“We are Republicans, and don't propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion.  We are loyal to our flag.”

-          Dr. Samuel D. Burchard, Presbyterian Minister and Union Civil War Veteran

“Our patience is wearing thin.” Thus did the imposter-in-chief and son of Antichrist Joe Biden bellow from the lectern on Thursday. 

More fully, his comments were:

My message to unvaccinated Americas is this: what more is there to wait for, what more do you need to see?  We’ve made vaccinations free, safe, and convenient.  The Vaccine is FDA approved [it isn’t, but that’s another matter]. Over 200 million Americans have gotten at least one shot.  We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin.  And your refusal has cost all of us.  So please, do the right thing.  But don’t just take it from me.  Listen to the voices of unvaccinated Americans who are lying in hospital beds taking their final breath saying, “if only I’d gotten vaccinated! If only!” It’s a tragedy.  Please don’t let it become yours.

With his words, this treasonous liar managed, in very short order, to declare war, not just on unvaccinated Americans, but on all the constitutionally guaranteed liberties of all Americans.

Quite apart from the fact that the Covid vaccines are unsafe and ineffective, Biden’s arrogant and threatening words are among the most disturbing, unconstitutional, and unchristian utterances made by any American politician ever.  It’s that serious. 

There is no provision in our Constitution that allows a president to dictate what medical treatments a person must have.  There is no support for such a thing in Scripture. 

Far from it. 

In 1988, Joe Biden’s bid for the White House was short circuited when it turned out he had, “lifted portions of a speech by United Kingdom Labour MP and Margaret Thatcher challenger Neil Kinnock.”   

It only he had stuck with plagiarizing Neil Kinnock.

Now, when speaking as President in 2021, it seems that Biden has raised his game, lifting his ideas from a higher source.  In this case, Revelation 13 seems to be where Biden is stealing his ideas these days.  There we read, “And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”

It is not my point here to argue that the Covid vaccine answers to the prophecy in John’s Revelation. With that said, Biden’s threat to the unvaccinated is certainly of that same spirit we find in Revelation.  “Do what I tell you, or else!” 

It’s also of the same spirit one finds in the Roman Catholic Church, the Great Babylonian Harlot of Revelation.  In the middle ages, Rome was all about “do what we say, or else!”  If you didn’t believe that Christ really, truly was present in the sacrifice of the mass, well, you were in a whole lot of trouble and would likely find yourself on the receiving end of some nasty business.  This is what dogma is.  “Believe, or else!”  No matter how stupid, absurd, and unbiblical Rome’s pronouncements were. You had to accept what the pope and his henchmen said or suffer the consequences.

Back in 2006 in his essay “The Religious Wars of the 21st Century,”  John Robbins wrote, “The Protestant Reformation is indeed over; the respite of peace, freedom, and prosperity it afforded the West from the long history of human brutality is drawing to a close; and the world is about to enter a new Dark Age of slavery, brutality, and war.  Only the second coming of Christ or an extraordinary work of the Holy Spirit can prevent religious totalitarians from imposing their will on billions of people.”

Some may have thought Robbins a pessimist when he wrote that.  But fifteen years later, his words seem downright prescient.

America is suffering under the government of its second Roman Catholic president.  And unlike the first one, John F. Kennedy, Biden not only sees no need to hide his political and economic Romanism, but actually goes out of his way to embrace them.    

By political and economic Romanism, I mean the application of the Roman Catholic Church-State’s (RCCS) theology and philosophy to those two disciplines.

Joe Biden’s Political and Economic Romanism

We’ve already seen one example of Joe Biden’s political Romanism in his arrogant announcement of vaccine mandates.  But one can find many other examples of Biden openly embracing the economics and politics of the Woman Who Rides the Beast. 

On his 2020 campaign website, we read:

In his encyclical, Laudato Si, Pope Francis directed the global community to raise awareness about the growing climate change crisis. Climate change threatens communities across the country, from beachfront coastal towns to rural farms in the heartland. Joe’s plan will tackle climate change and pollution to protect our communities.

By favorably citing Jesuit Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, Biden is advancing not only Rome’s environmentalist agenda but the ultimate aim of that agenda: global government.   In Laudato Si, Pope Francis, the current occupant of the office of Antichrist, approvingly quoted his immediate predecessor Antichrist, writing:

Given this situation, it is essential to devise stronger and more efficiently organized international institutions, with functionaries who are appointed fairly by agreement among national governments, and empowered to impose sanctions. As Benedict XVI has affirmed in continuity with the social teaching of the Church: “To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority, as my predecessor Blessed John XXIII indicated some years ago”(emphasis mine).

With the above in mind, is it any surprise that one of Biden’s first acts in office was to put America back into the treasonous Paris Climate Accord?  By doing this, Biden promoted the climate change of globalist lies of the RCCS.

Biden’s praising of Pope Francis’ socialist economics predates the 2020 presidential campaign.  In 2014, when many liberty minded Roman Catholics were aghast of Pope Francis’s open attack on capitalism in his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, Joe Biden said of one of the Pope’s critics, “As a practicing Catholic, bless me, Father, for he has sinned.”

We have already seen Biden’s thuggish attitude to those who disagree with the Covid vaccine campaign.  But Biden is not the first Covid authoritarian.  And while Pope Francis is certainly not the only Covid authoritarian, he is certainly one of the most prominent. 

Back in February of this year, there was this headline in the Huffington Post, “Vatican Threatens To Fire Employees Who Refuse COVID-19 Vaccine.” Antichrist loves the vax so much that, aping him, his Mini Me in the White House wants to bring the same blessing to Americans coast to coast.  Except, of course, to members of Congress and their staff.  They’re exempted. Rules are for little people!  Shades of the middle ages indeed, where there was one law for the nobility, and another for everyone else. 

Critical Race Theory is another point of agreement between the Biden regime and Antichrist.  They both think it’s wonderful.  In an article titled “Critical race theory and Catholicism go hand in hand,” Jesuit Patrick Saint-Jean wrote that, “CRT [Critical Race Theory] intersects easily with Catholic social teaching.”  Doubtless, it does. But then, that’s a condemnation of Rome’s evil and ungodly Social Teaching, not a confirmation of its righteousness as the Jesuit author of the article thinks.

Unsurprisingly, Joe Biden – it’s worth mentioning here that Biden attends a Jesuit-run parish in Washington D.C. – also thinks CRT is just awesome and something we Americans all need more of. 

How about immigration, migration, and refugee resettlement?  Once again, there is no distinction at all between the policies of the Biden regime and pronouncements of the Antichrists current and past on this topic.  In short, both the Pope and Joe Biden think it’s a great idea to flood the nation with immigrants, migrants, and refugees and stick the American people with the bill, all the while denouncing them as a bunch of depolorables for even so much as questioning whether these policies are good for the American people or make any economic sense.  In his blasting critique of Strangers No Longer, Pastor Ralph Ovadal called this “romanizing America through illegal immigration.” 

But it’s not just illegal immigration that the Popes of Rome, including the current Pope, use to destroy nations. It’s also welfare refugee resettlement.  Both Pope Francis and Joe Biden want to flood America with Afghan refugees.  Antichrist Pope Francis even prayed, “that displaced persons inside Afghanistan receive assistance and protection.”  That is to say, Francis wants them on the public dole.  This is one of Rome’s most flagrant refugee scams, conflating Christian charity, which is always the voluntary giving of one’s own things, with state-run welfare, which is theft. 

Naturally, the Biden regime thinks the same thing.  According to the Wall Street Journal, “Biden Administration Seeks New Law to East Afghan Refugees’ Path to Green Cards.”  So we can import literally plan loads of people, many of whom the State Department has no idea who they are and of whom, “only a small share of those entering the U.S. qualified through the Special Immigrant Visa program intended for Afghan interpreters, drivers, embassy workers and other who directly worked for the American military and U.S. contractors.”  Let the refugee handouts begin! 

I could go on, but the reader by now should be able to see that political and economic Romanism is, far from being accidental, is the very warp and wood of the Biden regime. 

If Americans are to have any chance of retaining any of their remaining liberties, it is imperative for Christians to denounce and refute the political and economic Romanism of the Biden regime.  

And this thing was the sin of the house of Jeroboam, so as to exterminate and destroy it from the face of the earth.

-          1 Kings 13:34

So just how is the Federal Reserve like the sin of the house of Jeroboam?  For that matter, what is the Federal Reserve and who on earth is Jeroboam and the sin of his house of which I write? 

Well, you won’t have to wait long.  Those questions, Lord willing, I aim to answer in this post.

Jeroboam and the Sin of His House

Jeroboam was the first king of Israel, the Northern Kingdom, which split from the House of David after the accession of King Rehoboam, the son of King Solomon.   The proximate cause of the split was a tax revolt of the norther tribes due to their unhappiness at Solomon’s policy of heavy taxation and the arrogant response of Rehoboam, Solomon’s successor, when Jeroboam and other representatives from the north asked him for relief.  The split of the United Kingdom into warring Northern and Southern Kingdoms is recorded for us in 1 Kings 12.

The ultimate cause of the split was the will of God.  Solomon had rebelled against God, having his heart drawn aside into idolatry by his many foreign wives, and the splitting of the kingdom was God’s punishment for Solomon’s unfaithfulness.

In 1 Kings 11, the prophet Ahijah had prophesied to Jeroboam that God he would tear the kingdom out of the hand of Solomon and give him ten tribes, leaving one for David’s successor.  The Lord even promised Jeroboam that he would build him an enduring house provided he did what was right in the Lord’s eyes.

But disbelieving God, Jeroboam quickly fell into the sin of idolatry, as had Solomon. 

In Jeroboam’s case, he was concerned that if residents of the Northern Kingdom kept going to Jerusalem to worship, their hearts would be turned from following him and return to the house of David.  To prevent this, Jeroboam invented a whole new religion.  He made two golden calves, putting one in Bethel and the other in Dan, “made priests from every class of people, who were not of the sons of Levi,” and made sacrifices at a time, “which he devised in his own heart.” 

Jeroboam was confronted by a prophet of the Lord, who in dramatic fashion denounced the king while he was in the act of sacrificing.  When Jeroboam stretched forth his hand and called for the prophet’s arrest – this was the Old Testament version of cancel culture – his hand withered, “so that he could not pull it back to himself” and the altar split in two and the ashes poured out of it. Jeroboam then asked the prophet to restore hi hand, which the prophet did. 

Now one would think that such a powerful demonstration of God’s power and anger would have moved Jeroboam to repentance.  But this did not happen.  In 1 Kings 13:33, 34 we  read, “After these event [the withering of Jeroboam’s hand and the altar splitting in two] Jeroboam did not turn from his evil way, but again he made priest from every class of people for the high places; whoever wished, he consecrated him, and he became one of the priests of the high places.  And this thin was the sin of the house of Jeroboam, so as to exterminate and destroy it from the face of the earth.”  

The Sin Didn’t Stop with Jeroboam

Jeroboam reigned as king of Israel for twenty-two years.  Scholars differ on the dates of his reign, one putting it at 922-901 BC, while another gives the dates 931-910 BC.  Samaria , later the capital of the Northern Kingdom, fell to Assyria om 722 BC, so in either case the Northern Kingdom would continue for another 179 – 188 years after Jeroboam.  But although Jeroboam was succeeded by many other kings of Israel, none of them departed from his sin of establishing a false religion in the kingdom right at the outset.  One could even say that the sin of Jeroboam was endemic to the Northern Kingdom.

You can see this from reading through the remainder of the books of 1 and 2 Kings.  A search using the term “sin of Jeroboam” on BibleGateway yielded 24 occurrences in these two books. 

-          And He will give Israel up because of the sins of Jeroboam, who sinned and made Israel to sin (1 Kings 14:16)

-          He did evil in the sight of the LORD, and walked in the way of Jeroboam, and in his sin by which he had made Israel sin (1 Kings 15:34)

-          For he walked in all the ways of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, and in his sin by which he had made Israel sin (1 Kings 16:26)

-          But Jehu took no heed to walk in the law of the LORD God of Israel with all his heart; for he did not depart from the sins of Jeroboam, who had made Israel sin (2 Kings 10:31)

“Walked in the way (or ways) of Jeroboam” also returned several results.  For example, King Ahaziah, Ahab’s son, “did evil in the sight of the LORD, and walked…in the way of  Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who had made Israel sin.” 

At no time did any of the kings who reigned in the Northern Kingdom break the pattern of the sin of the house of Jeroboam.  They all walked in his “original sin,” and the whole nation went into captivity because of it.

The Sin of the Federal Reserve

The sin of the Federal Reserve (and all other central banks) has at least one thing in common with the sin of the house of Jeroboam.  Once established by Jeroboam, his idolatrous religious system proved impossible to get rid of.  Even zealous King Jehu, the only king of the Northern Kingdom about whom God had anything good to say, could not bring himself to end the Jeroboam’s false religion.  In like fashion, the Federal Reserve, although manifestly a corrupt, unchristian, and unconstitutional system from its founding in 1913 right up to the present, has so far proven impossible so much as even to audit, let alone get rid of. 

The Federal Reserve was corrupt from the beginning.  Just as with Jeroboam’s false religion, there was no point at which the Federal Reserve (henceforth, the Fed) was not corrupt and dishonest and sinful.  According to Fed critic G. Edward Griffin in his book The Creature from Jekyll Island – I highly recommend this very readable critique of the Fed – the founding of the Fed was quite literally a conspiracy, with some of the most powerful bankers and politicians in America along with Paul M. Warburg of the Rothchild banking dynasty meeting under secretive circumstances on Jekyll Island in Georgia in November 1910 to hammer out the details of what would become the Fed.  Griffin describes this meeting as the, “birth of a banking cartel to protect its members from competition.”

Of course, that’s not how it was sold to the public. Taking pains not to use the term “central bank,” the conspirators sold the Fed – even the name Federal Reserve is a con, for the Fed is not owned by the federal government, it is a private bank owned by the Fed’s large member banks and it has no reserves apart from money it creates out of thin air in a sort of twisted version of creation ex nihilo – to the American people as a way of stabilizing the banking system which had been rocked by a major crisis in 1907.  In truth, the Fed was conceived as a  way of transferring the risk of a banking crisis from the bankers themselves to the American people, but of course the Jekyll Island crowd wasn’t about to let that cat out of the bag. 

Once established by the Federal Reserve Act, passed by Congress in 1913, the Fed set up shop and his been operating ever since.  During that time, the dollar has lost 98-99% of its purchasing power.  It’s important to note that this loss of purchasing power of the nation’s currency is not some unforeseen bug, but a feature, of the system.  The depreciating currency – and in a debt based fiat currency system such as we have in America the currency must be debased otherwise the system would collapse - is essentially a giant transmission belt that serves to strip mine purchasing power from the wages and saving of ordinary Americans and deposit that stolen wealth into the pockets of the wealthiest of the wealthy.

It should be said here that as Christians we do not criticize the wealthy because they are wealthy.  If a man become rich by honestly serving his fellow man, very well.  There is no sin in earning a lot of money.  But it’s quite another matter to steal a lot of money.  And this is what the Fed was set up to do from the very beginning. 

Just as Jeroboam’s false religion was corrupt and idolatrous from the very beginning and at no time had God’s sanction, so too is central banking - whether conducted by the Fed, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia, or the People’s Bank of China, it matters not which one we speak of; they are all corrupt – a fraud and a curse upon the nations in which it is practiced, and this includes nearly all nations on earth. 

But there is at last another way in which the Fed is like the sin of the house of Jeroboam.  Not only was the Fed, like Jeroboam’s false religion, corrupt from the beginning, but it has persisted from presidential administration to presidential administration. 

It matters not whether the president is Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, a man who promises to cut the size of government or vastly expand its powers, the Fed keeps running in the background, churning out dollars with a click of the mouse.  At the present time, the Fed is committed to buying at least $120 billion (that’s right, $120 billion) per month in federal government debt and mortgage backed securities.  To put that in some perspective, Jeff Bezos, whom Forbes Magazine named the richest man in the world for the fourth consecutive year in 2021, has a fortune listed at $177 billion.  In less than two months’ time, the Fed prints another Jeff Bezos sized fortune. 

And to say the Fed prints the money really isn’t accurate.  It would be better to say that it clicks the money into existence, because all the newly created money is brought into existence on a computer.  They don’t even bother running a printing press.

But back to the notion that the Fed is much like Jeroboam’s sin.  No presidential candidate in my lifetime – with Ron Paul being the one exception – has ever seriously talked about ending the Fed. 

When Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were running for president in 2016, Clinton criticized Trump’s comments on the Fed saying, “You should not be commenting on the Fed actions when you are either running for president or you are president.”  Clinton couched her remarks as protecting markets, but one suspects there was more to it than that.  Presidents aren’t supposed to talk about the Fed, because the Fed is supposed to be independent.  But while Fed supporters like to speak of the Fed’s independence from the political process, a more honest word to use would be “secretive.” Those who run the Fed act more as if they belonged to a secret society than public servants.  And that’s not surprising given that their labors are directly damaging to the legitimate interests of the American people.  Because of this, they must keep the hoi polloi in the dark about all their money printing schemes, the real reason for rising prices [rising prices are not inflation; inflation is Fed money printing which results in rising prices, but you’re not supposed to know that], corporate bailouts and the rise in wealth disparity. 

But even populist Donald Trump did not lay the axe to the root and call for an end to the Fed.  When Trump complained about the actions of then Fed Chairman Jent Yellen, he was upset only because he believe that the Fed was acting to help Hillary Clinton, not because Trump himself had any objection to the Fed. 

The Fed engaged in massive money printing under George W. Bush, Barak Obama, Donald Trump and is engaging in massive money printing under Joe Biden.  And not only does the Fed print massive amounts of new currency under all administrations, Democrat or Republican it doesn’t matter, but it does so at a faster and faster pace.  Indeed, because of the debt-based nature of our monetary system, cash must be borrowed into existence at a faster and faster pace to pay the growing interest on the existing debt.  It’s a bit like having tiger by the tail.  Once you grab that tail, you can’t let go.  Once you begin a debt-based financial system, which America did with the creation of the Fed, you can’t stop adding debt.  Such systems are a sort of cul-de-sac, a dead-end road to financial perdition.       

To sustain the unsustainable system of debt increasing at a faster and faster pace just to service the interest on the existing debt, central banks the world over have suppressed interest rates to near zero and even below zero.  That’s right, in today’s world of central banking, you get paid to borrow and punished to save.  This is a financial version of what Isaiah warned about, calling good evil and evil good.  This cannot continue indefinitely.

End the Fed

In his recent column “The Woke Fed,” Ron Paul wrote once again about the coming economic crisis and that the crisis would, “either be precipitated by or result in the rejection of the dollar’s world reserve currency status.”

But more disturbing than this is that Paul noted that the inevitable collapse of our current monetary system result in it being replaced, “with a government even more authoritarian than the current one.”  Paul doesn’t say so explicitly, but he’s likely referring to the creation of a new system of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC’s) by which the monetary elites will hope to remain in power once the current system implodes. 

Just as Israel desperately needed to repent of its idolatry by removing the false religions system of Jeroboam, so too does the United States need to repent of our monetary sins, end the Fed and allow the free market to determine what monetary system we should have going forward.  Note well, I do not say the government should institute a system of sound money, but rather the government should get out of the way wan allow the free market to determine what money is best. 

The idea that the government should not be involved in the manufacture of money may stride some readers as odd.  After all, don’t all governments manufacture money.  Most all of the them do, or use money manufactured by other governments, but this does not mean they are right in so doing.  To say that all governments print money simply is a descriptor of what they do.  But this is not to say they ought to do it.  Only that they do it.  

According to the Bible, there are only two function os government, punish evildoers and reward the good. There’s nothing there thay says anything about printing money, or in the case of the United States, chartering a private bank, the Fed, to regulate the money. 

Just as idolatry is always wrong, so too is it always wrong for politicians and central bankers empowered by them to regulate a nation’s money supply.  The bankers and politicians will always abuse their position.  Just as idolatry is evil and cannot be reformed, so too is central banking both evil and irreformable.  For the health of the nation, both must be done away with entirely  

Let us, therefore, end the Fed.    

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.

-          Genesis 1:1

April 15 of this month marked the 109th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic.  In commemoration of the event, one of the YouTube channels I followed put out a multi-part series covering the events of the April 14 and 15 1912, the night of the sinking. 

One of the videos featured and interesting fact that I had heard about previously but had not appreciated its importance.  As part of the evacuation, Charles Lightoller, the Titanic’s second officer and senior surviving officer, opened the gangway door on D-Deck to help with the lowering of one of the lifeboats. As it turned out, the door was never used during the ship’s evacuation, and in the chaos, was forgotten and left open. This, as it turned out, was a significant oversight.

The D-Deck gangway door was about halfway up on the port (left) side of the ship and normally well above the waterline.  According to one article, it was the ‘front door’ for first class passengers boarding the ship.  But as Titanic settled, eventually the water made its way up to the door and started pouring in.  The way it was explained in the video, the area the gangway afforded to the advancing water was actually larger than the sum of area of the original punctures made by the iceberg on the starboard (right) side at the time of the collision.  With this additional route for water to enter the ship, the sinking of the Titanic rapidly accelerated.    

So just what does this bit of Titanic trivia have to do with today’s subject at hand, marriage?  I admit, the connection may not be immediately obvious, but hear me out.

The stated purpose of this series, going back to Part 1, is, “to apply the revealed history found in Genesis to the current moral, political, scientific and economic problems of our day, refuting the contemporary confusion and setting forth the mind of God on these issues.” 

This brings us to the subject of marriage. 

Back in the day, and we don’t have to go very far back for this, most Americans accepted the Biblical definition of marriage, whether they themselves were Christians. 

But all that has changed in recent years.  If recent polling is to be believed, a full seventy percent of Americans now support same-sex marriage.  As one measure of how things have changed, I recall that the State of Ohio amended its constitution in 2004 to specifically define marriage as a union between one man and one woman.  There was widespread public support for the amendment and the measure was adopted with little public outcry.  This was a mere seventeen years ago. 

The Ohio amendment and all other state-level prohibitions of same-sex marriage were overturned in 2015 by a U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Obergefell v. Hodges case, which originated right here in river city, my hometown of Cincinnati. 

To return to my earlier point about how the mistake of leaving the D-Deck gangway door open sped up the sinking of the Titanic, in like fashion, I believe, the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision sped up the sinking of the America’s ship of state, which already was well under way in 2015.  It’s not as if leaving the gangway door open is what sealed Titanic’s fate.  The ship was going to sink anyway based on the damage already done by the iceberg.  But leaving the door open sped things up.  The same with America.  American’s have been losing their liberties since the Progressive Era – I always thought it should be named the Regressive Era – so the process has been going on for well over a century at this point.  The loss of liberty was well underway even in 1912 when the Titanic sunk.  But the rate of our loss of liberty, almost imperceptible at first, has sped up greatly in recent years.  In my opinion, the Obergefell v. Hodges decision can be likened to the leaving open of the D-Deck gangway door.  We were well on our way to sinking before that, but same-sex marriage sped things up. 

I say this because it allowed evil to access new parts of our society that had remained untouched until that time.  Over the years, there was greater and greater acceptance of same-sex marriage, but the legal recognition of it has seemed to speed up, not only the rate of acceptance of same-sex marriage, but also other parts of the homosexual agenda such as the recognition of transgenders as the new Brahmins of  the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion movement. 

