| Time | Text |
|---|---|
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John Adams' Moral Constitution
00:02:30
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| You know, I want to ask this question. | |
| What, David and/or Tim, what, both of you? | |
| Who was the Constitution intended for? | |
| Well, there's two ways to answer that question. | |
| I'm going to use John Adams' answer first. | |
| John Adams says our Constitution was made only for a moral and a religious people. | |
| Now, I know that's not what you were asking, but that was the belief is if you don't have enough religion and morality to control yourself, government will never pass enough laws to be able to control you. | |
| And specifically, that our Constitution wouldn't work because our Constitution was built on giving freedom to people. | |
| But again, you can't give freedom to people if they're not a religious and moral people. | |
| And so, even John Adams acknowledging that this was something that really was better suited for Christians because there wasn't the limitation or there wasn't the imposition. | |
| There were limitations on government. | |
| As you were pointing out, there's very few things the Constitution actually grants the authority for the federal government to do because they thought really rights belong to the people. | |
| It belongs to the states. | |
| The government shouldn't really control your life. | |
| They created a very small government. | |
| And that's what John Adams was pointing out. | |
| It was made only for a moral and religious people. | |
| He said it's wholly inadequate to the government of any other, meaning that if you try to give this Constitution to a people who are not moral and religious, this Constitution wouldn't work because it didn't really have the same level of details and constraints and controls on people. | |
| It gave so much freedom to people because they thought, well, look, if we're a moral people, we're people who go to church and read the Bible and live according to God's word, you don't have to have a whole bunch of laws to constrain their behavior because the word of God is guiding and limiting their behavior. | |
| But as we get further away from that, the Constitution doesn't really work as effectively. | |
| But that was the point of John Adams. | |
| It's made for a moral and religious people. | |
| Yeah, so what you have in history is you'll either have a big God or a big government. | |
| If you have a God that does not have much influence on your life, your thinking, your behavior, your nation, you'll need a big government. | |
| If you have a big God who does affect your life, your influence, if everybody in America lived by the Ten Commandments, doesn't matter whether they're Christians or not, if they live by the Ten Commandments and if they won't steal my property or kill me or take my spouse, if they'll do that, we'll have a great nation, whether they're Christians or not. | |
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Six Principles of American Government
00:02:32
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| So if you have a big God whose influence really is felt in the lives of the people, you have a small government. | |
| Now, the Constitution, from a more philosophical standpoint, the Constitution was actually written for the nation. | |
| The states had their own state constitutions, and the Constitution is built on the Declaration of Independence. | |
| So as we're in the 4th of July season, the Declaration, it starts with 161 words that give the philosophy of American government. | |
| It then gives 27 grievances showing how Great Britain was violating those six principles. | |
| And at the end, it says that that's why we're becoming an independent nation because we want these six principles. | |
| And that's what you find in the Constitution. | |
| But one of them was there is a Creator God. | |
| They openly acknowledge that. | |
| In the Declaration, it says this is the unanimous declaration of the 13 United States of America. | |
| Every state, we're telling you there is a God. | |
| Second thing they said was that God gives a certain set of moral rights and wrongs that are fixed. | |
| They're eternal. | |
| They're the laws of nature. | |
| Nature's God. | |
| We can know what's right and wrong, and it doesn't change from generation to generation. | |
| Ten Commandments, other laws like that, they stand. | |
| So we believe that a nation has to be found on fixed moral rights and wrongs. | |
| The next thing they said was that in addition to creator, in addition to moral rights and wrongs, that creator gives to every individual a certain set of guaranteed rights. | |
| This is where we get the belief that all men are created equal and they're endowed by their creator with certain unatable rights, quoting from the declaration. | |
| The fourth thing we find is the primary purpose of government is to protect our God-given rights. | |
| The fifth thing is below God-given rights, we get to have the vote of the majority make our policy. | |
| We don't have people imposing policies on us that we disagree with. | |
| We get a majority vote. | |
| And the sixth thing the Declaration says is if you ever get a government that didn't do these first five things, you have the God-given right to create a new government that will do these first five things that God wants. | |
| So that's what the Constitution was designed to do. | |
| It was designed to say, okay, based on these principles, now we're creating a national government on those principles. | |
| And so that Constitution recognizes that the Bill of Rights goes through and lists about 18, 19 inalienable rights that government's never supposed to touch. | |
| They belong to us because God gave them to us. | |