Under God: Law and Education | Faith & Freedom Series 2 | James Buntrock

In this session, James Buntrock continues his four-part "Faith and Freedom" series, digging into how law and education were meant to be rooted in biblical principles. He traces the origins of the "separation of church and state" idea, revealing that the phrase never actually appears in the Constitution and that the cultural weight it carries today really comes down to a single Supreme Court case in 1947, one vote, one letter, one sentence. He also explores how dramatically the goals of American education have shifted since the founding era, and wraps things up with some inspiring stories about George Washington and General Patton and the role faith played in some of history's most pivotal moments.

Transcript

Welcome And Great Awakening Vision

SPEAKER_00 0:00

All right, thank y'all for coming back for night two. I didn't run anybody off, I didn't offend anybody too badly, and and I think our attendance actually grew. And so uh thank you for being here. Uh again, my name is James Buntrock. I'm an associate pastor here at Glorious Way Church and executive director for My God Votes. Um we're doing this because uh, you know, we how many know we're coming up on the 250th year of our nation? This is a birth date that we're coming up and it's worthy of celebrating. And uh my expectation and and hope is that you're gonna pick up things and hear things that maybe you didn't know, maybe you haven't heard them presented this way. Um, but I want to help arm you with the truth so that when you hear counter uh claims out there in public with your family, people you work with, whatever you run into, I want to help you with the truth so that you can help others with the truth. If we're gonna have any hope at all about having another great awakening, um, it's gonna be because people like you are speaking the truth and doing it in the public square and not remaining silent and keeping this stuff uh locked up at home. And I see signs of churches you know beginning to revive. You've got mass baptisms happening, and and as long as it stays inside the church, it's not gonna affect our culture in any meaningful way. As soon as this spills out into the streets and becomes an awakening nationwide, then we can have some meaningful culture change in this nation. And I believe we got one more shot at this. And uh, how many want to be a part of that? All right. So, for those of you who have registered for all four uh of these series in in June, so all four Wednesdays, uh, and actually attend all four, um, we've got a piece on this table, a piece of uh colonial currency from Pennsylvania dated 1773, and we're gonna have a drawing. So those who registered and actually attended all four of these things, your name will go into a drawing on night four. On night four, we're gonna watch the uh uh movie Um The Great Awakening. It's a story about George Whitfield and his ministry and how he uh preached up and down the uh the colonies, and it resulted in the Great Awakening. It resulted in us having a nation. And so we're gonna see that story in the movie form. It's a great movie. At the end of that movie, we're gonna draw out of those those particular names, and somebody's gonna take that currency home, and it's yours to keep. So um, hallelujah.

Forgetting History Limits A Nation

SPEAKER_00 2:20

Yes. So I'm gonna give you a brief review on so we have some people here who weren't here last week, and you can watch this on live stream. This is out there, this is recorded, this is out there on Facebook and and YouTube, available for you to watch again. But I'm gonna give you a brief overview. You're gonna miss all of the historical nuggets that go into this. Brief overview from last week. Uh we read out of Psalm 78, where God warns us of the danger of forgetting. Uh, he commanded uh that the Israelites uh talk about the testimonies, talk about God, talk about his laws, and do it from generation to generation to generation to generation. And it went over and over and over, and it hammered that home in Psalm 78. And then at the end there in verse 40 and 41 and 42, it says that the Israelites limited the Holy One of Israel because they forgot his wonderful works to the children of men. He did some marvelous things and they forgot, and in doing so, they limited God. In other words, they limited the level or the degree that God could act on their behalf because he would not be justified in doing so. They forgot and they tempted the Holy One of Israel and they limited him, it says. And so uh the outline for these presentations is this monument that I have standing here to my left. This is the National Monument to the Forefathers. This monument uh was uh it's in Plymouth, England. And uh there you see Plymouth Rock, 1620, so that's where the pilgrims landed. About five miles away, this monument is standing uh in a park, uh, and very few people know about it, and I didn't know about it until just a few years ago. But this right here preaches uh a message, it tells the story, it's it's the uh it's the recipe, it's the instructions for a nation to find its way back to uh freedom and and the and the principles and the godly nation that God designed. And so, if ever we lose our way, the pilgrims left this road map of how to fix things for us right here. And so at the top of this monument is a figure called Faith, and she has pointed to heaven. She's got a star on her forehead that represents wisdom and knowledge. Her feet are firmly planted on the rock, and under her left arm uh she has the uh has a Bible and not just any Bible, it is the Geneva Bible. And uh and we've got one of those on this table here. By the way, the artifacts that are on this table, not the little blue books, but the artifacts, the real artifacts that are on this table. Uh, you're welcome to come up at the end of service and I'll be up here answering questions. I'll let you handle some of these things, um, and I'm gonna speak about some of these things uh throughout the presentation. So after we spoke on faith and the Geneva Bible, uh, we talked about morality and how morality uh is the only figure here with her eyes closed. She's looking inward where her morality comes from. Her morality comes from uh her faith in Jesus Christ and her biblical worldview. And uh she's got the Ten Commandments and the Scroll of Revelation in her lap. On the one side of her pedestal uh is the prophet uh Moses, and on the other side is the evangelist. And uh that's gonna bring us up to tonight where we're

