The Tenth Amendment

Signing The Constitution

From: The Desk of Dr. Archie Jones

The Tenth Amendment is a guarantee of the covenant between the states whose representatives framed and ratified the Constitution and the new central government created by the Constitution. The Constitution is the covenant which contains that solemn agreement.

The agreement between the several states and the new central government created by the Constitution was really much more than a “deal” as it has sometimes been called. For those civil governments were governments which saw themselves as under God’s authority, as subject to His providential blessings or chastisements for their faithful obedience or unfaithful disobedience to His eternal standards of rightness and justice. Really, the Constitution was a compact. Christian states—which had Christian constitutions, declarations of rights or bills of rights, and laws—and the new Christian central government which they had authorized with the Constitution, for the Constitution was a Christian document.

As Madison says in Federalist 39, the foundation on which the Constitution was established was “the assent and ratification of the people of America…not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct an independent States to which they respectively belong. It is to be the assent and ratification of the several States, derived from the supreme authority in each State,–the authority of the people themselves.” And “Each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body, independent of all other, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act.”

Continue reading. . . .

Why Are The Scriptures Full Of Warnings?

Martyn Lloyd-Jones

From: The Pen of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

There have been certain movements initiated by the devil which have affected the life of the whole Church, and which in turn have affected the lives of individual believers in the Church. We are, indeed, involved in these very things at the present time. ‘To be forewarned is to be forearmed.’ Let us use again the analogy of international problems. The last War came upon this country suddenly and unexpectedly because people would not face the facts, because we were nearly all believers in, and supporters of appeasement, surrendering this and that, saying that war could not happen again, and that two World Wars do not occur within a quarter of a century! This country kept on refusing to face the plain facts of the international situation. Men wanted to be happy and to enjoy themselves, and dismissed the man who kept on warning us as a ‘warmonger’, a ‘difficult person’ with whom nobody could work, an ‘individualist’. Precisely the same, it seems to me, is happening in the realm of the spiritual today. People say, ‘Do not be negative; let us be positive; let us just preach the simple gospel’. But the Bible is full of negatives, full of warnings, ever showing us these terrible possibilities. If you find in yourself a dislike of the warnings of the Scripture and of this negative teaching, it is obvious that you have been duped by the wiles of the devil. You have not realized the situation in which you are placed.

The movements to which I am referring can be best classified and considered along the following lines. We start with Heresies within the Church, which have been caused and produced by the devil and his powers. I am not concerned to go into the detail of heresies; I am simply concerned to emphasize the fact of heresies, the fact of movements within the life of the Church that have so often led to terrible trouble and produced a state of chaos.

A heresy is ‘a denial of or a doubt concerning any defined, established Christian doctrine’. There is a difference between heresy and apostasy. Apostasy means ‘a departure from the Christian truth’. It may be a total renunciation or denial of it, or it may be a misrepresentation of it to such an extent that it becomes a denial of the whole truth. But a heresy is more limited in its scope. To be guilty of heresy, and to be a heretic, means that in the main you hold to the doctrines of the Christian faith, but that you tend to go wrong on some particular doctrine or aspect of the faith. (Heresy)