But despite what the wokesters would have you believe, there is a valid definition of marriage that is binding on all men and women for the very reason that it is God’s definition of marriage.  And God’s definition does not agree with the Supreme Court’s. 

What is Marriage?         

Genesis 2:24 gives us a definition of marriage with the words, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”

Based on this and other verses, the Westminster Confession of Faith gives this definition of marriage, “Marriage is to be between one man and one woman.” 

As we can see, there’s no confusion at all as to the Bible’s definition of marriage, nor is it a thing hard to understand.  You don’t have to be at the level of a Martin Luther, John Calvin or Gordon Clark to get it.  And the Bible’s definition of marriage was so widely accepted even as recently as twenty years ago that, as noted above, Ohio was able to amend its Constitution to define marriage using the same words as the Westminster Confession.

Ohio’s decision and the decision of other states – Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee in this part of the country - to define marriage in a way that is consistent with the Scriptures is the very essence of good government.  But all this was preempted by the evil 2015 decision of the Supreme Court. 

Is Government Free to Define Marriage as It Sees Fit?

Now some may say that to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman is all well and good, but in the end, it’s only your opinion and you don’t have a right to impose your opinions on others.  Put a bit differently, some people like to argue that “you can’t legislate morality!” 

To which I would answer, the Christian definition of marriage is not an opinion, it is the Law of God.  And Christians have, not only the right to impose the Law of God upon the nation, but the duty to do so.  As to the objection that “you can’t legislate morality,” this is nonsense.  All criminal justice codes are, by definition, attempts to legislate, at least in the outward sense, morality.

Government is not free to define marriage as it sees fit for the simple reason that civil government is a creature of God.  The Apostle Paul asked the rhetorical question, “Does the thing formed say to him who formed it, why have your made me like this?” To which the obvious answer is, no, it does not.  And if civil government is a creature of God, and it is, then magistrates are not free to define terms as they see fit.  The Apostle Paul describes the civil magistrate as “God’s minister.” And if he’s God’s minister, his job is to carry out God’s will, which as a civil magistrate means punishing those who practice evil and rewarding the good.  And it is God who defines what is good and what is evil. 

When civil magistrates, and this includes Supreme Court justices, pass laws or give rulings that are contrary to the Law of God, they come under God’s judgment for calling good evil and evil good.

One way in which civil magistrates punish evil and reward the good is by enforcing just contracts.  Jesus gave an example of this in his Sermon on the Mount, where he told his hearers to agree quickly with those who are taking them to court, lest they be turned over to the magistrate for punishment. 

But what if the terms of a contract are unjust?  For example, we’ve probably all heard of cases where someone hired a “hit man” to murder someone for them.  In this case, the two parties agree to the terms of the contract, what is to be done the amount to be paid, but would the government be right to enforce such a contract if the hit man was not paid the agreed upon amount.  Of course not, for the simple reason that the terms of the contract themselves are immoral. 

For this same reason, the civil magistrate cannot recognize same-sex marriage or enforce the terms of such unions for at least two reasons.  First, there is no such thing as same-sex marriage, and civil magistrates are not free to redefine marriage to include such unions.  Second, because the terms of the same-sex marriage contract themselves are immoral. Not only do the Scriptures define what marriage is, they also explicitly condemn Sodomy.  It was expressly outlawed in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament we read that persons who practice it, as Paul makes clear to the Corinthians, “will not inherit the kingdom of God.” 

Calling Evil Good and Good Evil          

In Chapter 5 of Isaiah, the prophet pronounces woe on those who call “evil good and good evil.”  Even a cursory glance at the news should tell you that this is a common occurrence in our own day.  As the men of Judah in Isaiah’s day, Americans in the 21st century have “gone away backward.”  That is to say, not only have we as a nation gone wrong, we’ve gone 180 degrees wrong to the point where we think darkness is light and light is darkness and seek to punish anyone who says otherwise.    

We have, in short, lost our ability to discern good from evil. 

What accounts for this lack of discernment, the ability to make distinctions?  In his Trinity Review “The Church Irrational,” John Robbins tells us the fundamental answer is the will of God.  Men lack discernment because God causes them to lack it.  There’s an old saying Robbins quotes in “The Church Irrational” which reads, “Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad.”  Translated into Christian terms, one can find this idea expressed several times in Scripture.  One such example is in Romans Chapter 1, where the Apostle, after calling the readers’ attention to the reasons for God’s revealing his wrath against all ungodliness, writes, “And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient (or “fitting” as the NKJV reads).”

In looking at the moral, economic and political landscape in which we live in America in the early 21st century, it is clear that God has given many of my fellow countrymen over to a reprobate or debased mind for their refusal to honor him to “retain God in their knowledge.”  The widespread acceptance of homosexuality, the successful demands to change the law to allow for same-sex marriage, and explosion of interest in transgenderism in our time are clear demonstration of the curse of God Paul wrote about in Romans.

As Christians we mut pray, in the first place, that God would grant us discernment that we also are not deceived.  “Don’t be deceived,” was a consistent injunction of both Jesus and Paul.  As modern day Americans, we are subject to perhaps the most sophisticated and powerful propaganda machine the world has ever seen in the form of the media, entertainment and educational complexes, all which have repeatedly shown themselves hostile to Christ and all that is called God.  We must pray for discernment.

We must also pray for courage.  Near the end of 1 Corinthians, Paul tells his readers, “Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong.”  I always liked the King James translation of this verse, because it really does capture the sense of the Greek with the turn of phrase “quit you like men.”  The Greek verb translated by these words literally means “act like a man.”  It reminds me of Hugh Latimer’s heroic last words.  While the executioners were lighting the fires to burn him, he said to his fellow martyr Nicholas Ridley, “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man.  We shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England that as I trust shall never be put out.”   Who knows, maybe Latimer had Paul’s words in mind when he said this. 

Latimer’s courage, as great an example as it is of steadfast Christian faith, was not of him.  It was a gift of God.  And it is to the Lord we must look for the courage to fight the good fight of faith in these difficult days as well.    

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

-          Genesis 1:1

In his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis wrote, “The right to private property can only be considered a secondary natural right, derived from the principle of the universal destination of created goods.” 

Listed under the heading “Re-Envisaging The Social Role of Property,” Francis’ comments are not, as some of his more free market critics suppose, out of the mainstream of Roman Catholic economic thought.  Rather, the Pope’s attack on private property is simply a restatement of Rome’s long-held unchristian, erroneous, and socialist understanding of private property. 

To underscore Francis hostility to private property, we need look no further than the paragraph quoted at the top of this post, “The principle of the common use of created goods is the ‘first principle of the whole ethical and social order; it is a natural and inherent right that takes priority over others.’”  In Pope Francis view, collectivism is “ethical” while holding to the Bible’s view of private property, that it is lawful for a man to do what he wishes with his own things, is not. 

Contrary to Pope Francis, the common use of created goods, far from being the “first principle of the whole ethical and social order,” is a guarantor of poverty and tyranny.  One would think the many failed socialist states over the past 100 years, and the economic and political disasters suffered by those unfortunate enough to live in them, would make this clear.  But far from slowing them down, it’s almost as if the economic disasters suffered by the Soviet Union, Venezuela and a host of other nations embolden the socialists, including Pope Francis, to double down on calling evil good and good evil by pushing for more economic collectivism.     

In one of his lectures, John Robbins made the important point that systems of thought tend to go wrong from the g

very beginning. That is to say, systems of thought, in this case economic thought, tend to begin with faulty premises which then lead their adherents to faulty conclusions. 

This can be seen in the economic thinking of Pope Francis, who begins with the unbiblical notion of the “the principle of the universal destination of created goods” which in turn leads him to attack private property and capitalism – God’s economics – and to promote the form of coveting we know as socialism or collectivism. 

But while at least some Christians understand that capitalism is the economic system of the Bible, it may come as a surprise even to them that one must begin in Genesis to have a sound understanding of economics, specifically, the origin of private property. 

The Universal Destination of Goods   

In the first paragraph above, I quoted Pope Francis writing about the “universal destination of created goods.”  Unless you’ve previously studied Roman Catholic economic thought, this may be a new term for you.  As is often the case with new terms, it’s easy to read past them and instead focus on more familiar ideas.  But “the universal destination of created goods” – sometimes this same idea is expressed as “the universal destination of all goods” or simply “the universal destination of goods” – is the most important concept in Roman Catholic economic thought.  As such, it’s worth pausing here to discuss it.

In Ecclesiastical Megalomania, John Robbins wrote the following about the universal destination of goods,

The Thomistic notion of original communism – the denial that private property is part of the natural law, but that common property is both natural and divine – is foundational to all the Roman Catholic arguments for various forms of collectivism, from medieval feudalism and guild socialism to twentieth century fascism and liberation theology.  The popes refer to this original communism as the “universal destination of all goods” (38).

Robbins went on to note that the principle of the universal destination of goods is so important in Roman Catholic social thought that “all rights are to be subordinated to it.”  Robbins quotes Pope Paul VI writing, “All other rights whatsoever, including those of property and of free commerce, are to be subordinated to this principle [the universal destination of goods].”

This quote from Pope Paul VI, found in his 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio, exposes as false the contention that Pope Francis is somehow, of all the popes, uniquely anti-capitalist.  Responding to charges of Marxism stemming from his anti-capitalist 2013 Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis denied the charge and added that, “there is nothing in the exhortation that cannot be found in the social doctrine of the church.”  In this case, Francis is telling the truth.  One can go a step further and say that there is nothing in Francis’ subsequent writing which cannot be found in the social teaching of the church.  This includes Francis’ statement about the fundamental importance of the principle of the universal destination of created goods from his encyclical Fratelli Tutti.  Far from being uniquely anti-capitalist, Pope Francis’ hatred of free markets and his love of collectivism puts him solidly within the tradition of Rome’s social teaching. 

Original Communism or Original Capitalism

Rome’s doctrine of the universal destination of goods, as important as it is in the Church-State’s system of social teaching, itself rests on a prior erroneous idea, that communism, not private property, was the original pre-fall economic order.

According to Rome, God gave the world to man collectively, not severally, to each man individually.  In his Trinity Review “Ronald Sider – Contra Deum,” John Robbins refutes this idea as expressed in the work of Ronald Sider, an ersatz Evangelical whose economic thought has more in common with the Popes of Rome than with the Bible.  Writes Robbins,

Sider would have us believe that when God put man on Earth, he gave the Earth to men corporately, not severally. Nowhere does he present any evidence for this idea. God, holding ultimate ownership of the Earth, gave it to men severally, not collectively. The argument for this may be found in the works of the seventeenth-century Christian thinker, Robert Filmer, of whom, presumably, Sider has heard. 

What Robbins is saying here is that contrary to the false teaching of Rome, the original economic order was one of private property, capitalism, not communism, that is to say, collective ownership. 

Since Robbins cites Robert Filmer, it is worth noting that Robbins’ 1973 doctoral dissertation from Johns Hopkins University is titled The Political Thought of Sir Robert Filmer.  With that in mind, let’s take a look at what Filmer had to say about the original, pre-fall property order. 

Wrote Filmer,

[F]or it is not possible for the wit of man to search out the first grounds or principles of government (which necessarily depend upon the original [origin] of property) except he know that at the creation one man alone was made, to whom the dominion of all things was given, and from whom all men derive their title (203-204, Patriarchy and Other Political Works, emphasis mine).

The idea here is that God, being the ultimate owner of all things, gave ownership of all the world to Adam, who parceled out his dominion to his sons, who did likewise for their descendants and so on and so forth.  Writes Robbins,

Filmer argues for private property in the state of innocence in the same way that he argues that paternal and regal power are one:  first, both power and property, which in effect are but different names for the same thing, were granted by God in Genesis.  Second, respect for both power and property is commanded in the moral law.  Just as obedience to governors is subsumed under the Fifth Commandment, so private property is established by the Eight Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal.” In a sense, Filmer is much more loyal to the Scriptural account than the Fathers, who posit a “natural” community of goods before the Fall, despite the fact that, as Filmer points out, this would make the law changeable.  All other commandments are acknowledged to be valid both before and after the Fall; indeed, the Patristic doctrine was that the Ten Commandments were given because of the perverting effect sin had had on the law written in the hearts of men, and were not an addition to the effaced innate law.  It is the divine law as revealed in the Ten Commandments which Filmer substitutes for the natural law regarding community of goods [the universal destination of goods] which the Fathers had evidently adopted from the Stoics (Robbins, The Political Thought of Sir Robert Filmer, 277).

As did Adam, so too did Noah who, as Robbins notes, “was more or less a second Adam,” dividing the world among his three sons after the flood.  

In summary, both Robert Filmer and John Robbins taught, and taught correctly, that the original economic system at the founding of the world was capitalism, not communism. 

The Pivotal Role of Genesis

As noted in Part 1, the goal of this series is to apply the lessons of Genesis to the many, serious, and seemingly insoluble problems America, and more broadly, the nations of the West, face in the early 21st century.  And one of the most important lessons we can learn from Genesis is that the original economic system of the world, before the Fall, was, contrary to general consensus of the church Fathers and the teaching of the Popes of Rome, one of original private property, not original communism. 

It is said that the worse fate than can befall and idea is not to be brilliantly attacked, but to be incompetently defended.  By tracing the private property order back to the foundation of the world, one can establish that capitalism is the economic expression of Christianity and thus and idea that can and must be defended against those who would push communism, fascism or any other economic system that attacks the institution of private property. 

But private property has suffered at the hands of incompetent defense.  John Locke, for example, believed in private property but struggled to account for it.  For example, in his Second Treatise on Civil Government Locke explicitly denied Filmer’s contention that all titles to private property originated in Adam and agreed with the church Fathers that God gave the world to mankind collectively.  As such, he had to find some way to get from collective ownership to individual ownership. Locke solved this problem by arguing that collective property became private property when men mixed their labor with it.  “Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property” (Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government, 288, Laslett, ed.). 

So for Locke, it is the mixing of one’s labor with property held in common that makes it one’s own.  But where, we may ask, does one get the permission to mix his labor with property held in common?  Would this not be stealing from the commons?  Locke cites no Scripture for his argument. 

This is not a competent defense of private property, but it is a very common notion among those who would seek to defend capitalism against the predations of the Popes and other socialists. 

Reprove, Correct, Instruct

In his second letter to Timothy, the Apostle Paul wrote that all Scripture is God breathed and, “Profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.”  This includes the good work of defending private property and limited government, what John Robbins called constitutional capitalism, “the economic and political consequent and counterpart of Christian theology.”

Whether it is the Antichrist Popes of Rome, a president, prime minister, or member of Congress, anyone who teaches a form of economics that undermines private property and seeks to use government to steal from one man in order to give to another, Christians have a moral obligation to rebuke, correct and instruct them in the truth of the Word of God. 

Economics is not an independent science.  It is a branch of theology. But, unfortunately, many Christians today are nearly as in the dark concerning what the Bible says about private property as unbelievers.  This needs to change.    

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

-          Genesis 1:1

“Words cannot express how I feel.”  Many of us have probably said this or something like it.  I know I have. 

But as common as it is to hear people say that words cannot express this or that, this is a mistake.  Words are entirely adequate to express all thoughts. 

One lesson in the adequacy of language is found right in Genesis 1, where we see God speak the heavens the earth and all that is in them into existence.  If words are adequate to bring about the creation of the universe, by implication words are certainly capable of expressing whatever occurs within the universe.  This seems like an obvious point, yet for those of us who live in the irrational and emotional 21st century, it’s a point that must be emphasized. 

And God said, Let there be light….

It was mentioned earlier in this series that the Westminster Shorter Catechism provides a brilliant definition of the work of creation.  Question 9 asks, “What is the work of creation?,” the answer being, “The work of creation is, God’s making all things of nothing, by the word of his power, in the space of six days, and all very good.” 

It was by the “word of his power” that God spoke the world into existence in Genesis.  That same expression “the word of his power” occurs in the New Testament, where the Author of Hebrews tells us that Jesus is, at this very moment, “upholding all things by the word of his power.”  The term “the word of his power” sounds a bit unusual in English.  In his commentary on Hebrews, John Owen makes the point that one can change the order of the words from “the word of his power” to “the power of his word” with no difference in meaning.  Owen notes that one can even express the same idea by saying “his powerful word.”  Regardless of how one states the idea, in her Trinity Review “Linguistics and the Bible,” Marla Perkins Bevin noted that one implication of Genesis 1:1-3 is, “that what God says happens.”

Language, Neither Evolved nor Created

Most of us are familiar with the Darwinian explanation of the origin of the various forms of life we see.  Sometimes called “molecules to man” evolution, Darwinism posits that all life has evolved over billions of years through a process called natural selection.

But while Darwinism’s influence in biology is well known, less well known is its influence in other fields of study.  Modern linguistics – linguistics is the analysis of language – use Darwinist assumptions when discussing the origin of language.       

In Wikipedia’s entry “Origin of Language,” we read that famed linguist Noam Chomsky holds that language arose from a single chance mutation in one individual about 100,000 years ago, and that the language faculty was installed in perfect or near-perfect form.  It’s almost as if Chomsky is saying that the ability to use language was installed into a specific individual as one would install a program onto a computer.  In this respect, Chomsky is closer to the truth than some of his linguist colleagues who hold that language developed slowly over time from animal grunts and squeals. 

According to Bevin,

Language was not created and did not evolve from animal grunts or mews. God eternally has language as part of His rationality. Human beings have language because it is part of the image of God. Thus, God's use of language is an exemplar for human use of language, and it can be used to provide information about human language (“Linguistics and the Bible”).

Language is eternally part of God’s rationality, and men use language because by virtue of their rationality they are the image of God. Language is neither the result of evolution nor creation but precedes creation itself.  “When God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light, the word (and therefore the idea) chronologically and logically preceded the visible light. God's idea of light and God's language about light preceded visible light.”

The Origin of Different Languages

Just as the origin of language itself is an impenetrable mystery to those who deny the Word of God, so too is the origin of the multitude of languages that now, and for some time past, exist in the world.  That some languages are related to one another more closely than others is evident.  For example, there are many cognate words between English and German.  On the other hand, some languages have nothing in common, compare Chinese and English for one such example.

Where do all these languages come from?  As the Newsweek article “Why Are There So Many Different Languages in the World?” conceded, secular linguists struggle to answer this question.  “Why is it that humans speak so many languages?  And why are they so unevenly spread across the planet?,” asks the article.  As Newsweek puts it, “we have few clear answers to these fundamental questions about how humanity communicates.”

Now if the author of the Newsweek article had said, “I have few clear answers to these fundamental questions,” then this would have been a true statement.  But such is not the case for everyone.  For some of us know very well the origin of the multitude of languages that are spoken in the world.  But the establishment intellectuals of our day will not hear it. 

As with all other knowledge, Christians know the origin of the multitude of languages because it is, as all other knowledge, revealed to them in the Word of God.  In Genesis 11 we read God’s account of the origin of the multitude of language, that it was punishment for the disobedience of the men who built the Tower of Babel.     

Of course, if one were to present this argument in an academic setting, he would be immediately denounced as a quack and a fool and given the bum’s rush out of the ivory tower.  I remember one of my Latin professors in college dismissing the Tower of Babel preemptively before anyone even brought it up in class.  He was a brilliant man and gifted teacher, holding a Ph.D. from Cambridge.  But on this fundamental question about language, not only did he not know the truth, but he was actively hostile to it.

As Christians, we need not be embarrassed of the truth revealed to us in the Scriptures.  As Paul wrote, “But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty.”  There was a time in the West when arguing from the Scriptures was respected among academics.  Not anymore.  There’s probably no way to be dismissed faster by academe than by accepting the Bible as inerrant and true.  But then, that’s the world’s problem, not the Christian’s. 

Our Words Matter   

Somewhere in one of his lectures, I don’t have the reference handy, John Robbins made the point that people today tend to dismiss words as unimportant.  Indeed, they do.  One can see this in the way many politicians breath lies as easily as most of us breathe air, or in the crude insults some people wield so casually on social media platforms. 

But the Bible says our words, the words you and I use, matter in eternity.  This may seem shocking to some, focused as we are in our time on actions and material things rather than words.  But given that it was words that created the material things around us, and not material things that created words, it should come as no surprise that words matter to God. 

Said Jesus, “But I say to you that for every idle word that men may speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgment.  For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned” (Matthew 12:36-37).  Why is this?  Because our words show what we are in our hearts.  In another place Jesus said, “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil.  For out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks (Luke 6:45). Our words are revealers of who we are.  They show whether we are wise men or fools. Whether we are saved or lost. 

God prohibits lying and went so far as to list bearing false witness as one of the Ten Commandments.  Wrote Bevin,

God's abhorrence of lying makes sense because when God speaks, He describes or creates reality, and when people speak, God commands that human language should express the truth. God did not capriciously decide that human beings should not lie; He objects to lying because He is Truth itself, and His own use of language is truthful. If anyone fails to understand the pragmatics of first-words-then-things in Genesis 1, the significance of "Thus says the Lord" and God's abhorrence of lying might also be missed (“Linguistics”).

Jesus told his hearers that liars have the devil as their father.  “You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do.  He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him.  When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it” (John 8:44). 

Words matter.  It was words that God used to create the heavens and the earth.  It is our words, spoken and unspoken, by which we will be judged.  Let us take care to respect the power of words, both those of others and our own. 

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

-          Genesis 1:1

On March 24, 2021, ABC News ran the headline “Rachel Levine confirmed by Senate, become highest ranking openly transgender official.“ 

It wasn’t many years ago that such a thing – the Senate confirmation of a transgendered person for high government office - would have been impossible.  But in 2021 America, Levine’s confirmation was inevitable. 

A month earlier, the conservative website Revolver ran an article correctly predicting Levine’s confirmation.  The piece stated that, “Rachel Levine’s imminent confirmation proves Transgenderism is America’s new state religion.   The article went on to note,

Fifty years ago, the cult of transgenderism didn’t even exist. Merely ten years ago, it was still so obscure most Americans knew nothing about it. But over the past decade, transgenderism has been accepted en masse by the centers of power in America, which are now imposing them on the whole country. The core parts of its doctrine are easy to list:

·         Physical sex and “gender identity” are completely unrelated to one another.

·         Being “cisgender” and “transgender” are equally ordinary.

·         Gender is “fluid” and there are far more genders than merely “male” and “female.” In fact, there may be infinite genders.

·         Gender roles are socially constructed, and there is no biological basis for behavioral differences between males and females.

·         Despite the above, a person can also innately know that they were assigned the “wrong” gender, even if this is based on their failure to conform to gender norms that are, supposedly, only social constructs.

·         A person can know he is transgender at any age. It is completely normal for teenagers, preteens, and even toddlers to become “transgender,” with potentially invasive treatments like puberty-blocking pills and even surgery.

·         A person has the right to choose their own pronouns, to demand that others “state their pronouns,” and to demand punishment when their pronouns are not respected.

·         Not only may a person change his name at any time, but it is “deadnaming” to use or even mention a prior name.

