Second American Revolution: Jeff Ziegler (5 of 9)

http://www.forerunner.com/law/law.html

Question:-- Were the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution drafted to uphold the moral laws of God -- or were they Deistic humanist documents? If they were Christian documents, where have we gone so far off track?

Jeff Ziegler: There is no question that our Founding Fathers were an amalgamation of some Deistic humanists, Puritan thought as well as high Anglicanism, all mixed together and jostling for position in the context of our founding federal documents. However, there was an acknowledgment of man's overriding depravity, the idea that absolute power corrupts absolutely was not a foreign idea to these men. In looking at the Hebrew Commonwealth in its decentralized forms of government, our founding fathers in their wisdom, set about to create a system where there would be checks and balances against this idea of absolute power, government by man, tyrannical carnality, with three branches of government, all of which are supposed to work to counter balance the other. At least theoretically, they would keep in check any tyrannical impulse.

Unfortunately, that assumes these three institutions are appealing to God's Law. No matter how good the system, unless it is under the aegis and covering of God's Law, any system can revert to tyranny. It can be the tyranny of the majority of paganism, of humanism. Even in Israel, in the Hebrew Commonwealth, when they began to apostatize and fall away from God's Law, what did they begin to cry out for? -- a tyrant, a king "like all he other nations." They paid the price for it in terms of wars, tyrannical suppression and taxation, and ultimately in the division of their nation in two separate entities and then the invasion of foreign pagan powers to bring them under the enslavement of their anti-God ways. So they ultimately paid the price and we will too if we don't turn back to God's Law.

When we can compare biblical law versus natural law, scripture is the final immutable authority on every subject of which it speaks. It is binding not only on the regenerate that is the Christian, but the unregenerate alike. You'll either are following God's Law and prospering accordingly, or you'll be broken by it. It doesn't change. So whether you acknowledge it or not, it exists, and all men are judged by its standards.

Now there is certainly natural revelation. God has made himself known in the creation -- there is evidence of his creation everywhere. But ultimately it is not evidence that man needs. It's conviction of sin and to have his miscreant depraved nature arrested. The role of the civil magistrate is to keep a biblical and sound order, to prosper the righteous and to punish wickedness. You can't do that by natural revelation or natural law. Now it's true that in a godly or predominantly godly society, men will understand natural law in a way that mimics or comes close to biblical law. We see that in the embryonic stages of our nation. However, natural law can be co-opted and pirated by corrupt alien and humanistic worldviews. Natural law can be interpreted from many different angles. In so doing, morality become relativistic.

However, that cannot be said of the Ten Commandments because not only do we have the explicit injunction "Thou shalt not kill" (or murder) or "Thou shalt not commit adultery." But we have case laws which interpret that law and how it is to be administered in the civil realm. So biblical law is superior because it is defined revelation. It is specific and applicable.

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