Law Under God And Balanced Justice

SPEAKER_00 5:22

gonna pick up. We're gonna talk about this figure right here, which is called law, and the next one we'll talk about tonight is education, and the last one we'll talk about next Wednesday is liberty, the strong liberty man there. So we're gonna begin tonight's presentation uh with uh law. And uh and law is not a very exciting topic when you just talk about law, but if you if you understand that our government is written into law and that we've got good laws and bad laws, and our lives are affected on a daily basis by laws that are imposed or passed by our representation. Law is a very critical thing, and I'll try to make this as interesting as possible. And so you'll notice um I'm gonna skip through my presentation here because I got ahead of myself. Morality. Mayflower compact. All right, here we are. Law education. All right, so we've got the figure law. And so um law is holding a book of law in his uh under his left arm right here, and uh you can see that law is aligned below the Bible under Faith's arm right here. And that is not by accident. There's no accidents with any of this, any of the symbolisms on here. Everything is on purpose. And so law is aligned under God's word, and the book of man's law is aligned under God's word. And so the symbolism here is that uh our laws can't be good unless they align with God's laws and with God's word. Uh on the right side of the pedestal here is the word justice, and you've got a relief carving. Um, we'll get to it here. There it is, justice. And uh there you see that a woman is holding a set of scales and a sword. So the scales speak to uh justice, what is right, you know, the scales of uh of justice, uh, but she's also got a sword in there, and that that's a direct reference to Romans chapter 13, which says that governing officials are God's ministers for righteousness, and they do not bear the sword in vain. On the left side of the pedestal, so on the left side of law where he's sitting, um, is a figure called mercy, and really it's a it's a it's a figure of man standing with his arms relaxed uh at his sides and his palms open and facing upward. And you've got justice on the one side and mercy on the other side. And so what we gotta have is God's balance of justice and mercy. And uh there's a model scripture for this, and it's in Psalm 85. Um we could begin in verse 8, but I'm just gonna pick it up. I think this is verse 10 right here. Uh, if if you want, go back and look at this. Read 85, 8 through 13. If we're taking notes, 85, 8 through 13 in Psalms. But in verse 10, it says, His salvation is near to those who fear him for this reason, that the glory may dwell in our land. And then it says, mercy and truth have met together. So mercy and truth, or mercy and justice are met together, and then it says, Righteousness and peace have kissed. Righteousness and peace have kissed. And so it's critical to have the proper godly balance, the balance that comes out of God's word of both mercy and justice. There's a balance of that. And when we have God's mercy and justice and law, then we can have good laws and good application, godly application of his laws. And then if you look on the front here, there's a marble inlay. Uh that's not significant to the presentation tonight, but the marble inlay is the signing of the peace treaty between the uh Native American tribes. And so, you know, good law brings peace, uh, civil, a civil society, and you have a civil society, then you have peace.

Founding Debates And Common Sense

SPEAKER_00 9:04

So I've got on this table right here, and again, I will um I don't know which one of these it is because it these are fine print. Um but these are newspapers right here that are printed. So this is the Pennsylvania Evening Post. This one's printed March 28, 1776, on a Thursday. It says published every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday evenings. The price is two coppers. And so this was a newspaper, a real newspaper from 1776. And uh in one of these papers right here, uh it discusses uh it might be this middle one here, but it's discussing um various forms of government, um, the proposal of government. So you got to realize they're getting close to declaring independence. We're we're at extreme odds by this point in history with with the with the British. And so we're talking about, even in newsprint, we're talking about forms of government, what government should be, what it should not be, what the roles of the legislative, the executive, and the judicial branches are. And so these things are being discussed. Um, and so there's an entire uh front page portion that's given to that. Uh on one of these newspapers here is a rebuttal to Thomas Paine's Common Sense, which is interesting. And so this is this is a copy of Thomas Paine's Common Sense. Thomas Paine, uh, he I don't believe he was a believer, he was a deist. Uh, he was very involved in our politics in the very beginning. Um, he's considered one of the founders, although he's not a signer on any of any of the documents, but he was a big influencer of the day. And he wrote pamphlets uh that were very controversial uh during that day, um, which really helped fuel the desire and the passion and the need for uh breaking away from Great Britain and declaring our independence. And so in one of these newspapers, you got a rebuttal to common sense. How many of you recognize that our media today is still rebutting common sense on like a regular basis? And so this was even happening back then. But I'm gonna read uh just the first paragraph. This is the introduction and Thomas Paine's Common Sense, and so these things were published frequently, and people read them and they were controversial. And so, and he knows this. He said, Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor. And then listen to this a long habit of not thinking that a thing is wrong gives a superficial appearance of it being right. A long habit of not thinking that something is wrong gives a superficial appearance that it's actually right. And so, you know, this is true today. Um we see this with the argument that the church should not be involved in politics. And you know, a big part of our mission is to engage the church into the political and governmental arena. And it's really part, I consider it part of the Great Commission. Jesus said, go into all the world, and he didn't exclude that part of the world. But there's the sentiment amongst pastors and and and the public alike that the church should not be involved in politics. That was not always the case. There's a sentiment that says that the Constitution provides for the separation of church and state, and that the church should not insert itself in state matters. I mean, how convenient that the church wouldn't insert itself in state matters, but that's that's a recent development in our overall history. But yet for the last few generations they've been hearing this message over and over and over. There's a uh a false understanding that what they're hearing is right. And this is totally wrong. And so I hope to provide the arguments and the foundations and the facts for you to rebut these kinds of arguments as we go forward in our presentation tonight.

