Friday, March 4, 2016

Big Government: Playing with Fire?

Dr. Marshall Foster at World History Institute | February 27, 2016


 
In this crucial election year many Americans are awakening from their apathy. As we come to our senses, the biblical and constitutional wisdom of our founders can help us find our way back to freedom and prosperity. George Washington warned: “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence – it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”
 
Our wise colonists and founders knew that fallen human nature, as described in Scripture, would lead elected officials to expand their power and wealth whenever possible. Knowing this truth, Thomas Jefferson warned us never to place great trust in our elected leaders: “It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice [elected leaders] to silence our fears for the safety of our rights; that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism … our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no farther, our confidence may go… In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

Jefferson’s point above is a paraphrase of Psalm 149 in which God’s people are instructed “to bind their kings [rulers] with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron.” Our Constitution is a document which delegates very few and severely limited powers to our national government. The Constitution states in the Tenth Amendment that all powers not specifically delegated to the national government are “reserved to the states, respectively, or to the people.”

George Mason, the brilliant author of the Bill of Rights, was a Christian home school father who consistently brought his belief in the fallen nature of the human heart into his writing: “From the nature of man, we may be sure that those who have power in their hands will not give it up while they can retain it. On the contrary, we know that they will always, when they can, rather increase it.”

Mason’s views are “politically incorrect” today. In fact, most of our biblically trained founders — who agreed with Patrick Henry as he declared, “Give me liberty, or give me death” — would be considered radical, religious extremists by the secularists who dominate today’s pop culture.

[You can finish reading the rest of this article at World History Institute. Click here.]

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