By this time, you may be wondering why, in a post about the Biblical account of the creation of man, I’m writing about transgenderism.  My reason for doing so stems from the stated purpose of this series.  As I wrote in Part 1, “It is my intention in this series to apply the revealed history found in Genesis to the current moral, political, scientific, and economic problems of our day, refuting the contemporary confusion and setting forth the mind of God on these issues.” 

Nowhere is the confusion of our age more evident than in the matter of transgenderism, and nowhere is the mind of God in more desperate need of application. 

Male and Female He Created Them

In Genesis 1:27 we read, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

This one verse goes a long way to clearing up our present-day transgender confusion.  In combination with other passages, it decisively refutes the transgender agenda which, as the Revolver article quoted above notes, has been accepted en masse by the centers of power in America, which are now imposing them on the whole country.”

For example, there is no hint that, “Physical sex and ‘gender identity’ are completely unrelated to one another.”  There are men and there are women.  In Genesis 2:7 we read, “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”  Later in Genesis 2, we read, “And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone: I will make him an help meet for him…And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.”

Someone may object at this point that the first core premise of transgenderism listed above – physical sex and “gender identity” are completely unrelated to one another – has not been refuted.  “After all,” they may argue, “the text speaks only of Adam and Eve’s physical sex, not their gender identity.”

Yes, that’s true.  But we’re not done yet.

Genesis 2:23-24 help to build the case against transgenderism.  There we read, “And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”

There is no hint whatsoever in this passage that the terms “man and woman” mean anything other than the standard definition of the terms.  Adam was physically a man and understood himself to be so.  Likewise, Eve was physically a woman and understood herself to be so. 

Further, in Deuteronomy 22:5 we read, “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.”

This knocks out the idea that “physical sex and ‘gender identity’ are completely unrelated to one another.”  Very clearly, they are related to one another, otherwise the prohibition of men dressing as women and women dressing as men would make no sense.  Trans women – trans woman is a biological male who identifies as a woman – are not women.  They are men who are deceiving themselves and others. 

In the New Testament, there are several passages that clearly condemn homosexuality and, by implication, also condemn transgenderism.  Of these passages, the one offering the clearest condemnation of transgenderism is 1 Corinthians 6:9-10.  Writes Paul, “Be not deceived:  neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind…shall inherit the kingdom of God.”  In place of the terms “effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind,” the New King James Version uses “homosexuals” and “sodomites.” 

The Greek word translated as “effeminate” by the KJV and “homosexuals” by the NKJV is malakos, the basic meaning of which is soft or effeminate. This word can also be used to refer to passive male homosexuals, that is, those who submit to acts of homosexuality.  The NKJV provides “catamite” as an alternate translation of malakos.  Put another way, a malakos is someone who plays the female part in a male, same-sex relationship.  That is to say, the malakos is a man pretending to be a woman.  This is exactly what transgenderism is.  Such people, says Paul, “shall not inherit the kingdom of God.”

These passages also eliminate the third point of transgenderism – gender is “fluid” and there are far more genders than merely “male” and “female.” In fact, there may be many genders.  For that matter, they eliminate all the basic tenants of transgenderism, including the bizarre pronouns that have been invented by transgender advocates to avoid the use of standard male and female ones.   

The Scriptures teach that there are two sexes, male and female.  The notion that there is a thing called “gender” which is divorced from one’s physical sex is unknown in the word of God.  Because of sin, many confused people behave in ways that are sexually deviant and the Bible lists these out in some detail.  Among the deviant sexual behaviors listed in the Bible are: adultery, fornication, homosexuality, crossdressing, bestiality and incest. But simply because some confused people make claims about their gender, this in no way obligates Christians to believe them. 

Hated by the World, Rewarded by God

As Christians, we are told to test all things and hold fast what is good.  The standard for Christian testing is, and always has been, the 66 books of the Bible, the revealed, infallible, and inerrant Word of God.  And these 66 books deny every one of the claims of the transgender advocates. 

In our own time, the world appears to be spiraling into madness of the sort that we seen occur from time to time in history.  This is a dangerous time for Christians, as the man who holds to a Biblical understanding of men, women and marriage is bound to run headlong into the evil agenda that is being imposed upon society from above.  As the Revolver article noted, the tenants of transgenderism have, “been accepted en masse by the centers of power in America which are now imposing them on the whole country.”  And what is happening in America is happening throughout the formerly Christian West. 

But as Christians, we are called to be salt and light in this dark and dying world.  We do not have the option to ignore sin.  We do not have the right to call good evil and evil good.  We do not have the choice of remaining silent.  But condemning sin is only part of the job of being salt and light.  We also have the Gospel, the good news, of Jesus Christ to declare.  Through faith in him, sinful men and women can have their sins forgiven.  They can have their debased mind removed and a sound mind restored to them, much as the Gadarene demoniac.  Luke 8:26-39 records how Jesus cleansed this madman – Luke records for us that he wore no clothes and lived among the tombs - of demons.  When the men of the city heard what had happened and came to see for themselves, Luke tell us that they, “found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind” (emphasis added).  You and I live in a civilization that is losing its mind.  But we have the cure.  By God’s grace, some will listen.  As Paul noted in his epistle to the Corinthians cited above, “such were some of you.”    

But as the Scriptures also make clear, Christians will not always receive a warm reception when preaching the Law and the Gospel.  The world is going to hate us.  Jesus promised this would happen.  We can count on it.  “If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you.  If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.  Remember the word that I said to you, The servant is not greater than his lord.  If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you (John 15:18-20).  

But Jesus said this as well, “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.  Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you” (Matthew 5:11-12).

But whether we as Christians are heard or hated, let us be found faithful to our calling.  For as Jesus himself said, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:  Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever  I have commanded you:  and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

-          Genesis 1:1

“The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed, and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man, or Church; but wholly upon God (who is truth itself) the author thereof: and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God.”  Thus reads Chapter 1, Section 4 of The Westminster Confession of Faith. 

Last week it was mentioned that it would be both foolish and impious of me to attempt to prove that the 66 books of the Bible are the infallible and inerrant Word of God.  The foolishness of this project, as you may recall, was found in the axiomatic position the Bible plays in the Christian system of thought. 

An axiom is a first principle, an unproven and unprovable first principle.  The reason an axiom is unproven and unprovable lies in the very definition of the term “axiom” itself.  If one were to prove a first principle, then it would no longer be a first principle.  Whatever argument used to prove the axiom would take the original axiom’s place as the new first principle.  

Some Christians may be concerned by the assertion that we do not prove the axiom of Christianity – The Bible Alone is the Word of God – supposing that somehow this puts Christianity on a shaky footing.  But this concern can be assuaged by remembering that all systems of thought – and this includes all secular systems of thought of the sort the world delights to throw at Christians – have their axioms.  In this case, the Christian with his axiom is no worse off than the secular scientist or philosopher with his axioms.  The Christian begins his thinking in one place, the 66 books of the Bible.  On the other hand, the scientist begins his thinking in another place, perhaps on the axiom of the general reliability of the senses.

In addition to it being foolish to attempt to prove that the Bible is the infallible and inerrant Word of God, it was also mentioned that it would be impious to do so.  “Impious” is not a term we use often, so perhaps a definition is in order.  Merriam Webster defies it as irreverent or profane.  The notion that the fallible words of sinful man are better testimony of the truth than God’s Word itself is the very definition of impiety.  

The Westminster Confession citation above refers to several passages from Scripture to supports its claims.   

-          1 Peter 1:19, 21 And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts; for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.

-          2 Timothy 3:16 All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.

-          1 John 5:9 If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater.

It was Augustine who famously wrote, “For understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore do not seek to understand in order to believe, but believe that you may understand” (Tractate 29 on John 7:14-18).  In this statement, Augustine shows himself a Scripturalist.  He attempts not to prove the Bible is the Word of God, but accepts it as true – that is, he accepts the Bible as his axiom - and his understanding of God and his works follows from this.

With all this said, let us turn to the subject at hand, which is Genesis as history.

Genesis as History  

Accepting that Genesis is history – all of Genesis is, of course, history; but in our study the special emphasis is on Genesis chapters 1-11 – is fundamental to a correct understanding of the whole of Scripture.    

The stance of this author on the doctrine of creation is that Genesis 1 teaches, and teaches clearly, that the Lord created all things of nothing by speaking them into existence in the space of six literal, 24-hour days, and that the creation was all very good.

Among Christians, this was doctrine was not seriously challenged, “until,” as Gary Crampton noted in his Trinity Review “The Days of Creation,” “the late 18th and early 19th centuries with the onslaught of evolutionary thinking.” 

In reading the works of the Reformers of the 16th century and the Puritans, one will find, as far as this author is aware, no hint of a question about the historicity of the events recorded in Genesis 1-11.

In his Annals of the World published in 1650, James Ussher began by writing, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. {Ge 1:1} The beginning of time, according to our chronology, happened at the start of the evening preceding the 23rd day of October (on the Julian calendar), 4004 BC or 710 JP [Julian Period]…On the first day {Ge 1:1-5} of the world (Sunday, October 23), God created the highest heaven and the angels.” 

It may be that Ussher is right about the day on which the world was created.  But whether he is right about this or not, this is not the main reason I quote this passage from his book.  The reason I cite it is to illustrate the point that Ussher, as was typical of those in his day, accepted without question that Genesis teaches not only that God created the world in six, literal 24-hour days, but also the closely connected point that the earth itself is about 6,000 years old.  Note that Ussher gives 4004 BC as the year of creation. 

Above it was mentioned that the doctrine of creation out of nothing, in the space of six, literal 24-hour days, and all very good, was, as far as this author is aware, the universal, or near universal testimony of the church until the about 200 years ago.  With that said, it’s worth noting that there were some in the days of John Calvin who did not accept this teaching.  This may come as a surprise to some, but the challenge to the doctrine of creation in six 24-hour days made the opposite error of today’s scientists or theistic evolutionists.  In the 21st century, we’re used to hearing theologians attempt to square the Bible with modern science by coming up with various schemes to reinterpret the creation account in Genesis to accommodate long periods of time.   For example, the day-age theory posits that the days of Genesis 1 are long periods of time, perhaps millions or billions of years. 

But those who went astray in John Calvin’s time did not do so with the day-age theory.  No.  They made the opposite error.  Instead of making the days of Genesis into millions/billions of years, they erred by claiming that God created the whole world in an instant! Writes Calvin,

Here the error of those is manifestly refuted, who maintain that the world was made in a moment.  For it is too violent a cavil to contend that Moses distributes the work which God perfected at once into six days, for the mere purpose of conveying instruction (Commentaries, Genesis).

In reading Calvin’s remarks, I am reminded of a colorful quote, often attributed to Martin Luther, which reads, “History is like a drunk man on a horse.  No sooner does he fall off on the left side, does he mount again and fall off on the right.”  Modern scholars fall on the horse on one side by positing millions or billions of years in the place of the days of Genesis, while 500 years ago scholars fell off the horse on the other by claiming that God created the world in a moment. 

Both groups are wrong.  For both have failed in their duty of taking God at his word. 

The Westminster divines, on the other hand, got it right.  In their words, “The work of creation is, God’s making all things of nothing, by the word of his power, in the space of six days, and all very good.” 

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

-          Genesis 1:1

“The work of creation is, God’s making all things of nothing, by the word of his power, in the space of six days, and all very good.” That’s the answer the Westminster Shorter Catechism gives to the question, “What is the work of creation?’ 

It’s one of my favorite question and answer sets from the Shorter Catechism, for the same reason as the passage in Genesis on which it is based is one of my favorite passages of Scripture: it captures elegantly, and in a few words, the astonishing work of the creation of all things.

In the introduction to his commentary on Genesis, John Gill wrote,  “In the Syriac and Arabic versions, the title of this book is "The Book of the Creation", because it begins with an account of the creation of all things; and is such an account, and so good an one, as is not to be met with anywhere else.”

Genesis is, as Gill implies in the quote above, not the only account of creation from the ancient world. The Greeks had a creation mythology, as did the Babylonians and numerous other cultures. 

But creation mythology is not limited to the ancient world.  In modern times, we have our own mythological creation account known as the Big Bang.  This account, just like the ones from the ancient world, is a garbled version of the true account of the creation of the heavens, the earth, and all that is in them as set forth in Genesis chapter 1.     

At this point, some may ask how it is I can prove that the Biblical account of creation is true and that the others are mythological and false.  The short answer to this question is that the creation account given in Genesis is part of the inerrant, infallible, 66 books that comprise the revealed Word of God.

If you ask me to prove that the 66 books of the Bible are the revealed Word of God, my answer is that not only can I not prove to you that the 66 books of the Bible are the inerrant and revealed Word of God, but also that it would be impious for me to even attempt to do so.    

Now before you think I’ve thrown in the intellectual towel and am simply trying to dodge a serious question about why I believe what I believe, let me explain this a bit further. 

The reason that I cannot and will not attempt to prove that “the Bible alone is the Word of God” is that this is the axiom of Christianity.  It would be both foolish and impious of me to attempt to prove the axiom of Christianity. 

Why would this be foolish?

Because trying to prove an axiom is absurd.  The reason it’s absurd lies in the definition of the term “axiom.” 

In his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, Noah Webster defined “axiom” as, “a principle received without new proof.”  Therefore, if one proves an axiom is true, it is no longer an axiom.

Another way of thinking about the axioms is to understand them as a first principle in a system of thought.  Christianity is a system of thought.  Platonism and Aristotelianism are systems of thought.  Darwinism is a system of thought.  All systems of thought, whether Christian or pagan, have one thing in common.  They all have a beginning point, a first principle.  As John Robbins once put it in an email to this author, all thinking must begin somewhere.  The proposition that stands first in a system of thought is called an axiom.  It is a first principle.     

This may seem like an obvious point, but one of the most important things to remember about first principles is that they are, by definition, first.  If a first principle could be proven, it would no longer be a first principle.  The proof of the original axiom would then become the new first principle.

Gordon Clark well understood the necessity of unproven and unprovable first principles, writing about them in God’s Hammer,

Christianity is often repudiated on the ground that it is circular: The Bible is authoritative because the Bible authoritatively says so.  But this objection applies no more to Christianity than to any philosophic system or even to geometry.  Every system of organized propositions depends of necessity on some indemonstrable premises, and every system must make an attempt to explain how these primary premises come to be accepted.

The axiom of Christianity is, “the Bible alone is the Word of God.”  As Christians, we begin all our thinking with this proposition.    

As Clark indicated in the quote above, this leads us to another important question for Christians, why do we accept the premise that the Bible alone is the Word of God?  There are, after all, other texts that many people believe hold divine authority.  The Koran is one such example.  There are others.  The pronouncements of modern-day scientists hold much the same authority in the minds of many people in our time.  Think about the how the climate change advocates present their case.  “The science is settled,” they frequently tell us.  If you don’t agree, you’re a “science denier,” a 21st century version of a heretic.  

If you were to ask me why I believe the account of creation as set forth in Genesis – and just to be clear, when I say that I believe the account in Genesis, I do not mean this in some qualified way, such as those who advocate theistic evolution or some other scheme that denies what the Word of God plainly teaches; I believe it in the common sense that it was understood by Christians before the age of Darwinism; that is to say, I believe that God spoke the universe into existence out of nothing, in the space of six literal twenty-four hour days, and all very good -  I could provide several subordinate reasons.

One I’ve already given above.  The account of creation found in Genesis is astonishingly well written.  It is at once simple enough for a child to grasp, yet profound in its implications such that Job was reduced to silence when the Lord questioned him, asking, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”    

A second argument I could give for believing what the Bible teaches about creation is that it fits remarkably well with the rest of the Scriptures.  Above it was mentioned that Christianity is a system of thought.  This is an important point in the thought of both Gordon Clark and John Robbins.  Christianity is not, as some seem to think in our own time, a grab bag of ideas all thrown together in a heap.  Christianity is a logical system of thought.

Because Christianity is a system of thought, denying the account of creation as set forth in Genesis necessarily calls into question other Biblical doctrines which depend on a proper understanding of Genesis. For example, if we disbelieve Genesis, we call into question God’s character.  In essence, we’re calling him a liar and saying to him that he really didn’t do the things he said he did.  And if God lied to us about his work of creation, why would we trust him in other matters?     

When we say that the various parts of the Bible fit together into a nicely consistent whole, and that this is proof that it is the Word of God, we’re using what is called the coherence theory of truth.  That is to say, a system of thought is true because its various parts fit together much as a jigsaw puzzle does.  The Westminster Confession calls this the “consent of all the parts” in Chapter 1.VI. 

The two reasons I’ve laid out here for why I believe the 66 books of the Bible, including Genesis chapter 1, are true are, I think, good reasons.  But they are not in themselves conclusive. 

Indeed, the Roman Catholic Church-State did not find such arguments conclusive at the time of the Reformation, nor does it now.  According to Gordon Clark,

At the time of the Reformation when Luther and Calvin appealed to the Scriptures, the Roman Church argued that it and it alone accredited the Scriptures, and that therefore the Protestants could not legitimately use the Scriptures without first submitting to Rome.  People were supposed to accept God’s Word only on the authority of the church (God’s Hammer, 16). 

But if the majesty of the style of Scripture – for example the remarkable literary skill already mentioned that one finds in Genesis – or the way the doctrines of the Bible fit together so well despite the many authors, circumstances and even languages in which it was written are not conclusive reason for believing the Bible is the Word of God.  What is? 

Clark answers,

Against this claim [that the Church-State’s authority was needed to authenticate the Scriptures] the reformers developed the doctrine of the testimony of the Holy Spirit. The belief that the Bible is the Word of God, so they taught, is neither the result of a papal pronouncement nor a conclusion inferred from prior premises; it is a belief which the holy Spirit himself produces in our minds (16).

Or as the Westminster Confession puts it,

Our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth [of Scripture] and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts.

That is to say, saving faith, which consists of both understanding and consenting to the doctrines of Scripture, is a gift of God, is produced by of the God the Holy Spirit regenerating our hearts. 

Why do Christians accept what the Bible teaches about creation in Genesis 1 and reject the accounts of the ancient creation myths, the secular philosophers, and the modern Darwinists?  Because God the Holy Spirit has caused them to believe the Bible and to reject other truth claims. 

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

-          Genesis 1:1

“Republicans and Evangelicals are stupid.”  So proclaimed a work colleague of mine one day, seemingly out of the blue. 

Since I fell into both groups and was a bit curious as to what prompted his outburst, I asked him, “Why do you say that?” 

My colleague pointed me to an article he was reading in a newspaper he had brought with him – yes this was way back in 2007 before everyone had smartphones and still read physical newspapers.  The article was about the opening of the Creation Museum here in the Cincinnati area.    

Having lived in Cincinnati, I was well aware of the Creation Museum project.  Several years in the making, the museum had garnered extensive press coverage both locally and nationally.  Most of it was negative.  Denunciations galore poured forth from various mainstream news organizations about the mass enstupification of the of the American public that was nigh upon our doorstep because of museum’s opening. 

One example of that hostility is a Los Angeles Times editorial from May 24, 2007 title “Yabba-dabba science,” which, as you may gather from the title, makes great fun of the Creation Museum, likening it to an episode of “The Flintstones.”   

Apparently, my work colleague bought the propaganda.

Science, we are told by the L.A. Times and other voices of “reason,” is all about hard facts and logic.  All which, we are confidently told, militate against any possibility that the earth is a mere 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs and men walked the terra firma at the same time.     

But is science so-called really the arbiter of truth?  Think about just the past year and all the contradictory science we’ve heard.  Some of the most blatantly contradictory statements have come from the same supposed scientific experts.  For example, in a March 2020 interview with 60 Minutes, Dr. Anthony Fauci said,

Right now, in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks….there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is, and often there are unintended consequences – people keep fiddling with the masks and they’re touching their face.

Now, this same Dr. Fauci is out there saying that we may have to wear masks until 2022.  And not only that, he’s stated on the record that double-masking makes “common sense”!  And all this despite a great deal of scientific evidence that mask mandates do nothing to slow the spread of Covid. 

Clearly, Dr. Fauci has contradicted himself.  In fact, his statements often seem to be driven by some hidden political agenda rather than the scientific facts at hand.  Yet we are told that he is a coolly rational scientific mind and that anyone who doubts him is, in the words of Joe Biden, a Neanderthal.  

Or take the matter of the uber trendy cause of Transgenderism.  Facebook offers members a palette of 58 gender options.  Fifty-eight!  Supporters of transgenderism are often the same people who loudly announce their love of science and are quick to denigrate those who disagree with them as “science deniers.” Yet it is the progressives themselves who are the science deniers.   

If we consider the most up-to-date scientific opinion, the most reasonable conclusion is that there are only two sexes, and that the notion that there can be 58 genders is an absurdity.  Yet, the transgender folks will argue that one’s gender identity is not tied to one’s biological sex, and that a biological man really can reasonably identify as a woman and a biological woman really can identify as a man.  And yet, even if a man successfully “transitions” to a woman, every cell in his body is still genetically coded as male, with a both an X and a Y chromosome.  This seems like a hard case of science denialism on the part of transgender activists, but it’s rare for anyone to point this out. 

As Christians, we don’t rest our argument that there are only two sexes, male and female, on the findings of geneticists.  We believe this, because it’s revealed in the Word of God.  But it is interesting that today’s ideologically confused progressives will, on the one hand, lecture Christians about their supposed “science denialism,” while on the other hand, denying the science they claim to love so they can indulge their transgender fantasies.  

The Reason for This Series

I think of this series on Genesis as an example of root cause analysis. 

When I was in business school a few years back, they brought in a couple of speakers from Toyota to talk about the Toyota Production System (TPS).  Toyota, of course, is famous the world over for producing consistently high-quality cars are reasonable prices. 

One of the secrets of TPS is what the speakers called root cause analysis.  That is, to really address a quality problem in the manufacturing process, it’s necessary to determine the root cause of the problem.  There’s always a temptation to fix things ad hoc.  But if you really want to permanently solve a recurring quality issue, you have to pursue the problem to find its source.  Once you’ve traced the problem back to its source, you can then fix whatever the issue is.  Doing this will correct the downstream quality problems. 

It is my conviction that moral, political, and economic confusion we face in the 21st century is that we, like the me of Judah in Isaiah’s time, have turned away backwards from the revealed truth of God.  Even many Christians confused about these things.  And the root of much of this confusion is that they are confused about Genesis.  Either they have never been explicitly taught Genesis as history or have been instructed by modern misinterpretations of the book that present it as something other than what it is, history. 

Genesis – and by Genesis, I’m referring to the whole book, including the first eleven chapters - is not myth.  It is not metaphor.  It is history revealed to us by God himself. 

It is my intention in this series to apply the revealed history found in Genesis to the current moral, political, scientific, and economic problems of our day, refuting the contemporary confusion and setting forth the mind of God on these issues. 

The Scope of This Series    

It is my intention to focus on the first eleven chapters of Genesis in this series.  Not because the remaining chapters are not worthwhile studying, but in an effort to limit the length of this study to something manageable. 

A second reason for focusing on the first eleven chapters is that in them are found the origins of, and the answers to, many of the most vexing problems we face here in the early 21st century. 