Romans 13 And Delegated Authority

SPEAKER_00 12:51

And so I'm gonna talk about uh um Romans 13. And I've got it here up on the screen. I'm gonna read through this. I've got some words that are highlighted in there. You'll notice things that say governing and governing authorities are in red. There's a word that says ordinance in in blue and rulers in purple. And I'm gonna provide the Greek uh uh definitions of these words because the New Testament was written in Greek, but Romans 13 says, Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore, whoever resists authority resists the ordinance of God. Now I can stop right there, and I've heard time and time again from religious people that say we need to be subject to our government. They couldn't be further from being right. That is so wrong, but that's what they get out of this scripture that we need to subject ourselves to our government. All right, and then and then you say, Well, the government isn't doing right, and they say, Yeah, but God installed the government leaders, and so God did this, and he knows better than we do, and so we just subject ourselves to people like name them, any Democrat, and a lot of Republicans. But it says that whoever resists the authorities resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Do you want to be afraid of authority? Do what is good, and you will not have to, and you'll have praise from the same, for he is God's minister to you for good, but if you do evil, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain, for he is God's minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil. And so we'll roll out the uh uh Greek definitions here. So the author the word for authority is exusia. It is delegated influence and authority, but it also carries uh a kind of a secondary understanding here, and this is the context in which it was placed. This authority is jurisdiction or an office of authority. So I want you to think of this as an office. It's not a person, it's an office. It's someplace that a person operates from. It's a position of authority. It's the position that we're talking about here. So then we've got the root, uh the Greek word for ordinance that's in here. Um, that is a system or structure, it's an arrangement. Uh, the Greek word for rulers, um, that's a person. That's a magistate, a prince, a ruler, a person who is a chief. And so when I read this scripture again, I'm gonna plug these definitions in, and I want you to see what understanding emerges from this. Let every soul be subject to the office. It's not a person, it's an office, it's a jurisdiction, it's a position. Let every soul be subject to the office, for there is no office except from God, and the office that exists are appointed by God. Therefore, whoever resists the office resists the ordinance of God, or resist God's arrangement, or his structure. We're resisting his orderly arrangement when we resist the office that he's designed and implemented. And then it says, for rulers are not a terror to good work, rulers are the person. Remember that, rulers are the person. So rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil, and they don't bear the sword in vain. And so we look at this. God has established offices in government. God established government from the very beginning. Um, I also want you to consider the lines of authority. Where does authority come from? It comes from God. Where do we get that? Um, from the Great Commission. Jesus started out by saying, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. And then what does he do? He takes part of his authority and turns around and delegates it to people, disciples, believers, in fact. The commission is to believers. And so he's delegating his authority to us. Fast forward, look at our form of government. Remember, we the people, and we the people elect individuals, we elect rulers to sit in a seat or an office of authority. They get their governmental authority from us, the believers, and we got it from Jesus, and he got it from his father. So there's lines of authority that work with our delegated uh authority in our form of government. So we don't have a pure democracy, we have a constitutional republic with representative in office, and they represent and operate from our authority.

