What were the signatories of the Declaration of Independence and the framers of the United States Constitution thinking? Swapping Yahweh’s perfection for fickle finite man’s imperfection, regardless how much better it allegedly was than King George’s tyranny, doesn’t bode well for their intelligence:
Great men are not always wise... (Job 32:9)
The Declaration Speaks for Itself
Paragraph #2, Sentences 6-7
The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
Grievances #11 & 12
He [Britain’s King George III] has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
Standing Armies
King George was keeping the American colonials in check with the armed forces he had sent to America, enforced by the 1774 Quartering Act passed by Britain’s Parliament. This act allowed army officers to appropriate private property in which to quarter their troops without the consent of the owners.
As with all nations with standing armies, this was George’s last line of defense for ensuring compliance to his dictatorial government, especially for subjects with an ocean separating them from his immediate jurisdictional subjugation.
The Prophet Samuel warned that this is but one of the consequences of earthly kings:
Samuel told all the words of Yahweh unto the people that asked of him a king. And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. (1 Samuel 8:10-12)
Those not conscripted into the King’s military industrial complex would be easily subjugated by those who were.
After recognizing their sin, the people declared unto the Prophet Samuel in 1 Samuel 12:19, “Pray for thy servants unto Yahweh thy God, that we die not: for we have added unto all our sins this evil, to ask us a king.” Is it any different under the Constitutional Republic when every four years the people clamor for a president? The sin is the same. The only difference is the frequency in which it occurs under the United States government.
Woe to the rebellious children, saith Yahweh, that take counsel, but not of me; and that cover with a covering, but not of my spirit, that they may add sin to sin. (Isaiah 30:1)
The Prophet Isaiah is not referring to just any sin, but to the same compounded violation as that depicted in 1 Samuel 12:19. James Strong defines the Hebrew word nacak translated “cover”:
... a primitive root; ... by analogy, to anoint a king.176
Prior to 1 Samuel 8, Yahweh was the Israelite’s King covering and sole protector, with no need for another.
If God be for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31)
In 1 Samuel 10:19, just before anointing Saul as the Israelites’ first king, Samuel declared:
Ye have this day rejected your God, who himself saved you out of all your adversities and your tribulations: and you have said unto him, Nay, but set a king over us. (1 Samuel 10:19)
The Israelites covered themselves with a surrogate covering and thereby compounded their sin. It was one thing to violate one or more of the Ten Commandments. It was something else to purposely choose a surrogate human king over Yahweh. Samuel recites some of the consequences of such treason in 1 Samuel 8:9-18, but to no avail:
Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have a king over us; that we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles. (1 Samuel 8:19-20)
The sad irony in this is that Yahweh had chosen the Israelites to be a nation like no other—that is, as His wife and queen ruling at His side over all the other nations.* This is, in fact, what Israel means: ruling with El. (El is the abbreviation for Elohym, the Hebrew word translated “God” in the Old Testament). Israel was slated to rule with God above all the other nations, and how does she respond? Pathetically, she chooses to be like all the other nations she was chosen to rule over.
Because the Constitution’s framers chose We the People and their representatives rather than Yahweh as America’s Sovereign,177 their sin was the same, with consequences the same, as the Israelites in 1 Samuel 8. Every four years the sin is repeated here in America when Americans insist on their alleged right to elect a new president, despite the utter failure of all preceding presidents178 to do anything to halt America’s suicidal trek to the precipice of moral depravity and destruction.
Today’s Industrial Military Complex
This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them ... to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. (1 Samuel 8:11-12)
Bible law does not call for standing armies, but rather civilian militias, per Numbers 1:1-3, etc.
It’s true that both Article 1179 and Amendment 2180 provide for a militia. However, consider its purpose:
To execute the Laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel Invasions ... as may be employed in the Service of the United States ... according to the discipline prescribed by Congress. (Article 1, Section 8, Paragraphs 15-16)
Except for repelling invasions, there’s nothing biblical about this provision—especially since a constitutional militia’s principle purpose is to “execute the Laws of the Union ... in the Service of the United States”—that is, the “laws” of the biblically seditious Constitution in service to the biblically abominable Constitutional Republic.181
Making matters much worse, constitutional militias have been all but eliminated and replaced with today’s standing army. Elbridge Gerry, one of Massachusetts’s delegates to the Constitutional Convention, who refused to sign the Constitution, warned of this eventuality:
Whenever governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins.182
An unbiblical standing army (what today under the Constitutional Republic has become an international military industrial complex) was one of the colonials’ grievances against King George. But was the colonials’ ire fueled by God’s law or something else? The “something else” resulted in the constitutional framers, once again, replicating George’s biblical violation here in America.
