Thursday, February 25th, ‘10

Thursday, February 25^th, ‘10

CHECKS AND BALANCES

“For the Lord is our Judge, the Lord is our Lawgiver, the Lord is our King; He will save us” (Isaiah 33:22)

The French legal professor, Joseph Montesquieu, who wrote the book "Spirit of the Laws", was quoted most in the writings of the Founding Fathers, second only to the Bible. As to America’s foundational doctrine of separation of powers Montesquieu wrote, "Nor is there liberty if the power of judging is not separated from legislative power and from executive power. If it [the power of judging] were joined to legislative power, the power over life and liberty of the citizens would be arbitrary, for the judge would be the legislator. If it were joined to the executive power, the judge could have the force of an oppressor. All would be lost if the same...body of principal men...exercised these three powers."

So the Constitution implemented a three-branch government to combat the predilections of human nature. The founders also believed Jeremiah 17:9, that man at his core is “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked”. They understood the concept that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. To fight that, there would need be a balance of powers. Mr. Obama showed disrespect for that balance by castigating the Supreme Court on the floor of the House in January in his first State of the Union address, and the democrat Congress did the same by standing and cheering. The goal in all political coups is a one-party system and even better, a one-man system. The founders had lived under that kind of oppression so they were very careful to implement what was pictured in Isaiah.

There the divine Trinity is in clear display. God is three in one, Judge, Lawgiver and King, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, coequal, coessential, coeternal, committed to perfect unity in love. We come a bit shy of that model with all our political bickering. In this verse they saw a judicial branch, the Supreme Court, built on blind scales of truth, a legislative branch, with a check and balance in its system as well, House and Senate, Lawgiver, and an executive branch, not so much as King with monarchial powers but as Commander-in-Chief with directive powers. No other system has such built-in protection, guarantee and wisdom. Because of it our Union has survived over two and a quarter centuries by which time every other nation or empire had overhauled their constitutions numerous times. What do you say we keep it the way it is? Heaven’s Trinity is still intact and that’s through all eternity. That oneness via separateness has worked well since the dawn of creation. The Constitution isn’t a living document, amoebic and jellylike according to the whim of the times. It is rather a rock that never moves, though currently an excavation crew is trying to dynamite it right before our eyes