The Old Deluder

Six score and nine years before Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine and John Adams penned the constitution John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed the Old Deluder Act of 1647. It established public schools in America to teach children to read the Bible and thus defeat Satan.

Imagine, the purpose of our schools was to keep children from being deceived by Satan. Harvard was founded only 11 years earlier with this stated purpose:

After God had carried us safely to New England, and we had built our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God’s worship, and settled the civil government; one of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance learning, and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.”

In the Harvard student handbook, you find:

1.     The purpose of your studies is to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life. John 17:3

2.     Jesus is the foundation of all learning. Proverbs 2:3

3.     Since the Lord only gives wisdom, seek Him in prayer.

4.     Every student shall spend time at least twice a day studying Scripture.

5.     He will be ready to give account of what he has learned, applying spiritual truth. Psalm 119:130

6.     He will carefully retain God and His truth, so He does not give them over to a reprobate mind. 2 Thessalonians 2:11, Romans 1:28

Note that the Scripture references are not mine but put there by the board of Harvard.

Fast forward about 320 years (16 score) and if you were sitting in my second-grade class at Cahaba Heights Elementary you would have heard our teacher share a devotion from the Bible, then we would recite the 23^rd Psalm and the pledge of allegiance then the principal would come over the intercom and pray for our safety, our learning, our families and the day God had given us.

Now, 50 years later, not only have we given up on teaching the Bible, but we have thrown out everything connected to it while at the same time embracing secular humanism, atheism, psychology, and almost all other ‘religions’.

We tout it is progressive thinking and we pat ourselves on the back for our wise rise to self-autonomy but the very roots of this come from a very old source: Satan himself.

In Genesis chapter 2 God said, ““You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, ¹⁷ but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil ^lyou shall not eat, for in the day that you eat⁴ of it you ^mshall surely die.” One rule. One tree. Everything else Adam and Eve wanted to do or eat was theirs.

But Satan was crafty. He cast doubt in Eve’s mind... ’Did God actually say…then he created unbelief, you won’t die, you will become like God knowing good and evil.

The puritans who saw the benefits of using the Bible for education, the framers of the constitution who viewed the God of the Bible as authority for establishing our laws, the pastors who later started the Great Awakening all looked not to some unknown or unknowable God but the God of creation, for strength, for wisdom, for education, for provision, for everything they needed.

Society tells us, especially educators, point quickly to the vast amount of knowledge we have accumulated in the last 150 years yet like Adam and Eve we bite the apple (Ever notice the Apple logo with the bite out of it?) of temptation wanting to believe we can be like God or even better. * We think we are smarter, having proved there is no God or revealing Him now dead. We believe we are wiser for we now ‘know’ so much we can’t seem to find in the Bible. We know we are more compassionate for we continually must go in and provide for those who suffer through hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, earthquakes and school shootings, since God won’t do it. Most of all we know for sure there is no hell and no Satan to run it.

Maybe, just maybe, our forefathers were smart because they depended on God for answers. Today, ironically, we declare our independence not only of England 242 years ago but of the King who required we serve God the way he wanted.

I think maybe it is time for another revolution, one where we repent and learn to worship God the way HE wants us to worship. This Independence Day let’s declare our dependence on Him.

Here is the link to the movie trailer, Monumental.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x58tsql

It will challenge the American history you learned in school.

Also, I have attached a copy of America at the Crossroads, a study guide for those who seek to learn from Scripture and apply it to the nightly news. The study guide is free, but you can purchase the DVD teaching series at: https://www.precept.org/

C.S. Lewis wrote Screwtape Letters, his way of thinking through just how Satan ‘deludes’ us every day. I have attached of copy of this great must-read classic.

jeff

·       One of the books I am working on will be titled Iàgod, taking a serious look at how we in America today think we are better than God.