Article 7 concludes the United States Constitution as originally proposed and attested to by forty signatories on September 17, 1787.
The people ordained the U.S. Constitution on September 17, 1787, and the people ratified it on June 21, 1788. The Preamble and Article 7 are two bookends to what President Abraham Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, described as a “government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people,” in opposition to a government of Yahweh, by Yahweh, and for Yahweh.
Article 7’s provision for ratification verified the pernicious and seditious nature of the entire document. If the U.S. Constitution had been a biblically compatible document, based solely upon Yahweh’s perfect laws, it would not have been necessary for the people to ordain or ratify it, since it would already have been ordained and ratified by Yahweh Himself.
The ratification of the conventions of nine states, shall be sufficient for the establishment of this Constitution between the states so ratifying the same.
Done in convention by the unanimous consent of the states present, the 17th day of September, in the year of our Lord 1787, and of the independence of the United States of America the 12th. .In witness we have hereunto subscribed our names.
Christians are desperate to somehow make the U.S. Constitution a Christian document. For example, consider how much Christianity Archie Jones read into the six words “in the Year of our Lord,” which dated the signatures of the thirty-nine state delegates and Convention secretary:
…the plain implications of the reference [“in the year of our Lord”] are the same as those of the similar references in the Articles of Confederation (or anywhere else!): The Bible is true. Christ is the Savior. Christ, risen from the grave, ascended into heaven, and seated at the right hand of God the Father, is also the Lord, the sovereign Ruler of heaven and earth. The people of these United States are under the authority of Christ, whom they collectively acknowledge to be Lord. They have a special, covenantal relationship with Him, and that relationship, premised on His providential intervention in and rule of history, involves His blessings on the nation which has faith in Him and keep His commandments, and curses on the nation which collectively turns from faith in Him and so violates His holy laws. Hence, the nation must look to Him, and it and its civil governments much obey His laws.1Moreover, since Christ’s lordship is recognized in the Constitution, the American nation has a covenantal relationship to him. This covenantal relationship recognizes his lordship, his providential rule over history, his providential relationship to the American civil government and people.2
If what Jones claims is true, certainly somewhere in the Convention minutes, the copious Federalists Papers, or the framers’ personal diaries, one of them would have remarked that this was, in fact, their intent when they penned the words “in the year of the Lord.”
All of this may be true – that is, if this is what the signatories had in mind when they put their names to the document. But because they are not alive to ask what they had in mind when they employed the term “in the year of our Lord,” nothing Christian can be proven by its use, anymore than the declaration “God bless America,” declared by so many politicians today, makes their work Christian. The only thing that can be unequivocally determined from its use is that it was the means of dating the signatories’ assent to the document.
Even if each and every one of the signatories would agree with Jones’ assessment of the term and their use thereof, any Christian implications therein are eradicated by the signatories’ rejection and replacement of Yahweh’s laws with their own traditions in the Preamble and throughout the first six articles. The phrase “in the year of the Lord” does not make the Constitution Christian, nor does it exonerate the framers’ of the sedition and treason against Yahweh found throughout the document. What makes the U.S. Constitution a secular, humanistic contract is not so much its terminology but its “laws.”
Among other things, Jones equates the term “in the year of the Lord” with Lordship, but the test of Lordship is not found in mere words, but instead doing the will (the laws – Psalm 40:8) of the Heavenly Father and fulfilling the words of His Son:
Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? And in thy name have cast out devils? And in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity. (Matthew 7:21-23)And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say? Whosoever cometh to me, and heareth my sayings, and doeth them, I will shew you to whom he is like: He is like a man which built an house, and digged deep, and laid the foundation on a rock: and when the flood arose, the stream beat vehemently upon that house, and could not shake it: for it was founded upon a rock. But he that heareth, and doeth not, is like a man that without a foundation built an house upon the earth; against which the stream did beat vehemently, and immediately it fell; and the ruin of that house was great. (Luke 6:46-49)
Would Jones accept the same declaration (“in the year of the Lord”) as a genuine confession of Christian faith for someone wanting to place membership in the church he attends? I would hope he wouldn’t. The previous two passages demonstrate that such simple declarations by themselves mean nothing to Yahweh. Even if the founders had meant for this statement to be an acknowledgment of the God of the Bible, Yeshua declared that many would make such statements but that, if their works proved otherwise (as did the framers’ works), He would still reject them as Christians.
It is grasping at straws to claim the statement “in the day of the Lord” makes what is, otherwise, unchristian Christian. That this is the best Christian Constitutionalists can come up with only goes to further prove that the Constitution is, in fact, not Christian.
The framers failed to fulfill the essential requirements of Lordship, as does anyone who promotes their apostasy.
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1. Archie P. Jones, The Influence of Historic Christianity on Early America (Vallecito, CA: 1998), p. 66.
2. Archie P. Jones, “The Myth of Political Polytheism: A Review by Archie P. Jones [of Gary North’s book Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism],” The Journal of Christian Reconstruction (Vallecito, CA: Chalcedon, 1996) p. 280.