Should Christians Celebrate 4th of July?

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Love that verse. Love this song. It's a good, chill way to enter into this 4th of July celebration.

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You've seen him before, you know him, you love him. It's Mr. Zach Lautenschlager. Howdy. And he is here to join us for this 4th of July celebration.

It's a special Independence Day event. That's right. So you know the title of the show today, Should Christians Celebrate the 4th of July?

Some of you guys came in, you were like, you brought your America with you. You were like, let me see what these dudes have to say about this.

Don't worry, we're on your side. We're on your side. I'll just go ahead and whet your appetite.

Yes. Cards up front. Yes, yes, yes. But we wanted to say like, why? Like, why celebrate the 4th of July?

Why celebrate Independence Day? Why make a big deal over this amazing experiment? And I think that we should have like real

Christian answers to answer that question. It shouldn't just be because America and MAGA and Red, White, and Blue.

It shouldn't just be that. Like, why? Why is this such an amazing experiment? Why is it such an amazing thing that God did in history to bless us with?

So much as, of course, hanging by a thread. But we can still celebrate the goodness that those

Christians and the Christian worldview brought into existence in this amazing experiment.

So, 4th of July. If you were to ask just a random person on the street today, educated in our government facilities, what is the 4th of July?

Why are we celebrating it? I think actually you have a bunch of videos like that where they go out to the pier. Who's that guy that does those videos?

Mark Spence. Not Mark Spence. Mark, oh, I'll get his name somewhere. He has hilarious videos. 4th of July.

Zuckerberg? No! I'll find one of the videos, but it's hilarious. He'll go out and he'll just like in populated areas and ask questions and be like, you know,

Independence Day, why are we celebrating it? For what reason? And just like the average person on the street is like, no stinking clue.

No idea what for. It's, you know, for barbecue and beer for most people and it's a day off maybe.

So, what is the 4th of July? Why are we celebrating it? Why as Christians should we look back on it with favor and honor?

And so we brought one of our great friends and also one of my very favorite historians to listen to and that is

Zach Lautenschlager. If it happened in history, he probably knows about it and so I'll just tell you guys a funny thing.

Luke proved me wrong about that the other day. He actually sent me historical details. Did you know all of this? I did.

Did you? Yeah, it was a first. It was thanks to my Facebook feed for giving me something that he hadn't seen before.

Aviation history, but you didn't know this. So I'll tell you a funny thing. So a part of my sermon on Sunday, it was on Proverbs 14.

Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach upon any people. Part of the sermon is

I wanted to talk about different ways that our nation is sinning and how it's a reproach on us and how we've moved away from a

Christian view of just war theory and that doctrine's been developed throughout the history of the

Christian church and thank God for that because when you hear, and I brought this up in the message, when you hear things like that's a war crime, well the only reason you would think like that, like that's something you can't even do in war.

You have to have like a just way that you employ warfare in this world. Like the only reason you can say something like war crime is not because of atheism.

Atheism doesn't develop the idea of war crimes. It doesn't have ethical boundaries in the first place and if you listen to atheist ethicists, they'll say as much.

They'll just be as honest as they can be and say well of course there's no absolutes here. There's you know social conventions and things like that.

So when you hear people talking about like well that's a war crime, you can't do that, well thank God for the Christian world view that allows you to say things like that, but the

Christian church developed just war theory. You have Augustine or Augustine, however scholarly you are, going back and looking at him and the development of some of that just war theory and that moves throughout history.

And so anyway I wanted to talk about ways that we have sinned as a nation and how it's a reproach on us in how we do warfare and the wars over the last 20 -30 years you look at a lot of things we've been involved in, a lot of things that we've done the ways that we you know build up this military complex.

We have bases all over the world. We're spread all the way out all over the world. We stick our nose in people's business which we shouldn't do and we engage ourselves into combat and warfare in ways that are displeasing to God from a

Christian perspective and a Christian world view. So anyway I wanted to spend like two minutes talking about Pastor Luke's favorite pastor

Reverend Jonas Clark and I was just going to do a quick thing in terms of like how Christians used to think and that's all related to the war for independence and Paul Revere and all that stuff.

And so what I did is I said well I don't want to mess any of this up I know the story I can tell it but I want to get the names right and maybe some timing things right so I just messaged

Zach like Saturday night I think it was I think Saturday night and I was like hey you know if you could just leave me like a couple quick messages like I just need like person's place that kind of stuff because I want to tell the story of Jonas Clark and you know

Paul Revere and everything else and just do it briefly you know you don't have to go you know too crazy with it next thing you know like I get like this amazing like audio audio audio audio audio like the details before details of where he was and how he crossed where he crossed on the map and all the different things.

