Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Desire the unadulterated milk of the word like a newborn baby that you may grow thereby. His divine power has given to us everything pertaining to life and godliness through the knowledge of him who called us by glory and virtue by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises. that through these you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. Jesus prayed to the Father, sanctify them in truth. Thy word is truth. Before we open up God's word this morning, let's bow our heads together in prayer. Father, we're thankful that we have the truth of your Word, absolute truth, truth that is not relative to culture, truth that is not relative to background or economic status or ethnic positions or whatever. It is absolute truth for every human being that you have revealed to us that we may know how to think accurately about the world around us, not in terms of fantasies, not in terms of optimistic, wishful thinking that gets us divorced from reality, but we have absolute truth that every one of us must submit to, and we must have our thinking transformed. We cannot be conformed to the thinking of the world system which surrounds us, but we must all be transformed to think as Christ thinks, and we have His Word. This Word of God is the thinking of our Lord Jesus Christ. So Father, we pray that you would open our minds to an understanding of your word and of truth this morning, that God the Holy Spirit can use it to sanctify us, to strengthen us, and that we may apply it in wisdom to the situation we find ourselves in. And we pray this in Christ's name, amen. All right, you may open your Bibles to Psalm 146. We will get there eventually, but I want to say a couple of things about today. Today we are celebrating the 246th birthday of our nation. It was at that time during the months of actually started earlier in the spring, in May and April, on through June, or April, May, and then June, that the Continental Congress met and debated whether or not the colonies should separate themselves from the mother country of Great Britain. And there were pros and cons. Actually, a year before, there had been published from Massachusetts a list of grievances that had been brought before the king of England for the purpose of having a discussion with the ruling powers of Britain. And he would not even allow it to be brought into his presence. What that demonstrated was that the colonists were doing everything they could possibly do in order to respect the authority of the parliament and of the king And in order to address the various grievances, which were identified as violations of the charters of the colonies, they were violations of English law, and they were violations of many of the policies that had been approved by Parliament for the rule and the governance of the colonies. And so because the government of England would not even enter into a discussion, in fact, they just made things worse, it led to the Second Continental Congress to debate and to decide what their future relationship would be to the British Empire. That document I referred to was called the Declaration of the United Colonies on the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms. This was a year before the Declaration of Independence. So this was not something they entered into hastily. It was not something they were running towards as if this was their objective. Their objective was not to separate from England. They tried to do everything they could to live according to the law. But the British government was not responsive whatever. And not long before the Declaration of Independence, the colonists sent another petition called the Olive Branch Petition, and King George III just refused to even read it. So it became obvious and necessary for the colonists to recognize that they had to indeed address this situation and whether or not to separate from Britain. The Declaration of Independence was signed by 56 representatives from the colonies, Over half of them, 29 of them, had some sort of advanced training in what today we would refer to as either a seminary or a Bible college. Many of them had extremely strong testimonies of the grace of God in their lives. This morning I want to focus on just one of them, the one that most people think of because his signature is larger and more legible than anybody else's signature on the page, and that is John Hancock. Before I get to that I have this other slide. A lot of people question whether this nation is founded as a Christian nation. Now it depends on how you define the term Christian nation. If you mean that it is a regenerate nation, because that's what makes a person regenerate, then of course it's not a regenerate nation, because a nation cannot be saved, cannot be justified in the eyes of God. But if you're talking about what the way most of us refer to it, is this a nation whose beliefs, whose foundation, whose understanding of law and government and politics was grounded upon that which is revealed in God's Word, that the culture out of which Our founding documents were given birth to. The culture that gave rise to that was a culture that was shaped by a biblical worldview, a Judeo-Christian worldview. They understood the divine institutions and they were embedded within everything that was said in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. For those of you who don't know, I have six divine institutions. A divine institution is that which God embedded in the social structure of the human race from creation. And some were added later on by God for the protection, perpetuation, and stability of the human race. Therefore, anyone who is a human being, not just for believers. And so the first divine institution is human responsibility. There has been a war on individual responsibility in this nation for at least 100 years. It has been embedded within a lot of curricula in many different educational institutions. It's been embedded in a lot of legislation where people are just not held accountable for what they do. And Sergey got a job recently working after he came here to America up in the Seattle area. He's working in a warehouse. And in just a couple of weeks, he was making more money than anybody else