A third reason for focusing on Genesis 1-11 is that these are the chapters that are the most controversial and the ones most likely to be explained away, even by professing Christians.  Genesis, we are told by many serious Bible scholars, really doesn’t require that we believe the world was created in 6 literal twenty-four-hour periods.  This is foolishness.  Very clearly, that is exactly what Genesis teaches.  And if we deny this.  If we soft peddle this.  We’re falling into the trap that Eve fell into when the serpent tempted her by asking, “Yea, hath God said?” 

God indeed hath said! He has revealed to us the creation of the universe, and of all things in it, including man himself.  As the Shorter Catechism puts it, "God's work or creation is his making all things of nothing, by the word of his power, in the space of six [literal 24 hour] days, and all very good."

A fourth reason for focusing on the first eleven chapters of Genesis is that they are absolutely fascinating.  If we take God at his word and understand these chapters as history, we become the wisest people on the face of the earth.  As the psalmist wrote, “I have more understanding than all my teachers: for thy testimonies are my meditation.”  The smartest scientists strain and yearn to understand the origin of the universe.  But in the end, the most they can say is this or that may be true, but we can’t know for sure.  But you and I can know for sure.  For while science never can furnish us with knowledge, the Christian understands knowledge is a gift of God, freely given to those who trust in him. 

One last item regarding scope.  It is not my intention that this series exhaust all important implications of Genesis chapters 1-11.  Such is the depth of the Word of God that, I suppose, a lifetime of dedicated study would not exhaust everything from even a small portion of Scripture.  With that said, it is my prayer that in this series I can bring to the surface at least a few of the treasures found in this portion of Scripture and to impart them to my readers.    

Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.

-          Leviticus 25:10

 As is the case with many Americans, I’ve watched with horror the violence and rioting that has gripped this nation for nearly six months now.  Substantial parts of many of our largest and most famous cities lie in ruins from the predatory acts of mobs affiliated with organizations such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa. 

These overtly violent and leftist organizations have, with the apparent consent of local government officials, loosed a reign of terror in America’s cities the likes of which most Americans never imagined possible. 

The Covid lockdowns are another assault on liberty.  As recently as the beginning of this year, who would ever have imagined we’d have government officials attempting to dictate how we celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas with our families, or attempting to interfere with our liberty to worship the Lord in our churches?  Yet the so-called pandemic has been used as an excuse for government to suspend personal liberties we nearly all took for granted, close down our businesses, put us out of work and make us dependent on the government dole.

To add insult to injury, they have slapped masks on us, which do little and perhaps nothing at all to slow the spread of the virus but are most effective when it comes to humiliating and dehumanizing people and showing them who’s boss. 

Then to top it off, the Democrats committed election fraud on a shock and awe scale resulting in a Joe Biden “victory” to which we’re all supposed to accede, no questions asked. 

For as long as this author can remember, he’s heard talk of the decline of America and the decline of the West.  John Robbins noted in his essay “The Religious Wars of the 21st Century” that the West has been in decline for more than a century.  The reason for the decline?  Writes Robbins, “The Biblical theology that created Western civilization five hundred years ago has all but disappeared from the West.”  Robbins’ words were simply a restatement of the main thesis of Gordon Clark’s A Christian View of Men and Things that had been published over fifty years earlier. 

The American republic and the freedoms and prosperity Americans historically have enjoyed did not come about as some random occurrence.  It was not lightning in a bottle or happenstance.  The freedoms and prosperity of the United States is the result of the ideas that were believed by the people of America at the nation’s founding.  And their ideas about liberty – both political and economic – were the result of their believing the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation which began 251 years prior to the signing of the Declaration of Independence.   

In his booklet Christ and Civilization, John Robbins remarked that, “God blessed his people in Western Europe and America beyond anything they could have imagined, and his blessings spilled over into society at large, creating what we now call Western civilization” (45).  Christ, Robbins tells us, promised this in his Sermon on the Mount, when he told his disciples to seek first God’s kingdom and righteousness and that all the things they sought – food, clothing, etc. – would be added unto them. 

Robbins continued,

All these things – the things we call Western civilization – were added to the European and American Christians, on an historically unprecedented scale, just as Christ had promised.  And they were added because their priorities were straight:  They believed the Gospel, seeking first the Kingdom of God and his imputed righteousness, not their own righteousness or prosperity (46).

So how is it possible that a nation conceived in liberty, one that traces its founding back to the landing of the Puritans in December 1620, come to a point where liberty hangs by a thread and republican government is but a step from being extinguished?

In a word, unbelief.

As heirs of the founders of this nation, we have not guarded our doctrine.  We have, as the Israelites in the time of Isaiah and Jeremiah, forgotten our God.  And for this reason, all these things have befallen us.

It was mentioned above that this author has for most of his life read and heard about the decline of America and the West.  But while he’s heard about these things for decades and has taken them seriously, they always seemed rather theoretical and distant, but now they are at our front door. 

At the risk of sounding alarmist and of falling prey to the tendency to overstate the long-term implications of current events, it seems not a stretch to me to say that if Joe Biden is successfully cheated into the White House in January, it will be the end of our republic. 

The entirety of the American establishment – political, academic, business, religious, media, financial, and entertainment – is behind a Biden presidency.  The only thing that stands in their way are the Trump deplorables, and they have little to no institutional or cultural power. 

In fact, they have so little power and are regarded with such contempt that they can be insulted and physically assaulted and no one – not even the people and institutions that supposedly are on their side - will defend them.   

In a brilliant monologue from June 1, 2020, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson explicitly made this point.  “When the mobs came, they abandoned us,” was his opening line.  But it was really at the 12:31 mark that he got down to naming names of Republicans and conservatives who, when Republican voters needed them the most, instead turned on them, denouncing them as a bunch of racists. 

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It is scarcely possible for me to contain the anger I have for the cowardly politicians and others who, on the one hand say that they are behind you, but who, on the other hand,  abandon you to the mobs when the going gets tough.  It’s even worse than that, as Tucker Carlson pointed out.  Not only did people in the Trump administration, including Trump himself, do little to nothing to defend their supporters, or even simple law and order for that matter, but many of them actually piled on, saying in effect, “You know all those terrible names the Dems and BLM and Antifa are calling you – fascists, racists, etc. – well, they’re right; you really are all those things and you deserve the beat down your getting.” 

Yesterday, I was reminded once again of the astounding level of verbal and physical abuse Republicans and Trump supporters have been subjected to over the past five years.  A peaceful protest – not mostly peaceful, but actually peaceful – by Trump supporters in Washington D.C. turned violent when the demonstrators were attacked by violent mobs of Antifa and BLM.

But the obvious violence went largely unreported in the mainstream media.  No one asks Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or other Democrats to denounce such violence.  And really, if Biden were an honorable man, no one would even have to prompt him.  He’d do it on his own accord.

To borrow a phrase from Antifa, Joe Biden’s silence, and the silence of the Democrats, the silence of the media pundits, the silence of most Republicans, the silence of the academics, the silence of the Hollywood and entertainment elite, the silence of business big shots, the silence of the Big Tech executives is violence.  They allow, permit, condone and justify the open assault of peaceful Americans exercising their First Amendment rights. 

These are the same arrogant elites who will unctuously lecture their fellow Americans on justice while they themselves know nothing of it. 

Is it not abundantly clear at this point that now is the time for freedom loving Americans, and I mean here in particular, freedom loving Protestants, to take a stand to defend the nation founded by their forefathers? 

So what does that mean in practice?  For starters, it means praying for your country.  It means, in the first place, praying that the Gospel of Justification by Belief Alone be widely preached and believed.  It is this truth that created Western civilization and it is what will sustain and preserve whatever can be salvaged out of the current mess. 

It also means praying that justice prevail and lies be exposed.  Never, never, never in all my life have I witnessed such fraud as what took place during the November 3 presidential election.  It is imperative that Joe Biden be prevented from taking office in January.  He is a fraud and a usurper, plain and simple. 

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said this in an interview:

NEWT GINGRICH: Well, it's a nice sentiment. First, you go out and the Democrats steal five or six states, and that's what Republicans believe we're watching. We think we have evidence of a lot of it. Then you turn around and you say let's forget four years of Nancy Pelosi, let's forget four years ago of impeachment, harassment, opposition, hostility, hatred, and now that I've won, why don't we make nice together? 

I think he would have to do a lot to convince Republicans that this is anything except a left-wing power grab, financed by people like George Soros, deeply laid in at the local level, and, frankly, I think that it is a corrupt, stolen election. It's very hard for me to understand how we're going to work together without some very, very big steps by Biden. And I have -- I have doubts if the left-wing of his party would tolerate him genuinely trying to work with Republicans.

[…]

JEDIDIAH BILA: Yeah, Newt. No, I just want to ask you for clarity, because the accusation of incidents of voter fraud, which do happen in every election, unfortunately, is very different from the accusation of a stolen election. That's very serious. The implication here is that there's enough widespread voter fraud going on that would have changed the outcome of the election. I haven't seen evidence of that to this moment. Is that what you're suggesting has happened here?

GINGRICH: What I'm suggesting is you don't see the evidence because the local officials who are Democrats hide the evidence and then turn to you and say, "Since you have no evidence." So they say, "Oh, we let the poll watchers in the building." That's right. But they kept them far enough away they couldn't see anything. And I think I can show you case after case, it happened magically at almost exactly the same moment on election night that a series of key states quit counting, almost as though they were coordinating what they were doing. 

The Bible says “Thou shalt not steal,” but the Democrats have stolen the election, and done it with breathtaking boldness.  In doing this, they have lived down to the well-earned reputation as the party of rum, Romanism and rebellion.  In truth, the Democrats simply can’t help themselves.  It’s who they are.  It’s what they do.  It is, as it were, in their political DNA.  And they must be stopped.

It was our Protestant forebears that founded this country, and in its hour of need it is up to us to defend her.  We must pray and then we must act.  Not in foolishness, but in knowledge of the truth.  Not in fear, but in boldness.  Not in doubt, but in faith.

In Proverbs we read, “A righteous man falling down before the wicked is as a troubled fountain, and a corrupt spring.”  

If you and I remain silent in the face of obvious evil, we are that righteous man who falls before the wicked.  We must not let that happen. 

So what does it mean to act?  What does it mean to refuse to fall down before the wicked?  It has been my purpose to leave this open.  What each of us does is dependent upon the opportunities presented to us.

Take, for example, when Jerusalem was surrounded by the Babylonian army and the enemies of Jeremiah lowered him into a dungeon to die.  A certain Ethiopian eunuch named Ebed-Melech organized a rescue party and pulled Jeremiah out, saving his life. 

Not long after when the Babylonians had breached Jerusalem’s walls, God spoke to Jeremiah and told him to tell Ebed-Melech that his life would be spared, “because thou hast put thy trust in me.” 

“God is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him,” says the author of Hebrews. Because of this, we can have confidence, as did Ebed-Melech, the he will reward our efforts on behalf of justice and truth if we put our trust in the Lord.

What will that look like in this case, a reward from God?

I don’t know.

Perhaps we can save the American republic.  Perhaps not.  Ebed-Melech didn’t save Jerusalem from being sacked and burned with fire.  Jeremiah’s decades of preaching truth didn’t prevent the exile of the Jews to Babylon.

But God rewarded these men nonetheless.  And he will reward us as well, if we seek his face and speak his truth with all boldness. 

My brothers and sisters in Christ, it’s time to stand for liberty.  It’s time to stand for the truth. 

When Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah saw that her son was dead, she arose and destroyed all the seed royal.

-          2 Kings 11:1

“To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature, contumelious to God, a thing most contrary to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally it is the subversion of good order, and of all equity and justice.”

To modern ears could a more offensive sentence be found in all of literature?  Not having read all of literature, this author does not pretend to be able to answer that question definitively.  Yet with that said, it is hard to imagine an idea more repugnant to 21st century readers than this quote from John Knox’s essay “The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women” (hereafter, TMR).

We have, all of us living in the West in the early 21st century, been steeped in feminist theory from our youth up to the point where, for most of us, Knox’s words are little more than noise from a bygone era with no relevance for us today, except perhaps as a cautionary tale to warn us about how bad the bad old days really were.

Liberal Democrats, were they to read Knox, would quickly be triggered, alternating between outrage, ridicule and calls to have his ideas removed from social media.  Conservative Republicans, on the other hand, would attempt explain away what Knox wrote by saying that he was a product of his age, that what he was really writing against was 16th century liberal women and that if he were alive today he would gladly support a female presidential candidate so long as she was pro-life, pro-Second Amendment and promised to fight against the Green New Deal. 

Contemporary Protestants, even supposed Bible believing ones, would be embarrassed by Knox’s words.  Most likely, they would hope that no one would notice what he wrote.  Were someone to bring up TMR with them, they would find some way to explain it away and quickly change the subject.  Some Protestants can’t seem to gush enough about the prospects of a woman president.  In 2012, Republican Michelle Bachmann was considered something of a favorite among Evangelicals. According to one article, Evangelical pastors could not gush enough about her candidacy, with one Presbyterian minister saying of her that, “She was speaking the language of the heart of the people in this room.” 

Commenting on Bachmann’s presidential run in the Washington Post, D. Michael Lindsay observed that many outsiders were surprised to see Bachmann, who posited herself as a Christian conservative, both running as a presidential candidate and receiving widespread support from Evangelicals.  Lindsay went on to write, “The reality is that evangelicals today have crafted a notion of what feminist scholar Marie Griffith calls ‘practical Christian womanhood,’ whereby adherents hold seemingly contradictory notions regarding authority and gender ideals.”

But contrary to Marie Griffith, there is nothing “seemingly contradictory” about Evangelicals, on the one hand, supporting what Lindsay called “traditional gender roles at home” and, on the other hand, supporting a woman for president.  This is an actual contradiction, one of many compromises that Protestants have made with the world.  Is it possible that the weakness and ineffectiveness of the Protestant church in the 21st century is somehow related to its refusal to think, speak and act logically in accord with the teaching of the Scriptures? 

The idea that Knox was serious about what he wrote and may actually have been right, that is simply unacceptable to modern men and they will not hear it.  And this includes a great number of 21st century conservative Christians. 

But Knox was right.

There, I said it.  And I’ll say it again.

Knox was right.

It has long been this author’s view that feminism is not only one of the most ungodly ideas ever advanced in philosophy, but also one of the most destructive in practice.  Ideas Have Consequences is the title of a well-known work of philosophy by American Richard Weaver.  He understood that it was ideas that were primary, actions followed from them.  This was also the position of Gordon Clark and John Robbins.  As Robbins noted in one of his lectures on philosophy, our practice – the actions we take in life - is always based upon some prior theory.

Feminism is based upon the idea that man and women are in all respects equal and, therefore, the feminists logically conclude that there is nothing at all inappropriate about  promoting “a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation or city.”  Further, not only is doing so not inappropriate, but it is a positive good, for it liberates women from the oppression of the patriarchy.

Another implication of this idea, that men and women are in all respect equal, is that anyone who opposes promoting a woman to a position of political authority is not merely wrong, but a very bad person with questionable motives.

In a 1980 presidential debate with then president Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan famously asked the viewers, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”  Many think this was one of the decisive moments of the 1980 presidential election that saw Reagan unseat Carter. 

With all the turmoil we’ve seen in 2020, with our civilization apparently collapsing about us on a daily basis, perhaps it’s worth asking a similar question today.  Is society better off today that it was before feminism?  Does our government function better now that feminist philosophy and practice dominates both parties and all branches of government?  How about our schools and universities?  How are they doing?  Are they better off now that Women’s Studies has become standard fare on campuses everywhere? Or let’s look at families.  Are they better off now that women have won the right to sit in a cubicle eight or more hours a day working for some corporation that couldn’t care less about them rather than being keepers at home, working for their husband and children who love them?  What about churches?  Do feminist churches preach the Gospel more faithfully in the 21st century then they did in the non-feminist 18th century?

The answer to all these questions is not merely no, but a hard no.  But it’s worse than that.  Not only are the institutions of civil government, the church and the family not better off now than before feminism, they all are markedly worse off.  Within fifteen years of women winning the right to vote, America and other Western nations found themselves with a bloated, unbiblical and socially destructive welfare state.  Schools and universities today are little more than Marxist indoctrination centers that teach students not only to hate and despise their parents and their entire civilization, but also leave their students saddled with unpayable debt for the privilege of learning anti-Christian nonsense.  The practical effects of our ungodly educational system – a system in which feminism plays a major philosophical role – was on full display last summer in the Black Lives Matter/Antifa riots.  Many of the “peaceful protestors” didn’t even know whether they were male of female.  And families, they’re a mess too.  Marriage rates for Westerners are plummeting as are birth rates.  This should come as no surprise.  Feminist philosophy makes it impossible for men and women to relate to one another in the way God intended.  If the home becomes a battlefield where a husband and wife have to fight for dominance every day over everything, isn’t it just easier and more sensible to avoid marriage and children altogether?

Sometimes one will hear conservatives and Christians defend feminism by saying that it was a needed corrective back in the day but it just went too far.  We can’t reject feminism in toto as the reactionary Knox did.  No, we must be reasonable and hold fast what is good in feminism while avoiding the extremes.  This sounds reasonable, but it is foolishness.

Feminism was always an ungodly idea.  From the very beginning it was rebellion against God and his Word.  As proof of this, take the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments that came out of the famous Seneca Falls Conference held that year.  That conference, considered by historians as marking the start of First Wave Feminism, issued the Declaration which contained sixteen resolutions.  Time does not permit a discussion of all of them, but let’s take two as representative.

• He [man] allows her in church, as well as State, but a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church.

• He [man] has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God.

Both these propositions are easily refuted from the Scriptures.  “Let the women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak…Let a woman learn in silence with all submission, And I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence…A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife….”  These are not suggestions, neither are they culturally conditioned, neither is the language obscure.  It takes willful ignorance to construe these statements in any other way than to say that they forbid women from holding church office and serving as ministers. 

The same principle applies to civil government, which is the focus of Knox’s TMR. In TMR, Knox argues from the lessor to the greater when he writes,

The Apostle takes power from all women to speak in the assembly [church].  Ergo, he permits no woman to rule above man.  The former part is evident, whereupon does the conclusion of necessity follow.  For he that takes from woman the least part of authority, dominion, or rule will not permit unto her that which is greatest.  But greater it is to reign above realms and nations, to publish and make laws, and to command men of all estates, and finally to appoint judges and ministers, than to speak in the congregation….

If anyone objects to Knox’s logic here, let him ask himself who created church and civil government?  According to Scripture, the civil magistrate is as much a minister of God as is the preacher, for both derive their authority from him.  See Romans 13, for example, where Paul calls the civil magistrate God’s minister. If civil and church government are both created by God, then we can infer the principles that apply to one also apply to the other.  Going back to the quote above from the Washington Post, for Protestants to, one the one hand, hold to what the author called “traditional gender roles at home” [they are not traditional, they are God ordained] and, on the other hand, to promote a woman for president so long as she’s a conservative woman, is not “seemingly contradictory” but rather actually contradictory. 

The second resolution represents a direct attack of Scripture, for it says that men have usurped “the prerogative of Jehovah himself in claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God.”  This is wildly off the mark.  For it is not man who assigned a particular sphere to woman, but Jehovah himself: “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.  For the husband is the head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church”…“[let the] older women…admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands”…”as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord.”      

None of this is difficult theology.  The language of the Scriptures is clear and unambiguous.  Indeed, it would be hard to see how it could be clearer.  The problem is not the clarity of the Bible.  The problem is that sinful men have willfully rejected God’s counsel.  The feminist wind sown in the 19th century has become a whirlwind in the 21st, one that threatens to blow away what remains of Western Civilization. 

It was noted above that it takes willful ignorance to not see what the Scriptures plainly teach about men, women and their roles in the government of the family, the church and the state.  Certainly, those who claim to be teachers of Israel bear the greater sin, for they fail to teach their congregations what the Word of God so clearly states.  And if the preachers fail to preach the truth, it should come as no surprise that ordinary Christians fail to understand and believe it.  They perish for lack of knowledge.  And not Christians only, but their civilization as well.

Closing Thoughts

America has been building its Monstrous Regiment now for over 150 years. If we use the 1848 Seneca Falls Conference as a starting point, it's been at work on this project for a full 172 years. In truth, the ideas expressed at the Seneca Falls Conference originated much earlier.

It remains to be seen whether we will get our first woman president in the person of Kamala Harris. Technically, she's Joe Biden's running mate and is slated to take office as Vice-President should Biden win. Practically, many people think she will be more in charge than Biden will be, even if he remains in office for a time.

It likely was not a slip of the tongue when last week when Harris made reference to the "Harris Administration" and the next day Biden talked about "the Harris/Biden administration." Some thought this was a gaffe. A more likely explanation was that it was an attempt to signal to the feminist base that a vote for Biden would result in the first woman president.

But even if Donald Trump retakes the White House in 2020, the issue of a female president will not go away. It will merely be delayed. Trump himself has promoted the idea of a woman president and seems to be preparing his daughter Ivanka for this role.

In the opinion of this author, barring a new Reformation or the near-term return of Christ, America will succeed in completing it Monstrous Regiment in an upcoming election cycle, perhaps as early as 2024. The guiding feminist philosophy of the schools and churches of America requires it as does the political spirit of the age.

As Christians, this is an opportunity for us to speak out. Let us take it.

When Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah saw that her son was dead, she arose and destroyed all the seed royal.

-          2 Kings 11:1

“I wouldn’t vote for her.”  That was Ayn Rand’s curt response to a question from a woman in the audience of the Phil Donohue show.  She had asked Rand, “Do you believe that there is going to be a day when there is going to be a female in the White House as President and how do you feel about that?”

From the questioner’s reaction and from that of the audience, Rand’s answer was not expected, neither was it appreciated.  You can see the 1979 clip for yourself here, https://youtu.be/cL8g7zy6qxw.

Worth noting is how shocking and controversial Rand’s statement was as far back as 41 years ago.  Now this was the Phil Donohue Show, and Donohue himself was a feminist, and his audience, most likely, tended to skew liberal.  But that said, it is not clear that the audience reaction from a conservative Republican audience would have been much different.  Certainly in 2020, any Republican expressing anything remotely approaching Rand’s statement would quickly find himself making an apology tour. 

Donald Trump has expressed his support for a female president on more than one occasion.  In late August, Business Insider ran the headline “Donald Trump plugs Ivanka as the first female president claiming Kamala Harris is ‘not competent’ enough for the top job.” Note, Trump’s objection to Kamala Harris was not that she was a woman, but that she was not the right woman.  Further, he promoted his daughter as the right person to be the first female president.

There have been rumors for some time that Trump has wanted to see his daughter in the Oval Office, and the prominent role she had at last month’s Republican Convention and the statement reported in Business Insider certainly support those rumors.  It would not shock this author to see Ivanka declare herself as a presidential candidate in 2024 with the full blessing of her father.  Of course, she will have other female rivals to the throne, quite possibly including former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. 

In fact, it would not surprise this author at all if the 2024 election doesn’t bring us the choice between a Republican woman and a Democratic woman presidential candidate.  It’ll be pick your poison. Of course, the conservatives and liberals will tear one another apart with each side passionately denouncing the choice of the other party, while both parties miss the fundamental error they are committing.  That is to say, both sides will be equally ignorant that, in the words of John Knox, “To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature, contumelious to God, a thing most contrary to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally it is the subversion of good order, and of all equity and justice….”   