What he had for dinner. Yeah exactly it was awesome so I just sat and listened to all of them and Christine was in the office that was next to me when

I was playing it and she comes out she's like that is stinking awesome what is that? I was like I just told Zach to give me like brief details it was like every detail.

That was the Jeff Durbin three minutes yeah yeah so it was awesome because like I knew Zach was in town or coming here and then he shows up at church yesterday and I was like I'm not even going to attempt this like well

Zach's here so I asked him before church is hey in the sermon is it okay if I call you up just to give like a brief like talk through this and it was so nice to have

Zach there for that but anyway so Zach's always very helpful in terms of a lot of the details about particular historical situations and even conflicts and he'll tell you details like even surrounding that conflict and why they were thinking in this way so that's why

I really appreciate listening to you Zach just because I'll get more a fuller explanation than just sort of the bullet points of here they were there's what they did and all that stuff you get more details as to why they were thinking the way that they were thinking and maybe even at times you have

Zach tell you like well and this is what the people were thinking on the other side and this is why they were in this conflict and so that's always helpful so 4th of July Independence Day should

Christians celebrate the 4th of July Zach should they and why so obviously the question is one that does get fought over we do have some well -known theologians who stick to the idea that somehow

America is based on unjustifiable violence and rebellion and that Christians should have nothing to do with that and then unfortunately we have people on our own side who make arguments like there was a big conspiracy there was this effort to take

Christ out of all of it I propose that both sides are woefully their research is woefully inadequate let's just put it that way the short answer is not only should

Christians be paying attention to this and observing it but we should know a lot more about it we should dig into it just a little bit we don't have to go crazy with it but it is absolutely vital to know what happened in the bigger picture and answer the question did their actions please

God were these actions that are biblically justifiable obviously

I believe the answer is yes I think you're about to say Jefstifiable Jefstifiable I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing are they biblically justifiable and obviously

I believe the answer is yes and therefore that yes Christians should celebrate it but that's the standard right Christians should celebrate things that are biblically right that are biblically consistent and yeah so this question

I think is important to maybe ask ahead of time to lay a foundation so we don't get it to it on the end of the conversation but at the beginning so the challenge that people would have is whether or not you've engaged in a

Christian kind of warfare something that is actually just and you know people today you know a lot of people that I think are just sort of numb in their thinking and maybe pacifistic will be like I don't even like to say things like Christian warfare and it's like okay like I often say like have a good cry wash your face like you live in a fallen world and evil happens and there are victims and there are perpetrators and all the rest and so we do have a world where there is still conflict and there are still evil doers and people that do unjust things and so you have to be able to protect and defend innocent life and so yes you have to have a view of Christian warfare like how do you defend the innocent how do you protect and preserve human life and so you have to have this kind of conversation

Christian warfare so a lot of people say like I don't even want to say that but I think you know when you actually put your head into reality and think with a truly

Christian world view in different categories you can say okay Christian warfare so but people will say like I don't know if it was right to do that well the only way you can say something is right or wrong is if you have a standard an ultimate standard by which to measure and Christians historically again have developed the just war theory and it's been an amazing it's an amazing study to do on the topic of Christian sorry just war theory and how the

Christian church has worked very hard on this and thought through these things details sometimes complicated details

I'm like I never even thought about that yeah that's a detail of the whole thing like I'm glad Christians have thought through those issues by the way just as a bonus here

I would encourage you as you want to if you want to get deeper into this conversation go on YouTube that's where I saw it or heard it before in the past and look up Douglas Wilson just war theory he has an excellent series on the

Christian view of just war theory it'll blow your mind actually I think it's very very informative and it points is even entertaining it's like well this is very interesting to think about so but we're having this conversation should we celebrate it and so let's think through that conversation first Zach in terms of in history you know when you look at people in the colonies and everything they were enduring and how they thought of themselves as you know

British citizens and all the rest and what they were trying to do was was first and foremost not go to war what they were trying to do is be good citizens but also they were concerned about the issue of Lex Rex and the issue of the law is king and the king cannot essentially be a law to himself and you can't oppress us and so when they were responding though they were restrained at many points because they had a particular thing they had inherited in terms of their thinking about when this is allowed when are we allowed to do this when are we allowed to defend ourselves our property our families our land our rights when can we take up arms and that was all sort of in their thinking in their head it was being preached even the

New England pulpit was the major support behind the war for independence because they were thinking critically about these things as Christians so they had adopted or they were descendants of people who had given them this tradition talk about that for a second because you mentioned that in church yesterday.

