Proverbs 22:28
In his decline and fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbons lists five reasons for the fall of the mightiest dynasty the world has ever known, the
He says first of all there was a rapid increase of divorce and the decline of the sanctity of the home, which is the basis for society.
Second, there was higher and higher taxes, the spending of money by the government for frivolous things such as celebrations and bread.
Number three, the mad craze for pleasures, sports becoming, every year, more brutal and more exciting.
Number four, the building of gigantic armaments ignoring the real enemy within, the decadence and moral decay of the society.
Number five, the decay of religion, faith fading into mere form loosing touch with people where they live and becoming impotent to guide their lives.
Now a review of these five principle factors will help you to see that in
An indicator of what is happening is found in Proverbs 22:28
What does the Bible mean when it says, "remove not the ancient landmarks"?
A landmark was a boundary marker. And when the people of
It was a great crime in Biblical days to remove a landmark, to remove a boundary marker because in doing so, it was the same as stealing land from your neighbor. You might remove the boundary lines so that it would appear that you had more land than your neighbor has or you have part of his land. So it was a very serious crime. In fact, six times in the Bible it commands us not to remove the ancient boundaries, which were set by our forefathers.
Now since God issued these warnings, that means these boundaries were sacred to God. Moving a boundary stone was a violation of their covenant with God, their oath to God, which they made when they entered into the Promised Land.
Now, in similar manner, our founding fathers established some ancient landmarks in
I. THE LANDMARK OF GOD'S SOVEREIGN
The first landmark that I want you to see is the landmark of God's sovereign providence, the existence of God. Our forefathers believed in God's self-evident existence. They said in the preamble of the Constitution, "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."
Listen to what they said; all men are endowed by their Creator. They believed in a Creator. They believed in a sovereign God who ruled in the affairs of men. This was a boundary mark set up in the very Constitution of the founding of our nation. It is belief in a God who is active, a God who is providential, and a God who is sovereign.
In fact, they capitalized the word "Creator" because they personalized the person of God. They wanted us to know that they believed in the existence of God as a person. They also believed that they were created in the image of God. Their understanding of human existence was consistent with Scripture. They did not believe humans were a product of evolution, but that they were endowed by the Creator, created in the image of God. These are landmarks upon which our nation was founded.
That is why there is such effort today to remove the landmark of the Ten Commandments from every public building and out of every public place, because it is an ancient landmark.
It begins actually with a verse, "hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one, thou shalt have no other gods before me." This is a landmark set up by our founding fathers who founded this nation and who authored the Declaration of Independence. This boundary is being removed in many, many places today.
They believed in God's supernatural act of creation and that was the basis upon which people could enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Notice that they also believed in self-evident truth.
They said, "we hold these truths to be self-evident" which means that these are the truths upon which life in
Many of them did not believe in existential philosophy, they did not believe that something was right today and wrong tomorrow. They did not believe in relativism, that something is right if it is right for you and wrong if it is wrong for you. They believed that things were always wrong that were wrong and things were always right that are right. And I am telling you that the ancient landmark of world absolutes has been removed from our society today and it is disappearing very rapidly.
A recent survey shows that 80% of teenagers in high school do not believe there is any standard of absolute right and wrong. These are the future leaders of our country. But that is no surprise, neither do many of the members of congress, neither do many of the people who represent us, they have removed the ancient landmarks.
Our great founding father, George Washington, in his last address in 1792, reminded the nation that it was the providential sovereignty of God that raised up this nation of
If he would say that in his day, we should marvel at what he might say in our day after God has delivered us from two world wars, a Korean War, a Vietnam War, a Civil War years ago, and God has protected this nation and established it and made it strong in spite of all its mistakes. We are removing the boundary of the sovereign providence of God that founded our nation.
II. THE LANDMARK OF GOD'S SUPREME PRECEPTS
Now secondly there is the landmark of God's supreme precepts. James Madison was called the chief architect of the Constitution of the
He said this: “We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it, we have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government;
upon the capacity for each and all to govern ourselves, to control ourselves and to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”
Our nation was built on the landmark of supreme precepts of a supreme God. And when there is an attack on the ten commandments of God, when there is an effort to rid our public life from any evidence of the Ten Commandments of God, it is an attempt on the devil's part and all who follow him to remove the ancient landmarks, which our forefathers set up.
That is one of the chief reason that
John Quincy Adams said in 1821 that from the time of the Declaration of Independence, the American people were bound by the laws of God and the laws of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
And look at how far we have come. When every effort is being made to remove the mention of God or the influence of God from public discourse and public life and those who stand up as politicians and boldly proclaim that they are believers in Jesus Christ are mocked and ridiculed and held up to scorn. The ancient landmarks have been removed.
Our government was organized after a biblical pattern. Where did we get the idea for three branches of government? Executive, judicial, and legislative.
In Isaiah 33:22 you find the biblical pattern for the founding of American governmental organization. It says, " For the LORD is our judge, the LORD is our lawgiver, the LORD is our king; he will save us." The judge is the judicial branch. The lawgiver is the legislative branch. The king is the executive branch.
Don't let the revisionist of history and the humanist and the filthy, vile, Hollywood crowd make you think any differently. The commandments of God and the supreme precepts of God are an ancient landmark set by the founding fathers of our nation. And woe be to us if believers in Christ sit by idly while they remove the ancient landmarks.