Where Separation Of Church State Came From

SPEAKER_00 17:21

And so let's get to the doctrine of the separation of church and state. So most Americans um, and not you in this room, but there's plenty of Americans out there that believe that that the U.S. Constitution um we we get the doctrine of separation of church and state from the U.S. Constitution. Uh that is not true. It uh it's not in the Constitution. In fact, if you would like to come up here at the end, you're welcome to look at the Constitution. It starts here on page one. I got page two, page three, and page four, and on the far end, we've got the Bill of Rights. You're welcome to come up here and read that and see if you can find the phrase separation of church and state. You will not find it. It is not in the Constitution and for good reason. The Founding Fathers never intended that the church should be completely separate from the uh the state. They saw religion and morality, uh, specifically the religion and morality that comes from God's word, from that Geneva Bible, uh, as indispensable supports to the government and the structure that they were creating. Uh, that phrase came from a letter from Thomas Jefferson uh that he wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802. So, just so you know, this is we got the Constitution, and that phrase comes from the Bill of Rights, which is right here. And you'll note that there's no fancy writing up here that says Bill of Rights. In fact, there are 12 rights enumerated right here. This was passed by Congress uh at first. The 12 were passed, and then the states had to ratify them, and they chose to only ratify 10. And so amendment number one and two, as listed on here, are not part of our Bill of Rights. Uh, one of those was later passed, much later, I think in the 1940s, it was ratified by Congress by the states. But um we've got 10 Bill of Rights, and the first one is known as the Establishment Clause. It's up on the screen. It says Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion and preventing the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances. There are five rights that are protected right there in our Bill of Rights, which is now part of the Constitution. And so that phrase doesn't exist right there. It says Congress shall make no law. And last time I checked, Congress doesn't make laws that violate this right there, that respects the establishment of religion. But courts have taken this so much for further, and we're gonna dive into uh some of these courts right here. So this phrase actually comes from a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptists. They were concerned, the Baptists were concerned, that government would meddle in their ecclesiastical rights. Thomas Jefferson is assuring them, how did we lose our screen back there? Something went to sleep. There we go. Come back. All right, so Thomas Jefferson is assuring them in this letter, and I've highlighted the line there. I don't know if you can read it on your screen. He says, I contemplate with sovereign reverence the act of the whole American people, which declare that their legislator, legislature, should make no law respecting the establishment of religion or pre prevent or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus establishing a wall of separation between the church and state. So this is one line in a letter where Thomas Jefferson is affirming his personal conviction that religion should be a private matter and that government should not interfere with our religion and the way we practice that. Remember where they came from. Kind of a tyrannical government where things were being imposed, in particular religion. And so he's reassuring them of this. So that is one line in a letter. And by the way, Thomas Jefferson, after he pinned this letter, um, he went to church in the U.S. Capitol, where he had invited the preacher. And there was more than 400 in attendance. And actually, there were more than a thousand in attendance, and this thing lasted like two or three hours long. This was a church service in the U.S. Capitol, and this was normal for them. This was going on before the Capitol was the construction was ever completed. It continued past reconstruction times. And you know, we've got a mission, you know, one of our ministries here at this church, My God Votes, we're working to establish regular church services in state capitals during legislative sessions, once a week, every week, where a pastor from somewhere in that state comes in and brings the word of God and ministers the message and has praise and worship and prayer. And it's starting to change things. And we've got this going on in eight states, and we'll be adding more states to that next year. And so this was normal at that day. This is so far from normal today, and people look at you like you're crazy. You're gonna do what? Capital, this is normal, and we've got to make these things normal again. And so this phrase was in a letter that was unnoticed, undisturbed, amongst a long list of other letters. I mean, Thomas Jefferson wrote a lot of letters, and nobody looked at this one line out of this letter for like 150 years. And so, how did we get to separation in church and state?

