say that we do not have many judges on all levels devoted to justice and who seek to comply with their Constitutional authority. Previous Presidents and Congress have just ignored Supreme Court decisions they considered unconstitutional. Abraham Lincoln went a little further and actually threatened to have the Supreme Court arrested, but was talked out of it by his cabinet. Few others have stood up to judges that exceeded their authority, and the result has been devastating. Our judicial branch has radically re-engineered the basic social fabric of America in a way that has led us to the point of civil war.
The Constitution provided amazing wisdom for a way to resolve our differences: let them be worked out by the states and by the people on the local level. These are the ones who will have to live with the decisions on the social issues and entitlements, and should be the ones to choose how they’re worked out.
Our federal courts have now drifted so far out of their lane that soon neither Congress nor the President will be able to function at all, much less do it as they were designed to operate. Even so, the Supreme Court’s worst transgression was to nullify the first part of the First Amendment to the Constitution for the entire country, thereby denying us our most important freedoms—freedom of religion and freedom of speech. Here is what that first part of the First Amendment says:
Congress shall make no Law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….
Could it be clearer? Note that it says “Congress” shall not do this. This was understood to mean the entire federal government because under the Constitution, Congress alone had the authority to make federal laws. So where did the federal government get the authority to mandate that there could not be prayer in state or local schools, or there could not be religious displays such as the Ten Commandments, or other religious symbols in public places? They usurped authority that is unconstitutional by directly disobeying the First Amendment to prohibit the free exercise of religion.
So why was there not outrage about this? There was by some, but it was disregarded because there was no political will on the part of Congress, the President, or the states at that time to push back on such egregious violations of the Constitution. The court’s draconian measures have continued to get more extreme in their obvious intent to drive religion out of the country, and none of our leaders have been willing to lead the charge to stop them.
The worst consequence of all is how our country has increasingly obeyed the wayward Supreme Court instead of The Lord, and we have suffered the consequences that the Scriptures make clear will be the judgment of a nation that turns away from God.
The judgments of The Lord are rarely Him actually striking, but when a people or a nation does not want Him, He leaves. When He leaves, so does the hedge of protection He promised to those who seek Him. Just one example is how we have gone from being shocked by ten billion dollars a year in damages from natural disasters to spending well over $300 billion last year for natural disasters! Some want us to think this is climate change, but even if it is, do we not think God is capable of using a shift in climate to bring about His judgment? Search the Scriptures and see if all of the disasters we’ve been suffering are not those it is written will come upon the nations that turn away from following God.