in the warehouse because he took responsibility for what he did. And he worked hard. He had a work ethic. And so all these other snowflakes that are working there are getting angry and mad at him because, you know, he was even offered the job of being the manager of the warehouse. Because he worked, he took personal responsibility for what he was doing. And all of these others that were there had no idea how to take personal responsibility. They just wanted to show up. and get money. And they wanted as much money as he did. Socialists. So this is a problem today. We're rearing a generation that has no sense of personal responsibility. That is the foundation of these divine institutions. The second divine institution is marriage. God created man and woman, male and female, not 120 different genders. Male and female for the purpose of marriage. And the very first thing that God says in Genesis 1, I think it's 27 or 28, immediately after saying God created the male and female, what did he say? He said, be fruitful and multiply, connecting the fact that he created these two sexes for the purpose of the propagation of the species. It's further developed in Genesis chapter 2 and Genesis chapter 3. So that's the first and second divine institutions. The third one is family. which was foreseen in that original creation mandate to be fruitful and multiply. Now those three divine institutions were all established before there was any sin. So their purpose was not to control and limit evil, to control and limit the damage of sin. Their purpose was to provide for prosperity, for growth, for the blessing of all in God's creation under perfect environment. But we all know what happened. Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That brought sin and corruption into all of creation, not just the human race, but everyone in the human race became immediately, I mean, Adam and Eve became immediately alienated from the life of God. And this circumstance of sin and spiritual death was passed on from generation to generation. Now nothing new was added to those first three divine institutions, but because under the law of personal responsibility, the first divine institution, God allowed the human race to live almost with impunity. And so sin became so wicked and so evil that by Genesis chapter 6, God sees that the man's heart is wicked and evil continuously. And so God brought judgment on the human race, which was the flood. Now we get the fourth divine institution, which is human government, which is established by the covenant with Noah. And that authorizes capital punishment. And there is a sign or symbol of the Noahic covenant, which is a rainbow. Most people think that it just relates to one promise in the covenant, but it relates to the whole covenant. Most people think it just represents God's promise not to destroy the earth by water again. But there's a couple of other things in the covenant. Up to this time man was a vegetarian and now he was to eat meat. So that's part of the covenant. Up to this point there was no capital punishment for murder even though there had been murderers from the second generation. Cain killed his brother Abel. But now under the Noahic covenant there would be capital punishment. So we should look at that rainbow and we should remember two things. Eat meat. Execute murderers. And God will not destroy the human race by flood again. Those three things. And this idea of human government means that God delegated to the human race the responsibility to govern ourselves. And one of the most egregious, serious things that we can do is to adjudicate a case of murder and make that decision that this person is guilty and they deserve to be executed. And so that very command sort of encapsulates all other forms of governance and legislation. But that failed. And so instead of following the command at the end of the Noahic Covenant to scatter and fill the earth, which was part of the original creation covenant, they gathered themselves together in rebellion against God and built the Tower of Babel. Everyone spoke the same language. And so because the Tower of Babel was not just an architectural architecturally unique feature. It wasn't just a building project. It was an attempt to rebel against God. They were establishing their own gods and goddesses and they were trying to build something that would reach to the heavens so that if God decided to flood the earth again they would be able to survive by climbing to the top of the tower. So God saw this and he brought judgment again. This time he scattered the languages. And this established nations in Acts chapter 17, Paul makes a statement that God is the one who establishes nations and peoples and boundaries. And so borders, something that is abused by many today. They want open borders. That is a rebellious attitude toward God. God established borders. He established nations. This is known as biblical nationalism. Nationalism has been dragged through the mud by internationalists. But they are wrong. And there are others who are nationalists and have distorted it with other ideas that are not part of it. But all nationalism means is that God is the one who instituted nations, and they are to govern themselves. And so nations have borders, and these are to be protected. And the purpose for a nation is to provide for the welfare of the people within their borders, to defend against foreign enemies, and to deal with criminals within the borders. So now you have personal responsibility, marriage, family, then you have human government, and then you have nationalism. Now I believe Israel, how we treat Israel, is a divine institution because there's a principle in Genesis chapter 12 verse 3 that God says, whoever, whoever means believer or unbeliever. It means any nation, any people, it doesn't matter who you are. Whoever blesses Israel I will bless, but whoever curses Israel I will curse. That's like the other five divine institutions that applies to believer and unbeliever alike. And so how a nation treats Israel is going to be determinative. So these are six divine institutions and this nation, even though they were just a very, very small percentage, less than 1% of the population was Jewish, at the time of the American War for Independence, much