Supreme Court Decisions And Cultural Fallout

SPEAKER_00 22:28

Well, we've got this the U.S. Supreme Court in 1947 that did us this favor. And by the way, Thomas Jefferson, um, he originally drafted no religion should be established in Congress. That was the original suggested phrasing by uh James Madison before we ended up with the phrase that we have now. This was debated, and the concern was that this might be taken to mean that government had no interest in religion. And that was not what the founders meant or attended at all. They they wanted, they cared a lot about religion. It was a big deal in their life, and so they didn't want it interpreted that way. So we have the interpretation that we have today. Uh John Adams said that our constitution was made for a moral and religious people and is it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. George Washington said, of all the dispositions that lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. That means without religion and morality, the whole thing falls apart. And so here we are, 1947. And in Washington's view that I just quoted to you, that was the view that continued all through these years, right up until this moment in history, 1947, a Supreme Court decision. It was a 5'4 decision, and they they had this uh argument that they made that under the First Amendment, neither a state nor federal government should pass laws that aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. And so this was the moment where the modern strict separation view was born. Um again, this is a 5-4 decision. So if you have four and four, that means this decision was made by one. One vote on the Supreme Court. One vote in one case. Looked back 150 years and found one letter where there was one sentence that used that phrase. And that's why we have, quote, separation of church and state that is culturally acceptable today. One court, one vote, one letter, 150 years prior, one sentence out of that one letter. They didn't look to the Constitution, they didn't look to the debates of the founders and all the thought and processes that went into our Constitution and our declaration. They didn't look to that. They were looking for one anything, one thing to pull God and the Bible out of our nation. And this was the thing. And so, fast forward a little bit. Um, since then, we've had several court cases, um, and I'm gonna just briefly run through some of these. So this is Engel versus Vitali, 1962. Uh, this was a this was a ruling that called this prayer that's up on the screen right now. It says, Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence on thee, and we beg thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our countrymen. Amen. So this was one prayer in school, a very generic prayer. It didn't say the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It wasn't in Jesus' name that they prayed. It was a generic prayer, and this court case, Engel versus Vitali, 1962, ruled it unconstitutional because of what was established in 1947, the court precedent before. Um, 1973, Roe versus Wade, legalized abortion, 2015, a Burgerfeld versus Hodges, legalized gay marriage. Since then, our birth rates have gone down, our marriage rates have gone down, our our the the number of Americans who who give to charity goes down. Let me ask you this is America better off since this turn? Because these are events that turned the course of this nation. Is America better off? The crime rates are up. Behavior of students in school is horrendous, off the charts, horrible. Not all students, but the behavior of the bad students is awful, and we tolerate this and we put up with this. Children are without fathers, and that rate is rising dramatically. Forty percent of the kids born in this nation today are born by unwed mothers. And a quarter of the kids that are born into this nation today have no father figure. I mean, like not an adopted father, not a stepfather, not a biological father. They just have no dad. It's just a mom raising their kid. That's a quarter of the nation today, of the kids that are born. And so all this comes from one vote, one court case, based on one sentence, buried in a stack of letters. Does that seem right? Logical. This is this is this is what we we face today. Uh in 1971, the Supreme Court heard a case, Lemon versus Kurtzman. So it gets worse for us. Um Lemon versus Kurtzman, this is what established what's known as the Lemon Test. In short, um, the Lemon test is says that any law or practice or symbol or structure must be primarily secular. I'm on the wrong slide there. There it is. It must be primarily secular. So it just required that things must be secular for them to be constitutional. In 1980, this is uh Stone versus Graham, the court ruled in a Kentucky uh about a Kentucky law requiring the display of the Ten Commandments. So Kentucky required display of the Ten Commandments in schools, in public classrooms, and they ruled that to be unconstitutional. And this is what they said about that. Let's see if I've got this quote on here. I do. It says if the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the school children to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey the Ten Commandments. And so they found a problem with that. That's our Supreme Court, 1980. Um, we'll go to uh 1925. Uh this is a picture of the Bladensburg Cross. This is a war memorial in Maryland. Um in 2019, um, and this cross was erected, I think, in 1925. It's been there a long time. So in 2019, the American Legion versus American Humanist Association um said that it was being maintained with public funds, and therefore it's uh it's unconstitutional. And they said that for it to be constitutional, the cross would have to come down, or you could simply knock the arms off the cross, and then it would be okay. These are comments from our courts, and this is press precedent law, and so other decisions and other law, this affects other laws in our nation. When a court makes a decision of something constitutional or not, it means other laws look are looking at these court decisions, trying to decide is this going to be something that's gonna pass muster with the court or not? And so it really changes the course and it shapes our nation.

Kennedy Case And Ten Commandments Project

SPEAKER_00 29:18

There is some good news in all of this. So in June 27th, this was a few years ago in 2022, court case, Kennedy versus Bremerton School District. This is in Washington State. This is what broke the Lemon test precedent of 1971. So here you see a picture of Coach Kennedy uh kneeling and praying on a football field. And this was his custom after every game. He would get out there and just give God thanks. He didn't have a big public thing, they didn't give him a microphone. He just went out there and did this briefly on the football field. And so uh there was a case filed, and he got fired from the school district for not uh for not stopping this behavior. And so when he continued this and he got fired, uh then the then the case happened. Um he almost lost his marriage over this. There's a movie about this. This was a very long fight for him. I think it was like seven years uh before it finally made it to the Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court made a court decision, probably the best one ever. And so now, instead of it being primarily secular, that's the standard that we've had all this time. Um now longstanding religiously expressive monuments, symbols, and practices require a strong presumption of constitutionality. If it's been here a long time, if we have a long history of doing this, if it's part of our long-standing tradition, it's gotta be constitutional. In other words, the court says you can't make history unconstitutional. That's what this nation did. We did it for a long time. This has got to stand today. And so now the Ten Commandments, um, they they they've been part of American education since from 1647 all the way up until 1980 when that one Kentucky case uh ruled it out. The Ten Commandments is the basis for civility, it's the foundation of our religion and morality, and it allows us to have to be a free people. It's the foundation of law. Um, how without God's morality, God's laws, would you know what's right or wrong? That's where we get right and wrong from. And so we can't just throw the uh the foundation out. So once we have, and I'm gonna start at the beginning here, once we have faith, and it's faith in the one true God, and and we've got God's morality, um, then we can have good laws. And when we have good laws, they're aligned with God's laws and they're under God's laws. When we have this condition, now we're gonna get to education. And so here you've got a woman sitting uh on this seat right here, and she's got a book open, and she's pointed um to and let me back up a little bit before I get to that. So Ten Commandments, there's a slide of Ten Commandments in Austin outside of Austin. I forgot this part. We just delivered 3,456 Ten Commandments posters to Klein ISD. Um that's enough for every classroom in Klein. There's a lot of school districts out there that still don't have this. And our Texas law states that if the Ten Commandments poster of a particular size and shape is donated to the school, then it must be displayed in the classroom. And so I hope this project continues. I'd like to adopt some other school districts. We've got a lot of schools around our area, and and you know, wouldn't it be great if they actually followed some of the Ten Commandments? Like life would be a whole lot better, our society would be better. So now we can get