If you don't believe this nation was founded upon God's principles all you have to do is tour the Capitol and the monuments and the government buildings there that we hold so dear. In the Rotunda of the Capitol of the
Four of them depict a biblical theme. One picture shows a group of pilgrims departing from
There is a place in the Rotunda just off the Rotunda in the Capitol building for Congressman to meditate and pray. There is a prayer room for the Congressmen of the
Surrounding him are the words from Psalm 16:1, “Preserve me, O God, for in thee do I put my trust.” Above him are the words from
Also incorporated into the window are the two sides from the Great Seal of the
The names of the thirteen original states are contained in the central portion of the window. The remaining states are listed in chronological order around the outside pane, starting in the lower left corner. The two lower panels of the window show the Holy Scriptures and a candle, signifying the light from God’s law.
A Bible, usually opened to Psalm 23, sits on the altar underneath the window. Two prayer benches, six chairs, plants, two candles and an American flag complete the furnishings in the room.
The stained glass window was donated by craftsmen from
It is not we who are departing from the founding of our nation, it is the modernists, the Hollywood crowd, the humanists, the seculars, the ACLU, the People for the American Way, and all the rest of them who deny the supreme precepts of God and what our nation was founded upon.
Another ancient boundary that is being removed is that of marriage and family values. When the pilgrims came to this land, they came to this land with their families seeking to worship God in freedom.
And the family, a society upon which this nation was built and upon which this nation stands, the traditional family, monogamous, one husband and one wife, a man and a woman, and the children of that marriage, making a home, making a family, it is the basic unit of society and has been in Western civilization for centuries.
But in this very day and in this very week, they are seeking to remove the ancient landmark of the American family and traditional family values.
The gays, the homosexual crowds, and the liberals have b-passed the rule of law and have gone over the law to judges who are liberal who will rule the ruling they want and perform same sex marriages in their states. And they will not stop. In fact, recently in
It seems almost ridiculous that we should have to define marriage as being between a man and a woman. It is not between two men, it is not between two women. It is not between a man and a beast or something else, but it is as God said in the beginning when God created Adam and made a fitting help for him and took woman out of his side.
And that is forever the pattern that God has set for marriage and society. We have a group of people who make up only 6-8% of our population and yet they seek to remove this ancient landmark. And the only way to prevent them from doing it, evidently, is to pass an amendment to the Constitution that says, in
Why is this so important? If we ignore the ancient landmark of marriage, and marriage is “anything goes”, then the day will shortly arrive when someone criticizes publicly the gay lifestyle or denounces the gay lifestyle as being immoral and ungodly, that they will be guilty of a federal crime.
You say, well that is preposterous, well; I will have you to know that in
That in Canada it is against the law to make any kind of speech that could be called homophobic or hate speech against gays denouncing gays, and if you do that you are subject to six months in prison. They want to silence our pulpits, they want to silence our churches, and they want to shut us down.
They are like the people in Paul's day, they do not want to hear the Word of God, "when they knew God they did not glorify Him as God neither were they thankful but they became vain in imaginations and darkness filled their hearts and burning in lust for one another, they turned to one another, men with men, and women with women, working that which is unseemly."
There is nothing more harmful to the family today than the idea that a gay marriage is the same as traditional marriage. They want to get it in public schools where every school is taught, where every child in school is taught from the kindergarten up that two mommies is as good as mom and daddy or two daddies is as good as a mom and daddy.
And unless they are stopped by the only means we have at our disposal, the ballot box, they are going to accomplish this. And the freedom of speech that we enjoy to preach the gospel and the Word of God as it is to people as they are is in danger in this land. They are removing the ancient landmark upon which this nation was built. And we are in crisis in this nation.
And then the ancient landmark of freedom and religion is going to be removed from our land if we are not careful. They come in the guise of separation of church and state.
Separation of church and state as it is being interpreted today by the courts is a myth. It was never intended to be in the Constitution. Eighty-six percent of all evangelical ministers surveyed believe that the courts have gone too far in their interpretation of separation of church and state. It has gone beyond separation to silencing the church.
Never did our founding fathers mean that the pastors and the churches could not preach on moral issues of the day and talk about moral stands of the day. It never meant we are not supposed to have the Ten Commandments on the walls of our schools or our courthouses or "In God We Trust" on our coins.
It never meant that our Congress was not supposed to pray before every session or that by the Vice President's chair across from him in the Senate are the words on Congress's wall, "In God We Trust."
And yet we have made it a wall of separation. A wall of separation, those words and that verbiage, is not in the Constitution of the
His response was actually intended to assure the Baptists that the government had no business being involved in church affairs. Reminiscent of
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”
Th Jefferson
Jan. 1. 1802.
The statement was never intended to keep the church out of state, but quite the opposite. There is no such thing as a wall of separation built by the founding fathers.
What they did say is that Congress cannot pass any law prescribing a state religion nor can they prevent anybody from exercising their free worship. That is all it means. It doesn't mean I can't sign up a thousand voters, it doesn't mean I can't preach my convictions, it doesn't mean I can't be involved in the issues of the day. Isaiah was, Elijah was, all the great prophets of God were. Even Paul spoke face to face with the authorities and the leaders of his day and he preached to them the faithful gospel of Jesus Christ.
When you think about it logically, why would the founding fathers establish a republic built upon the acknowledgment of God’s presence and providence, and then make a law restricting churches from being involved in its operation and maintenance?
The believed in the Landmark of God’s Supreme Precepts.
III. THE LANDMARK OF GOD'S SURE PROMISES
Then there is the landmark of God's sure promises. We rejoice today that God says in His Word this, Deuteronomy 28:1-2,10
Look at the world today. Do you think they are afraid of our military?
And God says if you will obey these commands, I will lift you up. I will make other nations fear you.
But for the rest of the chapter, from verse 15-68, the consequences of refusing to obey are listed. What is the result when a nation forgets the ancient landmarks?
Listen:
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