A standing army was one of the issues disconcerting to some of the opponents to the Constitution. This was particularly true for Luther Martin, one of Maryland’s delegates to the Constitutional Convention, who after attending the Conference for approximately three months (on September 3, 1787), prior to its formal conclusion, left in disgust. He subsequently campaigned against its ratification.
At the Maryland Ratifying Convention, among a number of other grave concerns, Luther Martin voiced his alarm regarding the constitutional likelihood of a standing army:
…the congress have also a power given them to raise and support armies, without any limitation as to numbers, and without any restriction in time of peace. Thus, sir, this plan of government, instead of guarding against a standing army, that engine of arbitrary power, which has so often and so successfully been used for the subversion of freedom, has in its formation given it an express and constitutional sanction….183
A standing army in times of peace, the very same grievance leveled at King George twelve years earlier, which is still in place today, but multiplied times more dangerous. President John Quincy Adams “prophetically” predicted some of the consequences of America’s international military entanglements, which are, in turn, consequences of Article 4’s provision for a standing army184:
[America] well knows that by once enlisting under other [nation’s] banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors, and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force; the frontlet on her brow would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished luster, the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world....185
With the Constitution having so little to say regarding warfare, no wonder Adams’s warnings have become a reality, at the behest of the international bankers and their new-world-order machinations.
War Powers
The power to declare war is an extremely serious responsibility. So why were the framers so vague in defining the parameters of warfare and the conditions under which war could be declared?
Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11: [Congress shall have power] To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water.
Article 1, Section 8 is the only place of “substantive significance” that warfare is cited in the Constitution.186 Little wonder this power has been abused, especially when left to the “discretion” of a bunch of unbiblical legislative usurpers.186
Because the framers provided no biblical parameters, unbiblical warfare has been the rule ever since. As a result, from 1945 to the present, the Constitutional Republic has bombed nineteen different countries. This has been done under the guise of defending America’s sovereignty and promoting democracy—as if promoting democracy is something noble.
The fact is, America is none the better for those wars, and not one of those nineteen countries has yet to be become a legitimate democracy—not that this would be something to celebrate had they done so.
Something’s terribly amiss—at the expense of life and limb of America’s young men and women.
Wars fought for political gain or financial profit are ungodly acts of aggression. It would be prudent for Americans to take heed and learn from King Josiah’s and King Amaziah’s tragic mistakes. Although they were both acclaimed godly men by God, Josiah was nonetheless killed per 2 Chronicles 35:21-24 and Amaziah was taken captive per 2 Kings 14:8-14, for their unprovoked wars of aggression.
War Propaganda
It’s been a propaganda mantra here in America that we need to “fight them over there so we won’t have to fight them over here.” But fighting alleged enemies “over there” has not made America any safer and, in some instances, such acts of aggression have made America less safe.
Without the constitutional power to borrow per Article 1, Section 8, Clause 2186 (making America a slave to her lenders per Proverbs 22:7, one of the reasons the international bankers love war so much), all of America’s former and current unbiblical military conflicts could have been averted and an innumerable number of lives spared.
The Declaration’s signatories and Constitution’s framers (including George Washington who presided over the Constitutional Convention) were not concerned about standing armies, only King George’s standing army. That this is true was witnessed a mere six years after the Constitution was ratified in the 1794 Whisky Tax Rebellion when President George Washington himself led a military force of nearly 13,000 strong against some 400 Pennsylvania tax-protesting farmers, under the pretense of protecting the Constitution.
Biblical Warfare
None of America’s previous military conflicts would have occurred had the constitutional framers established biblical civilian militias per Numbers 1, governed according to the biblical statutes for warfare.
And Yahweh spake unto Moses ... saying, Take ye the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel ... every male by their polls; from twenty years old and upward, all that are able to go forth to war.... (Numbers 1:1-3)
This describes an autonomous militia, not a national standing army, national service, or military draft. Under King Saul, ancient Israel gave up this autonomy under Yahweh as her commander for a centralized standing army.
The Constitutional Republic’s standing army is part of the curse God warned the Israelites about in 1 Samuel 8 that would come with their enthronement of an earthly human King—or President.
America’s young men are kidnapped via the Constitutional Republic’s draft (when enforced) and routinely sacrificed by today’s military industrial complex. In other words, United States citizens are financing the Constitutional Republic’s ungodly conflicts not only with their tax dollars but also with the blood of their sons and daughters.