Education, Biblical Worldview, And Purpose

SPEAKER_00 32:36

to education. We're talking about education. We have the Ten Commandments in there. Um, here is this woman. She's sitting on a on a pedestal here, she's pointing to a book of knowledge, she's training her children. Proverbs 22, 6 says that we should train up our kids in the way they should go so that when they're old, they don't depart from it. And training is not just telling them one time, training is like a repetitious thing. It's over and over and over again. It's making them do something. Kids ought not to raise themselves. We're not into free-range parenting. Um, and and yet parents drop kids off at school and expect the school to raise the kids, and that's backwards. Parents, raise your kids. Train them up in the fear of an admonition of the Lord. She's got a laurel wreath around her head right there, that's a symbol of victory. In Romans 8 37, it says, Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. Uh, under the pedestal on her right side is uh a relief carving. Um this is uh youth on the right side. And so here you've got a mother walking with her children, uh, she's training her children, um, and she's teaching them on the right side. On the left side of the pedestal, uh you've got an image of wisdom. And this one's interesting because it is a long-bearded man, and uh it he's holding in the palm of one hand a globe, and you see that there's a Bible uh in that relief carving there, too, in the bottom right. And so that literally means that he has a biblical worldview. And you think about the pilgrims who designed this thing, they were talking about biblical worldview long before we've been talking about biblical worldview. This was a thing for them. Uh on the on the front part of this pedestal right here is the signing of the Mayflower Compact, um, which the purpose was having undertaken for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith. So Romans 1.28, there's the front of that platform right there. Um Romans 1.28 says, and even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate or a debased mind to do those things which are not fitting, those things which ought not to be done. Since they didn't like to retain a knowledge of God, God turned them over. He turned their mind over to a reprobate mind, a mind that's devoid of understanding, like they were so far gone. They didn't even want to think about that there is a God. That's where we're at today. The movement to take God out, to take God out of government, out of schools, now it has just been bleached out. So that generation after generation, they don't even know that there's a God. They don't even consider that there's a God. There's a growing group of people in our culture called the nuns. They don't believe in anything. They're just nun. You know, you gotta check what religion you're in. They check the nun box, not the Catholic nun, but the N-O-N-E box. And it's because they didn't like to retain a knowledge of God. What if they retained a little bit of a knowledge of God? What if we put some things in front of them where they recognize that our rights and our freedoms come from God? Like, I don't know, the Declaration of Independence on my far right here. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created. Wow, they're created. Something created them. All men are created equal. There's no one above the other. We hold these truths to be self-evident, all men are created equal, that we are endowed by our creator. Our creator put something special on the inside of us. Certain inseparable or inalienable rights among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What if we talked about God in our documents and let them know that there is a God, and our founders believed in this, and we have a nation because of this, and you can choose not to believe it, but you ought to have a knowledge of God. We could at least come up to that baseline level and give people a knowledge of God again. I believe this thing would begin to turn around. And so the purpose of education, we're going to be talking about education now. Um the original purpose with the Puritans was to instill the love of God into their kids, to instill the love of country into our kids, to instill the love of family into our kids. Um and why in that order? Love God first, love country second, family third. That was a very specific order. Because if you love your country, it's going to take care of you. If you don't love your country, it will very quickly become the enemy of the family. And the Puritans recognized this and they had that order to it. Um, in 1647, so this is what's called the Old Deluter Satan Act. Um, this was basically the first mandatory education law in America. And it was obviously named after Satan, the great devil himself, red, scaly, bifurcated tail, and all. Um it says in that act, it says it being one of the chief projects of the old deluder Satan to keep men from the knowledge of the scriptures as in former time. So the devil is trying to keep people from having a knowledge of God and having a knowledge of scriptures. It was required in schools and in every community to have a public school and to ensure that sound education was based on God's word. Why was this? Um, think about where they came from. They came from a land where people couldn't read God's word and it was provided to them from uh religious leaders. It was written in another language that they didn't understand. And so we've got a Geneva Bible here. This is dated 1599. I told the story