"And now," said Legree, "come here, you Tom. You see, I telled ye I didn't buy ye jest for the common work; I mean to promote ye, and make a driver of ye; and to-night ye may jest as well begin to get yer hand in. Now, ye jest take this yer gal and flog her; ye've seen enough on't to know how."

"I beg Mas'r's pardon," said Tom; "hopes Mas'r won't set me at that. It's what I an't used to, - never did, - and can't do, no way possible."

"'Ye'll larn a pretty smart chance of things ye never did know, before I've done with ye!" said Legree, taking up a cowhide, and striking Tom a heavy blow cross the cheek, and following up the infliction by a shower of blows.

"There!" he said, as he stopped to rest; "now, will ye tell me ye can't do it?"

"Yes, Mas'r," said Tom, putting up his hand, to wipe the blood, that trickled down his face. "I'm willin' to work, night and day, and work while there's life and breath in me; but this yer thing I can't feel it right to do; - and, Mas'r, I never shall do it, - never!"

Tom had a remarkably smooth, soft voice, and a habitually respectful manner, that had given Legree an idea that he would be cowardly, and easily subdued. When he spoke these last words, a thrill of amazement went through every one; the poor woman clasped her hands, and said, "O Lord!" and every one involuntarily looked at each other and drew in their breath, as if to prepare for the storm that was about to burst.

Legree looked stupefied and confounded; but at last burst forth, "What! ye blasted black beast! tell me ye don't think it right to do what I tell ye! What have any of you cussed cattle to do with thinking what's right? I'll put a stop to it! Why, what do ye think ye are? May be ye think yer a gentleman master, Tom, to be a telling your master what's right, and what ain't! So you pretend it's wrong to flog the gal!"

"I think so, Mas'r," said Tom; "'the poor crittur's sick and feeble; 't would be downright cruel, and it's what I never will do, nor begin to. Mas'r, if you mean to kill me, kill me; but, as to my raising my hand agin any one here, I never shall, - I'll die first!"

Tom spoke in a mild voice, but with a decision that could not be mistaken. Legree shook with anger...

"Well, here's a pious dog, at last, let down among us sinners! - a saint, a gentleman, and no less, to talk to us sinners about our sins! Powerful holy critter, he must be! Here, you rascal, you make believe to be so pious, - didn't you never hear, out of yer Bible, 'Servants, obey yer masters'? An't I yer master? Didn't I pay down twelve hundred dollars, cash, for all there is inside yer old cussed black shell? An't yer mine, now, body and soul?" he said, giving Tom a violent kick with his heavy boot; "tell me!"

Did Christ not say, “From the beginning of the creation, God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh...’ Was He not referring to Adam and Eve and quoting from Genesis?

And again, “As it was in the days of Noah so it shall be at the coming of the Son of Man…” Was He not comparing the flood to the conditions of His coming? If we deny the flood will we also deny his coming again?

And again, do we believe the testimony of His eye witnesses, “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” If we deny that death entered by Adam’s sin, then will we deny the gospel that in Christ men are freed from sin and death?

We must hold fast to the testimony of Genesis because Christ and His Apostles confirmed the Genesis account of creation, the entrance of sin and death, and the flood and warned against the assumptions of uniformitarianism [2 Peter 3]. We do greatly err in accommodating these assumptions to the violation of Biblical Theology.

When is hatred acceptable for the Christian? Such a question repulses many. If we do a word search of “hate” in the Bible, the following quotes are found…

"It is with the Word that we must fight, by the Word we must overthrow and destroy what has been set up by violence. I will not make use of force against the superstitious and unbelieving...No one must be constrained. Liberty is the very essence of faith...I will preach, discuss, and write; but I will constrain none, for faith is a voluntary act...I have stood up against the pope, indulgences, and papists, but without violence or tumult I put forward God's Word; I preached and wrote--this was all I did. The Word alone did all. If I had wished to appeal to force, the whole of Germany would perhaps have been deluged with blood."

By articulating the Biblical doctrine of faith as wholly a gift of God, Luther undermined the Catholic inquisition and formulated the theological rationale for religious liberty.

We thank President Wilson for stating the liberal view of the kingdom. Jesus Christ is a failure and His promises cannot be trusted. The state is here to implement a ‘practical’ plan to bring in the kingdom of God on earth. Obamaism and the social gospel is nothing new.