Yes, way back in 1558 John Knox dropped the mic, so to speak, on the matter of government by women in his devastating treatise “The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.”  In it, Knox did not argue, as so many feminized men are prone to argue today, that this or that woman was unfit to hold public office because of her position on this or that issue.  No, Knox’s argument was more fundamental and more Biblical than that.  Knox argued that the Bible prohibited women from severing in civil government altogether. 

Knox was right.

After reading it, I want to stand, applaud and praise the Lord for the insight and courage that he gave the Scotsman.

So impressive is “The Monstrous Regiment” that had Knox done nothing else in his life except to write that treatise, it would be enough to qualify him for Christian hero status.  Without a doubt, “The Monstrous Regiment” is one of the greatest political treatises ever written by a Christian and a serves as a model for how Christian scholars ought to use the Scriptures when dealing with political questions. 

Let’s take a closer look at Knox’s work to see if we can identify what makes it so devastating. 

For our walk through, I’ll be using the Trinity Foundation’s edition of “The Monstrous Regiment” titled “The Place of Women.”

Worth noting is that “The Place of Women” was first published by the Trinity Foundation in August 1984, most likely as a response to Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale’s choice of Geraldine Ferraro as his vice-presidential running mate in that year’s election.

Since that time, other women have followed in her footsteps, most notably Sarah Palin, who served as John McCain’s running mate in 2008, Hillary Clinton who headed the Democratic ticket in 2016, and now Kamala Harris who’s Democrat Joe Biden’s pick for vice-president.   

The Scripturalism of John Knox

Wonder it is that among so many pregnant wits as the Isle of Great Brittany has produced, so many godly and zealous preachers as England did sometime nourish, and so many learned men of grave judgment as this day by Jezebel are exiled, none is found so stout of courage, so faithful to God, nor loving to their native country, that they dare not admonish the inhabitants of that Isle how abominable before God is the Empire or Rule of a wicked woman, yea of a traitoress and bastard....

What an opener!

Here, Knox shows two traits that are lacking in most Christians today: discernment and courage.  In his Trinity Review “Why Heretics Win Battles,” John Robbins noted that, “Their [Christians] lack of discernment stems from a lack of knowledge of Scripture, and their lack of courage comes from a lack of belief in the promises of Scripture.”

The Prophet Hosea declared, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” And just as it was true in Hosea’s day, so it is also in ours.  The level of ignorance of Scripture, even among today’s Bible-believing Protestants, is shocking.  As a result, many have found themselves blown this way and that by the winds of popular culture, including feminism.

One sees this principle at work in many areas.  We are trained to see the Bible as applying only to learning how to be saved and only between the hours of 11am and 12pm on Sunday mornings, and let secular thinking guide us the rest of the time.

Now it is certainly not my intention to say that the Bible is not about learning about how to be saved from one’s sins or that it is wrong to study the Bible between 11am and 12pm on Sunday’s. Not at all. The point is that the Bible, while furnishing us with the information we need to be saved, is not, as the fundamentalists would have use believe, limited to that.  The Bible is an entire system of thought that covers and authoritatively governs, not just soteriology, but every field of knowledge.  The Bible, in short, has a systematic monopoly on truth.  Not some truth.  All truth.  God’s truth is all truth.

This includes the truth about politics.  This may seem strange to some, that the Bible has anything, let alone anything decisive, to say about politics.  “Separation of church and state,” some Americans may cry.  Well, yes, separation of church and state is a Christian idea.  But it’s one thing to say that the New Covenant prohibits theocracy (it does) and quite another to say that God’s Word is not authoritative in settling political matters. 

If there be any who doubt that the Bible speaks authoritatively on matters of politics, consider the question of the origin of civil government.  Where does it come from?  Very clearly, it comes from God himself, the first example being found in Genesis 3 where God placed two Cherubim “at the east of the garden of Eden” and a “flaming sword.”  The purpose of this was “to keep the way of the tree of life.”  Put another way, God did this to prevent sinful Adam and Eve from stealing his property. 

In the New Testament we see that the civil magistrate is called “God’s minister” and is charged with punishing those who practice evil and with rewarding the good.

Government is not a secular invention of man, but a divine institution created by God as punishment for, and as a partial cure of, sin.    

And because civil government is a creation of God, if governors are to understand how to rightly govern, they must appeal, not to secular philosophy, but to the Word of God. 

Unfortunately, the pregnant wits of the Isle of Great Brittany lacked the discernment to understand what God had said in his Word about proper civil government.  Had they possessed Knox’s insight, perhaps they would have taken a stand with him.

But lack of discernment was not the only issue with the clergy of Knox’s day.  Another was lack of courage. 

Knox complained that among the men of Great Brittany, “none is found so stout of courage, so faithful to God, nor loving to their native country,” to speak out against the Monstrous Regiment. 

Lack of courage is also a problem in our own day.  In the Preface to his book Ecclesiastical Megalomania, John Robbins noted that, “The world of American scholarship seems to have partitioned itself, at least with regard to the study of the Roman Church-State, so that the study of the Roman Church-Sate has been reserved for Roman Catholics” (page 10).  Robbins posits that one reason for this may be fear of being labeled “anti-Catholic.”  He goes on to write that this fear, “undermines all scholarship.” 

Indeed, it does.

Fear is debilitating.  It causes Christians to self-censor, so that they dare not speak publicly, perhaps so that they dare not even admit to themselves privately, concerns that they may have with this or that issue out of fear of the consequences that may follow.

Now admittedly in our feminist ruled age, talking about God’s prohibition on women rulers is a scary topic.  As a friend said to me in an email about last week’s post, some “Christians” would consider it to be “fighting words.”  No doubt he’s right.  Therefore, when dealing with sensitive topics, it’s not wrong for Christians to use prudence.  As Jesus himself enjoined his hearers, “Give not that which is holy unto dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine.”  You don’t have to go up to your feminist colleague at work on Monday and begin defending “The Monstrous Regiment.” If you do, you may find out what Jesus meant by his warning, “lest they turn again and rend you.” 

But if we Christians never discuss the tenants of their faith, and the political statements of Scripture are just as binding as the Gospel of Justification by Belief Alone, is that not a failure on our part to do our job of being “salt and light” to a dying world. 

Just stop and look around you.  What do you see?  You see an entire civilization going mad, quite literally perishing for the lack of knowledge.  As Christians, we are called to speak truth at all times, but now the need for truth is desperate.  We live in a time when men think then can become women, and women think they can become men…or some other previously unknown category such as “nonbinary.” Rioters, looters and felons are the good guys who peacefully demonstrate, but the cops are evil and must be defunded.  Racking up massive, unpayable debts is now the American way, while financial prudence is considered foolishness.  One commentator I follow calls these Satanic inversions.  He’s right.  This is what Isaiah meant when he condemned those who called good evil and evil good. 

Speaking God’s truth, that, “To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city is repugnant to nature, contumelious to God, a thing most contrary to his revealed will and approved ordinance,” is to risk accusations of hate speech and court cancellation.  But to say this is simply to present God’s truth to the world, without which it will perish.  Though the world would call it hate speech, standing on the Word of God and declaring it to the nations is an act of mercy, for how will they hear without a preacher?        

As Christians, we can take courage from the many verses in Scripture that promise God will reward the faithful.  In Psalm 28 David wrote, “The LORD is my strength and my shield,” and one can find many other such verses in the Psalms and elsewhere in Scripture. 

Toward the end of his epistle to the Ephesians, Paul wrote that believers wrestled not against flesh and blood but against spiritual wickedness in high places.  In light of this, what were the Ephesians to do?  Run and hide?  No! Paul told them to put on the whole armor of God, their one offensive weapon being “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” 

As Christians, we need to learn to apply the Word of God to all areas of life as did John Knox in matter of politics.  Knox was able to take the stand he did, not on his own, but because he both understood the Scriptures and believed the promises of God to those who are faithful.  May we be his imitators.

(To be continued…)

When Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah saw that her son was dead, she arose and destroyed all the seed royal.

-          2 Kings 11:1

As of this writing in early September 2020, Americans find themselves faced with another presidential election in just two short months.  As is the American custom, much ink has been spilled over the past year concerning the November election.  In reality, the spilling of ink began much earlier.  With so much election commentary out there, surely, it would seem, there’s nothing more this author could add to the mix that hasn’t already been discussed thousands of times and by people much better qualified.

But this would be a mistake.

There is one topic, and a significant one to be sure, that, on the one hand, is a prominent feature of the 2020 presidential election but, on the other hand, has received hardly any commentary at all. 

Joe Biden’s March 15th promise, and the fulfillment of that promise, to choose a woman running mate. 

On second thought, my statement that little commentary has been directed to Biden’s promise to choose a female running mate needs refinement.  For there has been quite a lot of commentary on this topic.  Before Biden made his choice, there was endless speculation about who she would be.  Would it be Michelle Obama?  Stacey Abrams?  Someone else?  Before the riots in Minneapolis earlier this year, many speculated that Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar was under consideration.  Others thought it might be Elizabeth Warren. 

Since Biden made the announcement that he had selected Kamala Harris, there has been no end to the discussion about his pick.  Democrats and liberal commentators have, predictably, praised her selection.  Republicans along with the conservative media have, predictably, criticized her for her policies.

So it’s not correct to say there has been no commentary on Biden’s promise to choose a woman for his running mate. 

But the problem is not that there has been no commentary on Biden’s running mate. 

The problem is that the commentary, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, has missed the mark.  Martin Luther talked about an idea he called the Schriftprinzip, German for writing principle.  According to Luther, the Schriftprinzip was the notion that, “nothing except the divine words are to be the first principles for Christians; all human words are conclusions drawn from them and must be brought back to them and approved by them.”  

The correct focus of the commentary on Joe Biden’s promise to pick a woman for his running mate is not who she is.  Neither is it her supposed qualifications for office, nor it is her voting record, nor is it her public policy stances.  The proper question to be asked, both for Christians and non-Christians, is whether it is appropriate to have a woman vice presidential candidate at all?

The short answer to this question, the answer we get if we use, not common sense, not feminist philosophy, not secular conservative thought, but the Schriftprinzip is, no, it is not.    

Taking this a step further, it is unchristian for a woman to hold any public office.  It is unchristian for a woman to vote. 

In this feminist day and age, this is not an easy or popular stance to take.  In fact, a more unpopular stance would be hard to imagine.  Secular liberal feminists obviously hate the thought at anyone saying there are pursuits inappropriate for women.  The very idea that a woman, just because she is a woman, is unqualified for a task strikes at the very heart of feminism, which sees men and women as fully interchangeable.  Secular conservatives, always trailing their liberal counterparts by twenty of thirty years, are in no position to object to a woman vice president or president.  Based on current conservative thinking, it’s just obvious that women are as qualified as men for public office.  It’s simply a matter of finding the right woman, one of conservative principles.

It’s doubtful that conservative Evangelicals are much better.  Several years ago, Paul Elliott reported that he attempted to sound out Evangelical opinion on the question “Would it be Biblical to elect a woman as President of the United States?”  When he took the position that it was, “foreign to God’s ordained authority structure for a woman to rule a nation,” he reports that he was met with a firestorm of pure emotional rejection. 

Secular liberals, secular conservatives and Evangelicals all agree, there’s nothing amiss with having a woman govern a nation.  It’s just a matter of finding a qualified woman.  Anyone who thinks otherwise is a very bad person, one whose views are beyond the pale of polite, acceptable discussion, one who deserves to be cast into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.      

Certainly, modern feminism accounts for much of the hostility to anyone who opposes women holding pubic office.  But it appears there is something else at work.

John Knox, who in 1558 penned the ultimate refutation of women in politics, “The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women” – the Trinity Foundation published an edition of Knox’s masterwork in 1984 under the title “The Place of Women” -  noted in the introduction to his essay the sinful reticence of the clergy to speak out against the government of women. 

Knox suggested three reasons for the silence of those who ought to have known better.  First, they might be suspected of sedition.  Second, opposition to female government could well prove dangerous to the author, publisher and readers.  And third, even if they did speak out and hazard persecution, no one would pay them heed.

Knox dismissed these arguments by saying that if they were true, then the prophets themselves were very fools, for they did not cease to admonish Israel despite charges of treason, dangers to themselves, or mocking from those who heard them.  Likewise, continued Knox, if these objections were true, then Jesus Christ harmed his apostles by charging them to preach his teachings throughout the world.

The watchmen, charged Knox, were failing to do their job.

Knox’s charge was right about the Christian men of his day.  And the same can be said of Christian men in our time.  We are failing in our calling as watchmen. 

Why do Christians today not speak out against the monstrous regiment of women – “regiment” in Knox’s usage means “government” - as they ought?  Perhaps it has less to do with 20th and 21st century feminism and more to do with their lack of understanding of what the Bible teaches, their failure to realize that the Bible has a monopoly on truth such that all statements of all men must be brought back to it and approved by it, and a lack of courage born of disbelief in the promises of God.     

(to be continued)

The so-called corona virus (CV) pandemic has taken the world by storm.  Like many people, this author had never so much as heard the term “corona virus” until about three or four months ago.  But writing now in early May 2020, it seems as if it’s been with us forever. 

One of the barriers to thinking clearly about the CV pandemic and resulting lock down of the economy was the remarkable speed at which it all occurred.  It seemed that one day all was well, and the next that governors across the country were ordering their citizens to “shelter in place.”  It was almost as if the entire nation were sucker punched at once.  One day we were going about our business, working our jobs as we always had, and the next we were working from home or not working at all.  Who could ever have imagined such a thing as recently as the beginning of this year? 

The official narrative is that the virus is an unexpected event, originating in China.  Despite the Chinese leadership’s heroic efforts to contain it, the virus managed to spread throughout all the world.  Here in the US, Anthony Fauci is officially hailed as a hero and governors who locked down their states are thought to have taken bold action to save the nation from an even higher death count than has been reported.  They are heroes.  And the more severely they locked down their states, the more heroic they are.    

Although the rapidity at which the crisis emerged and my unfamiliarity with pandemics made analysis difficult at first, the whole CV pandemic always seemed more than a bit suspect to me.  And the longer it has gone on and the more information that has come out, the more my original suspicions have been confirmed.  Below are thirteen reason why I doubt CV narrative.

1.      Quarantining the healthy: The foolish and unbiblical policy of quarantining the healthy makes it obvious that our policymakers either do not know what they are talking about or have evil intentions.  The Bible does permit governments to quarantine the sick.  This can be seen in Leviticus chapter 13 where we read about the detailed process the priests used to determine if a man had leprosy.  It was only after the priest had declared him leprous that an individual was put outside the camp.  But there was no provision in the Mosaic law to lock up healthy people in their dwellings to prevent the spread of leprosy.  Israel as a nation was never locked down.  Applying quarantines only to the sick is an extension of the biblical view of criminal justice.  The Bible’s approach to criminal justice is one of crime punishment, not crime prevention.  In the Bible, a man was punished only after going through due process and being found guilty. There was no bureaucracy in place to punish the innocent with onerous regulations aimed at preventing crime.  Quarantining the healthy is a form of punishing the innocent and it needs to stop. 

2.      The remarkable attack on religious liberty:  It was just three weeks ago that Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear threatened Christians who attended Easter services in Kentucky with having their license plates recorded by local officials and put in quarantine (house arrest) for fourteen days.  Never has this author seen such an arrogant and sinful stance by an American governor toward Christians whose only “offense” was to obey the Biblical injunction to gather on the first day of the week to worship.    

3.      Soviet-style censorship of free speech:  In addition to the free exercise of religion, the US Constitution guarantees the right of free speech.  Yet the major social media companies have taken it upon themselves to censor content that contradicts the official narrative.  For example, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki stated in a recent CNN interview that “Anything that goes against WHO recommendations [on the CV] would be a violation of our policy and so remove is another really important part of our policy.” Likewise, Facebook says that in light of WHO’s declaring COVID-19 a global public health emergency, it will be, “taking aggressive steps to stop misinformation and harmful content from spreading.” Some will say that this is not a violation of free speech, since these YouTube and Facebook are private companies.  But the line between social media companies and the government is blurry.  For example, law professor Jonathan Turley wrote a post earlier this year titled “The Death of Free Speech: Zuckerberg Asks Governments For Instructions On ‘What Discourse Should Be Allowed.” The Atlantic published an article by Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith and University of Arizona law professor Andrew Keane Woods that the Hill described as calling for Chinese style censorship of the internet. 

4.      The destruction of economic liberty:  Government officials in the United States have forced businesses to close and put, so far, about 30 million people out of work.  This is the largest spike in unemployment in the history of our nation.  Yet the people that have been responsible for making and implementing and enforcing these policies have themselves remained conspicuously employed.  Anthony Fauci has not lost his job.  Neither has Deborah Birx or any of the dozens of governors who have locked down their states.  These actions have created extreme economic hardship for a significant part of the population, while those who are the cause of the suffering are insulated from the repercussions of their actions. 

5.      Destruction of personal liberty:  It’s shocking just how much many of the CV pandemic peddlers seem to love totalitarianism.   See, for example, Tucker Carlson’s report on Peter Walker, a former employee of the McKinsey consulting firm in China.  One clip shows Carlson raising concerns about China’s oppression of its citizens and Peter Walker responding by saying, “look at the results.”  Extraordinary.  An American business leader responding to China’s oppression of its own citizens by saying, “look at the results.”  Who would have thought we’d ever hear such a thing? The Atlantic ran a story at the end of March saying “Get Used to It:  This Lockdown Won’t Be the Last,” telling Americans that they have a future of multiple lock downs to look forward to.  All for our own good, of course. 

6.      Money printing by the Federal Reserve:  In response to the economic shut down, the Federal Reserve (the Fed) has engaged in a surge of money printing the likes of which have never been seen before.  According to this chart from the St. Louis Fed, the Fed’s balance sheet has increased by about $2.4 trillion just since February 19.  When we say that the Fed’s balance sheet has increased by $2.4 trillion, this is just a polite way of saying that the Fed has created $2.4 trillion out of nothing in the space of a little over two months.  To put that in perspective, it took the Fed about a century to create $3 trillion dollars.  That they’ve managed to do nearly that in just over two months without anyone saying much about it is remarkable to say the least.  And don’t for a minute thing the Fed’s done.  According to the very mainstream Marketwatch, the Fed could grow its balance sheet to $10 trillion by early 2021.  This unprecedented increase in the supply of money coupled with an unprecedented decrease in economic output will result in more dollars chasing fewer goods, implying unprecedented consumer price inflation.  Put in Biblical terms, this is theft.  And not only theft, but theft on a scale that is hard to comprehend.  Yet we’re told by elite propaganda outlets such as the New York Times that the expanding debt, which is made possible by the Fed’s expanding its balance sheet, is a good thing.   In truth, such policies by the Fed are both sinful and destructive of our nation.  That massive debt expansion and money printing are sold to the American people by their leaders as positively necessary for dealing the CV pandemic is good reason to suspect the entire narrative is bogus.

7.      The strange involvement of Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases with the Wuhan Institute of Virology:  According to the New York Post, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infection Diseases (NIAID) gave $7.4 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab from which the CV supposedly was released.  The New York Post article dated 4/20/2020 goes on to state that the National Institute of Health, which oversees NIAID, just shut off funding to the lab the prior week.  The financial connection between Fauci’s NIAID and the Wuhan lab is, to say the least, interesting.  Perhaps more information is forthcoming on this issue.

8.      Anthony Fauci’s Jesuit connections:  It’s remarkable how often one finds Jesuits, or men trained by the Jesuits, at the center of important events.  Jay Powell, the current Chairman of the Federal Reserve, went to law school at Jesuit Georgetown University.  Recently appointed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh attended high school at Georgetown Preparatory School, a Jesuit boys college prep school. As of the summer of 2018, Kavanaugh was a volunteer tutor and served on the board of Washington Jesuit Academy.  This bring us to Dr. Anthony Fauci.  As Berean Beacon reports, Anthony Fauci attended Jesuit schools from Our Lady of Guadalupe Grammar School in Brooklyn all the way up through his undergraduate degree from College of the Holy Cross.  Says Berean Beacon, “Today, Dr. Anthony Fauci, is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a position he has held since 1984.  This Jesuit trained deep state operative has been intimately involved in public affairs and policy for the past six presidential administrations.  And now the world stands at the precipice of forced vaccination at the hands of a conglomerate of church, state and science so falsely called.”  

9.      Bill Gates: The more one learns about Bill Gates, the more suspect he becomes.  The Microsoft billionaire has inserted himself in the response to the pandemic to a degree that is truly remarkable and, therefore, his actions require scrutiny.  What do we find when we look into Gates?  He’s a vaccine nut.  As a recent article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Children’s Health Defense website tells us, “Vaccines, for Bill Gates, are a strategic philanthropy that feed his many vaccine-related businesses (including Microsoft’s ambition to control a global vaccination ID enterprise) and give him dictatorial control of global health policy.  This has prompted some people to say that Bill Gates wants to microchip you, which various fact checking websites have had a field day refuting.  But not so fast. As this report from Target Liberty tells us, Bill Gates doesn’t want to microchip you, he just wants to give you a digital tattoo to prove you’ve had all your shots.  Well, that makes me feel so much better! 

10.  Quarantining the Healthy:  The Bible teaches that there is a place for quarantining individuals who have dangerous diseases.  But if you read what the Scriptures say about quarantining, it is all about isolating the sick, not locking down the healthy.  Yet we’re told by all right-thinking people that to be safe, we must lock healthy individuals in their homes.  This inversion of the Biblical principles of quarantining is prima facie evidence that those who are running the response to CV are at best confused in their thinking.  Another possibility is that they are actively malevolent and intend to use the CV pandemic to attack Americans’ civil rights. 

11.  Worldwide, synchronized media hype:  It’s been fascinating to see the worldwide media hype surrounding the CV pandemic.  Commenting on this phenomenon during a recent interview on the Ron Paul Liberty Report, Denis Rancourt made the point that this hype appeared to be “coordinated.”   He went on to say, “I believe that there is a network that does influence the main editors of the main papers in the great number of countries and then that sets the scene so the word is given out when they want something like this [the CV hype] to just flood the mainstream media.”    

12.  Empty hospitals:  We were told that hospitals across the country would be swamped beyond capacity, but that seems not to have been the case.  In fact, far from being at overcapacity, many hospitals are laying off doctors and nurses due to lack of business.  The Washington Post, for example, reported on April 9, 2020 that “Cash-starved hospitals and doctor groups cut staff amid pandemic.”  That certainly isn’t what we were led to believe would be happening.  Military.com reports that a Seattle field hospital set up in that city closed after three days during which it saw not one single patient.  Reuters ran a story on May 1 with the headline “Little-used Navy hospital ship Comfort leaves New York after treating COVID-19 patients.” Of course, pubic officials never will admit that they were wrong. Their strategy will be to say that it was their lock down and enforcement of social distancing that accounted for the much lower than anticipated incidence of COVID-19.  But their attacks on liberty and the destructive spending by Congress and money printing by the Fed, all which evils were necessitated by the lock down, strongly suggest that their approach was not the correct one.  