on this last week. It's not quite right on the date. Um there's a story behind that, but this Bible was printed in the 1620s or 1630s. This is the first Bible in the English language with chapter and verse and some commentary in the side, so that the common man could read and understand God's word for the very first time. Why was that critical? Because when religious leaders were telling people about what God's word said, they made stuff up and bad things happened. Really bad things, like the Crusades. And they did awful things in the name of God. And so there were, you know, the fake Christians of the day declaring what God's word says about that, James Tallerico. Um, fake Christians of the day twisting God's word, telling people it says one thing when that's the opposite of what God meant, what was opposite in his word. And so it was required that kids know the Bible so that they wouldn't ever fall prey to that ever again. Um we've got the New England primer here. Um let's see, I'm gonna I'm gonna skip over this. So here's a here's a picture of a page out of the New England primer. The picture from this page is from 1777. I've got blue books here on this table right here, and I believe I have enough, one for every family that attends tonight. And so if you're a family, if you're a family of one, if you're a family of twelve, just take one. And you're welcome to come up to the table at the end and take one, and when they're gone, they're gone. Um I certainly hope we've got enough. And so that is a uh a copy of the 1777 New England primer. I've got another New England primer right here in this plastic bag. I'll open this up at the end and I'll show you some of the pages out of this. Uh, this one's kind of fallen apart, and so I'm gonna handle it delicately. But this one right here is from 1845. And there's some subtle changes between the various years, but this is how this is the first grade level learning. And and what you have on the screen here is the alphabet. This is how these kids learn the alphabet. In Adam's Fall, we send all. Heaven defined, the B is for Bible mind. And so they learned the alphabet in the context of God's Word. There were something like 43 questions on the Ten Commandments. In 1816, New Jersey schools, uh, first and second graders, would commit to memory the book of John. The book of John, all of it. And that was the baseline. That's what all the students would do. Others who were a little bit higher level and performing, they would go ahead and learn other chapters, up to 30 chapters of Psalms, including Psalm 119, the longest in the Bible. Uh, and they would also commit to memory the text from the sermons from the prior Sunday. This was things that happened in school. So that was 1816, New Jersey. Um in 1892, Pennsylvania schools, this was a requirement. They had to commit to memory a Bible chapter every week. So just pick a chapter out of the Bible and memorize that. And something from American literature. So an example of this would be they might memorize Psalm 91 and I don't know, Gettysburg Address. That was normal, 1892. Uh, in 1862, the Chicago Public Schools' fourth grade geography test. Um, here is a page out of their geography book. This is the test right there. These are things that they were learning just as a comparison. You you know, maybe we've got teachers in the room uh who can decipher this. How many, so fourth grade, Chicago public schools, how many degrees of longitude are there? How many degrees wide are the temperate zones? What is a watershed? Name the principal animals of the frigid zones. I don't know if fourth graders know this stuff today, but I'm pretty sure most adults don't know this stuff today. And so this is 1862. Your brain is capable of learning stuff, and we are dumbing people down on a regular basis. We're going backwards. Um, mental health for uh uh mental math, not mental health, mental math for elementary school students, 1877. Um if you can't read the slide, I'll read it to you. It says a boat worth $864, of which one eighth belonged to person A, and one quarter belonged to person B, and the rest to C was lost. What loss did each sustain, having been insured for $500? They had to work this out, so they didn't have a calculator, they couldn't use a pencil and paper here. This was mental math. They had to do these things in their head and be able to come up with the answer. Um, here's uh here's another one here. It says, um, well, I don't have this written on here, but on a farm there's 60 animals, horses, cows, and sheep. Um for each horse there are three cows, and for each cow there are two sheep. How many animals of each kind? Real quick, give me the answer. All right, we'll just move on. I'm just showing you, like, they used to learn some stuff back in the day. Uh, this is Bible courses, so this is from Dallas school system in eight in 1974. Uh, they learned, they had two courses, the Old Testament course and the New Testament course, two separate courses. They were required for graduation. These are public schools. Uh, and so I've got a slide here from uh lesson one. And I wish I had plugged all that in my notes, and so I'm gonna have to squat down here and attempt to read this stuff again. But it says uh in lesson one, where was Christ before he was born? What title does John apply to Christ in this chapter? For what purpose was John sent by God? Um five things the angel told Mary concerning the child Jesus. Like, so this is public school learning right here, and this was still okay in 1974 in the Dallas school system.