of it was financed by wealthy Jews. And it was very important. And in America, it was a haven for Jews. They could come here without any fear of persecution, any fear of anti-Semitism. And it is those six principles that I believe we must take to the voting booth. And we must evaluate candidates on the basis of those six foundational principles. And whoever gets the closest used to be whoever held all of them firmly. But now we have those that don't, that are, we have a war against those divine institutions in this culture. And so in some cases you may have candidates that hate, that reject all six of them and they're opposed by a candidate who only rejects three of them. So you're left with a tough decision. But it's better to have somebody who holds to three of them than somebody who has none of them. And that's difficult. But when this nation was founded, all of the founding documents embedded within them and embedded within the Anglo-Saxon culture was a belief in those six different principles. And this influenced everybody. And it came from the scripture. In 1983, Donald Lutz, who at that time was a political science professor at the University of Houston, had a 10-year project that analyzed over 15,000 political documents from 1760 to 1805. They evaluated 3,154 citations. That is where it gave credit for the quotation. Second, the most often quoted source for political ideas was the Bible, mostly the Old Testament. Over one-third of all were direct quotes. from Leviticus, from Exodus, from Judges, from 1 Samuel chapter 8. The next most quoted source was John Locke. He was quoted one-fourth as frequently as the Bible. And about two-thirds of his quotes were allusions to the Bible. So you see the Bible had a heavy influence on the thinking and the writings and the political philosophy of the founders of this nation. Fourth, another 60% of all references came from authors whose original source went back to the Bible. So the Bible had an incredible impact. One of the foremost signatures, as I mentioned earlier on the Declaration, is John Hancock's. His dates were 1737 to 1793. He died at the age of 55. His father and his grandfather were both pastors. His grandfather had been the pastor of the church in Lexington, Massachusetts. You know, the war for independence started with the battles of Lexington and Concord. It started right there, just outside the home, the parsonage, where his grandfather had lived and where he had played as a little boy. He was elected as the president of the First Continental Congress. Previous to this, he had been the president of Massachusetts Colony organizations trying to deal with the oppression of the British. Later he served as the governor of Massachusetts. He issued a prayer proclamation on October 15, 1791, and in that proclamation he said, and pray especially that universal happiness can be established in the world, and that all may bow to the scepter of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that the whole earth will be filled with his glory. Now, a couple things I want to point out here. Number one, this is evidence that he was clearly influenced by the scripture and that he was a believer. But it also indicates that he has a squirrely view of the kingdom. And he thinks that somehow, and this was already beginning to infiltrate the thinking of the colonists, the idea of post-millennialism really gained popularity from Jonathan Edwards in the First Great Awakening in the 1740s. And so this idea that is a biblical idea that somehow the church will eventually bring in the kingdom. By the 19th century, what you see is that view of the kingdom becomes secularized, and the attempt to bring in a utopia also becomes secularized until it becomes part and parcel of Marxism, utopian socialism, and other things of that nature. But at this point, all this says is, number one, he's a believer. Number two, he's influenced by the Bible. Number three, he gives evidence of already you see the influence of some of these ideas that now have really exploded in the evil of this country. But in his last will and testament he said, I, John Hancock, being advanced in years and being of perfect mind and memory, memory thanks be given to God therefore calling to mind the mortality of my body and knowing it is appointed for all men once to die direct quote from Hebrews 927 do make and ordain this my last will and testament principally and first of all I give and recommend my soul into the hands of God that gave it and my body and that's an allusion to a passage at the end of Ecclesiastes in my body I recommend to the earth nothing doubting, but at the general resurrection I shall receive the same again by the mercy and power of God." Like many, many others who served our nation in its founding, he was a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. So now I want to direct our attention a little bit to Psalm 146. Psalm 146 is a thanksgiving psalm. It is a declarative praise psalm that is calling the people to praise God calling people to praise God doesn't mean that you say hallelujah it means that because hallelujah is the command to literally in Hebrew that means praise God that is exactly what we have at the very beginning that first line praise the Lord in Hebrew is hallelujah and this is this call to worship Now what's interesting is this psalm is bracketed by this particular statement. You have in the first verse, it begins with Hallelujah as the prologue, and in the last verse, in verse 10, it closes with the same phrase, Hallelujah. So this tells that this is a psalm of praise, and one form of praise is giving thanks to God. And as we come together here this morning, and we reflect upon the history of this nation, we have so much to be thankful for. And we should remember that. We should be thankful, and that thankfulness should be visceral. That we are thankful we live in this nation. We are thankful we have the many freedoms that we have. And that doesn't mean it's a perfect nation. There are many flaws, and the Founding Fathers understood there were some problems they could not deal with at that time, but they embedded within the Constitution the means to correct them as time went on. But they just knew, and part of that was with the horrible