We have been examining the power of Prophetic Voices not only to shape our world, but also to actually launch nations into existence. This week we will explore the ideas and words that formed our own nation. Stepping back and looking out across the vast plain of history, one can see a prophetic trail of truth and freedom, providentially working its way through time. To place the American story in true perspective, we must go back to early Bible times.

Old Covenant. First we will look the power of the prophetic word to shape the nation of Israel. The first hint of God's prophetic Word setting events in motion came immediately after Adam and Eve's fall into sin in the Garden of Eden. There, God spoke His first promise of restoration and deliverance (Genesis 3:15). God began His actual "nation-creating" work with Abraham, promising to make him and his offspring into a great nation (Genesis 12:1-3). Four hundred years after Abraham's grandson Jacob led his family into Egypt to avoid famine, Israel had grown into a nation of millions of souls held in the bondage of slavery. God sent Moses, the deliverer, to lead them out and into the promised land of Canaan (Exodus 3:10). While crossing the desert wilderness, Moses received the Ten Commandments from God (Exodus 34:28) and a multitude of other laws. These laws - God's Word - became the prophetic seedbed - a garden of ideas communicated through spoken and written words - from which the Hebrew culture sprang. This unique collection of words is also called the Old Covenant or Testament. In the centuries that followed, God added to this seedbed through other anointed prophets, poets, and patriarchs.

But the Old Covenant fell short because it did not possess the power to transform souls from the inside, and it left men struggling to meet a high set of standards with little power to live up to those standards. The Old Covenant contained two essential elements: 1) an impossibly high external standard for conduct and behavior, an "external government" pressed upon men from above, and 2) the promise of God to bring a Messiah or Savior to redeem and deliver from the bondage of sin - a restored "God-aided, internal government" made possible by being born again.

New Covenant. Christ is the fulfillment of that promise. When He arrived, He ushered in the New Covenant built upon His own redemptive work and the work of the Holy Spirit. "He took away the first, that he may establish the second." (Hebrews 10:9) He said, "You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32). After His resurrection, His Apostles and Prophets continued to use words - both spoken and written - to tell the story of Jesus' ministry on earth and to communicate His ideas.

The New Covenant presents mankind not only with God's Word, but also with the power to be transformed into a new man, a new creation, with a "new birth" in Christ. And those with this new birth are no longer helpless in their struggle to live up to God's high standards. Christ's redemptive work, along with the aid of the Holy Spirit, provides us with a new "internal government" to help us live according to God's laws and precepts. This "God-aided, internal government" would, in time, become one of the foundational ideas upon which our own nation, the United States of America, would be constructed.

Reformation. The collection of writings of both the Old and New Covenants makes up what we Christians call the Bible. This book represents the ideological groundwork - the seedbed - from which our own nation, the United States of America, has grown. Following nearly twelve hundred years of spiritual darkness in the western world - a time when the Church succumbed to an extended age of apostasy - a man named Martin Luther read the Bible and discovered that the scriptures proclaimed a radically different message than what the established church was teaching at that time. He boldly took a prophetic stand nailing his list of 95 theses or complaints to the doors at Wittenburg. It is almost as if Luther was acting as one of God's Prosecuting Attorneys, presenting a case against the organized, established church of his day. Luther realized that his own conscience was not meant to be controlled or manipulated by an ecclesiastical authority. His revelation and subsequent stand, based upon Biblical truth, became more seed for the slowly evolving road toward political freedom in the Western world.

Many followed in Luther's steps. Thinkers and writers distilled sound doctrine from the Holy Scriptures. But kings and leaders of the organized, established church resisted. Multitudes of believers surrendered their lives in martyrdom and their deaths became prophetic voices, testifying to the power of faith over fear. What emerged from this dark and bloody era of Western history was a new idea of man. People began to see themselves as free, individual souls, created in God's image and redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ. And the ancient idea known as "the divine right of kings" to rule and exercise unchecked authority began to be challenged.

Prophetic Voices continued their influence. Speakers spoke. Writers wrote. Ideas found expression. Chains of oppression fell to the ground and men claimed freedom of conscience from kings and potentates who had once held them in bondage.

The Law is King. As it was in the time of Christ, kingdoms trembled at the power of the truth. In England, John Locke, William Blackstone, and others laid the ideological framework for the idea of civil, self-government under God's laws. Locke taught that "conscience is the most sacred of all property."Samuel Rutherford wrote Lex Rex, the Law and the Prince. In the New World, Jonathan Edwards and other preachers tilled the cultural seedbed. Then, in the fullness of time, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and other great thinkers and leaders, cast off the bonds of England's King George and formed a new nation, "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Though nearly lost in our generation, our system of government was built upon the New Covenant idea of "God-aided, internal self-government."

Think carefully and follow the prophetic idea strand through time.

• God laid the foundation of Christian culture through Moses, the law (or external government), and the Hebrew nation (Old Covenant).
• Christ the promised Seed (Gen 3:15), brought freedom through the truth (John 8:32), and established the possibility of God-aided internal self-government (New Covenant).
• After more than a millennium of the external law being re-imposed by kings and popes, Luther and others re-discovered the lost truths of Scripture and along with them, the idea of God-aided internal self-government (Reformation).
• Christian thinkers wrote about the freedom that comes from God-aided internal self-government under just laws (Law is King).
• American colonists grew a new, self-governing system, a system of civil self-government, from this ideological seedbed of Christian, God-aided, internal, self-government (The US Constitution).