A New Book Correctly Diagnoses America’s Ills and Prescribes the Cure
I believe that everything we need to make a good world and rid ourselves of evil is contained in the Ten Commandments. ~~~ The Ten Commandments are not a list of rules. The commandments prove that God wants mankind to be free: “I am the Lord your God who took you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” Following the commandments actually frees us from the terrible consequences of sin, making our lives better.
—Dennis Prager—
No human society has ever been able to maintain both order and freedom, both cohesiveness and liberty apart from the moral precepts of the Christian Religion allied and accepted by all the classes. Should our Republic ere forget this fundamental precept of governance, men are certain to shed their responsibilities for licentiousness and this great experiment will surely be doomed.
—John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court—
Key points: America is in peril, but don’t give up on her yet. A new book accurately diagnoses her problems and points to the only solution that will put her back on track. You can help to facilitate repentance and national healing in America, and in so doing you can help restore authentic liberty in this land. Read an important new book by Pastor Sam Jones. Be informed, stand up, and speak up.
A streamlined version of this article is available here.
We can learn many important moral lessons from the Hollywood of yesteryear. In an article titled “The Ten Commandments: Foundation of Liberty,” Gary DeMar showcases some important but almost-forgotten insights from one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors and producers, Cecil B. DeMille. DeMar writes,
Most people who have seen the film Ten Commandments on television have never seen Cecil B. DeMille’s opening introduction. DeMille had something more in mind than just making a film about a religious figure from the Bible. He considered his production to be so important that he came out on stage to deliver a short but powerful statement on the nature of freedom under the law of God:
The theme of this picture is whether men ought to be ruled by God’s laws or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator like Rameses. Are men the property of the State or are they free souls under God? This same battle continues throughout the world today.
Watch:
Notice the statements in the introduction that DeMar did not quote, but certainly could have: “Ladies and gentlemen, young and old: This may seem an unusual procedure, speaking to you before the picture begins, but we have an unusual subject — the story of the birth of freedom, the story of Moses.”
Freedom’s Fertile Ground
In previous Word Foundations posts, including the one released last week, we have sought to highlight the important connection between law and liberty. In this article from August, 2020, we even presented an audio clip from The Ten Commandments (though not the same clip posted above). The article states,
Mark it down. The Ten Commandments aren’t just for individuals, but for societies and cultures, too. When a society respects and obeys them, that society is infused with mutual respect and with the order and cohesiveness that makes liberty possible. In the 1956 movie The Ten Commandments, Moses put it this way: “There is no freedom without the law.”
There is no freedom without the law.
—Moses in the 1956 epic The Ten Commandments—
The Ten Commandments and the genesis of liberty are inseparable. The Ten Commandments and the preservation of liberty are equally inseparable. We see this vividly in Scripture, but we also see it in history. The story of America is — and we must not miss this — a story of freedom and liberty made possible by God’s law, including His Ten Commandments. James Madison is credited with saying, “We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind of self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.” While it is debated whether or not Madison actually made this statement, it nevertheless is consistent with the beliefs the Founding Fathers held.
Liberty cannot be established or maintained without God and His laws.
Far too few individuals today understand this important principle, but one leader who does is Sam Jones, Pastor of Faith Baptist Church in Hudson, Iowa and cohost of The Shining Light Podcast. Pastor Sam has written an important book that affirms just how necessary divine law is to the preservation of liberty. Just as Cecil B. DeMille said of his epic film, so it can be said of Sam’s book: The theme “is whether men ought to be ruled by God’s laws or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator like Rameses. Are men the property of the State or are they free souls under God? This same battle continues throughout the world today.”
Just as Cecil B. DeMille said of his epic film, so it can be said of Sam’s book: The theme “is whether men ought to be ruled by God’s laws or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator like Rameses. Are men the property of the State or are they free souls under God? This same battle continues throughout the world today.”
Sam demonstrates the interlocking relationship of liberty and law by warning readers about what happens when the Ten Commandments are ignored or treated with disdain by the populace of a once-free nation. The title of Pastor Sam’s book is 5 Steps to Kill a Nation and How to Stop the Bleeding.
The Urgency of the Matter
You see, while far too few Christian leaders understand the tight relationship between law and liberty, Satan definitely does; and he has been working relentlessly to drive a wedge between Americans and the God of the Bible. Don’t be fooled! He’s been succeeding to a great extent by driving a wedge between Americans and God’s law.
You may have heard that at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in September of 1787, a woman asked Benjamin Franklin what form of government the delegates to the convention had decided the new nation would have. Franklin replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” After recounting this event, Pastor Sam writes,
Benjamin Franklin understood what many modern-day Americans apparently do not: The form of government the Constitution affirmed is fragile. It will only work if the people cooperate, not merely enjoying their liberties and rights for their own sakes, but accepting their responsibilities as citizens.