13.  Suspect attribution of cause of death:  The Guardian ran a story on April 15 with the headline “New York City coronavirus death toll jumps past 10,000 in revised count.”  As it turns out, the NYC added 3,778 people to the death toll who weren’t tested but were presumed to have died of the disease.  That seems more like guesswork than anything else.  Just last week, Project Veritas ran a story saying that funeral directors in NYC were indicating that COVID-19 death statistics were being padded by falsely attributing cause of death the COVID-19.

What shall we make of all this?  It seems to me that there are two main possibilities.  First, our leaders – by leaders I’m referring not only to political leaders but to thought and business leaders as well – are simply confused.  They really do think that cracking down on free speech, locking healthy people in their homes, forcibly closing business, putting tens of millions of people out of work and having the Fed print oceans of bogus money really is the best way to deal with the CV.  Second, they know the whole lock down social distancing thing is absurd and are simply doing this as a way of conditioning people to even more stringent lock downs and social controls in the future, perhaps culminating in some sort of world government dystopian tyranny of the sort one reads about in the book of Revelation. In my opinion, the latter is a more likely scenario than the former.

This is not to say that all politicians, business leaders, journalists and academics who support the lock downs are aware of some great master plan.  But the remarkable amount of worldwide coordination going on suggests that there is some organizing agent behind the scenes.  It is possible that I could be wrong about this.  It is my opinion.  You may have a different view. Perhaps additional study will make things clearer.  But whether the lock downs and attacks on personal liberty and economic freedom just happen to have the appearance of coordination, or whether there is, in fact, a conspiracy to take away our liberties and our property, it is imperative for Christians to stand up and speak out, rebuking from the Word of God those who would encroach on our Constitution and our freedom. 

It may sound strange to some to think that the Bible can be used to fight for freedom.  But in truth, it is the Bible and the Bible alone, the sword of the Spirit as Paul calls it, that is our only sure weapon in in our fight against tyranny.            

“But we will certainly do whatever has gone out of our own mouth, to burn incense to the queen of heaven and pour out drink offerings to her, as we have done, we and our fathers, our kings and our princes, in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem.  For then we had plenty of food, were well-off, and saw no trouble.”

-          Jeremiah 44:17

In his book Logic, Gordon Clark noted a number of informal logical fallacies.  On page 17, he mentioned, among others, a fallacy called in Latin post hoc ergo propter hoc, or as we would say it in English, “after this, therefore because of this.” This logical error, hereafter the post hoc fallacy, involves asserting that, because event B took place after event A, that A is what caused B. 

Now it’s true that there can be a cause and effect relationship between an earlier event and a late event.  In Jeremiah 44, the prophet, speaking for God, states, “You have seen all the calamity that I have brought on Jerusalem…because of their wickedness which they have committed to provoke Me to anger.”  God makes it entirely clear in this passage that the prior disobedience of the people of Judah was the cause of his bringing judgment on Jerusalem.  We don’t have to guess at why the Babylonians leveled Jerusalem and burned the temple in 586 BC, God tells us explicitly both the cause and the effect. 

Later in chapter 44, we get the reaction from the people to whom Jeremiah was prophesying.  As it turned out, they didn’t much care for his sermon. Part of their response to Jeremiah was a classic case of post hoc fallacy.  See if you can spot it.

But we will certainly do whatever has gone out of our own mouth, to burn incense to the queen of heaven and pour out drink offerings to her, as we have done, we and our fathers, our kings and our princes, in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem.  For then we had plenty of food, were well-off, and saw no trouble. But since we stopped burning incense to the queen of heaven and pouring out drink offering to her, we have lacked everything and have been consumed by the sword and by famine (Jeremiah 44:17-18).

Did I say, see if you can spot it?  Reading this passage further, it seems to me that there are two post hoc fallacies to be found.  In the first place, the people argue that their burning incense and pouring out drink offerings were the cause of their prosperity when they were in the land, when, in fact, it was God’s grace that provided for them.  Second, they attributed their current state of exile to their worshipping the queen of heaven, when, in fact, the cause of their exile was God’s punishing them for their disobedience.  

I bring up the preceding Biblical example of post hoc fallacy to introduce the main point of this post, which is to refute the linkage, put forward by mainstream financial reporters, the outbreak of the Corona virus in China is reason for the recent stock market sell off and spike in the price of gold. 

Stocks Down, Gold Up – Obviously, It’s Coronavirus!

A quick look at two headlines from Friday on CNBC will give you a good sense of just how hard the mainstream financial media is pushing the coronavirus-as-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it meme.

In the first place, CNBC wants you to believe that Friday’s, and the week’s, stock selloff was due to coronavirus.  “Dow drops more than 200 points, posts losing week as coronavirus fears resurface,” was how they put it.  Similar headlines could be found earlier in the week as well.  Now some may argue, “the headline doesn’t explicitly say, “Coronavirus causes 200-point drop in the stock market. It merely says that stocks went down as coronavirus fears went up.”  Technically, that’s true.  CNBC doesn’t make an explicit causal link between coronavirus and stocks going down.  But the intent, in my opinion, of headlines of this sort is to plant the seed in the reader’s mind that there is a cause and effect relationship at work.  Just read through the article to see what I mean.

On the same day as the headline above, CNBC ran another headline, this one reading, “Gold surges 1.5% on growing coronavirus concerns.”  Not only does coronavirus have the ability to drive down stocks, but it can cause gold to spike as well. 

In both cases, sinking stock and rising gold, CNBC is asking its readers to accept coronavirus as the cause.    First came coronavirus, then stocks went down and gold went up.  Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Now, am I saying that coronavirus could have no effect on stocks or gold?  After all, it appears that the illness has caused significant economic disruption in the world’s second largest economy.  Could not such a disruption cause stocks to go down and at the same time cause gold – gold is considered a “risk off” asset, one that does well when “risk on” assets such as stocks are doing poorly – to go up? Yes, it could.   

But while coronavirus could cause stocks to go down and gold to go up, it is not, in my view, the primary reason for these events.

To illustrate what I mean, consider that case of an overly indebted man who has a personal financial crisis due to an unexpected car repair bill.  The man has been living beyond his means for years, but has successfully shuffled his debts around, staying just one step ahead of bankruptcy.  Now ask yourself, was the unexpected car repair the reason this fellow suddenly found himself in financial dire straits, or was it the years of profligate living?  I would argue that it was the years of profligacy that were the real cause.  The unexpected car repair bill was just the thing the happened to expose the underlying problem, one that had been building for a long time before his car suddenly had mechanical problems.

In like fashion, the West’s financial system has been deteriorating for years, while at the same time stocks are hitting record highs and safety assets such as gold and silver are, comparatively speaking, performing very poorly.  In the opinion of this author, this is an artificial situation.  Stocks, in fact, should be much lower, while gold and silver should be much higher.  A better explanation for the current stock market troubles and breakout in the gold price is required. 

 It’s the Fed! It’s the Fed! It’s the Fed!

I mentioned above that the current valuation of the stock market is artificial, that is to say, it is not based on market forces.  Stocks aren’t the only asset in a bubble, either.  At the same time, we have a stock market bubble, we also have a bond market bubble and a housing bubble.  There are so many assets in bubble territory – by bubble, I simply mean the assets in question are overvalued - that some financial observers are calling it the “everything bubble.” 

In the late 90’s we had the tech bubble.  Any stocks with .com in their name immediately shot up to stratospheric valuations, only to come crashing down in 2000.  In the 00’s, we had the housing bubble, when real estate zoomed up in value, only to tank in 2008 during the financial crisis.  In fact, the 2008 crisis was closely related to the popping of the housing bubble.     Now we have the everything bubble, with stocks, bonds and real estate all at record valuations. 

So how is it possible to have so many markets in bubble territory?  The root cause of the everything bubble is the same as that of the .com and housing bubbles – it’s the Fed. 

Ever since the 2008 crises, the Fed, together with the Plunge Protection Team (PPT) and the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF), has used its enormous power and influence, not only to prop up favored markets, but to suppress those out of favor.  It has done this through money printing – quantitative easing, or QE – market manipulation – some of the Fed’s manipulations are overt, such as cutting interest rates, while some of them are covert and speculative; for example, a recent headline in ZeroHedge reported that then Fed Chairman Janet Yellen said in 2017 that the Fed “might be able to help the U.S. economy in a future downturn if it could buy stocks and corporate bonds”; what are the odds this is already going on in secret? -  and good old fashioned propaganda. 

So what’s the problem with market rigging?  There are several, one of the most pernicious of which is this:  Once you start rigging, you can’t stop.  Market rigging, you see, is a lot like telling a lie.  Just as you can’t tell only one lie, so too you can’t just rig one market.  Rather, you have to rig all markets. 

If you want to create the (false) perception that the economy is doing great, you have to push up stocks and housing.  The most effective way to push up stocks and housing is to artificially support the bond market.  The Fed, by purchasing bonds through QE, artificially raises the price of bonds, which has the effect of artificially lowering bond yields.  When bond yields are held down, this pushes cash into the stock market where it can find a better return than it can in the bond market.  Lowering bond yields also lowers the interest rate of home loans, making it easier for people to borrow more money to buy a house.  More money flowing into the housing market means higher housing prices. 

At the bottom of all this is Fed money printing.  If the Fed did not have the ability to create money out of nothing and then to use that newly created (counterfeited) money to purchase US Treasuries (and quite possibly other assets), stocks, bonds and real estate would all be much lower.

But as was mentioned above, once the Fed started on its program of market manipulation – the Fed’s market manipulation began in earnest with the 2008 crisis, but it had been going on for at least 20 years before that – it found it could not stop. 

Market rigging, you see, is a bit like having the proverbial tiger by the tail - Once you grab it, you can’t let go or you get eaten.  Likewise, once the Fed started rigging markets, it found it couldn’t stop.    

This is not for lack of trying.  Beginning in December 2015, the Fed started to inch up interest rates up from 0%.  This program went on through December 2018, at which point the markets crashed.  This prompted Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to convene an emergency meeting of the PPT  on December 24, 2018.  Remarkably, when markets reopened the day after Christmas, the Dow shot up a record 1,100 points.  But if you think this was the PPT’s doing, you’re a conspiracy theorist. 

Almost immediately after the December 2018 market crash, Fed Chairman Jay Powell announced the reversal of the Fed’s policy of raising interest rates as well as an end to its Quantitative Tightening (QT) program of selling long dated US Treasuries.

Today the Fed once again is in full QE mode and, very likely, will be lowering interest rates in March.

As Proverbs tells us, “Treasures of wickedness profit nothing,” and, “Wealth gained by dishonesty will be diminished.”  In like fashion, while all the Fed’s machinations so far have been successful at propping up stocks and housing, these artificially inflated markets are very unstable and susceptible to crashing.  All it takes is for some unexpected event, a virus outbreak for example, to undo them. 

It’s not the cornovirus that’s the cause of our current bout of financial instability, it’s the Fed.

 Gold and Silver Suppressed

As mentioned above there are any number of financial assets that are now in bubble territory.  But two that decidedly are not are gold and especially silver. This is not an accident.  Just as the powers-that-shouldn’t be artificially inflate the value of favored assets, so too do they suppress the value of assets they don’t like, precious metals.  Gregory Mannarino, a trader and YouTuber whose work I follow, refers to these monetary metals as being in an “inverse bubble.”  That is to say, he believes their value is being artificially held down, and by the same people who seek to artificially inflate stocks, bonds and real estate. 

But just as artificially inflated bubbles in stocks, bonds and real estate are unstable, so too are inverse bubbles in gold and silver. 

Rather than seeing gold going up due to coronavirus, a more likely explanation is that the rise in gold is due to Fed money printing.  Gold started a major bull run as priced in US dollars around the end of May 2019, long before anyone had even heard of coronavirus.  Not only was this in response to the Fed’s actions to that point, but many observers think the smart money anticipated the Fed’s bailout of the banks via its program of supporting the Repo Market, which began in September and  is still ongoing.  

So Why Are They Pushing the Coronavirus Meme? 

If it’s true what I’ve said, that the problems in the stock market and the rise in gold are due, not to the coronavirus, but to the activities of the Fed, why is the media pushing the coronavirus meme? 

The answer:  The mainstream media’s main job is not to inform you, but to misinform you.

You see, fellow deplorables, we’re not supposed to know the secrets of the high priests at the Fed.  They are our betters.  They are our masters.  Our job, like ordinary Roman Catholics before the Reformation, is to accept what our masters at the Fed and in the media say, with implicit faith.  That is to say, our job is to take what they tell us at face value and never, ever ask uncomfortable questions. 

The masters of the universe have an unspoken rule: Whenever there’s an economic problem, a fall guy is needed.  The Fed must never be blamed.

Back in the 70’s there was a terrible bout of inflation that was the result of President Nixon pulling the plug on the Bretton Woods accord in 1971.  Even as a young boy, I remember hearing all the excuses for rising prices.  It was the oil sheiks of OPEC.  It was frost in the orange groves in Florida.  It was droughts, hurricanes and hailstorms. 

Anything but the truth, Fed money printing.

Think about that famous scene in the Wizard of Oz, where Toto goes and pulls back the curtain hiding the “Wizard” in his control booth.  “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” bellows the Wizard, trying desperately to keep Dorothy and friends from discovering that the Wizards was no Wizard at all, but just a man with a lot of special effects at hand.

That’s exactly the way we’re treated. 

And it doesn’t matter what your political persuasion is, either.

You could be the bluest of blue Bernie Bros who hangs on every word Rachel Maddow speaks.  Watch her program for years if you will.  Listen to all of Bernie’s stump speeches several times over.  You’ll hear them talk about income and wealth inequality, but you’ll never once hear them pin it on the real culprit, the Fed.

You could be the reddest of red staters, owning multiple MAGA hats and never missing a minute of Sean Hannity.  Yet you’ll never once hear him talk about the role the Fed plays in creating price inflation and how its policies have caused stagnant wages and reduced living standards for the very people Donald Trump claims to represent, ordinary working Americans.    

Even if you’re a middle of the roader and stick to mainstream network news, it’s the same sorry state of affairs.  Watch the evening news for decades on end if you will, but you’ll never learn a thing about how the Fed creates money from nothing and hands it out to its friends and how you pay for it.

These omissions are not by accident.  They are by design. 

The powers that shouldn’t be are quite happy that people are ignorant of the games the Fed plays and they want to make sure people stay that way.

Flooding the airwaves with false explanations of financial market activity is how they keep people in the dark. 

It’s not the coronavirus.  It’s the money printing.

It’s the Fed.     

It’s the Fed.

It’s the Fed.

All the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall be defiled; he is unclean:  he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall his habitation be.

-          Leviticus 13:46

"We haven't faced an enemy like we are facing today in 102 years - we are at war. In the time of war, we must make sacrifices, and I thank all of our Ohio citizens for what they are doing and what they aren't doing. You are making a huge difference, and this difference will save lives," said Governor DeWine. "Right now, we are in a crucial time in this battle. What we do now will slow this invader so that our healthcare system will have time to treat those who have contracted COVID-19 and also have time to treat those who have other medical problems. Time is of the essence." Thus reads the announcement on the Ohio.gov website where the state’s Stay At Home Order is also listed. 

Clearly, Governor DeWine takes the coronavirus [the Ohio.gov website calls it COVID-19] outbreak very seriously.  Note the repeated use of military terminology in the quote above.  We are told that “We haven’t faced an enemy like we are facing today in 102 years” [apparently, this is a reference to the 1918 outbreak of the Spanish Flu]…“we are at war”…“In time of war”…”we are in a crucial time in this battle”…”What we do now will slow this invader.”

With all this military terminology, one wonders when the Governor plans to institute a draft.  Then on second thought, in a way, he already has.  As the website notes, beginning March 23, 2020 at 11:59 p.m. Ohioans are under a Stay At Home Order.  This order is effective until 11:59 p.m. on April 6, 2020 “unless the order is rescinded or modified.”  This order applies to everyone, and as of this writing on March 29, no recension or modification of this order has been announced.  So in a way, all Ohioans already have been drafted into the Governor’s war. 

One question that seems not to have been asked in the wake of Governor DeWine’s announcement is, on what authority does he give this order?  Reading through the order, one finds that it contains provisions that shutter a not insignificant portion of the businesses within the state.  What is the legal basis for the Governor’s order?

One possible answer is that Ohio has adopted some form of “Medical Martial Law” legislation that was propagated in the wake of the Swine Flu pandemic in 2009.  Researcher James Corbett produced a video back in 2009 related to the Swine Flu pandemic which he titled Medical Martial Law and which dealt with the legislative response that followed the outbreak of that pandemic.  In his video, Corbett states that something called “The Model State Emergency Health Powers Act” was drafted by the Center for Law and the Public’s Health at Georgetown University (Jesuits) and Johns Hopkins University.  According to the website of The Centers for Law & the Public’s Health, the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act (MSEHPA) “grants public health powers to state and local public health authorities to ensure a strong, effective, and timely planning, prevention, and response mechanisms to public health emergencies (including bioterrorism) while also respecting individual rights.” 

The website boasts that forty-four states have adopted MSEHPA in whole or in part, but, curiously, Ohio is not listed among them.  Neither was I able to find anything on other websites linking MSEHPA to Ohio.  That being the case, this model legislation, as dangerous as it is, apparently is not the basis for the Governor’s actions.

According to the language in the Order itself, the basis for the Order is R.C. [Revised Code] 3701.13 which allows the Director of the Ohio Department of Health to “make special orders…for preventing the spread of contagious or infectious diseases.”  

That said, although he doesn’t come out and say it directly, Governor DeWine and Dr. Amy Acton (Ohio’s Director of Health) seem eager for the public to see the Stay At Home Order as some form of Medical Martial Law.  This can be seen from the Governor’s own words, laden as they are with military terminology.        

Are Quarantines Biblical?

As Christians, we must always ask ourselves “What do the Scriptures say?” when thinking through the circumstances we come across in our lives.  This includes the words and actions of civil magistrates.  In this case, let us start by asking this question, are quarantines biblical? 

The short answer to this question is, yes, they are.  We know this from the Law of Moses which details procedures for placing in quarantine those diagnosed with certain illnesses or those who have become ceremonially unclean for some reason.  There are many such passages in the Old Testament Law.  Here is one example:

And the LORD spoke to Moses and Aaron saying, “When a man has on the skin of his body a swelling, a scab, or a bright spot, and it becomes on the skin of his body like a leprous sore, then he shall be brought to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons the priests. The priest shall examine the sore on the skin of the body; and if the hair on the sore has turned white, and the sore appears to be deeper than the skin of his body, it is a leprous sore. Then the priest shall examine him, and pronounce him unclean. But if the bright spot is white on the skin of his body, and does not appear to be deeper than the skin, and its hair has not turned white, then the priest shall isolate the one who has the sore seven days. And the priest shall examine him on the seventh day; and indeed if the sore appears to be as it was, and the sore has not spread on the skin, then the priest shall isolate him another seven days. Then the priest shall examine him again on the seventh day; and indeed if the sore has faded, and the sore has not spread on the skin, then the priest shall pronounce him clean; it is only a scab, and he shall wash his clothes and be clean. But if the scab should at all spread over the skin, after he has been seen by the priest for his cleansing, he shall be seen by the priest again. And if the priest sees that the scab has indeed spread on the skin, then the priest shall pronounce him unclean. It is leprosy” (Leviticus 13:1-8).

Individuals who were unclean were pronounced unclean by the priest and were required to dwell outside the camp.

“Now the leper on whom the sore is, his clothes shall be torn and his head bare; and he shall cover his mustache, and cry, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ He shall be unclean.  All the days he has the sore he shall be unclean.  He is unclean, and he shall dwell alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp” (Leviticus 13:45-46).

It’s worth noting that Jesus himself gave implied support to the Levitical quarantine laws in the account of his healing the ten lepers in Samaria.  Luke tells us in 17:11-19 that, upon being implored by ten lepers to heal them, Jesus told them to go and show themselves to the priests, which was in accordance with the laws concerning leprosy set forth in Leviticus chapter 13. 

There are other examples of quarantines in Scripture, but the citations above are enough to show that quarantines themselves are not in conflict with the Bible’s teachings.

Is Ohio’s Stay At Home Order Biblical?

Although we have shown that quarantines have Biblical support, this does not necessarily mean that all quarantines meet the standards of Scripture.  So let’s ask another question, is Ohio’s stay at home order biblical? 

In the opinion of this author, the answer is no.  Not because quarantines themselves are wrong, but because Ohio’s Stay At Home Order, which is a type of quarantine, applies too broadly.  In an attempt to slow the spread of coronavirus, the Governor and Health Director have drafted an order that applies to all individuals regardless of whether they exhibit symptoms of coronavirus or have even been tested for the disease. 

One way of illustrating my point is to look at the Bible’s view of criminal justice.  Ask yourself this question, is the Bible’s stance on criminal justice one of crime punishment or crime prevention?  The correct answer is crime punishment. Although I do not have the reference handy, this point was brought up in a lecture by John Robbins, and my remarks on the Bible’s view of criminal justice are drawn from his comments. 

According to Robbins, the Bible focuses on crime punishment.  In the Law of Moses there are many clear statements concerning the civil law.  There were commandments on what people were to do and not to do as well as civil punishments for those who violated the law.  Worth noting, although all violations of the Law of God were sinful, not all were crimes. Put another way, some sins were also crimes.  The way you can tell the difference is whether there are civil penalties – e.g. restitution in the case of theft, death in cases of murder - attached to them.  Those violations of the law that did not have civil penalties, while sinful, were not crimes. 

But while there were laws set forth for the punishment of crimes in ancient Israel, there was no bureaucratic regulatory body set up to punish the innocent by burdening them with regulations designed to prevent crime.  For example, murder was prohibited in the Ten Commandments but there was no government Sword Control Administration that, in the name of preventing murder, required people to register their swords with the government or prevented people from owning them.

If a man was accused or murder, the Law provided for due process for the accused.  If found guilty, the law also provided for the punishment of the guilty individual.  That was all. 

Israel’s quarantine laws were similar.  To be quarantined, one first had to show himself to a priest for examination.  The Law laid out in great detail the process the priest was to go through, and it was only after all the steps in the process had been followed that a man could be declared unclean and quarantined outside the camp.  There were no general quarantines announced in the name of preventing disease.  Only those who were determined to be infected after the priest had followed due process were quarantined.       

The Dangers of Ignoring Due Process

Due process is a bulwark against arbitrary government.  Going back to the Biblical laws concerning leprosy.  Suppose for a moment that the priestly examination process did not exist or was circumvented.  One can easily see how the leprosy statue could become a political weapon.  All one would have to do to have his enemy put outside the camp would be to accuse him of having leprosy, present him to a priest that was a little shady or on the take, and have him declared unclean.

In like fashion, there are those who today are greatly concerned, this author among them, that giving governments the power to shut down private businesses and essentially put people under house arrest who have never received due process to show that they are ill or are carriers of a communicable disease represents a step toward tyranny.  

Now some may argue that the Governor has no intention of being a tyrant and has only the best motives.  Even so, there is a problem.  Going back to the Biblical example of identifying lepers, even if someone accused his neighbor of having leprosy, not having hated him in times past, and even if the priests were honest and not greedy for a bribe, lack of due process in examining possible lepers would almost certainly result in people being put outside the camp who did not deserve to be so treated.  This would represent a gross injustice to them and possible financial and social ruin for the rest of the family as well. 