Liberals like Wilson and Obama neglect the priority of the kingdom. In their view of man his problem is not sin; man has no need of righteousness. They think man can be perfected by meeting his physical and educational needs, and they can do it better than the church.

Where does such errors originate? Christ told Pilate that His kingdom was not of this world. He told His people to ‘seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness…’ [Matthew 6:33]. The apostle tells us plainly that the ‘kingdom is…righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit’ [Romans 14:17].

When liberals say they want separation of church and state, they do not mean a free church and a free state as the Founders meant. They want to separate the church from its legitimate role of benevolence and take it on themselves. They presume to know the purposes of God and have a ‘practical’ plan to perform them.

There was a consensus among the people of the necessity of a limited federal government to secure their God given rights to life, liberty and property. Today this consensus is gone.

There is a new ideology opposed to constitutional government that empowers the people. There is no concept of personal liberty under limited government because there is no basis for self-government. The priority is not to secure the right of men to equality under law, but to establish social and economic equality by an intrusive and expanding state. In the new America the Constitution limits the power of the people rather than the federal government.

Colonial Americans engaged in rebellion against a tyrannical government. The new Americans refuse to see that socialism is the road to tyranny. The original Americans risked everything for the advance of liberty. The socialist Americans line up to give away their liberty.

The originals believed that Biblical Christianity is essential for men to learn self denial and to be self-governing. The socialists reject their religious heritage and prove the colonials are right by advocating state sponsored coercion rather than liberty.

‘The alien who is among you shall rise higher and higher above you, and you shall come down lower and lower.He shall lend to you, but you shall not lend to him; he shall be the head, and you shall be the tail. Moreover all these curses shall come upon you and pursue and overtake you, until you are destroyed…’ [Deuteronomy 28:43-45].

In that respect we deserve a greater condemnation than Israel because we have seen greater things and more evidence of the salvation of God than they did in their deliverance from Egypt. The types and shadows of Christ have come to full light in the NT revelation.

Now if the apostle commended the Bereans for searching the Scriptures to prove his preaching, then surely we ought to test our own pastors and teachers. ‘Test all things; hold fast what is good.’ Our authority is not men or church, but the Bible alone.

The Bible says to ‘study to show thyself approved unto God.’ Will you begin a study of the Great Awakening? Will you start by reading a sermon by Jonathan Edwards? If you will, then consider that he was preaching to his colonial American congregation, not to an assembly of masters of theology. This will demonstrate to you the level of degeneracy that has infected the Protestant churches. By that we mean that the emphasis is no longer on the teaching ministry and preparing the saints for the work of ministry.

http://www.apuritansmind.com/JonathanEdwards/JonathanEdwards-Sermons.htm

The Law says to be faithful to our spouse, but the depravity of men will prevent him from the joy of the legitimate expression of his sexuality.

The progressives advocate anything that is contrary to the Law. Porno, sodomy, pedophilia, bestiality mark the progression into sexual perversion of men given over to reprobation.

What is porno except an aid in committing adultery in the heart?

The Founders were unenlightened as to the fruits of the reprobate. As reasonable and sane men they saw these things as abominations and an offense to nature and to nature’s God. Seeing these things as enlightened and progressive requires adherence to a false religion like radical naturalism.

Nations have walked this path before…

This is the view of autonomous man. Blinded to the revelations of God and full of pride, his depravity has come to full bloom.

God is revealed in the creation of all things that exists, but this man has suppressed the truth and exchanged it for radical naturalism. All that exists is not created because that would require a Creator.

God has revealed Himself in the person and work of Jesus Christ, but He was crucified by men who were unable to recognize Him. It is no different today. He is rejected by men because they are blinded by the prince of darkness to do his will.

Now this blindness is deceitful for the blind man boasts as if he could see what is unseen. It escapes his notice that his life is but a vapor. All he has and treasures will soon be gone including his body. The memory of him will perish. The unseen reality of the eternal will soon overwhelm him.

Men like Tony Snow, who are given to see the unseen as through a glass dimly, now realize the reality that they lived by faith…

Rather than a record of the rapid and mass destruction of contemporary life forms, they say that the fossil record shows the gradual development of life from the simple to the complex.