It’s often said that if your government calls, it’s your patriotic duty to serve, regardless the cause. However, Yahweh prescribes strict rules of warfare for His subjects:
When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it. And it shall be, if it make thee [an] answer of peace ... then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee. And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it.... When thou shalt besiege a city a long time, in making war against it to take it, thou shalt not destroy the [fruit] trees ... to employ them in the siege: Only the trees which thou knowest that they be not trees for meat [fruit], thou shalt destroy and cut them down; and thou shalt build bulwarks against the city that maketh war with thee, until it be subdued. (Deuteronomy 20:10-20)
Because most Christians are unaware of the Bible’s warfare statutes, they’re likewise oblivious to the United States’ unbiblical warfare tactics. Case in point: the United States’ attack upon Iraq in 2003 after George W. Bush spurned Saddam Hussein’s peace offering. Another example: the United States’ indiscriminate Agent Orange defoliation policy employed in Vietnam, which alone identified it as an unbiblical and therefore unrighteous war.
These and other biblical rules of warfare determine the righteousness of a war.
It’s true that untold numbers of people have been killed globally in wars fought in the name of Christianity, but few of these wars were actually Christian. If a military conflict waged in the name of Christianity is not biblical, it’s not Christian.
More often than not, these conflicts have been departures from the biblical rules of warfare and are, consequently, culpable for the untold number of unjustified deaths in these alleged holy wars.
Only conflicts waged in legitimate defense of one’s homeland are biblically justified and godly. Consequently, Christians must stand vigilant against sending their children to fight in the Constitutional Republic’s ungodly conflicts to defend the biblically egregious Republic. Not only might their children be sacrificed in an unrighteous cause, the soldiers in these unbiblical wars of aggression are very likely to be judged by God as murderers or accomplices to murder.
This is true today because the Declaration’s signatories’ grievance regarding King George’s standing army was not generated from a biblical paradigm but from merely their own ethical standards (“without the consent of our legislatures”), resulting in the Constitution’s framers installing their own standing army, one today that makes George’s standing army look impotent.
For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. (Jeremiah 2:13)
* Exodus 19:3-9, Numbers 23:9, Deuteronomy 14:2, 26:16-19, 28:1-2, 1 Chronicles 17:21-22.
Source Notes
176. James Strong, “Dictionary of the Greek Testament,” The New Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, s.v. “nacak” (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1990) p.79
177. Chapter 3 “The Preamble: We the People vs. Yahweh” of Bible Law vs. the United States Constitution: The Christian Perspective,
bibleversusconstitution.org/BlvcOnline/biblelaw-constitutionalism-pt3.html
178. Chapter 5 “Article 2: Executive Usurpation” of Bible Law vs. the United States Constitution: The Christian Perspective,
bibleversusconstitution.org/BlvcOnline/biblelaw-constitutionalism-pt5.html
179. Chapter 4 “Article 1: Legislative Usurpation” of Bible Law vs. the United States Constitution: The Christian Perspective,
bibleversusconstitution.org/BlvcOnline/biblelaw-constitutionalism-pt4.html
180. Chapter 12 “Amendment 2: Constitutional vs. Biblical Self-Defense” of Bible Law vs. the United States Constitution: The Christian Perspective,
bibleversusconstitution.org/BlvcOnline/biblelaw-constitutionalism-pt12.html
181. Bible Law vs. the United States Constitution: The Christian Perspective, in which every Article and Amendment is examined by the Bible,
bibleversusconstitution.org/BlvcOnline/blvc-index.html
182. Elbridge Gerry, Spoken during the House of Representatives’ debate regarding the Second Amendment, Annals of Congress, August 17, 1789
183. Luther Martin, Jonathan Elliott, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions, on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, 4 vols. (Washington, DC: Jonathan Elliott, 1836) vol. 1, p. 59
184. Chapter 4 “Article 1: Legislative Usurpation” of Bible Law vs. the United States Constitution: The Christian Perspective,
bibleversusconstitution.org/BlvcOnline/biblelaw-constitutionalism-pt4.html
185. John Quincy Adams, quoted in William H. Seward, Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams (New York, NY: C.M. Saxton, Barker & Co., 1860) p. 132
186. Chapter 4 “Article 1: Legislative Usurpation” of Bible Law vs. the United States Constitution: The Christian Perspective,
bibleversusconstitution.org/BlvcOnline/biblelaw-constitutionalism-pt4.html