Right and I think it's really I love the note about about Pastor Wilson's stuff on just war you also need to check out

Greg Bonson's and you already mentioned it on Bonson U but Greg Bonson's talk on just war theory six points and that's really

Bonson lays out and encapsulates the reformed perspective which is a it doesn't disagree very much with the catholic perspective the pre reformed perspective on just war and so that's the starting point this concept was developed ever in Europe as soon as the gospel arrived as soon as the gospel arrived and people started and we have to recognize at that time it was in Greek and Latin and so all of Europe is studying the bible in that language and they actually became fairly fluent and so I would start by positing that not only is war justifiable sometimes sometimes war is required that as a

Christian you are obligated you are obligated to fight a war that you may not not and the case when that is true is when it is an act of defense we are commanded to provide for the members of our own household just on a personal level on an individual level and this is always where you start this is what

Dr. Bonson taught me when I was in high school that number one you reason from the individual to the corporate if you want to ask how does this obligation bear bring to bear come to bear on a country well first of all you ask how does it come to bear on the individual individuals are required especially men to provide for their families and in fact the failure to do so is an act of infidelity to Christ that is the word used you are worse than not believing in God at all infidel correct you are worse than an infidel and so that is given in the context of financial provision but that obviously you can't provide financially for your children and go that's fine you can come right in here rape them and kill them that's cool go for it dude no you stand guard and you defend your family and so we are and this isn't just for men although it is primarily a man's job but specifically we are required to provide for the people who depend on us and so then if we take that and reason that corporately as a nation what's our responsibility well if we are being attacked and my family is in danger of being wiped out by the raiding vikings for example what do we do well

I join together with my neighbors and we go out and we oppose them and we say no you can't do that well that's war it's the concepts of headship and self -defense applied to a national scale correct exactly especially self -defense and yes and then you have that representative nature that it's my job to represent my family and to interpose on their behalf right and so absolutely so now and that comes down to the

English common law it is one of the most amazing places for seeing the application of the word of God and on Sunday Jeff you mentioned how amazing it is to hear what they say during a coronation we haven't been to a coronation for a long time right

Elizabeth was queen for a longish time longer than I've been alive longer certainly longer than I've been alive oh thanks and so you have on display even though Charles the second rightfully named

I think not quite as bad as Charles the first of England but still a sucky king in my opinion aren't all kings that's just to my

UK friends over there guys just relax we like Alfred relax just joking guys it's just a joke

Alfred was cool Cromwell was great but he wasn't a king but the amount the self -conscious effort to apply the word of God to every area of life in England throughout most of its history is shocking and it's not that they always succeeded we're actually making the case that they didn't always succeed we're criticizing some of that but that is something that is unique to England it did not happen in Italy because of the

Roman Catholic structure it did not happen in Germany in the same way because of the

Holy Roman Empire and although you had a very reformed populace for a long time they never really could take political power it did not happen in France because of St.

Bartholomew's Eve when the crown just went out and committed mass murder against anyone they suspected to be reformed kicked the

Huguenots out those Durban types my family is from France relax

French people and Huguenot that's right Durban means city dweller and yeah they were

Huguenots remarkably accurate I hate the country I like the city and I just feel it in my bones

Durban's goal at this moment in time is to offend everyone do you think the king would have been mad if they sent me as like I'll come diplomatically go before the king during the time for the war for independence do you think he'd be mad if I called him

Chuck look here Chuck knowing him you'll probably throw a fit we're getting sick of this we're trying to reason with you but you're being unreasonable

Chucky but in England by the grace of God you had this repeated effort and it came again and again and again and again through you can go back to you go back to Alfred you can go back a few years later a few hundred years later you've got

Runnymede which is where the Magna Carta was signed and then you've got repeated efforts between then and the reformation in which the common ordinary people kept saying no you can't do that that's not okay that's not alright the king has to do something here the king has to obey the law and so the idea of Lex Rex which was finally well articulated by Samuel Rutherford during the

English Civil War while the Westminster divines were meeting we don't think about that fact but that whole thing with Cromwell and their fighting is happening while the divines are there meeting in London that's all happening at the same time it's the 1640s so but Lex Rex is the battle cry for English for a millennia ever since Alfred and I guess

I should make sure I acknowledge for those who don't know Alfred is one of the earliest

Saxon kings right and he was incredible not perfect by any means but an awesome dude he had the book of dooms we use the word doom today to mean a bad judgment your doom has come upon you but it is simply an ancient

Saxon word that means judgment so the book of laws or judgments it was his self conscious effort to apply as much of the word of God to the people of the

Angles the Anglo Saxons as possible and at the end he says if I forgot anything you go to the bible and you find the part that applies to this and you apply it straight because I'm sure there will be something

