Watch and listen to entire event recording the above “Appeal to Heaven” from April 29th, 2024, Governor’s Office @ the Patrick Henry Building, Capitol Square, Richmond, Virginia
Bob Marshall, past General Assembly Member 26 years
“If my people who are called by my name humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” [2nd Chronicles, 7:14].
Think about that! Not only does our Creator heal us as individuals, but He is willing to heal our entire land if we but ask Him and follow his Commandments!
We must remember that Satan is the Father of Lies who relied on subtlety in the Garden of Eden. Yes, our Declaration holds that all men are created equal. But not all behavior is equal in God’s sight. And the Ten Commandments are not the Ten Suggestions!
The Bible says that people of faith are called to “walk as children of light…and try to learn what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness.” [Ephesians 5:8, 10-11].
In a representative democracy (a republic), we the people are the government. In a market economy, we the people are the economy. Ordinary citizens must make it clear to our elected representatives that we are tired of the policies that are bringing more death and destruction to America and to our world, whether by promotion of war, or abortion or sodomy around the world, or open borders that allow countries to empty their jails, or policies that promote more crime, or even inflation that makes it harder for people to put food on the table or gasoline in their cars.
In America, Government officials, receive their elected or administrative offices from the people. But such authority derives from our Creator to benefit the people, not harm them! [Romans, chapter 13]
Now our Savior decided that He loved the world He created, and His people who were the Crown of His creation. And even when Adam and Eve turned away, He did not destroy us or the world He had created, but sent His only Son to redeem the world. Why?
Because He loves us and would rather go after one lost sheep! He did not make us robots, he gave us free will to love or reject Him. But rejection of Him and His ways does not bring personal happiness or fulfillment but the exact opposite! He calls us His children, and wants what is best for us and even provided for us His intelligible, written directions!
So our calling as people of the Book is to show that same, magnanimous and incredible love to our families and our neighbors at the one-on-one personal level and to benefit others at the larger level, to secure peace and justice for our children and grandchildren and others.
Taking part in civic or political action, then, is an extension of the admonition “to Love our Neighbor as ourselves.” Do we love our neighbor by legalizing debilitating mind and body destroying drugs? Paying taxes for and promoting abortions, promiscuity and immoral lifestyles across the world? Encouraging pornography and transgender policies in our government supported schools? Waging War after War?
Legalizing personal vices is not the right path to public happiness.
Unfortunately, the ever-growing secular state which seeks to hide or ridicule the Creator’s plan for His children substitutes the false God or Idol of human Government as the savior of mankind through the promotion of sodomy, abortion and the culture of death and unjust predatory wars which contradict Christian beliefs, teachings and practice.
If the secular state can go after President Trump with such vengeance, charging him with crimes even outspoken Democrats consider bogus, it is understandable that the Biden Administration can prosecute Eva Edl, an 89-year-old-woman, who was interned in a Yugoslavian Communist Concentration Death Camp in the late 1940’s. Her alleged crime? Violating the “Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act,” authored by the late US Senator Ted Kennedy. [The Daily Signal, 4/21/24]
The FACE Act prohibits the use of force, obstruction or property damage intended to interfere with “reproductive health care services.” Sidewalk pro-life counseling and prayer for women facing abortion hardly constitutes the use of force, obstruction or property damage. Yet, this 89-year-old woman (and she is not the only one) is suffering from unjust prosecution via the FACE Act.
And how killing a child before birth is considered “reproductive health care services” is beyond me! Even the Obama Administration defined applicants for Childrens Health Insurance to mean “an individual under the age of 19 including the period from conception to birth.” [Code of Federal Regulations, Title 42, Volume 4, Revised as of October 1, 2010, CITE: 42CFR457.10, pp. 426-428;]
Will all those who adhere to Biblical values face the same fate, for not complying with the atheistic government “religion.”
Our First Amendment was added to the Constitution to protect the God-given freedom of conscience of religion. It is worth protecting but is definitely under attack!
The Apostle Matthew relates the parable of the wheat and the chaff after good seed was being sewn with weeds. When asked if the owner wanted his helpers to remove the weeds that were growing next to the wheat, he said, no because the wheat will be uprooted as well. “Let both grow together until the harvest…” [Matthew 13]
Our job as we remain in the vineyard, for however long the good Lord wants us here, is to proclaim from the rooftops that there are higher moral laws that trump evil laws and policies. We must always speak and act with charity, for no one knows the day nor the hour that we will be asked to give an accounting to our Creator of our life here on earth.
Be assured that the Redeemer of the World is always with us, and waiting to heal us and our land if we but call upon Him and adopt His ways.
Just watching the moral collapse of America is not an option for persons of Faith if only because there are no “safe” zones.
The Declaration of Independence affirms that: “All Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed …”
And since the Founders of America placed a “firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence,” to establish America, we, their descendants should also seek protection from Divine Providence to preserve and restore America.
