For the Lord is Our Judge, the Lord is Our Lawgiver, the Lord is Our King; He will save us. (Isaiah 33:22)The Spirit of the LORD spake by me, and his word was in my tongue.
The God of Israel said, the Rock of Israel spake to me, He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God.
And he shall be as the light of the morning, when the sun riseth, even a morning without clouds; as the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain.
Although my house be not so with God; yet he hath made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things, and sure: for this is all my salvation, and all my desire, although he make it not to grow.
But the sons of Belial shall be all of them as thorns thrust away, because they cannot be taken with hands:
But the man that shall touch them must be fenced with iron and the staff of a spear; and they shall be utterly burned with fire in the same place. (2 Samuel 23:2-7) The Last Words of David (Also see Psalms 2 and 72. Psalm 72 is thought to be the last Psalm of David because of verse 20.)Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil. (Ecclesiastes 12:12-14)
He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? (Micha 6:8)
O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day. Thou through thy commandments hast made me wiser than mine enemies: for they are ever with me. I have more understanding than all my teachers: for thy testimonies are my meditation. I understand more than the ancients, because I keep thy precepts. (Psalm 119:97-100)
For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach [them], the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. -- The Lord Jesus Christ (Matthew 5:18,19)And it is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than one tittle of the law to fail. -- The Lord Jesus Christ (Luke 16:17)
For it is written,
As I live, saith the Lord,
every knee shall bow to me,
and every tongue shall confess to God.
So then every one of us shall give account of himself to God. (Romans 14:11,12)Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth. Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him. (Psalm 2:10-12)
For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad. (2 Corinthians 5:10)
And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself. And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God. And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean. And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS. (Revelation 19:11-16)
And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.
And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire. (Revelation 20:11-15)That the judicial laws of God, as they were delivered by Moses . . . be a rule to all the courts in this jurisdiction . . ." (April 3, 1644) -- New Haven Colony Charter
Paul does not regard government as provider of income, health care, education, national parks, money, or any of the other services common to our modern welfare states; its function is quite simple: to punish wrongdoers. -- John W. Robbins (1949-2008)
1. An unrighteous judge doth condemn the cause of God himself; for every righteous cause is his. 2. Yea, he condemneth Christ himself in his members; for it that he doth it to one of the least of those whom he calleth brethren, he doth it to himself, Matt. xxv. It is a damnable sin, not to relieve the innocent and imprisoned in their distress, when we have power: what is it then to oppress them and unrighteously condemn? 3. It is a turning of the remedy into a double misery, and taking away the only help of oppressed innocency. What other defense hath innocency, but law and justice? And when their refuge itself doth fall upon them and oppress them, whither shall the righteous fly? 4. It subverteth laws and government, and abuseth it to destroy the ends which it is appointed for. -- Richard Baxter (I:857, 1615-1691)
Blasphemy against the Almighty is denying his being or providence, or uttering contumelious reproaches on our Savior Christ. It is punished, at common law by fine and imprisonment, for Christianity is part of the laws of the land. -- William Blackstone
There never has been a period in which Common Law did not recognize Christianity as laying at its foundation. -- Joseph Story, Dane Professor of Law at Harvard University in his 1829 inaugural address
To the kindly influence of Christianity we owe that degree of civil freedom and political happiness which mankind now enjoy. In proportion as the genuine effects of Chritianity are diminished in any nation, either through unbelief, or the corruption of its doctrines, or the neglect of its institutions; in the same proportion will the people of that nation recede from the blessings of genuine freedom...Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our present republican forms of government, and all the blessings which flow from them, must fall with them. -- Jedediah Morse
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other. -- John Adams (1735-1826), Address to the Militia of Massachusetts, 1798
Most people agreed that our law was rooted, as John Adams had said, in a common moral and religious tradition, one that stretched back to the time Moses went up on Mount Sinai. Similarly almost everyone agreed that our liberties were God-given and should be exercised responsibly. There was a distinction between liberty and license. -- Terry Eastland
Pride makes men pretend to be more just than God; and to think that they could more justly govern the world; and to censure God's threatenings, and the sufferings of the good, and the prosperity of the wicked, as things so unjust, as that they thereby incline to atheism. So James and John would be more just than Christ, and call down fire on the rejecters of the gospel; and the prodigal's brother, Luke xv. [Luke 15] repined at his father's lenity.
Pride maketh men slight the authority and commands of God, and despise his messengers, and choose to be ruled by their own conceits, and lusts, and interests, Jer. xiii. 15,17; xliii. 2,3 [Jeremiah 13:15,17; Jeremiah 43:2,3]; when the humble tremble at his word, and readily obey it, Isa. lvii. 15; Neh. ix. 16,29; Isa. ix. 9. [Isaiah 57:15; Nehemiah 9:16,29; Isaiah 9:9] -- Richard Baxter (1615-1691)Under the guise of various rhetorical devices, American jurists are more and more openly taking power into their hands. Robert H. Bork, when he was Federal Court of Appeals Judge, described the situation well when he said of constitutional interpretation, "What we get then is neither constitutional law nor moral philosophy but simplistic and idiosyncratic legislation by judges that claim the finality accorded to constitutional law." The "net effect" of this, says Bork, is "simply to free judges from restraints many of them would otherwise feel bound to honor" and to produce a malaise of "unguided and expanding judicial power." -- Virginia Armstrong and Michael Farris, editors, The Christian World View of Law
What of any relevance do you bring to the table as a replacement for the Christian principles that has blessed America beyond any other nation in recorded history. . . ?