I forgot to write down here and so this is the incredible well and the reality is that the gospel had already reached the

British Isles had already reached Britain before Alfred got there right that's where Patrick the

Briton or who we call Saint Patrick comes from he's a Briton it's his people that Alfred they're Vikings people arrive and take over so like I say not perfect and there are all these back and forth and anyway so but that's the context for all of this how does the word of God apply to us as a nation and so why is it that Robin Hood just this fantastic story that will not go away in the

English mind and so it won't go away here because we are still descendants of Albion as it used to be said seeds of Albion were descendants of the

English way of thinking Robin Hood is a fantastic story and an idea in English law what other place could you go to where the hero is the guy who fought the government to us we're like well yeah duh but go anywhere else in the world and ask where's your

Robin Hood story it's not the same it's not the same they have a very different concept of these things and so when you finally get to let's say we get to the 1600s and this is when the colonies are being established right the first colonists come over here with a grant or a warrant from the king to settle in Virginia to settle in the new world they have what's called a charter is a big written piece of paper that is in the tradition of the

Magna Carta which is simply Latin for big charter or overarching charter right and they arrive with this charter and what it does is it gives them the authority to govern themselves they will have their own parliament it will be called the house of Burgesses this is why

Virginia to this day the Virginia legislature refers to itself as the oldest deliberative body in America which it is but it's also full of pompous you know what because of that who have actually fought with for decades but when they arrived here they had this charter that said we have our own parliament and then we have a governor from the king and when and this is the king's person when the governor sits as governor that is the king here and he has the authority that the king has he can call the parliament he can dismiss the parliament he can veto laws he can ask for taxes and he is he is due respect in the person of the king his soldiers are to be respected he has the authority the civil authority he doesn't get to make laws by himself he doesn't get to take your house if he wants it there is a law that the king must follow but he is the king parliament the parliament of England has no authority in the colony of Virginia they are the parliament of England and they relate to the king the same way the parliament of Virginia relates to the king and this is how each of the 13 colonies at the time of the

American war for independence 150 years later or so 170 these it is the same each of these different what we would call states at that time they were colonies has its own parliament and there is this whole sweep of history in which after the colonies most of the colonies are founded you have parliament in England taking more power in defense of the people they are the round head the round heads raise up these are the puritan nobility and they are opposing the king and his cavaliers or chevalier they have this

European perspective continental perspective and if you look at pictures of the

Stuart kings right this is James and Charles and Charles and James these are the kings when

America is being founded they all have long flowing hair they have got all this you know they dress somewhat effeminately it is everything very much in the

French model and then you have got Oliver Cromwell and his dudes and they are all rough and very manly they have got they cut their hair short because they believe that is what the bible says you know we can argue about it but that is why they cut their hair short or they couldn't grow hairs as some of us it is kind of starting joining your ranks

Luke I will be shaving here soon out of embarrassment sorry

Jeff is over there like I don't know what you are all talking about don't even try red light therapy guys it will bring it back so the parliament eventually begins to interpose between the people of England and this is while the colonies are over here just kind of the back water nobody cares this is where you send all the troublemakers you can get rid of right the king is just sending puritans over here hopefully hoping the

Indians will take care of them basically but give them what they want who cares give them their own parliament send them over there get them out of the country that is their attitude the ones who stay take over parliament and eventually you have the

English civil war in the 1640's in which Cromwell rises up and with his allies they try

Charles I for the crime of murder and genocide because he had gone straight up on a war against none of the people of England but the people of Scotland killed over 18 ,000 was responsible for killing 18 ,000

Scots Covenanters and so Cromwell eventually the parliament convenes a trial they try him for his crime they convict him and they behead him they execute him this is unbelievable it has never been done in the history of the west and no one has ever said we are going to justly and righteously put a king to death and it was a direct assault on the common concept of the day which was divine right of kings right the king says

I have been given a warrant by God to rule that's what they did everyone was Christian everyone had believed in God and so their excuse was well

I get to do what I want because I am God on earth divine right correct it wasn't that I am a man it is that I am

God to you basically that's where it went an abuse correct yep and so this is going on in England while the colonies are forming and by 1700 of course in 1688 you have the glorious revolution in which after Cromwell the crown devolves back to the

Stuart line to Charles the I'm sorry yes to Charles the second and then

James the second and there is this back and forth and it's never really a good thing but it fails it falls apart and eventually the crown devolves to the house of Orange which is from Holland isn't that weird they are reformed right well that's because one of the