Personal Virtue and National Happiness
America’s Founders believed that the moral virtues of citizens played a direct role in the happiness of citizens and the Nation.
Our First President, George Washington, in what has become known as his (September, 1796) Farewell Address, echoed Jefferson’s sentiments regarding the link between personal and public morality and resulting national happiness:
“Can it be that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue? The experiment, at least, is recommended by every sentiment which ennobles human nature. Alas! Is it rendered impossible by its vices?”
On September 17, 1789, the last day of the Philadelphia Convention, Benjamin Franklin, signer of the Declaration of Independence and delegate to the Constitutional Convention from Pennsylvania, urged fellow delegates to support the final draft of the Constitution despite his serious reservations. Franklin, speaking from written notes, stated:
I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them. . . . I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us. . . . I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain, may be able to make a better Constitution. For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions . . . and their selfish views. . . . It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does. . . . Thus I consent … to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best.
Pope St. John Paul II also addressed the question of legislative imperfections:
“. . . When it is not possible to overturn or completely abrogate a pro-abortion law, an elected official, whose absolute personal opposition to procured abortion was well known, could licitly support proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law and at lessening its negative consequences at the level of general opinion and public morality.” [Evangelium Vitae]
Handling Supreme Court Decisions you disagree with.
Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address noted:
“The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses for it must needs be that offenses come but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’”
In June, 1857 before his election as President in 1860, Lincoln distinguished between compliance with Supreme Court decisions and giving them respect based on whether decisions were unanimous, given without bias, based on legal public expectations, and uniformly and steadily enforced by government departments which relied on correct historical facts.
Lincoln noted the 1857 Dred Scott decision failed this test, “…it is not resistance, it is not factious, it is not even disrespectful, to treat it as not having yet quite established a settled doctrine for the country.”
The Obergefell decision, in my judgment, also fails Lincoln’s test.
Before Obergefell, the Supreme Court consistently, uniformly and unanimously treated marriage as a unique relationship between one-man and one-woman.
- In Reynolds v. United States [98 US 145 (1879)] the Supreme Court ruled that marriage was limited to one man and one woman and prohibiting polygamy did NOT violate the First Amendment’s Free Exercise of Religion Clause.
- The Congress affirmed traditional marriage by conditioning western territories entrance into the Union by requiring polygamy prohibitions in the constitutions of Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Utah thus affirming marriage as being comprised of one man and one woman.
- The US Supreme Court ruled, “… A husband without a wife, or a wife without a husband, is unknown to the law.” [Atherton v. Atherton, 181 U.S. 155, (1901), reversed on other grounds, Haddock v. Haddock, 201 U.S. 562, (1906)]
- Two Minnesota men who applied in 1970 for a marriage license were denied since Minnesota restricted marriage to “persons of the opposite sex.” They appealed to Minnesota’s Supreme Court which cited the Loving v. VirginiaSupreme Court case, “there is a clear distinction between a marital restriction based merely upon race and one based upon the fundamental difference in sex.” [Baker vs Nelson Minnesota 291 Minn. 310] They appealed but the US Supreme Court stated, “The appeal is dismissed for want of a substantial federal question,” while upholding the lower court’s decision that the two men had no right to marry each other. [Baker vs. Nelson, 409 U.S. 810 10/10/1972)]
Democrat members of the General Assembly have introduced resolutions to repeal the 2006 Virginia voter approved One Man, one Woman Marriage amendment. Please share this legal history to defend real Mariage when the General Assembly Democrats get around to voting on this policy.
America and War
During America’s Civil War, it is reported that Abraham Lincoln was asked if God was on his side. He answered, “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side…my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.”
Regarding the War in Ukraine, it never needed to happen.
The political and military neutrality of Ukraine had been accepted by the United States, Russia and Great Britain in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum as part of establishing a nuclear non-proliferation agreement which provided that the three Powers would “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine … to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.
Our prayers should never cease asking God the Father to intercede for peace and for the violence and destruction to stop. It is not the politicians who will be serving on the front lines but young people who did not seek out war. French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, at the close of World War I, stated, “War is too important to leave to the generals.” If that is true, and I think it is, then, Peace is too important to leave to the politicians.
As citizens we have the moral right and civic duty to pray and fast for peace. When the disciples of Jesus were perplexed that they had failed to cast out a particular demon from a possessed young man, Jesus responded, that, “This kind can come out by nothing but prayer and fasting” (Mark 9:29).
As for the official position of the United States regarding foreign entanglements in wars, George Washington warned Americans right from the first:
“Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all—religion and morality enjoin this conduct…. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other.…”
It is hard to disagree with the statement attributed to Benjamin Franklin, that “There never has been a good war, or a bad peace.” But far more importantly, Christians should recall the Beatitude Christ gave us: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Mt 5:9).
