15 He who walks righteously and speaks uprightly, He who despises the gain of oppressions, Who gestures with his hands, refusing bribes, Who stops his ears from hearing of bloodshed, And shuts his eyes from seeing evil:
16 He will dwell on high; His place of defense will be the fortress of rocks; Bread will be given him, His water will be sure.
17 Your eyes will see the King in His beauty; They will see the land that is very far off.
Later in the chapter, we read this declaration:
22 (For the Lord is our Judge, The Lord is our Lawgiver, The Lord is our King; He will save us)...
John Adams understood that the survival of our nation and its Constitution depended on the morality and spirituality of its people. According to the National Archives, he stated, "Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by...morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition [and] Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other..."
The Founders firmly held this Biblical view. They therefore constructed government fully expecting the worst – expecting that the people leading all three branches would become corrupt. Fifty-five hundred years of recorded history prior to the Founding Fathers had demonstrated that as the pattern of every human government that had ever existed. Understanding this, the Founders made specific plans to help limit the inherent corruption of man and they sought ways to prevent all three branches from becoming wicked at the same time. They wanted a fail-safe so that if one did, then perhaps the other branches could restrain it or drag it back to its limited function. The result was the various clauses providing and enforcing Separation of Powers.
Jeremiah 17:9 states, "The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?" The Wallbuilders article, in quoting from The Founders' Bible, stated: " The Founding Fathers understood the import of this verse and openly cited it..." The essay goes on to relate:
The Biblically illiterate believe in the innate goodness of man – that man will naturally do what is right, but experience regularly affirms the opposite: without a heart regenerated by the power of God, man will routinely do what is wrong. Adams specifically rejected any notion of the innate goodness of man, especially when it came to government:That is from Adams' A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America.To expect self-denial from men when they have a majority in their favor, and consequently power to gratify themselves, is to disbelieve all history and universal experience – it is to disbelieve revelation and the Word of God, which informs us ‘the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked’ [Jeremiah 17:9]. . . . There is no man so blind as not to see that to talk of founding a government upon a supposition that nations and great bodies of men left to themselves will practice a course of self-denial is either to babble like a newborn infant or to deceive like an unprincipled impostor...
The Supreme Court has ruled on a complicated case with broad implications for disputes between the federal judiciary and presidents, reining in the power of federal judges.
The Trump administration had asked the court to put an end to nationwide injunctions issued by lower federal courts – an issue that came up during the legal fight over President Trump's attempt to challenge the issue of "birthright citizenship."
The actual executive order about citizenship was not officially the subject of this particular ruling. Instead, the high court was focusing on whether lower federal courts can issue rulings that assert power over the president, overturning actions of the Executive Branch.
In a big win for President Trump, the high court ruled that individual judges lack the authority to grant nationwide injunctions, as several federal judges have tried to do this year.
Court analysts, discussing the case on SCOTUSblog, report that Justice Barrett wrote the opinion for the Court in the 6-3 ruling.
She wrote, "Federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them. When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too."
Justice Clarence Thomas issued a concurring opinion, clarifying that the Court "today puts an end to the 'increasingly common' practice of federal courts issuing universal injunctions."
In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said that the majority's opinion was "an existential threat to the rule of law." Barrett stated:
"We will not dwell on JUSTICE JACKSON's argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries' worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: JUSTICE JACKSON decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary. No one disputes that the Executive has a duty to follow the law. But the Judiciary does not have unbridled authority to enforce this obligation—in fact, sometimes the law prohibits the Judiciary from doing so."
I remember the words of former Alabama and U.S. Attorney General and U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions, who would describe judge's job as calling "balls and strikes." Constitutionally speaking, regarding the three branches of government, Congress makes law and sets parameters, the Executive Branch carries out those laws based on the Constitution, and the Judiciary is there as an arbiter when there is a dispute about the content or intent of those laws.
The Founders got it right, and there was apparently Biblical inspiration for that system, recognizing as Wallbuilders pointed out - human beings are not naturally good, rather they are naturally sinful. If, for instance, one branch of government goes south, if you will, the chance of catastrophic harm to our government is reduced by having checks and balances.
As Wallbuilders states:
Under the Progressive belief, if man shoots someone, the problem is with the gun; since man is instinctively good, it can’t be his fault that something bad happened, so we need to regulate the gun, not the man. Or if someone gets drunk and abuses his spouse, it is because man has a medical disease beyond his control – it’s not his fault, for he is inherently good. Or if someone fathers a dozen children out of wedlock, it is because he was not given enough condoms in school. In short, under Progressivism, if man does something bad, there was some outside cause for it, for man is inherently good.
We are responsible for our behavior, and we need the power of the Holy Spirit in order to walk in a way that pleases God. Humanity is basically evil - that is why we need a Savior. Time and time again, we see our Founders as men who spoke of a reliance on Almighty God. As we reflect on God's hand on our nation, we can be thankful for the evidence of divine inspiration upon our system of government.
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