A GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE

I'm going to do something I never do when in the pulpit. I'm going to wax eloquent about politics. But the eloquence is not mine and I'm not going to tell who said it [to minimize any prejudice] or whether I agree with it or not until the next post. I want to hear what you think about it. A couple of things first....

One__ I know the Lord is Sovereign over all nations, No question. His purposes will be accomplished. But I am asking us to discuss our responsible part in it all.

Two__ As believers we are citizens of another country and must never get more involved in the politics of America than we are involved in the gospel of the Kingdom. America is not the Kingdom of God and America is not a Christian nation since there is only one of those [1 Peter 2:9] and that's the one God is building made up of every believer out of every nation on earth who has responded to the true gospel of Christ. But, that said, we are to live responsibly as citizens in both I think.

Three__I don't know whether or not this will fly as a good conversational piece, but I thought it worth a try seeing the dire straits we're in politically these days. The author is a bit cynical perhaps and that may be something someone will wish to address. But whatever we say, let's speak of our citizenship here, but speak with our spirit reflecting our citizenship there. Thanks.

QUOTE FROM____________?

"The framers of the Constitution may have been brilliant but they weren't perfect.

They lived in another age__lawyers, merchants, and gentlemen farmers__amateur politicians all. For their time the concepts they introduced were radical, but they were not unrestrained. The preamble may have been orchestrated for "We the People," but the fine print kept the common fingers off the piano keys.

The founders were men of property, in an age when only men who owned property could vote. The concept of common sufferage, to say nothing of women voting, was alien to them, something they would have rebelled against as vigorously as they fought the British Empire. Campaigning for public office was an act of personal dishonor.

They could not conceive of their experiment falling into the hands of full-time politicians steered by armies of consultants, forming committees to suck millions in "donations" from those seeking favor from government: permanent officeholders who would wield the levers of power with the partisan ruthlessness of warlords.

A Congress routinely hijacking essential national legislation just to load it with amendments like tumors, hauling pork back to their districts to solidify their death grip on power. This would have been as foreign to them as E.T. When Lincoln sat in Congress for his single term, beginning in 1847, he considered himself lucky to have a desk with a drawer in it for his private papers and the privilege to borrow a book from time to time from the Library of Congress.

Only the insane of the eighteenth century could foresee that a bleak two lines added to the Constitution a century after it's creation, authorizing the collection of a federal income tax, could result in a seventy-year rampage by government to mentally rape its own citizens with millions of pages of totally unintelligible tax laws, rules, regulations, and forms.

Today we have special federal tax courts because the law is so convoluted that ordinary federal judges are presumed too ignorant and unschooled to understand the complexities of laws and forms that every citizen down to the village janitor is required to understand, to obey, and to sign under penalty of perjury and threat of imprisonment.

Nor could it be possible in the Age of Reason to foresee a Social Security system that if run by a private business would result in their arrest, prosecution, and conviction for operating a Ponzi scheme. In the real world, taking invested funds in the form of Social Security taxes, paying current claims, and skimming the rest for other purposes is called embezzlement. When government does it, it is simply called politics. In either case the arithmetic is always the same. When the scheme goes belly-up, its operators, if they're smart, will be in Brazil, or, in the case of Congress, retired, which is the political equivalent of being in Brazil.

With all of this, the people in what is touted as the greatest democracy on the planet have no effective recourse. They cannot act directly to fix any of the obvious open sores or seeping wounds in their own government, because the founders didn't trust them with the only effective medicine, the power to amend their own Constitution. That is reserved for the serpent its creators never saw.

Short of revolution, something Jefferson urged take place at least every twenty years, the average citizen is left to pound sand by casting a largely empty vote to replace the devil-in-office with the devil-in-waiting and hope that the caustic nature of power to corrupt can somehow be neutralized.

Praying for the devil to grow a halo, we all plod on, one foot in front of the other, trusting that somehow we will not follow the Soviet Union over the national cliff."

Paul B.

UPDATE 5/7/09

There is a frequent commenter on Wade's blog [And sometimes here] who goes by the name of "Thy Peace" but should be called "Perry Mason." That person has a knack of putting information together and assisting in understanding of issues by putting that information out to the public. So you could say that that person also is a bit of an Internet detective.

"Thy Peace" found my source for this post and my love of fiction books has been found out. It is Steve Martini author of "Shadow of Power, who in that book" [chapter 8 pages 125-127] makes the interesting comment that is the basis for this post. [Even fictional books sometimes has profound insights.] Martini is a former lawyer, advocate for the abused, and has experience in civil and federal courts.

He's a good fiction writer too if you like the genre as much as I do. [If you do you might try Lee Child, James Grippando, Robert Crais, among others.] You certainly have to spend a lot of time in airports and on planes as do I to have the time I'm sure. Way to go Thy Peace. ;)