Stuart one of the sisters of the Stuart kings married into the house of Orange and her descendant is now the king of England by descent and so William and Mary come in 1688 take the throne and the house of Orange immediately devolves to the house of Hanover and that's where the

Georges come from the three Georges George the first and George the second father and son George the third is the grandson of George the second and so during this period

Parliament goes beyond and begins to become corrupt this is two or three generations after the Puritans and you have this big power struggle

Parliament has become ascendant the crown is largely neutered and now Parliament is starting to tyrannize mostly financially you have this rampant mercantilism in which

Parliament makes laws saying you can't buy anything except from me and anything you have of value you have to sell to me and I sell it back to you and so this is being done worldwide this is where you have the

East India Tea Company this is where you have so there are elements of historical accuracy and I hate to say this but it's the example everybody knows there are elements of historical accuracy in movies like the

Pirates of the Caribbean in which the King's troops are somewhat objectionable the King's governors are objectionable well that is partially true because of the rampant excesses of Parliament and they were they were financially subjugating everywhere they could possibly go because they had they owned all the companies they got these royal warrants and the

East India Tea Company had its own army had its own navy they became their own thing because they had a warrant from the

King to conduct business and no one else could they had a complete monopoly and then they had a majority in Parliament so they could pass laws saying you have to buy and sell from us and this is mercantilism so by the mid 1700's

George III is growing up 1765 he becomes King and thanks to Lord Boot B -U -T -T -E he is

B -U -T -E I think it is one T but it said Boot he advises the

King that you need to take power back from Parliament it is imbalanced and the reality was it probably was and at that point

Boot was probably right in England but now you have this power struggle between Parliament and the Crown and the colonies are on the board now they are prosperous, they are wealthy they produce wealth and they want control, it is worth having now it is worth having these colonies and who cares they have a charter the

Crown didn't care and Parliament didn't care and so this is the context now you have 10 years between when

George III becomes King and when the shots are fired on Lexington and Concord and during this 10 year period this idea is resurrected that Parliament is actually the primary legislative body over each of the colonial parliaments and that you have the

King and then you've got English Parliament and then you've got the peons in the Americas and the problem with this is that the

Parliament of course they don't care they very soon after this they established Roman Catholicism as the state church in the next colony over which is called

Canada and of course our peer and forefathers looked at that and were horrified because George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, the

Lewis family, the Clark family, you name all of these people who lived in Northern Virginia, they are the faithful remnant of the

Puritan roundheads who were with Cromwell, these are their descendants these guys were there they were there when they finally said that's it, there will be a law for the

King and if you break the law you will suffer the consequences and if you commit a capital crime we will put you to death after a fair trial if you're convicted and so the

Washingtons the Lees the names in America that you go wait a minute

I've heard that name before, these guys are the roundhead Cavaliers, that's what they were called they were the descendants of the

Puritans who were gentry and that's why you see when, this is another remarkable thing about the

American War for Dependence Hancocks for example, they were not of that stock

John Hancock Sr. was the pastor of the church in Lexington, he was not wealthy, his brother became a merchant in I'm sorry, his son became a merchant in Boston, became wealthy and eventually his grandson

John Hancock II who we know became very wealthy so he was new money, the

Washingtons, right, put you John Henry here, huge signature the Washingtons the

Lees, the Jeffersons these people were old money old money in America and they had money from England, but all of them together, you can look at them you can look at Fielding Lewis for example, that's

George Washington's brother -in -law, he married George's sister if you go to Fredericksburg, Virginia you can see his house, it's still there, it's gorgeous, monstrous for the day it was just unbelievably opulent and he was the most wealthy man in America, he spent his entire fortune and died a pauper at the end of the war making weapons for the

Continental Army his wife was taken care of by her family in her dotage, in her old age because she did not have money and this is the recurring theme over and over and over again, they were precious few wealthy

Americans who didn't fund the war you'll find fewer who didn't and so this is what's you've got that and then you've got the

Puritan work ethic in New England where they made, this is new money, they made it from shipping and so through this ten year period, you have the

Crown and the Parliament fighting over who's going to control this wealthy, these wealthy colonies and the colonists are looking at going, okay, well we need to take care of our families, but primarily we worried about what we came here for, religious freedom and the ability to serve

God in every area of life and if we allow Parliament to legislate for us that will no longer be the case and they just proved it by making what we fear the most,

Roman Catholicism the church the state church, which means you would be forced to pay money to them as a tax you would be forced to worship the way they said, you would no longer be able if they said you pray to Mary, you pray to Mary or they put you to death, they say you can't teach your children the

Lord's Prayer, well that had just happened a hundred years, a hundred fifty years earlier and they all remembered it, why they were here fresh in their memories, very much so very much so, so you come to this period from 1765 to 1775 where the