Although I do not have estimates of how many people have been put out of work or owners who have had their businesses restricted or closed by the Governor’s Order, the number must be significant.  According to the order,

All places of public amusement, whether   indoors or outdoors, including, but not limited to, locations with amusement rides, carnivals, amusement parks, water parks, aquariums, zoos, museums, arcades, fairs, children's play centers, playgrounds, funplexes, theme parks, bowling alleys, movie and other theaters, concert and music halls, and country clubs or social clubs shall be closed.

Even businesses that are allowed to remain open have had restrictions placed on them.  For example, I had to pay a visit to my local computer store.  Upon arrival, I found on the door of the establishment that the store was prohibited from allowing more than thirty customers in the store at once.  This meant that the store had to pay associates to organize incoming customers in a way that would comply with this order rather than going about their normal duties.  Most likely, the store’s sales are being negatively impacted.  Further, customers were forced to bear the cost of waiting in line and of delays in completing their purchases. 

Now you may argue that this is a minor inconvenience, but multiply this statewide and the cost of complying with this new regulation is probably not small.     

Not Just an Ohio Problem

I have written in some detail about Medical Martial Law as it has been applied in the State of Ohio, because it’s where I live.  Many other states have similar or even more restrictive laws concerning the coronavirus outbreak. 

Just this weekend, President Donald Trump let it be known that he was thinking about imposing a quarantine on the states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.  Politico reports that the measure would have been “an enforceable quarantine.” While it’s not clear what is meant by “enforceable quarantine,” it appears to mean severely restricting movement in and out of these states.  New York Governor Andrew Cuomo seemed to take it that way, asserting that the idea amounted to a “declaration of war on states.”

Outside the U.S. things aren’t any better.  Several countries in Europe have been locked down as has been Australia.

Closing Thoughts

The focus of this post has been to discuss one aspect of the governmental response to coronavirus that has received little attention from pundits, namely, it is an attempt to answer the question, what do the Scriptures say about quarantines? 

In the opinion of this author, there is a strong case to be made from the Bible that quarantines are permitted.  But this is not to say that all quarantines meet with biblical guidelines.  As the biblical approach to criminal justice is one of crime punishment, not crime prevention, so too the biblical standard for quarantine is disease “punishment” not disease prevention.   As one does not regulate society to prevent crime, thus punishing the innocent, so too one does not quarantine everyone, including the healthy, to prevent the spread of disease.  Just as in biblical criminal justice, punishment is meted out only after due process is given to the accused, so too the biblical approach to quarantine is to isolate only those individuals who have been found to carry the disease.  If it is unjust to punish the innocent along with the guilty, so too is it unjust to quarantine the healthy along with the sick.  Yet governments to a large degree have opted to do just this, quarantine the healthy along with the sick.  This is unjust.

And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.  For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.

• John 3:19-20

The words from John at the top of this post are readily recognized by Christians as coming from Jesus’ dialogue with Nicodemus, the Pharisee who came to inquire of him one night.  The immediate application of Jesus’ words is, of course, to himself as the light who came into the world and was rejected of men, for they loved evil and feared lest their deeds should be exposed.

But while Christ said these words in the context of explaining his person and purpose for coming in the flesh to Nicodemus, his comments have a wider application.  They are a specific case of a broader principle we see in Scripture, that of the Christian principle of openness and honesty.  Those who love the truth do what they do in the open.  They let their light shine before men that others may see their goods works and glorify their Father in heaven.  On the other hand, those who practice evil, those who have something to hide, they do their work in the dark, fearing to be seen by men.

One application of the principle of openness and light is the Christian idea of government as a servant of the people, not as their master.  When the disciples argued about who was the greatest, Jesus explained the Christian concept of leadership, which was radically different from the model the world offered.  Christ explained that the rulers of the Gentiles “exercised lordship” (lorded it over) them, but such was not to be the case among his followers.  Following Jesus example, those who would be first in the Kingdom of Heaven were to be servants of all.

With Jesus words in mind, it should come as no surprise that one of the side effects of the 16th century Reformation was a significant change for the better in civil government.  Writing in Christ and Civilization, John Robbins noted,

The revolution first accomplished in the churches could not be confined to them, but quickly spread to civil governments.  Not only was there a reduction in the power of churches in Protestant societies, but a reduction in the size and scope of civil government as well.  For example, Steven Ozment reports that “when the Reformation was consolidated in Rostock in 1534, it brought not only an end to the privileges of the clergy but also a government agreement to reduce its own number by about one-third,” and to submit to a detailed annual accounting (122).  Karl Holl, Professor of Church History at the University of Berlin (1906-1926), wrote, “…it was the Reformation that first set a rigid limit to the absolute power of the State.”

Now let those words sink in for just a moment.  If you’re like me and long to see the seemingly impossible, a return to limited, honest government, what took place at Rostock in 1534, the reduction of civil government by a third and its agreeing to submit to an annual accounting, appears as something not far from a miracle.

But just as the Christian Reformation brought about a “rigid limit to the absolute power of the State” in the 16th century, so too has the abandonment of Reformation doctrine in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries led to the recrudescence of big, unaccountable government.

The current presidential election cycle in the U.S. has produced no end to the calls for bigger government.  Indeed, on the Democratic side the candidates have spent months fighting it out to determine who can give away more public loot the fastest.  For the first time in my lifetime, among progressive Democrats there have been open calls for socialism.

The Republicans talk a better game on this point.  President Trump, for example, publicly stated that American would never be a socialist country to loud applause.  Very well, let us hope he is right.  But since that speech, the president has added another branch to the military and praised a major infrastructure bill in his latest State of the Union address just a few weeks ago.  Indeed, at the end of January Politico reported that “The federal deficit under President Donald Trump will top $1 trillion this year” and project an average deficit of $1.3 trillion over the next ten years.  In the opinion of this writer, the actual deficits likely will be much larger.

And while government – federal, state and local - keeps getting larger and larger and more and more intrudes into our lives, regardless of whether the Republicans or the Democrats are in power, it also is becoming steadily more secretive.

While not the only example of secret government, the Federal Reserve could certainly be put forth as Exhibit A in this regard. Technically not part of the federal government – although chartered by the Federal Reserve Act, it is privately owned - the Fed, America’s central bank, has been shrouded in darkness even before it was officially voted into existence on Christmas Eve, 1913.  In the first chapter of The Creature from Jeykyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve, author G. Edward Griffin describes the 1910 secret meeting on Jekyll Island, Georgia, where powerful senators and financiers met to draw up plans for the Federal Reserve.  It was, in Griffin’s words, “a classic conspiracy.”

Over the years, the Fed has jealously maintained it secretive nature.  One writer captured the mysterious nature of it quite well in the title of his book on the Fed, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country.

Over the years various attempts have been made to open the Fed’s books and reveal the temple’s secrets, but to date they have come up short.  The last time Congress tried to pass a bill to increase Congressional scrutiny of the Fed, then Fed Chairman Janet Yellen wrote a three page letter to then Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi complaining that the proposal would “severely impair the Federal Reserve’s ability to carry out its mandate to foster maximum employment and stable prices.”  Nothing ever came of that bill.

When overnight repo rates suddenly spiked from around 2% to 10%, the Fed immediately swung into action to tamp rates back down.  This intervention, which was originally supposed to last a few days or a few weeks at most, is still going on nearly five months later.

One odd thing about it:  There has never been a clear, official explanation concerning the reason the overnight rates spiked as they did.

Back in October 2019, presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin asking “why they [the Fed’s nightly bailouts of the repo market] were necessary.”  The letter made the news cycle for a day or two, then disappeared into the ether.  It seems that the powers-that-be sat Warren down and explained to her how things are, that one does not tug on Superman’s cape, even, and perhaps especially, a presidential candidate.

The Fed, it’s still shrouded in secrecy after all these years.

Just to be clear, this is not an endorsement of Elizabeth Warren’s presidential candidacy, but she was not wrong to ask for an explanation of the Fed’s actions.  Curiously, though, she went to the Secretary of the Treasury with her question, not to Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Fed.  The reason for her choice of action is unclear to this author.

To date, there still has been no adequate, official explanation why the Fed is bailing out the repo market in increasingly large amounts each night.  The official word is, move along folks, nothing to see here.

This has left truth seeking financial analysts to speculate about just what’s on fire to cause the spike in overnight lending rates an the now five months old bailout. One common suspect is Deutsche Bank (DB), the largest bank in Europe, which has been on fire for a number of years and almost certainly should have collapsed by now.  That it is still standing is evidence that DB is secretly being bailed out.  Given the Fed’s actions in 2008, it is not at all unreasonable to suspect that its bailout of the repo market is in some way related to keeping DB alive.

A Better Way

As was mentioned earlier in this post, Jesus’ words comparing the world’s approach to government – “the rulers of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them” – to the Christian approach to government, those who seek to lead are to serve, has a much wider application than just he church.

At the time of the Reformation, we began to see this put into action, as both the size and scope of government were reduced, and governments were subjected to an annual accounting.

But in the decadent 20th and 21st centuries, we have witnessed a reversal of the gains made during the 16th century.  Governments have grown ever larger, and governors have come to see themselves, not as the servants of the people, but as a privileged class to whom ordinary people must give obeisance.

In many nations throughout the West there is an increasing sense that government of the people, by the people and for the people - these words, by the way, known to most Americans as part of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, were not original with Lincoln, he was quoting John Wycliff who in 1384 wrote in the prologue of this translation of the Bible, “The Bible is for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the People -  has become a forgotten concept.

There is good reason for people to believe this.

But if Western nations are ever to recover some semblance of their lost liberties, that change will not come through the political process.  It will have to come through the pulpit.

Jesus said, “Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.” Jesus’ primary reference here was spiritual freedom, but it is not a stretch to see in his statement political and economic implications as well.

It was the Reformation’s teaching of Justification by Faith Alone that first brought spiritual, and later, political and economic freedom to the nations it touched.  And it is the disappearance of Reformation doctrine in those same nations that has led to their increasing slide into political authoritarianism.

Quite possibly the most egregious example of the enslavement of once free nations in Europe and North America is the erection of a system of secretive central banking in those same nations over the past century or so.

Ron Paul tells us that we need to audit and then end the Fed.  To this I can only say amen.

But for that to happen, the American people have a lot of repenting to do.

“There’s a historic battle going on now across the West, in Europe, America and elsewhere. It is globalism against populism.  And you may loath populism, but I tell you a funny thing, it’s becoming very popular.”

• Nigel Farage

As of January 31, 2020, Great Britain is no longer part of the European Union (EU).  Britain’s success in parting ways with the EU, what is commonly called Brexit, short for British Exit from the EU, is the culmination of nearly 30 years of work by Britons opposed to the Maastricht Treaty, which the was signed by the U.K.’s conservative government in 1992, making Great Britain part of the EU.

In June 2016, a referendum was held asking voters whether they wanted to remain in the EU or leave.  Despite a great deal of opposition from the establishment, the vote went 52% in favor of Brexit, with 48% electing to remain in the EU.

Although interests dedicated to keeping Britain in the EU worked hard to subvert Brexit, the resounding victory of the conservatives under the leadership of Boris Johnson on December 12, 2019, effectively guaranteed the success of Brexit.

In this post, I don’t intend to get into the weeds of the political process that brought about Brexit.  Neither do I intend to write much about the principle figures who supported Brexit or opposed it.  My aim here is to step back and to view Brexit in its larger historical context, that of conflict between the Protestant Westphalian World Order and the New World Order globalism of the Roman Catholic Church-State (RCCS).

Though very little attention has been paid to the religious aspect of Brexit by mainstream journalism, and though it may seem strange to some to speak of any relationship between the 16th century Protestant Reformation and the 21st century Brexit, this author holds that, not only is there a relationship between the Reformation and Brexit, but that the relationship is a close one.  Indeed, it is not an overstatement to put the relationship in these terms:  No Protestant Reformation, no Brexit.  It’s that simple.

Globalism:  Protestants Oppose, Catholics Embrace            

On January 12, 2017, the Washington Post ran an article titled “Catholics like the European Union more than Protestants do. This is why,” in which political scientists Brent Nelsen and James Guth note the split between Protestants and Roman Catholic over the EU and explain the reasons for this phenomenon.

After commenting that there’s a great deal of skepticism about the role of religion in European politics, Brent Nelsen observed,

But in 2001, we started looking at Eurobarometer data, and it’s very clear that Catholics, controlling for all other factors, favor the E.U. more than do Protestants.  These attitudes were forged in the Reformation, with the development of two different approaches to governance in Europe. Catholics see Europe as a single cultural whole that ought to be governed in some coordinated way. Protestants, on the other hand, have seen the nation state as a bulwark against Catholic hegemony, and they have been very reluctant to give it up, even as religion has become less important.

This is an excellent summary of the very distinct views of international relations held by Protestants and Romanists.  Later in the article, Nelsen expands on this idea,

Catholicism has always been a universal religion.  It was the successor to the Roman Empire, and in Catholic theology and ideology, there’s always been an emphasis on the unity of Christendom. Even today, even though the pope doesn’t claim secular authority, there’s still supranational governance within the Roman Catholic Church. So Catholics have always been very comfortable, even if subconsciously, with the notion of supranational governance.

After the Reformation, Protestants, on the other hand, attempted to carve out areas of religious liberty and caught on to the notion of the nation state. They didn’t invent the concept — it was invented by both sides as they came out of the religious wars of the 17th century — but the Protestants saw the nation state as very important for guaranteeing their liberty. For people in the Nordic states and the United Kingdom, the continent was the source of instability and of hegemony, and that’s part of why they developed a strong commitment to the nation and to national sovereignty — this was really the main vehicle for defense against, first, expanding Catholic control in the 16th and 17th centuries, and then, later on, Napoleon and Hitler.

We can summarize Nelsen’s comments thus: The Roman Catholic Church-State, as successor to the Roman Empire, believes in globalism, in empire building and in a top-down structure of world government, whereas Protestants view these ideas as tyrannical and see the nation-state as a bulwark against them and as a guarantor of personal liberty.

What Saith the Scriptures?

So who’s right in this conflict?  Are Romanists calling for world government – it’s remarkable to this author that, despite the many, open, and aggressive calls for world government by popes and other high officials of the Roman Catholic Church-State, so little note is made of Rome’s push for globalism;  this is true both among members of the mainstream media and the independent, alternate media; it’s as if reporters and pundits all have veils over their hearts when writing about Rome – in the right, or are Protestants who view the nation state as a bulwark against tyranny?

Very obviously, the Protestants have it right.  So where are the Scriptural proofs?  While this author does not claim to exhaust in this brief post all the Bible has to say in support of independent nation states and in opposition to globalist tyranny, it is possible to hit the highlights.

Empires are Monuments to Sinful Man’s Pride  

The Tower of Babel is one early example of man’s sinful attempt to build a world empire as a monument to his own pride.  After the flood, the Lord commanded Noah and his sons, much in the same way as he had Adam, to “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.”  But Noah’s descendants did not obey, preferring instead to stay in one place and to erect a monument to their own pride.  As Genesis 11 recounts, the Lord responded and put an end to their enterprise.  He confused their language and “scattered them [the people] over the face of all the earth.”

In his address on Mars Hill, the Apostle Paul sheds further light on God’s reason for doing what he did to Babel.  According to Paul, confusing their language and scattering them across the face of the earth appears to have been an act of God’s mercy.  Paul explains, “And He has made form one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him” (Acts 17:26-27).

Now “nations” (Greek ethnos) here has a different, though related, meaning to the modern term “nation state.”  Nations, in Paul’s usage, were what we today would call “people groups.”  That is, a nation was a collection of individuals sharing a common ancestry, language and culture.  A nation state, as we use that term today, although not identical to the what Paul meant by “nations”, is a closely related idea.  A nation state, as it’s come to be understood, is the political expression of a particular people group.

To prove this, simply think about the nation states of the modern world.  They have, historically, represented people with a common ancestry, language and culture.  This is not to says that there can be no distinctions among people within a nation state.  But, practically speaking, it appears that there are limits to how much diversity can exist within a nation state before that nation state itself ceases to exist.

If it’s true that God approves of nations in the people groups sense of the term, and it is, it also appears that he likewise approves of the political expression of people groups, what we have come to call the nation state.  This can be seen in the radical reorganization of international relations that occurred in the century following the Protestant Reformation.

The Westphalian World Order  

The Thirty Years’ War and the Treaty of Westphalia that settled it, are among the most important, most positive, and yet among the most forgotten by-products of the Reformation.

So forgotten are the Thirty Year’s War and the Treaty of Westphalia, that probably a large percentage of the American people has never even heard of them, let alone could tell you anything about them.  But if you explain the ideas of the Treaty of Westphalia to them, not only will people generally agree with them, but they likely will say that it’s just common sense.

The Thirty Year’s War took place from 1618-1648 and was a battle between the Catholic and Protestant states of the Holy Roman Empire.  Despite the guarantee of religious freedom within the Holy Roman Empire as a result of the Peace of Augsburg, Emperor Ferdinand II attempted to force citizens of the empire to follow Roman Catholic teaching. The Protestants refused to go along, and the long war, the first pan-European war, one that resulted in more than 8 million casualties, followed.  In short, the good guys won, the papal forces were defeated, and the world has never been the same since.

In a nutshell, the Westphalian World Order is the principle of Mind Your Own Business (MYOB) applied to individual countries.  It may surprise many people, but MYOB is a Christian principle.  For example, in 2 Thessalonians, Paul writes, “For we hear that there are some who walk among you in a disorderly manner, not working at all, but are busybodies.  Now those who are such we command and exhort through our Lord Jesus Christ that they work in quietness and eat their own bread” (2 Thes. 11-12).

Just as there are people who sinfully want to mind everyone else’s business, so too are there national leaders that sinfully want to mind everyone else’s business.  Such was the case of Rome in the pre-Reformation period.  During the Thirty Years’ War, Rome and her proxies were fighting to continue their long-held traditions of murder, theft and extortion, but received, as it were, a mortal wound from the Protestants.

But Rome, though substantially weakened, never gave up her globalist ambitions.  Today, Rome is an institution recovering from that mortal wound.

The European Union as the Fourth Reich

Students of the Second World War are doubtless familiar with the term The Third Reich (German, Die Dritte Reich), which is what the Nazis called Germany under Hitler’s regime.  The German word “Reich” can be translated as “empire, kingdom, or realm.”

Now calling Nazi Germany the Third Reich implies that there was a First and Second Reich.  So what were these?  In his book Mystery, Babylon The Great I.A.

Sadler identified the Holy Roman Empire as the First Reich (111) and the unified Germany from 1870 – 1918 as the Second Reich (214-216).  The Third Reich was, of course, Nazi Germany which lasted from 1933-1945.

Sadler draws a number of parallels between the Hitler’s Third Reich and the EU, which he calls the Fourth Reich.  To wit,

• The EU’s attempt to create “a collectivist European State, with a single economy and currency are remarkably similar to the Nazi plan in 1942 of a united Europe under the control of Germany,

• The fall of communism in eastern Europe brought about a unified Germany and the eastward expansion of the EU and NATO. A unified Germany has become the dominant force in central Europe, “revealing a disturbing parallel with the growth of the Third Reich” (264).

• Czechoslovakia was split in two with the Czech Republic becoming aligned closely with Germany, mirroring Germany’s occupation of the Sudetenland in 1938,

• “Austria then joined the European Union mirroring the Anschluss with Germany in 1938” (264).

Sadler concludes, “Today, through the Maastricht Treaty, national independence has been virtually abolished in favour of a European superstate, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Hitler’s Third Reich.”-

Reichs Under the Control of Rome

Though separated by time – the Holy Roman Empire got its start in the 9th century under Charlemagne – the four Reichs have this in common, they were/are all collectivist empires heavily influenced, indeed one could argue, under the control of, the Roman Catholic Church-State.

• The Holy Roman Emperor was crowned by the pope.

• Sadler notes that during the years of the Second Reich, “the Vatican progressively aligned itself with Germany, ensuring the balance of policies shifted away from those of Protestant Prussia towards that of a pro-Romanist German Empire, which forged an alliance with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Austria-Hungary had long been a bastion of the Jesuits and the Church of Rome in Central and Eastern Europe” (214).

• The Third Reich famously signed a concordat with Rome. For details, see Hitler’s Pope, The Secret History of Pius XII by Robert Cornwell.

• The Fourth Reich, the EU, has been widely supported by the Roman Catholic Church-State. Indeed, the EU got its start with the Treaty of Rome in 1957, and the popes of Rome have consistently supported the EU.

Many have argued, and this author is in agreement with them, that the EU, properly understood is really the reincarnation of the Holy Roman Empire.  As Sadler notes, the full name of the First Reich was “Sacrum Romanum Imperium Nationis Germanicae”, The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (111).  Although there were many non-German nations that were part of the Holy Roman Empire, the core of the Empire’s economic and political power was Germany, and the Emperor was crowned by the pope.

[caption id="attachment_5345" align="alignnone" width="718"] Pope Francis and German Chancellor Angela Merkel shake hands on the occasion of their private audience, at the Vatican, Saturday, June 17, 2017. (L'Osservatore Romano/Pool Photo via AP)[/caption]

In like fashion, the core of the EU’s economic and political power is Germany, and the current Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, though nominally Lutheran, is a close ally of the Holy See.

Brexit in Context, A Protestant Victory

With all this history in mind, Brexit can be seen in a new light.  In the opinion of this author, one could argue that Brexit really ought to be seen as the culmination of a sort of second Thirty Years’ War.  Worth noting, is that it took nearly the same amount of time for Nigel Farage and others to bring about Brexit – 27 years – as it did for the Allies to defeat the Catholic forces of the Holy Roman Empire.

In support of this, the idea that Brexit can be seen as a sort of second Thirty Years’ War, let us return to the Washington Post article referenced above.   In response to the question, “Did religion play a part in the Brexit vote?” author James Guth responded,

Yes. If you look at the 2014 European Parliamentary Election Study, in the run-up to the Brexit vote, it’s clear that in the United Kingdom, Catholics were supportive of the E.U., as were minority religions — Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists — whereas Evangelical Protestants were the most critical of the E.U. And a lot of the surveys that were done just before and after the Brexit vote, even though they weren’t very good at identifying different religious groups, found pretty consistently that the more Protestant you were, the more critical you were of the E.U. That may have made the difference: If those Protestants had voted the way the average citizen of the United Kingdom had, Brexit wouldn’t have passed (emphasis added).

When asked, “Is Catholic support for the E.U. a result of explicit church guidance? Or is it simply an implicit cultural value?” James Guth had this very interesting response,

It’s both. The Catholic Church has explicitly supported European integration since World War II. Every pope since the end of World War II has been very supportive of the E.U. In 2014, Pope Francis gave a talk at the European Parliament about the need for the E.U. to rediscover its vision. Catholics are getting cues from the top, even if they’re subtle ones.

It’s the same story with Protestants. In the United Kingdom, you have Evangelical pastors who, on the Sunday before the Brexit referendum, were talking about how leaving the E.U. was the better Christian choice. I was at a conference in Oxford a couple of years ago, and on Sunday, I attended an Evangelical Anglican congregation. The greeter who met us at the door asked me what I was there for, and I explained that I was giving a paper on religion and European identity. He said, “Well, I think you’ve come to the wrong place. We don’t have any Europeans in this congregation.” People are getting cues like this all the time, from the clergy, from others in the congregation. It’s a pervasive cultural force, even if it’s becoming weaker (emphasis added).