So now I ask the arrogant unbeliever: upon whose ethical system do you base your standards for civic law? Whose philosophy will you have undergird your vision of American jurisprudence? Would you have the "prophet" Friedrich Nietzsche and his champion, Adolph Hitler? Or perhaps Karl Marx who expostulated on the glories of equality (the loss of private property) and his murderous disciple Vladimir Lenin, who built Marx's utopia with the blood of millions? Or would you sell us the bloody, chaotic French Revolution and its heroes, such as the whoremonger Rousseau, who left his children to die in orphanages, and Robespierre, who helped shed the blood of thousands of innocents? Or perhaps Plato or Socrates, who lived in a culture that practiced human sacrifice and glorified pedophilia?
What religious system would you like to see undergird our culture and law? Hinduism with its oppression of women, child-temple prostitution, and degrading caste system? Mohammedanism with its political and religious oppression? How about the atheism of the French Revolution with all its misery, rapine, and bloodshed? Or perhaps you would like to sell us on the new age superstitions and witchcrafts that still keep much of Africa in social and political chaos? Or maybe you prefer the model of law and order and centralized bureaucracy of Maoist Communist China which mandates forced abortions, shoots its protesting students, jails its Christians, uses slave labor camps, and can't feed its peoples? Or perhaps you would simply have us submit our political heart and soul to our oligarchical masters-the Supreme Court? Certainly they can create law out of thin air. Or perhaps you would just base society on the innate goodness of man and human reason-the 'goodness' and 'reason' that has made this the bloodiest, most murderous century since the birth of Christ. I await your pathetic, liberal arts collegiate answer. -- Randall Terry in The SwordMoreover, as Van Till points out, "The unity and organic character of our personality demands that we have a unified knowledge as the basis of our action." If this unified knowledge is not provided by the theologians, it will be provided by someone else. Human action requires that unified knowledge. Man's being requires a systematics, and he will either live or die in terms of it. His faith will lead him to action or inaction, to suicide or life.
Thus, systematics cannot be avoided. The only question is, which systematics? Every non-Biblical system has collapse built into it. It rests on false premises, leads to false conclusions, and cannot give a valid and rational interpretation of the nature and purpose of life and the world.
A systematic theology derived from Scripture is widely denied today as an impossibility. The reason for this is that such deniers are concerned rather with affirming another system, such as a systematic anthropology, man as creator of his own essence and lord of his own being. Such attempts, however, are a futile passion. Only a Bible-based systematics can stand and is valid. -- R.J. Rushdoony (1916-2001), in Systematic Theology (1994)
Begining of Quotations From AMERICA'S GOD AND COUNTRY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF QUOTATIONS*
"Sir Francis Bacon wrote:"
There never was found, in any age of the world, either philosophy, or sect, or religion, or law, or discipline, which did so highly exalt the good of the community, and increase private and particular good as the holy Christian faith. Hence, it clearly appears that it was one and the same God that give the Christian law to men, who gave the laws of nature to the creatures.
"In 1748 Montesquieu wrote in his The Spirit of the Laws:"
The Christian religion, which orders men to love one another, no doubt wants the best political laws and the best civil laws for each people, because those laws are, after (the Christian religion,) the greatest good that men can give and receive.
Montesquieu's "concept of three branches of government: judicial, legislative, and executive, was based on Isaiah 33:22:"
For the Lord is our Judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king.
"In 1772, some four years before the Declaration of Independence, he [George Mason] wrote,"
The laws of nature are the laws of God, Whose authority can be superseded by no power on earth. A legislature must not obstruct our obedience to Him from Whose punishment they cannot protect us. All human constitutions which contradict His Laws, we are in conscience bound to disobey.
"On November 4, 1820, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Jared Sparks:"
I hold the precepts of Jesus as delivered by Himself, to be the most pure, benevolent and sublime which have ever been preached to man . . .
"Supreme Court of Pennsylvania 1824, in the case of Updegraph v. The Commonwealth, 11 Serg. & R. 393-394, 398-399, 402-407 (1824), recorded the court's declaration that:"
No society can tolerate a willful and despiteful attempt to subvert its religion, no more than it would to break down its laws -- a general, malicious and deliberate intent to overthrow Christianity, general Christianity.
Religion and morality . . . are the foundations of all governments. Without these restraints no free government could long exist.
It is liberty run mad to declaim against the punishment of these offenses, or to assert that the punishment is hostile to the spirit and genius of our government. They are far from being true friends to liberty who support this doctrine, and the promulgation of such opinions, and general receipt of them among the people, would be the sure forerunners of anarchy, and finally, of despotism.