Americans are appealing to the Crown their perspective is, we answer to the Crown the same way the Parliament does the

King must not be aware of what the Crown is doing that must be what's going on it must be that the

King is just out of it, and so they spent a decade petitioning the King petitioning the

King, petitioning the King redress of grievances please, use your authority to disperse

Parliament, use your authority to tell them to stop, we are being oppressed, and we appeal to the

King, and this is a thousand year history that every commoner had the right to appeal to the

King for justice if it wasn't happening anywhere else and his response was? and the

King's response was either ignoring it or sending more injury, more insult, closing the port, and eventually sending troops to America to subjugate his own citizens so these are the conditions that formed the powder keg which was to be the

American Revolution, exactly when the King started sending troops, that's when they said, oh this is not going to work, now they were long farsighted individuals who said from early on now the

King, he's complicit privately they would say he's complicit but it would have been improper and even unjust for them to lay that at the

King's feet without proof and so they spent a decade petitioning for, should please fix this problem, and during this time the

Parliament demanded all these different taxes and they demanded all kinds of different things and as long as the correct process was followed in other words, the

Crown would send a message to the colonial Parliament that I need a tax and the colonial

Parliament would levy that tax and send it back, and they did that again and again, in fact they paid massive amounts of taxes for those 10 years and even previously, largely to fund

England's conquest all over the globe, a lot of it was not good but some of it happened here in what was the

Seven Years War in Europe or what we call the French and Indian War How does this relate to the term or phrase taxation without representation?

It is exactly the key phrase and it's something that is in our psyche today because it often gets repeated and it gets repeated as a cheapening of well, they just didn't want to pay the tax and so it comes down to the charters they had a legal, they had the legal authority constitutionally to govern themselves and once they gave that authority over, what would happen?

Well they would be under the boot of a foreign power the Parliament of England would now rule them and they were watching

England do all kinds of horrific things to everyone they possibly could and so eventually the

King's officers, there are several cases like it's in, I believe it's in Connecticut where there was this tree and it was only,

I mean there are people, there may be people alive who saw it today, but there was this big oak tree and they had this meeting at the town hall in Connecticut and the

King's men said produce your charter and everyone knew they were going to grab it and take it so they didn't have it and so they called this, doused the lights grabbed the charter, gave it to a guy, then lit the lights again and the charter was gone, they went out and hid it in this oak so that they couldn't, so we still have it and you know it exists and we know you don't have it and you know you don't have it so you can't destroy it and it spent time inside this hollow, like a big knot, hollow knot in charter oak

Wow. Yeah, so there are stories like this where they try to abrogate the charter and claim it doesn't matter, we don't care, and so that's why you have the appeal to heaven that's why you have we dare defend our rights that's why you have the segmented snake join or die, it's why you have don't tread on me, these are all the same, it's why you have, like if you look the strategic sac you know strategic air command is gone now when

I was a kid I lived outside a sac base and the symbol for strategic air command was a gloved fist, it's a male, you know like a gauntlet coming out of a cloud with a thunderbolt in its grip, this is an ancient puritan concept that comes from Cromwell's era of God will fight for us, that's

God's fist and if we obey him he will take care of us and it was a little bit perverted

I cringe a little bit when I think about them saying that that righteous anger of God is actually a drop of nukes on you which is what sac was but I get it right, there is a sense in which ok if we use it justly then yes so during this ten year period yeah one of the battle cries became no taxation without representation because as they said the power to tax is the power to destroy so in other words if we pay the tax we will be acknowledging that they have the authority to make law for us, we dare not pay the tax, if they want tax they can come and ask and we'll give it to them they did it a bunch and they actually had legal authority in 1713 parliament in one of the early skirmishes with the

Hanover kings, that would have been George I I believe they passed a tax on sugar or molasses mostly to tax the rum that was being made, now here's a hilarious thing

Rhode Island was the first original baptist state and it was and that's not necessarily a bad thing although some of us call it rogue island for a reason you're trying not to get angry

I was just struggling in this and just trying to introduce you to my battle acts but you know you have to suppress your viking urges over there but the great thing is that because there was less regulation there were fewer laws in Rhode Island it became the place where you made rum and so all of the rum production was in Rhode Island some people consider them pirates because they would smuggle rum the molasses in and the rum out to keep from paying the tax and so in 1713 they passed this and all the colonies said they don't have the power to tax us ignore it, and they did and Parliament didn't lift a finger, that's why it was so easy to smuggle rum, until the war started smuggle the molasses in and the rum out and so that set up a 50 year precedent under English common law that Parliament has no authority to tax us 50 years ago they said we had to pay a tax we made the legal argument and we refused to pay it