Among those responsibilities is the duty of embracing and practicing virtue, because, as we will see, freedom cannot be maintained without it. In turn, virtue is tied to faith in and devotion to God. How does one express these? Obeying the commandments is ground zero. When we as Americans do this, we help make it possible to keep the republic our Founding Fathers painstakingly established in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.
Conversely, one of the most effective ways a society can kill a free nation is by dismissing, ignoring or directly rebelling against the Commandments. We can summarize rejection of the Ten Commandments in five easy-to-remember principles:
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- Forget God (this relates to Commandments 1 through 4),
- Destroy the Family (Commandments 5 and 7),
- Devalue Life (the Sixth Commandment),
- Take What Isn’t Yours (Commandments 8 and 10) [, and]
- Hate Your Neighbor (the Ninth Commandment).1
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In the body of the book, under the umbrellas of these themes, Pastor Sam discusses
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- the nation’s departure from a respect for God and the things of God, from a Judeo-Christian faith and a Judeo-Christian set of ethics,
- the assault on the the time-honored definitions of marriage and the family,
- the evil of abortion and the rise of a disrespect for human life in general,
- the deceptively enticing push for socialism, which includes assaults on property rights and on hard work as the most reliable means of increasing one’s own wealth and independence, and
- a relentless attack on objective truth; an attack which, not coincidentally, has given rise to relativism and other belief systems that glorify personal autonomy.
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All of these, of course, are directly related to the nation’s posture toward the Ten Commandments and the values they uphold. Pastor Sam puts it this way:
In the Ten Commandments, we see the foundation of Western Civilization.…Since the Ten Commandments are at the core of the United States, tinkering with, manipulating and replacing those ten basic ethical guidelines inevitably will lead to America’s demise. How does a society kill a nation? By removing the principles inherent in these commands. Conversely, to rebuild it, the people need to uphold these ideals and practice them as a way of life. If a foundation cracks and turns to dust, no structure resting on it can remain. I believe that after reading this book you will find a direct correlation between the cultural and societal decline in America and the dislodging of these great principles from the nation’s foundational base.2
Dennis Prager, a devout Jew, has observed,
Both reason and American values…make these claims:
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- The more important the state is, the less the liberty.
- The more important God is, the smaller the state.
- Therefore, the more important God is, the more liberty there is.
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A proof of the validity of these assertions is that as this country — the country, not the government — becomes more secular, it becomes less free, just as has happened in other Western countries. We have far more laws governing human conduct than ever before in America’s history. And Western Europe has even more, including limitations on as basic a liberty as free speech.
The more important the state is, the less the liberty. The more important God is, the smaller the state. Therefore, the more important God is, the more liberty there is.
—Dennis Prager—
Jones, a Christian, and Prager, a Jew, certainly disagree on a significant number of important matters. But they fully agree on the idea that liberty cannot exist without God and His laws.
Learn How to Stop the Bleeding
Dear reader, I cannot encourage you enough to get a copy of Pastor Sam’s book. Read it and
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- learn the true extent to which our liberties — liberties we have all too often taken for granted — are in peril.
- Learn about the false yet noble-sounding ideas that have taken hold in our country, and how Satan has used them to attack God’s commands and to turn citizens’ hearts away from the Supreme Lawgiver.
- Learn the importance of one individual’s obedience to God, and of contending for God’s truth, even in a day when it appears that truth will be soundly rejected. It may be that many won’t listen, but some will, and some will respond with open hearts and minds.
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Read — and remember that Jonah preached to a city many would have written off as hopeless. Yet the people of Nineveh repented! Remember that the King of Nineveh urged repentance and said, “Who can tell if God will turn and relent, and turn away from His fierce anger, so that we may not perish?”
What happened? “God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God relented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it.”
If Nineveh repented, so can America; but God’s people are going to have to be informed, alert, on task, walking in step with Him, and understanding the times and responding appropriately…
…doing all they can, with God’s help, to stop the nation’s bleeding and to promote her healing.
I believe God still loves and wants to use America again, for His glory. If this doesn’t happen, let’s make sure we didn’t keep it from happening through our action…or inaction.
A PDF file of this visual is available here.
Dig deeper: On the April 13, 2021 episode of the Shining Light Podcast, Pastor Sam and his cohost, Patrick “No Compromise with Evil” Wyett, discuss 5 Steps to Kill a Nation.
An enlightening exercise: Equipped with this new understanding of the liberating power of God’s law, watch The Ten Commandments again (or for the first time if you haven’t seen it already). Watch it with your family. Thank God for the power of His laws to liberate from bondage.
Explore the connections between biblical truth and the founding of America in Principles of Liberty: Ten Biblical Truths Embedded in the Declaration of Independence, a five-session Bible study series.
Copyright © 2021 by B. Nathaniel Sullivan. All rights reserved.
top image credit: Photo by Gaia Armellin on Unsplash
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture passages have been taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Notes:
1Pastor Sam Jones, 5 Steps to Kill a Nation and How to Stop the Bleeding, (Newport Beach, CA: The GK Publishing Company), 14.
2Jones, 15.
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