Which theory best fits the data? Are there different and distinct life forms as in the created kinds that reproduce after their kind? Or is there a continuum of transitions and indistinguishable divisions between the different life forms?

Now ask the darwinites why their theory supports the Genesis Flood model. Can they offer an explanation that will not bring both laughter and sadness to the unbelievers; laughter in its sophistry and sadness that men could believe such nonsense?

Why does the whole world so easily turn away from truth to believe a lie? The Biblical view of man is lost as well as the Gospel that constrains his depravity.

Will we acknowledge that Reformed Christianity (Calvinism) established the theological foundation on which the nation was built?

Will we acknowledge that rule of law is preferable to the rule of kings and that God’s law is preferable to man made law?

If we acknowledge these things are true and essential for liberty under limited government, how many would want to return to the founding principles?

The American Revolution against a tyrannical king was predicated on the Great Awakening. This revival of Biblical Christianity held that all men including king and governments of men were subject to law. The law they were referring to was English Common Law that was based on the Law of God given to men in the Bible.

Autonomous reason leads to naturalism and the absurd notion that everything that exists is here by natural process, even though natural law says that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed by natural process. The conservation of energy and the increase of entropy testify of a supernatural beginning as in Genesis 1 and 2. ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done...’

Vatican Adds Seven New Deadly Sins Including Damaging Environment and Drug Dealing

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

By Richard Owen

ROME —  Drug pushers, the obscenely rich, environmental polluters and “manipulative” genetic scientists beware — you may be in danger of losing your mortal soul unless you repent.

After 1,500 years the Vatican has brought the seven deadly sins up to date by adding seven new ones for the age of globalization. The list, published yesterday in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, came as the Pope deplored the “decreasing sense of sin” in today’s “secularized world” and the falling numbers of Roman Catholics going to confession.

The new deadly sins include polluting, genetic engineering, being obscenely rich, drug dealing, abortion, pedophilia and causing social injustice.

The Catholic Church divides sins into venial, or less serious, sins and mortal sins, which threaten the soul with eternal damnation unless absolved before death through confession and penitence.

It holds mortal sins to be “grave violations of the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes,” including murder, contraception, abortion, perjury, adultery and lust.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into Hell.”

Although there is no definitive list of mortal sins, many believers accept the broad seven deadly sins or capital vices laid down in the 6th century by Pope Gregory the Great and popularized in the Middle Ages by Dante in "The Inferno": lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy and pride.

Christians are exhorted instead to adhere to the seven holy virtues: chastity, abstinence, temperance, diligence, patience, kindness and humility.

Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Vatican body which oversees confessions and plenary indulgences, said after a week-long Lenten seminar for priests that surveys showed 60 percent of Catholics in Italy no longer went to confession.

He said that priests must take account of “new sins which have appeared on the horizon of humanity as a corollary of the unstoppable process of globalization.” Whereas sin in the past was thought of as being an individual matter, it now has “social resonance.”

“You offend God not only by stealing, blaspheming or coveting your neighbor’s wife, but also by ruining the environment, carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos,” he said.

Bishop Girotti said that mortal sins also included taking or dealing in drugs, and social injustice which caused poverty or “the excessive accumulation of wealth by a few.”

He said that two mortal sins which continued to preoccupy the Vatican were abortion, which offended “the dignity and rights of women,” and pedophilia, which had even infected the clergy itself and so had exposed the “human and institutional fragility of the Church.”

For a thousand years the church had lost the message of the Gospel. Men looked inside themselves for the graces that merited salvation rather than a righteousness wholly outside of themselves. It is to Christ that one must look for salvation, said Dr. Luther, not inside oneself. Once the religious subjectivism of the medieval church was eliminated among the Reformation countries, the energy consumed by desperately seeking and ‘earning’ salvation was turned outward, and a thousand years of intellectual, political, social, economic, and religious stagnation ended.

The Reformation gave us the Scriptures in the common tongues. The Bible was the written constitution of the church. It limited the power and authority of church leadership and made them accountable to the membership. The people could now read for themselves the proper role of the clergy and the church.

The death and resurrection of Christ had guaranteed free access of all believers to God. Justification came only by grace through faith, not through baptism, nor through the mass, nor any other sacrament, and certainly not through good works. The Reformation rebirthed the idea of the priesthood of all believers, and it became the foundation for modern political democracy; that is, the equality of all men before God and the law.