Parliament didn't lift a finger that would win in any court in England throughout history, it was cut and dried and so they had a very strong legal position and they knew it and eventually it came down to as Parliament's power was threatened in England and as they were actually now locked in struggle with George III over who was going to control all of this between the

Crown and Parliament everybody started paying a lot more attention to taxing the colonies both sides wanted it and the colonies were just caught in the middle saying hey stop, we're just trying to be

Englishmen over here, leave us alone we dare defend our rights, these are the rights of Englishmen we're not some foreigners we're not a subjugated people, we are you, we came over here 5 minutes ago our leading men have the same names as your leading men and they're, you know like the the

Pitts, the Pitt family, there was William Pitt the older, William Pitt the younger, they were both yeah they were both

Prime Minister in their own time and they both supported the colonists rights, they said look we deny our own existence if we deny them their rights, it was

Pitt the younger who said the worst man in the world to deprive an Englishman of his rights is another Englishman you can't send

Gage over there, you can't send these these leading men, these guys are the sons of the round heads just like Washington is, they're the same they're the same thing and so that's why

Gage never could catch up with and actually subjugate, he had all the power in the world he could have but he couldn't make himself do it because he looked at it and said that's actually mostly right,

I mean they were fighting over the minutiae interesting Man there's so many questions

I want to ask but I just think, I hear I listen to all this and you think about the 4th of July today and there's a lot of dudes out there that don't tread on me thing, it's just kind of a slogan that we've adopted to justify our, whatever

I want to do, rebellion and you know we want to throw off authority and all this but if you listen to the story of the

American Independence like these men were all about like pursuing freedom under the God of the Bible like that's why we're doing what we're doing that's the primary motivator under all of this like we want to be free to be what

God created us to be, like as men to serve God, yes to serve God and that carries with it like this responsibility that we're accountable for the actions of our government, like we're actually responsible for how they act that falls directly upon us and so far from it being a call to throw off all authority which is how

Independence Day is sometimes posited, like I'm my own boss, it's far from that, it's a call to return to be subjected to the authority of God in his word.

Exactly, and this is what the pulpits up and down the coast, you know up and down the

American colonies but especially in New England, you know we would say the pulpits in New England thundered right, you've got these strong Puritan pastors but it happened all up and down,

I mean you've got the same thing going on in the south with slightly different cultural things going on but they were all preaching exactly that they were preaching from Isaiah chapter 5 which says that God is calling in Babylon to judge

Judah, to judge the two southern tribes because they have allowed their authorities to become drunk and to fail to uphold and defend the rights of the poor and the needy.

Literally drunk, heroes at mixing wine but also drunk on power. And yes, and that, there are two famous lines from that, from Isaiah chapter 5 that we don't think about, one is

God whistling in, he whistles in Babylon, like he's calling in a horse, like you know the shadow facts, he's whistling in Babylon they're hastening, they're hastening to come and then that verse about heroes at mixed drinks, they are no longer heroes at defending the people, they're now heroes at day drinking, day drinking.

When they should be working. This is not a holiday, this is not just a holiday. So this is what's being preached up and down for a hundred years, and so yes, the

American people have it ingrained in them, so much so that they're not really even, many of them and we have these interviews, like de

Tocqueville interviewed elderly rev, or vets, and asked them, revolutionary vets, why did you do this?

And they would say, they kind of had this common man's approach, they're like, well, I don't know that I ever even read the Declaration of Independence, one of them said.

I just knew that they meant to take our freedom and our ability to serve God away from us, and we meant they shouldn't.

And he just left it at that. It's what David Hackett Fisher, my favorite historian, I'm not really a historian, I'm a historical geek.

My favorite historian is David... Uncool.

I was uncool before it was cool. Now that I believe. Take that,

Christian nationalist. The original Christian nation. But, now

I forgot what I was going to say. David Hackett Fisher points out that this is really what he would call a habit of the heart.

There is an ingrained way of thinking that is not going to be heavily articulated by the common man, it is just the way, this is what they were inculcated in.

And it's not necessarily a good thing, but it is in the sense that, look, not everyone will be highly articulate, not everyone can just say it.

What are we going to do? What are we going to do when it actually comes down to it? And that was the amazing thing to a man.

The Americans believed that, number one, we cannot give up our freedom without denying God's commands.

And number two, they believed, and we can't just go to war with the king, because that would be denying God's commands.

So we have to walk the tightrope. And that was the gorgeous and beautiful thing of the ten years from 1765 to 1775, of them walking this tightrope and begging and pleading and all these maneuverings.