Providence Stories From Washington To Patton

SPEAKER_00 43:52

This right here is an Italian Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsky. He said socialism is the precise, precisely the religion that. Must overwhelm Christianity. And in the new order of socialism, we'll triumph first by capturing the culture through infiltration of the schools, the universities, the churches, and the media. This is like 1920s stuff right here. Do you see that this has happened and continues to happen in our culture? I was talking to one of our teachers about classrooms. So I remember, you know, in elementary school, we used to get up, stand up, and reverence the flag and do our pledges. And I guess the schools still do pledges. But then we'd have a song, a patriotic song that we would sing. Whatever happened to that? I don't know that students do that anymore. I think that's just lost. And I'd like to bring that back. Whatever happened to singing God Bless America, or My Country Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty, of thee I sing. That's a hymn. That was written by a Baptist man way back in the day, but it speaks of God. My country tis of God. We have a country because of God. They would have a knowledge that there is a God and we have a nation because of this if we would just bring these songs back. How can we, and we talked about some of these miracles last Wednesday, but where is this in our education, in our history, in our culture of teaching the miracle side of what happened in our nation? Last week we talked about how Washington and his troops were stuck against the East River, 9,000 versus 30,000, and he was surrounded. And then the British sent the ships to go travel up the river, but God laughed and he sent a wind that blew them further down the river. And then when Washington didn't have anywhere else to go, he said, get anything that floats, and his men and other people in the region started helping him with boats and rafts, and they started shuttling people off the beach, a mile-wide gap, and they carried 8,000 troops across the river. And when morning broke and there was no hope for the thousand that remained, plus George Washington, God sent a fog. And the British recognized this. It's written in their diaries that it was providential, this fog that was sent. I could scarcely see six feet in front of me, and it was providential. They recognized that God did this. God protected Washington and his men to get them off the beach. I mean, that level of miracle, that speaks of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea. It's on par with that. Do we teach that in school? Do these kids learn these things? Can we teach about how Washington, he's my hero. He gathered his men up and uh and they went to paddling across the Delaware River, the icy Delaware River, in December on Christmas Day to have a surprise attack on their enemy. So that's the battle at Trenton. But God was with them there because not one American soldier lost his life in that battle. This is George Washington, who had two horses shot out from under him, four bullet holes documented in his coat, but no bullet holes in Washington. God anointed that man to stand in an office and to do what he did, and God protected him. And that's part of our history. And if the Christian faith was such an important part to our founders and their identity, and it so greatly affected their decisions, wouldn't it make perfect sense to teach about the faith and morality that guided them and why they made the decision instead of just saying they made this choice, they did this? There was something behind that. And we can't teach that in school because now we're getting off into religious land. But we need to get off into religious land because we are a Christian nation. Well, we talk about we'll talk about Abraham Lincoln next week, and he has a wonderful testimony. And I've got some artifacts from Gettysburg that I'm gonna have here on this table next week. I'm gonna take just a few more minutes here and talk about uh World War II and General George Patton. You know, he's known as General Blood and Guts, and he's also a good hero. Um whenever he would come into a European town and he had just fought a battle, he would find the church in that town. And inevitably there would be a cross in that church, and you know, a figure of Jesus on that cross, and he would march into that church and he'd leave his guys outside, and he'd take his helmet off and put it under his arm, and he'd stand there in front of Jesus. And then he'd give him a battle report. Jesus, we're doing real good over here, but I could sure use your help over here. We're having a hard time here, and I wonder why you do this. Sir, I'd like some help. He would just talk to Jesus on a matter-of-fact basis and give a battle report. And so at the Battle of the Bulge, this was a turning point for World War II against uh Nazi Germany. And uh and he was a man, General Patton was a man who said, I can do the job. If I can just get my troops to there, we can we can get there and take this thing over, we can we can win. I know we can do it. So he starts marching his equipment, his troops to get there, but the weather is horrible. It is cold, it is wet, it is muddy, it had been raining, and uh and he finally had the idea that we need to appeal to God for help. So he called his chaplain over and he said, Chaplain, do you have a prayer for weather? And the chaptain said, I I don't know, let me check. So the chaplain gets back to him and said, Sir, we don't have a prayer for weather. General says, Chaplain, write one. So the chaplain wrote a prayer for weather. And the chaplain actually was awarded a medal for the prayer that he wrote. It must have been a great prayer. And so this was the prayer. Now, this is one thing that is not original, but this is on period paper. And so the paper that I have here is old, but the replica printing on here is just that, it's a replica printing. This is the prayer card written by that chaplain that General Patton sent out to 250,000 troops. How do you get these little prayer cards to 250,000 plus troops? It's hard enough to get supplies out there and ammunition and equipment out there and to do it secretly, and he still managed to get 250,000 of these things out to his troops. Why? Because he wanted his troops to pray with one voice, one prayer to one God. And this was the prayer. It says, Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech thee of thy goodness to restrain these immoderate rains which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon thee, that armed with thy power we may advance to vic from victory to victory and crush the oppressor and wickedness of our enemies and establish thy justice among men and nations. Amen. That was his prayer that he sent out. And no doubt the troops prayed this. So General Patton specifically asked, he said, if we can get four days of good weather, we can break through that line, we can make the difference. Four days we can get there. And our gracious Heavenly Father gave him six days of good weather. And George Patton's appeal to Jesus in one of those churches, it's documented that he came in there and said, Sir, if you'll give me four days of good weather, we will send you more Germans to your near bookkeepers in heaven can be can keep up with. And so God gave him the six days. History records the rest of it, and we defeated the Nazis and saved the world with the help of God. And so that's a testimony from General Patton. I want to know do our schools teach a testimony like that about General Patton? They ought to, because that's how it happened. Do they teach that 55 out of our 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were Bible-believing Christians? Do they teach that our original founding documents had numerous references, referenced the Bible more than any other book, and out of the book of the Bible, Deuteronomy was the most referenced. Do they teach these things in our public schools? They ought to, and we've got to get that changed. And so you've read this quote here long enough from Antonio Gramsky.

Lincoln Quote And Closing Question

SPEAKER_00 52:01

The last quote that I'm going to give you tonight is from Abraham Lincoln. He said, The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next. Philosophy of one generation in the classroom will be the philosophy of the government in the next generation. So I'll leave you with this question tonight whose philosophy will we tolerate in our schools and our laws? And next week we'll talk about liberty. And we've got some great artifacts that I'm going to bring in here for next week. So thank you all for listening tonight.