Written by Larry Ball | Thursday, November 27, 2014

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As I search the Bible I find no first amendment. What I do find is the responsibility of the civil magistrate to enforce justice and equity as defined by God’s law (Rom. 13). What I do find is the responsibility of God’s ministers to use the Bible to confront those in power about their lawlessness. The root of freedom is found in God’s law and not in the First Amendment.

It is quite obvious that we are living in a dramatic cultural shift in America. Traditional Christianity is being replaced with materialistic hedonism. Homosexual marriage is just the latest in a strain of legal maneuvers to destroy the remnants of the Christian Faith in the public square. Recently, in Houston, Texas, the sermons of clergymen were subpoenaed by the civil magistrate for examination in a court case. For the moment, some victory in that situation can be enjoyed. Where will it all end? Only God knows!

Most Christians react to this cultural change by flying high the banner of the First Amendment. It is assumed that it is our ultimate weapon against the modern attack which is hostile toward biblical Christianity. The First Amendment has traditionally defined the right to free speech and the free exercise of religion. It has worked well up to this point. However, I believe it is time to abandon this strategy for the following reasons.

The United States Constitution is nothing more than a social compact that was contracted between representatives of the particular states. It is distinctly secular. The entire document reflects the thinking of John Lock more than it does a system patterned after some divine paradigm. I believe this was a mistake by our forefathers, but that is an article for another time. It can be argued that Christian principles such as human depravity influenced such tenets as the division of power. Presbyterians like to think that the election of representatives to rule under a Constitution reflects their own form of government (a republic). The Constitution, as a secular social compact, has no divine warrant above the will of the electorate (democracy), or the will of the elite (oligarchy). It views civil government as an entity in a closed system that may assume there is no god, or if there is a god, he is always congenial toward the beliefs of those in charge. Therefore, at best, religion is irrelevant; or at worst, it is an enemy of the goals of the social planners unless it promotes the prominent social agenda of its leaders. The Constitution worked well for Christians when they controlled the culture, but as we lost the culture, the Constitution is now being used against us. The Constitution has become a “living” document which means it is essentially a dead document. Don’t expect the dead to come to your rescue. Christ is our Savior because he is alive. Speech has never been totally free. There have always been laws on the books prohibiting some speech as slander. You cannot cry “fire” in a crowded movie theater. In 1960 the Journalist Abbott Joseph Liebling said that “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Here is the great irony of the 21st century — the same First Amendment that guarantees freedom of speech may be used to judicially convict biblical Christians of slander. It can be legitimately argued that the Constitution was founded upon states’ rights. Every state had the right to establish a particular Christian religion. However, the principle of states’ rights was destroyed by the Civil War. As a result of that war, federal courts now assume the authority to overrule the electorate of any state that votes to prohibit homosexual marriage. As I search the Bible I find no first amendment. What I do find is the responsibility of the civil magistrate to enforce justice and equity as defined by God’s law (Rom. 13). What I do find is the responsibility of God’s ministers to use the Bible to confront those in power about their lawlessness. The root of freedom is found in God’s law and not in the First Amendment. The sooner we understand this the better it will be.

Fighting our enemies with the first amendment is no longer viable. It needs to be abandoned. Let us fight using the word of God with the hope that God might continue to grant us true freedom in the United States of America.

Larry E. Ball is a Honorably Retired Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is now a CPA. He lives in Kingsport, Tennessee.