No free government now exists in the world unless where Christianity is acknowledged, and is the religion of the country. . . . Its foundations are broad and strong, and deep. . . . it is the purest system of morality, the firmest auxiliary, and only stable support of all human laws. . . .
Christianity is part of the common law; the act against blasphemy is neither obsolete nor virtually repealed; nor is Christianity inconsistent with our free governments of the genius of the people.
While our own free constitution secures liberty of conscience and freedom of religious worship to all, it is not necessary to maintain that any man should have the right publicly to vilify the religion of his neighbors and of the country; these two privileges are directly opposed.
"In 1833 Noah Webster translated the Common Version of the Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testament, with Amendments of the Language. In the preface he wrote:"
The Bible is the Chief moral cause of all that is good, and the best corrector of all that is evil, in human society; the best book for regulating the temporal concerns of men, and the only book that can serve as an infallible guide to future felicity. . . . It is extremely important to our nation, in a political as well as religious view, that all possible authority and influence should be given to the scriptures, for these furnish the best principles of civil liberty, and the most effectual support of republican government.
The principles of genuine liberty, and of wise laws and administrations, are to be drawn from the Bible and sustained by its authority. The man, therefore, who weakens or destroys the divine authority of that Book may be accessory to all the public disorders which society is doomed to suffer. . . .
There are two powers only, sufficient to control men and secure the rights of individuals and a peaceable administration; these are the combined force of religion and law, and the force of fear of the bayonet. -- Noah Webster, New Haven
"On May 28, 1849, Robert Charles Winthrop spoke at the Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Bible Society in Boston, stating:"
The voice of experience and the voice of our own reason speak but one language. . . . Both united in teaching us, that men may as well build their houses upon the sand and expect to see them stand, when the rains fall, and the winds blow, and the floods come, as to found free institutions upon any other basis than that of morality and virtue, of which the Word of God is the only authoritative rule, and the only adequate sanction.
All societies of men must be governed in some way or other. The less they have of stringent State Government, the more they must have of individual self-government. The less they rely on public law or physical force, the more they must rely on private moral restraint.
Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled either by a power within them, or a power without them; either by the Word of God, or by the strong arm of man; either by the Bible or by the bayonet.
It may do for other countries, and other governments to talk about the State supporting religion. Here, under our own free institutions, it is Religion which must support the State.
"On September 5, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln . . . acknowledging the . . . Bible . . . presented him [declared]:"
In regard to this Great Book, I have but to say, I believe the Bible is the best gift God has given to man. All the good Saviour gave to the world was communicated through this Book. But for this Book we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man's welfare, here and hereafter, are to be found portrayed in it . . .
"In 1866 Robert Winthrop addressed the American Bible Society in New York on its jubilee, saying:"
Beyond all doubt, my friends, we are dealing here today with the great enginery of the world's progress, with the greatest of all instrumentalities for social advancement as well as for individual salvation.
"Wesley Merritt (1834-1910) . . . the Superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point, 1882-87 . . . expressed:"
The principles of life as taught in the Bible, the inspired Word, and exemplified in the matchless Life of Him "who spake as never man spake," are the rules of moral action which have resulted in civilizing the world.
The testimony of great men, like Gladstone and his fellow statesmen; like Havelock and his fellow soldiers, who have made the teachings of the Scriptures their rule of conduct in life, are wonderful helps to men of lesser note and smaller intellectual and moral powers. One example, even of the smallest of these, more than offsets the efforts of an hundred unbelievers in active opposition.
They are the worthy followers of the religion of the Bible, and in their daily lives interpret the inimitable example and Divine precepts of the Son of God, our Saviour.
"George Mason stated before the General Court of Virginia:"
The laws of nature are the laws of God, whose authority can be superseded by no power on earth.
*Sources
Many more related statements and documents may be found in the following source documents for this listing.
Federer, William J. (compiler), America's God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations, ISBN: 1880563053 9781880563052 1880563096 9781880563090 1880563134 9781880563137.
"An invaluable resource highlighting America's noble heritage, profound quotes from founding fathers, presidents, statesmen, scientists, constitutions, court decisions . . . for use in speeches, papers, debates, essays . . ." -- Publisher
Amerisearch
https://americanminute.com/
Ashby, Ruth (author), and Russell Motter (editor), The Great American Documents, Volume 1. 1620-1830, Volume 2. 1831-1900, ISBN: 9780809094608, 9780374534530, 9780809094592, 9780374537371, 0809094606, 0374534535, 0809094592, 0374537372.
"A graphically illustrated history of America through its major speeches, laws, proclamations, court decisions, and essays introduces, through the narrative character of 'Uncle Sam,' each document's origins, creation, and impact." -- Publisher
William J. Federer (compiler), American Quotations and Great American Documents, (Austin, TX: NavPress Software, 1997).
This is an greatly expanded edition of AMERICA'S GOD AND COUNTRY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF QUOTATIONS combined with GREAT AMERICAN DOCUMENTS on CD-ROM in STEP format.
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