institution of slavery. And there were many, at least half the delegates there were either already abolitionists, they were against slavery, or they did not own slaves and they were sort of in the middle. But because of those that were involved with slavery in the South, they couldn't solve it. So they could either let the whole thing collapse or say, OK, we're just going to put into the Constitution the process whereby this can be solved later. And unfortunately, and you've heard me talk about this before, it was the arrogance on both sides in America that led to the the war between the states and all of the horrors that occurred there. It is because of the legalism, and it is because of the anti-biblical teaching on both sides among the transcendentalists, who of course rejected any biblical influence, but they believed that man on his own could bring in a utopic state, and so to do that we needed to get rid of slavery. And on the other hand, out of New England you had had the development of New England theology, and one of its worst products was a man named an evangelist so-called he did not give the gospel his name was Charles Grandison Finney and Finney taught that every human being was born as Adam was created without that is without sin and That all he needed was a little emotional push in order to turn to God and to give that emotional purse push he would sing like 29 verses of just as I am but he was an abolitionist and His idea was man was perfectible because he was not born a sinner. So man is perfectible, so society is perfectible. Now, if we can just get rid of slavery, then we can bring in the kingdom. See, it's a total heretical view and twisting of Scripture that was absolutely horrible, fueled by his arrogance and the polarization and opposite reaction of arrogance in the South that led to the Civil War. In contrast, in England you had these great evangelicals with sound biblical theology. William Wilberforce, John Newton, who wrote Amazing Grace, and numerous others. They were referred to as the Clapham sect. Clapham was a part of London. And it took them about 20 years of working within Parliament, but peacefully it led to the abolition of the slave trade, and then eventually by the 1830s to the abolition of slavery. No shots were fired. Why? You had heresy and arrogance in the United States. You had humility and biblical foundation in England. One produced a vision and a war. The other did not. If you start on the wrong foundation ideologically, apart from Scripture, you will destroy the nation. That's what almost happened during the war between the states. If you don't, you can have peaceful resolution of these problems. We must start with this idea of praising God and giving thanks for all that we have. The last verse is interesting. It begins with the phrase, Yahweh shall reign forever. This brings in the idea of the kingdom. Now I don't have time to deal with all of this this morning, but the more I read this, the more I study this, especially when you look at verses 6 through 9, What you discover is that there's a list of attributes that are praised by God. There are nine of these characteristics here, and when you get down to the second part of them, you start hearing things that are quoted similar to other passages in the Old Testament that are clearly messianic, and these are quoted and applied to Jesus in the Gospels. And it occurred to me, as I was reading yesterday, I wonder if this is really a messianic psalm. And then this morning I got up and did some further research, and I'm not the only one who thinks this is a messianic psalm. But it is not a common view. But the common view is that there may be only one messianic psalm, and I reject that. But I think there are a lot of these psalms that are messianic. This is talking about what God will do in the kingdom. We'll get to that in a minute. So God is described as our only true helper. The Hebrew word is Ezra. Eve was created to be an Ezra for Adam. He's our only hope. He's the creator of the heavens and the earth and the seas and all that is in them. An echo of the rationale for Sabbath in Exodus 20 verse 11. He executes justice for the oppressed. He gives food to the hungry. He opens the eyes of the blind. He lifts up those who are oppressed. He loves the righteous. He watches over strangers. Now the way this is written in the present tense, it sounds like this is something that he is doing now. And yes, there are some examples where God does indeed do this now. But these are very similar to passages like Isaiah 61, 1 and 2, and some other Old Testament prophecies related to the Messiah. And I believe that if you read this as it is translated in the English, it sounds like, well, this says God should be doing this now, but I don't see him doing this now. I see a lot of injustice in the world. I see a lot of orphans that are not being taken care of, widows that aren't being taken care of, people who are starving, people who are in great need. I don't see this. But if this is prophetic, If this is related to what the Lord will do when he establishes his kingdom on the earth, then this is looking forward to what the Messiah will do. And this is what we see when we look at some other passages in the Old Testament. Now I'm just going to skip ahead a little bit and try to pick some of this up when we get down into verse 6. So 6 and 7, that is explaining what God is doing. Verses 7 through 9, He is the one who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry. The Lord gives freedom to the prisoners. The Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord raises those who are bowed down. The Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the strangers. He relieves the fatherless and widow. But the way of the wicked He turns upside down. Well, in Isaiah we have statements like Isaiah 26, 19, talking about the future kingdom. Your dead shall live. Together with my dead body they shall arise, awake and sing. You who dwell in the dust, for your dew is like the dew of herbs and the earth shall cast out the dead. Then in Isaiah 35, 5 and 6 we read, then the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. then the lame shall leap like a deer and the tongue of the dumb sing, for water shall burst forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert." See, this is talking about what happens when Messiah comes and establishes his kingdom. The utopia is not for here and now, the utopia is in the future when Messiah comes and rules from the throne of David in Jerusalem. And all of this, this kind of thing was something we need to pay attention to because there is a significant warning to us when we come to about verse... I'm going to skip this and go to... okay. Verse 3, do not put your trust in princes. This is what the founding fathers understood. Ultimately you cannot put your trust in human government to solve all your problems. Today we live in a world where the upcoming generation thinks the government's job is to solve all their problems. But God says do not put your trust in princes nor in a son of man in whom there is no salvation. This word is the Hebrew word teshua which comes from the word for salvation. I think in most of the Psalms it refers to deliverance from the problems that we face And here would be the problems we face politically, socially. Don't put your trust there. Because his spirit departs, he returns to the earth. In the very day, his plans perish. In other words, what he's saying is when he dies, all of his hopes and dreams die with him. We've gotten a little bit of a hint of how this happens in Ukraine. On February the 24th at 430 in the morning, when the missiles and bombs began to rain down on Ukraine, People woke up and realized that all of their hopes and dreams blew up. That their hopes for their children, their hopes for their future, their hopes for their business all blew up. Because the nation was at war and the reality was much of it was going to be destroyed. And you had well over a million, three or four million Ukrainians at least have left the country. You have six or seven more displaced. They're away from their homes, they're away from their jobs, away from their businesses. All of their hopes and dreams are gone. They have no idea what the future will hold. Everything they hoped for, everything they planned, everything that they envisioned for their future is gone with the wind. And so the only hope, Scripture says, is the one who has the God of Jacob for help, whose hope is in the Lord. It's interesting, this word for hope, is only used twice, and it's used in reference to God. Isaiah 26.3 says in reference to happiness, happiness we think of as this ephemeral emotion, but it's not. It's inner happiness, inner joy. Isaiah 26.3 says, you will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, not in man, but in God. for in Yahweh the Lord is everlasting strength. And so Psalm 146 is a cautionary reminder to us that in all of the ebb and flow of politics we dare not put our hope and trust in man because man can only do so much. Our hope is to be in the Lord. We do not know what the future will hold. We know the trajectories in this country for the last 200 years have been in the same direction. And apart from the grace of God I don't think they will change. But our hope is not in politics. Our hope is not in the government of the United States of America. Our hope is in the Lord Jesus Christ. Now that doesn't mean we just become passive and throw up our hands and say what will be will be. We are to be involved. We as believers have a responsibility to be a light in the midst of a wicked and crooked generation. And by the grace of God, there have been times in history when cultures and nations have turned back and turned to God. But that comes because there are believers who grow to spiritual maturity, believers who are witnesses for the truth, believers who get involved in that which is the only and ultimate solution, which is conformity to the image and likeness of Christ, which comes as a result of spiritual growth. And it starts with believers. who, like the psalmist, make a commitment, says, while I live, I will praise the Lord. I will sing praises to my Lord as long as I live. With our heads bowed and our eyes closed. Father, we are so thankful that we live in this nation, a nation that recognized from its founding that there were certain unalienable rights. Rights that did not come from government. rights that did not come from culture, rights that did not come from any other human factor, but rights that were ours because we were created in your image and likeness. And Father, we're thankful that we have had a government that recognizes that embedded in our imageness is that we have the God-given right to worship as we determine. to worship freely without government interference. We have the right to speak our mind, to express our opinions without government interference. We have the right of self-defense and to carry whatever we deem necessary in order to defend our lives. These are embedded in what it means to be a very human being. They do not come from government, but we thank God we have a government that recognizes that these things are true and that that still holds. We pray that it might continue to hold. And Father, we give thanks that we live in a nation where we can freely proclaim the gospel and we can proclaim the truth that there is life, that we are born spiritually dead but there is life and it is a free gift. And that Jesus Christ died on the cross. He paid the penalty for our sins so that all that is necessary is for us to trust in Christ and the instant we believe in him for salvation that you give us his righteousness. We receive the righteousness of Christ so that we are declared to be righteous, not on the basis of what we do, but on the basis of what Christ did for us on the cross. And Father, we thank you so much that we have a church, that we have other churches, we have friends that are believers, that are desirous of spiritual growth, that hunger and thirst for righteousness. And we pray that might be true of us. that we might not be those who sit on the spiritual sidelines, but those who are pressing on to spiritual maturity and responding to the high calling of the grace of God. So Father, now as we continue to our service and we continue in our recognition, honoring of Mark's achievements with his doctorate, we pray that that time will go well. And we just thank you again for all your blessings in Christ's name. Amen.