Given the history of Roman Catholic attempts to reestablish its hegemony in Europe through support of the EU, and beyond through various globalist initiatives, the Brexiteers successful campaign to pull Britain out of the EU must be seen as a resounding win, not only for Great Britain, but also for all men everywhere who oppose tyranny and love liberty.

Closing Thoughts

“The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those who exercise authority over them are called ‘benefactors,’” said Jesus to his disciples, who were disputing among themselves about who was the greatest.  Jesus reminded his disciples that it was the unbelieving pagan rulers who oppressed the people while seeking the praise of men.  Jesus went on to tell them, “But not so among you,” and continued by teaching them the principle of servant-leadership.  It is from this that we get the Christian idea of government as servant.

The application of Christ’s words to our present topic is easy to see.  The secular rulers and popes of our day act with the same high-handed disregard for personal liberty as the ancient emperors and rulers Jesus used in his example.  They pretend to be for the people, but their policies are actually destructive of the best interests of the very people they claim to represent.  Nevertheless, they wish to be seen as benefactors and love to be lauded as such.  This haughty spirit can be seen in the popes of Rome by their support for the EU and in the bureaucratic minions who carry out the EU’s marching orders.

In the opinion of this author, the original vote for Brexit in 2016, the election of Donald Trump that same year, the resounding victory of the Tories and Boris Johnson in 2019, and now the successful completion of Brexit should be seen as God’s grace to the people of Great Britain and the United States.  This is not to suggest that everything about Brexit, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump is perfect and above reproach.

But warts and all, what the people of the Great Britain and the United States actually received, is so far superior compared to what they might have received, and perhaps even deserved to receive, that this author cannot help but see God’s gracious and providential hand at work.

In America, we dodged a real bullet in 2016, coming close to electing globalist Hillary Clinton.  Had she become president, she and her globalist advisors would have quickly gone about the business of importing millions more welfare migrants and creating a permanent socialist, Democratic electoral majority.  It would have been the end of America as we know it.

Had the Brexit vote gone the other way in 2016, had the Labour Party and Jerremy Corbyn carried the election in December 2019, Britain likewise would have been in a very different, and much worse, position.

This author tends to be rather pessimistic by nature, always waiting around for the next disaster.  One could even argue that’s justified given the rapid downgrade in society so evident all around.

But all the bad news should not blind Christians to God’s grace, in their own lives and in broader society.  God is still very much in charge, and always has been.  There is not one thing in all of history that takes place but that he has brought it about both for his own glory and for the good of his own people, who were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world.

The bottom line is this, Antichrist took a good beating from Brexit, and in that Christians can rejoice.

Let us take encouragement from this win, trusting in God to grant us wisdom and strength day by day.

Q. 62.  What is the visible church?

A. The visible church is a society made up of all such as in all ages and places of the world do profess the true religion, and of their children.

            - Westminster Larger Catechism

Last week it was announced that the U.S. State Department had adopted a new rule governing the issuance of category B nonimmigrant visas.  The rule, which took effect on Friday, Jan. 24, is aimed at reducing birth tourism.  Birth tourism is the practice of expectant mothers traveling to the United States to give birth on U.S. soil for the purpose of acquiring American citizenship for their children.

For those of us who have advocated for reform of America’s disastrous immigration laws in a way that protects the legitimate interest of American citizens, this was a welcomed, if limited, victory.  It is a welcomed victory in that, in the words of the State Department document outlining the ruling, “This rule will help prevent operators in the birth tourism industry from profiting off treating U.S. citizenship as a commodity, sometimes through potentially criminal acts…”  It is a limited victory in that it leaves open the larger, more important question, of birthright citizenship.  Specifically, the question of to whom birthright citizenship properly applies.

In the opinion of this author, birthright citizenship properly applies only to children born to parents, either both, or at least one of them, possessing American citizenship.  The notion that a child can rightfully acquire American citizenship by virtue of being born on American soil, regardless of the citizenship status of the parents, is foreign both to the Bible and, in the view of this author, to the Constitution.  

Why the Rule Change?

The Public Notice from the Department of State lays out the reasoning behind the rule change, citing concerns about national security and criminal activity associated with the birth tourism industry (Public Notice, page 1)– yes, to the surprise of many Americans there is such a thing as the birth tourism industry.  Further down in the Notice, one finds other good reasons to end the practice of birth tourism.  For example, many times the birth tourists stick American taxpayers with their hospital bills, and this despite their having large sums of money available to pay for the medical procedures.  The notice also cites the defrauding of “property owners when leasing the apartments and houses used in their birth tourism schemes” (Notice, 11).

But for all the problems caused by birth tourism, there was no language that formally prohibited this activity in the regulations that covered visa issuance.

What has Changed? 

Category B nonimmigrant visas historically have been used by individuals engaged in birth tourism.  Such visas are issued by the U.S. to allow foreigners to travel to the United States for the purpose of pleasure, defined or the purpose of visa issuance as, “legitimate activities of a recreational character, including tourism, amusement, visits with friends or relatives, rest, medical treatment, and activities of a fraternal, social, or services nature” (Notice, 2).

The State Department has updated their rules to include language stating, “that the term pleasure…does not include travel for the primary purpose of obtaining United States citizenship for a child by giving birth in the United States” (Notice, 2-3).

In addition to explicitly prohibiting visa issuance for the primary purpose of giving birth in the United States, the new language governing nonimmigrant B visas requires that someone coming to the U.S. for medical treatment, “has the means and intent to pay for the medical treatment and all incidental expenses, including transportation and living expenses” (Notice, 3). 

The White House Statement    

NPR reports that White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham issued a statement calling birth tourism a burden on hospital resources.  She added, “It [the State Department rule change] will also defend American taxpayers from having their hard-earned dollars siphoned away to finance the direct and downstream costs associated with birth tourism.” 

NPR goes on to note that birthright citizenship – birthright citizenship as currently practiced in the U.S. allows that any child (with a few exceptions) born on U.S. soil is deemed an American citizen, regardless of the citizenship of the parents – became an issue in 2015, with then candidate Donald Trump calling for the elimination of it.  Trump also revived talk about birthright citizenship just prior to the 2018 mid-term elections and apparently is now bringing back this issue ahead of the 2020 election.

This observer long has been frustrated by the White House’s inaction on reforming birthright citizenship and cautiously sees the State Department’s rule change as perhaps signaling more aggressive action to come on this issue.

Other Views on the Rule Change

As you may expect, not everyone is happy about these new rules.  According to a report by ABC, Shilpa Phadke, a vice president at the Center for American Progress – a liberal policy think-tank – denounced the change.  “This rule is yet another attempt by the administration to control women’s bodies, driven by racist and misogynist assumptions about women born outside the United States.”

This is a strange charge, as this rule change has nothing whatsoever to do with race, neither is it “misogynistic.”  Rather, the rule has everything to do with preventing the abuse of American citizenship, what the State Department Notice correctly called turning American citizenship into a commodity which serves as a source of profit for those engaged in potentially criminal acts. 

As serious as America’s immigration problem is, Phadke’s reaction points to another problem that may be even more serious: the near total inability of liberal and progressive public intellectuals to talk about matters of public policy in terms other than the shrillest language possible.  It’s not enough for Phadke to disagree with the State Department’s rule change and explain the reasons for her disagreement, but as a good cultural Marxist she feels obligated to impugn the character of those who support the rule change by calling them, in effect, a deplorable basket of racists and sexists.  It’s as if no other explanation for the rule change is possible or needed.  It’s as if Phadke and others of her ilk think all they need to do is shriek “racism!” every time they don’t agree with a given policy and their intellectual work is done. 

Progressive intellectuals of Phadke’s ilk not only contribute nothing positive to public discourse, but actually do significant damage to the country.   Their constant shrieking of “racism, sexism and homophobia” have so poisoned the well of public discourse, that it is nearly impossible for American’s to so much as have a civil discussion about important matters of public policy, let alone propose solutions that address the serious problems facing our nation. 

A Biblical View of Birthright Citizenship    

Birth tourism and the current misinterpretation of birthright citizenship by Constitutional lawyers are closely related, but distinct issues.  The current understanding of birthright citizenship holds that any child (with a few exceptions) born on American soil is deemed an Americana citizen, regardless of the citizenship status of the parents. 

It is this misinterpretation of birthright citizenship that has opened the door for birth tourism and all the abuses of American citizenship entailed by it.

One way of helping think through the issue of birthright citizenship is to look at it in the context of what the Bible has to say about government more broadly.

Bible scholars acknowledge three types of government:  family, church and civil.  Each of them has its distinct sphere of authority.  Parents have the power of the rod.  The church has the power of the keys.  And civil government, it has the power of the sword.  Although the three types of government have different areas of authority and their own means of enforcing their rules, there are some common threads connecting them.

One thread is that men are given the authority to rule in all three.  The father is the head of the family.  Church officers are men only.  And despite the feminism that in recent times has come to dominate the thinking even of Christians who should know better, authority in civil government is also reserved for men.

But patriarchy is not the only thing the three forms of government have in common.  The method of how one becomes subject to the authority of a particular government is also similar.  To put this in more familiar language, let us ask this question:  How does one become a family member?  The most common method is by being born into it.  That is to say, one becomes a family member and subject to the jurisdiction of it by natural birth. 

There is another way one can become a family member, adoption.  In this case the parents agree to take in the child of another and treat him as if he were their own child. 

Inclusion in the visible church works in the same way as the family.  Children of at least one believing parent are considered to be part of the visible church in the same manner as natural children of parents are considered part of the family.  Of course, birth to believing parents is not the only way one can become a member of the visible church.  A credible profession of faith allows believing adults to receive baptism and inclusion in the visible church as well. 

The same principle that obtains in the case of family and church government also applies to civil government.  How does one become a citizen of a nation?  By birth or by oath of citizenship.  For example, I have my American citizenship by virtue of being born to two parents, both of whom are themselves American citizens.  It is also possible for those subject to the jurisdiction of other nations to become Americans by taking an oath of allegiance to the Constitution of the United States. 

Notice that in reference to family and church government, there is no Biblical provision for granting inclusion to a child simply by virtue of where he was born.  Think about it.  What if a woman, for some reason, gave birth on your property?  Would her child, simply by that fact, be considered a member of your family?  Of course not.

Let’s consider another scenario.  Suppose an unbelieving woman were for some reason to give birth on the ground of a church.  Would you say her child should receive baptism and be considered a member of the visible church?  Certainly not!  To do that would be to contradict the Westminster Larger Catechism and the teaching of the Scriptures.  For an infant to receive baptism and be considered a member of the visible church, he must have either both, or at least one, believing parent. 

In like fashion, there is no Biblical provision for the children of a non-citizens to be deemed citizens simply because they happened to be born on American soil.  Such children properly are considered citizens of the nation where their parents have their citizenship. 

A proper, Biblical understanding of birthright citizenship, that it applies only to children having at least one citizen parent, is the ultimate and only permanent solution to the problem of birth tourism.

Secular Arguments for and against Birthright Citizenship Reform

In the July 18, 2018 Washington Post, an editorial by former Trump administration official Michael Anton was published titled “Citizenship shouldn’t be a birthright.” Anton looked closely at the language of those who framed the 14th Amendment – the 14th Amendment is cited as the basis for birthright citizenship for all – and concluded, “The notion that simply being born within the geographical limits of the United States automatically confers U.S. citizenship is an absurdity – historically, constitutionally, philosophically and practically.”  Anton is spot on here.

As you probably expect, critics didn’t take long to pounce on Anton’s argument.  And as you probably guessed, they accused him of, wait for it…racism!  Typical of the attacks on Anton is an editorial, also in the Washington Post, published just a few days after Anton’s titled “Michael Anton and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Racist Argument on Birthright Citizenship.” According to author Daniel Drezner, a law professor at Tufts University, if you oppose granting American citizenship to the child of a Mexican mother who sneaks across the border and gives birth at taxpayer expense, or deny citizenship to the child of a Chinese or Russian or Nigerian mother who lied about her intentions for coming to the United States, you’re a racist, plain and simple.  Actually, since the Russians are white Europeans, the fact that birthright citizenship reform applies to them as well creates a bit of a problem for folks who argue, as Drezner and Phadke do, that racism is at the heart of birthright citizenship reform.  But then, contemporary progressives never let logic get in the way of a good opportunity to virtue signal. 

In a follow up piece to his WaPo editorial titled “Birthright Citizenship:  A Response To My Critics,” Anton observed,

I  expected the reaction to a recent op-ed I published calling for the end of birthright citizenship to be cantankerous. I even expected it to be hysterical—from the Left. I did not expect self-described “conservatives” to be just as hysterical as the Left, and to use precisely the same terms. “Nativist.” “Xenophobe.” “Bigot.” “Racist.” “White nationalist.” “White supremacist.”

Here, Anton describes the phenomenon, long noted by some conservatives, that a good number of well-known conservative lights, when push comes to shove, actually sound more like political liberals than conservatives. 

Conservatism as Antichristianity

Why is this?  Why do conservative stalwarts often sound just like the liberals they ostensibly oppose?  The answer is that both liberalism and conservatism are anti-Christian in their basic philosophic assumptions.  This was John Robbins’ argument in his Trinity Review “Conservatism, An Autopsy.”  Robbins wrote,

Conservatism as a political movement displays as much variety of thought as liberalism. Yet both liberalism and conservatism are united in their Antichristianity. Both are “tolerant,” but neither will tolerate Christianity. It is a mistake to think that conservatives and conservatism, as opposed to liberals and liberalism, are neutral on the issue of Christianity. There is and can be no neutrality. The conservatives seem to recognize this, but unfortunately the Christians do not. Many Christians still believe that politics is an endeavor that can be pursued shoulder-to-shoulder with conservatives. They believe that there is common ground upon which both Christians and conservatives can stand and build-or rebuild-a free society.

Given conservatism’s anti-Christian philosophical assumptions, it is unsurprising that conservative writers would side with the liberals they supposedly oppose.  Conservatives, like liberals, deny that the Bible is a textbook for political philosophy and instead think that one can oppose liberalism by appealing to natural law or to tradition or to Roman Catholic thought.

The Roman Church-State on Birthright Citizenship

As you may expect, officials of the Roman Catholic Church-State (RCCS) have at various times made known their opposition to the Biblical doctrine of birthright citizenship.  One example of this is a piece posted on the United States Conference of Catholic Bishop’s (USCCB) website titled “The Catholic Church’s Position on Birthright Citizenship.”  Guess what?  The bishops think the current system is great just the way it is, and any attempt to change it would be very, very bad. 

After the usual boilerplate lies about addressing the “legitimate concerns surrounding immigration law enforcement” – despite its claims, the RCCS could not care less about immigration law enforcement actions that promote the well-being of Americans – the bishops get down to business.  They start with the lie that reforming birthright citizenship to exclude the children of foreign nationals “would render innocent children stateless.”

For example, Article 30 of the Mexican Constitution specifically states that children born to Mexican parents in a foreign country are still considered Mexican citizens.  Since the about a third of Anchor Babies – children born in the US to non-citizen parents – are born to Mexican mothers, this provision in the Mexican Constitution seriously undermines Rome’s argument that by reforming its birthright citizenship laws, the US will leave children stateless. 

Closing Thoughts

With all the bad news on the political and economic fronts, to hear that the State Department has taken a concrete step to make birth tourism harder was a welcome breath of fresh air. 

In the opinion of this author, reforming American birthright citizenship law along Biblical lines is the single most important step the federal government can take to address America’s immigration problem.  Ending birthright citizenship for children born in the US to non-citizens is more important then building the wall, reducing refugee numbers, or even removing people in the country on temporary protected status who have been here for twenty years.  Not that those other things are unimportant.  But they do not rise to the level of properly defining how a one becomes an American citizen. 

As with all matters of right and wrong, political or otherwise, the ultimate standard against which all ideas must be measured is the Word of God, the 66 books of the Bible.  Since it is impossible to derive the birthright citizenship for the children of non-citizens from Scripture, Christians can be confident that calling for reform of our current birthright citizenship laws to eliminate granting citizenship to the children of non-citizens not only is not wrong but is, in reality, a positive good. 

Too often, public debates about immigration consider only what is good for immigrants and ignore completely the question of what is good for American citizens.  Birthright citizenship as is currently practiced in the Untied States represents a gross abuse of the American people and turns that which should be highly valued, American citizenship, into a cheap commodity that easily can be acquired by barely disguised fraud. 

The State Department’s move to make it harder to commit birthright citizenship fraud is a welcome move and a big win for immigration sanity, but more remains to be done.

It’s time for a change.  It’s time to reform American birthright citizenship laws.    

“The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those who exercise authority over them are called ‘benefactors.’ “

-          Luke 22:25

In the event you have a life to live and don’t have hours of free time every day to monitor the latest big plans the master-of-the-universe-types have for the rest of us serfs, peasants, and minions, you may be surprised to hear that the great high holy week of globalism has arrived.  It’s Davos time!

What’s that you say?  You’ve never heard of Davos? Well, you just don’t know what you’re missing.  Davos is a town in Switzerland that once a year plays host to the World Economic Forum (WEF), the exclusive annual January gathering of the world’s great and good where they discuss weighty and important topics that you and I can’t understand and make big plans for how to impose their vision of the future on us. 

The Corporate Line

I admit, I haven’t paid much attention to the run up to this year’s gathering.  What tipped me off this time around, though, was all the climate change hype that kept showing up on CNBC, a financial channel I follow regularly.

For example, one recent headline on CNBC read “Capitalism ‘will fundamentally be in jeopardy’ if business does not act on climate change, Mircosoft CEO Satya Nadella says.”      

This is a new take on climate change.  Generally, what you hear from the mainstream media (MSM) is that it’s capitalism itself that is causing climate change and that it needs to be ended in favor of the sort of Green New Deal Marxist claptrap one hears from the likes various American politicians whose names I won’t mention in this space. 

But here’s a businessman - the CEO of Microsoft no less! – announcing to the world that climate change is an existential threat to capitalism.  Adapt or die, seems to be is message.

The article begins by announcing, “The science is clear that environmental sustainability must factor in a corporation’s growth plans, or the capitalist and economic system the U.S. enjoys ‘will fundamentally be in jeopardy.’ “  Now the piece doesn’t say exactly what “science” is “clear” to the point that it requires the radical re-evaluation of the purpose of a corporation as is proposed in this article, but one supposes Nadella is referring to the report put out by the WEF just in time for the group’s 2020 meeting this week in Davos.

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to you, but about halfway into the article one comes across the obligatory “Orange Man Bad” reference.  You see, unlike righteous CEO’s such as Nadella who care about the environment, Orange Man, “has tapped the brakes on a number of the country’s climate initiatives, such as pulling the U.S. out of the multilateral 2017 Paris Agreement.”

After plowing through a lot of corporate-speak virtue signaling, about “sustainability” and Microsoft’s new “Climate Innovation Fund” we read,   

Microsoft’s CFO Amy Hood, appearing alongside Nadella later in the interview, said the eco-friendly program along with the company’s $750 million commitment to affordable housing in Seattle, Washington “are good returns on investments.”

Reflecting on this statement, author Tyler Clifford notes, “She stopped short of projecting what the return on investment in these initiatives would be, but explained that it will be measured and the company will hold itself accountable.” 

So the Microsoft CFO won’t offer a projection of the return on investment of these “eco-friendly” programs?  Remarkable.  Her silence on this subject should be a big clue.  Not only will the “eco-friendly” initiatives not be profitable, they almost certainly will destroy shareholder value. 

Now one can feel a certain amount of sympathy for Nadella.  He’s the high-profile CEO of a hugely successful company.  As such, he’s expected to talk the talk and walk the walk of the master of the universe types whose good graces he must court.  My guess, he probably doesn’t believe all the sustainability nonsense he talks about.  It’s just the cost of doing business.

The Davos Globalist Line and Antichrist

While Nadella’s comments aren’t openly globalist, another article on CNBC let the globalism behind the WEF report out of the bag.   

WEF has said it aims to assist governments and international institutions in tracking progress toward the Paris Agreement and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

The Paris Agreement was the destructive treaty, from which President Trump wisely pulled the US.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals, known more formally as The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, is a formula for international socialism and world government, which unsurprisingly has been openly praised by globalist Pope Francis.

Writing in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, On Care for Our Common Home, the current occupant of the Office of Antichrist, Pope Francis, openly called for world government as the cure for the so-called environmental crisis.  Worth noting Pope Francis did so by quoting his predecessor Benedict XVI, who himself referenced his predecessor Pope John XXIII (the Vatican II pope).  Wrote Francis,

Given this situation, it is essential to devise stronger and more efficiently organized international institutions, with functionaries who are appointed fairly by agreement among national governments, and empowered to impose sanctions. As Benedict XVI has affirmed in continuity with the social teaching of the Church: “To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority, as my predecessor Blessed John XXIII indicated some years ago”.

So Popes Benedict and Francis agree, there is a need, in fact an urgent need, for “a true world political authority.” Even the secular globalists at Davos aren’t quite that open about their plans to rule the world.  But the Antichrist popes of Rome not only say it, but they nearly shout it from the rooftops.  As Jesus said of the Pharisees, “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.”

It’s doubtful that the masters-of-the-universe at Davos or the UN or in the Vatican really believe the stated goals of the Paris Agreement, the UN’s Sustainable Development goals or the flowery nonsense about “our Sister, Mother Earth” found in Laudato Si.  More likely, they do believe in the unstated goals of these programs:  unlimited power over humanity.

John Robbins on the Ecologers   

As far back as 1972, John Robbins clearly identified the power lust that lurked behind the environmentalists’ mask.  “The ecologers,” he wrote, “do not wish to have dominion over the Earth and subdue it:  They wish to have dominion over men and subdue them” (“Ecology:  The Abolition of Man,” in Freedom and Capitalism, page 561). 

Closing Thoughts

In Genesis 1, God commanded man to, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”  Some theologians call this gift of dominion the cultural mandate. 

Because of the commandment, Christianity has a radically different view of man’s relationship to the Earth than medieval mystic religions such as Roman Catholicism or modern secular movements such as environmentalism.  Christians hold that the Earth is not divine, it is God’s creation, made by him but separate from him.  Man is not part of nature, but rather has dominion over it.  Further, not only is it not wrong for man to increase in number and to exercise dominion over the Earth, but it is positively sinful form him not to do so.  For to refuse to multiply and to exercise dominion is to go against the express command of God himself, which is the very definition of sin.

The globalists and environmentalists of the 21st century – be they secularists like the Davos crowd, or religious like the Pope – stand all this on its head.  Man no longer has dominion over the Earth.  In their scheme of things, it is the Earth that has dominion over man.  Man must serve the goddess Mother Earth and they, her priests, will prescribe the appropriate sacrifices for us.

As did the rulers of the Gentiles in Jesus day, our globalist taskmasters aim to “exercise lordship” over us, all the while positing themselves as our “benefactors,” who are saving us from the ravages of the climate crisis.

But their program is not about benefiting mankind.  It's a subtle attack on freedom, capitalism and Christianity. 

Let the Lord's people hear his Word, let them stand upon it, and let them reject the globalist's wicked counsel.