They recognized that financial sanctions or economic sanctions were the best way to fight back, because that's what really hurt

Parliament. Parliament is run by the guys that own all of these mercantile operations. And so if they said we're not going to buy tea, suddenly a huge chunk of Parliament goes broke.

Because they depended on the American colonies for the majority of their business and the colonies were heavily regulated by you can't buy tea from anyone else.

It's a good strategy for Christians today, not patronizing the businesses. And especially if you'll do it on mass.

We need to move beyond, well, we don't like Bud Light because they went from bikinis and American flags to gays and American flags.

Well, that is, okay, I get it. I don't like Mulvaney either. That dog won't hunt. But I'm sorry, this is not, let's go back to good looking women in bikinis and rock and roll in the ads.

This is not, that's not good advertising. This is not a Christian perspective.

So they petitioned their government for redress of grievances. They engage in all these things that they believe were wise and last resorts.

But what kicked the can down the street to where they actually took up a rifle? So next year, 2025, is the 250th anniversary of the

Battle of Lexington and Concord. That will be April 18 and 19. It is eight months, no, yeah, eight months away.

That will be the 250th. And the year after that is the 250th of the signing of the Declaration, 26. And so we are coming up on exactly when that happened.

So eventually you have the focal point became Massachusetts because it is the industrial and mercantile hub of the colonies.

This is, Boston Harbor is where it's at. And so, and you have a strong group of men in Sam Adams and his mentor

John Otis, who we don't think about, but he was just an incredible dude. Eventually he got hit on the head and lost much of his capacity.

But he was incredibly articulate. You have Dr. Joseph Warren, who did not live beyond 30 years of age, or just barely, and ran the entire thing.

He was friends with Margaret Campbell Gage, who was General Gage's wife. She was an

American, and we're pretty sure that she is the one who confirmed, yes, they are going by sea, and it's tonight.

And that's how they knew. But this all happens, by the time you get to 1773 is the

Boston Massacre, in which the King's troops open fire, not unprovoked, but they respond unbelievably in disproportionate use of force.

He got a bunch of dudes with rocks. And the soldiers open fire with their muskets, and they kill a 12 -year -old boy.

A street kid. And so you've got that, and then you've got the

Boston Tea Party. The Boston Tea Party was an economic protest. And we've talked a little bit about that.

We can get up to it here. But ultimately some of the things that are super fun, like with the aftermath of the

Boston Massacre. We call it the Boston Massacre. The English call it the Boston Massacre. Everybody calls it the

Boston Massacre, even though the Crown was horrified that that, no, it wasn't a massacre. It was putting down some kind of rebellion.

There was this one big seaman who was loud and probably drunk, who, if he'd been able to get close enough to the soldiers, probably could have, he'd be like you, probably could kill him with his bare hands.

He was huge. And they were scared of him. But that doesn't mean you form up and just fire indiscriminately into the crowd of women and children.

These guys are carrying bayonet -fixed muskets. They've all got spears. They can handle themselves.

Two fascinating things that happened. Number one, because this is Massachusetts, this is the best seafaring port arguably in the world right now.

And our ships are faster than anyone else's, our clippers. And so Sam Adams sits down with Joseph Warren and they write the account and they put it on the clipper ship and they send it to London and it gets there weeks ahead of the

British, of the official record. And so by the time Gage's report gets there, the people, everybody on the people on the street, they have folk songs about it.

They've got the Punch and Judy shows, you know, the whole little puppet shows used to be really popular. You see them in the movies where they're like doing stuff.

Those were a thing. That's how that was popular media at the time. You had these shows about the

Boston Massacre that everybody in London at least knew about it and thought their government was wrong because we got there first.

We were better at it than they were. And then the other really cool thing is that John Adams volunteers to provide defense counsel for the officers who commanded the soldiers to fire.

And he said what they did was wrong. I'm not going to try to pretend that they should get off, but they should get a fair trial.

And he was widely respected. Instead of being shunned by his people, he was widely respected by his people.

Not because he was trying to excuse murder, but because he said we would be denying our very existence if we didn't ensure they got a fair trial.

And there was this huge problem. There was a core of very rowdy types, the mob in Boston, who were just waiting to burn down public property or tar and feather someone or beat the tar out of somebody else or steal their stuff.

And in fact, they were honed and there were two sides. There was the north end and the south end.

This was the two sides of Boston. There was the north end mob and the south end mob. And every 5th of November, remember the 5th of November?

This is a bad day in history because this is when the papists tried to blow up the Protestant Parliament in England in the 1600s.

By this time it's called Pope Day. And that's the common reference to it. And they would burn the

Pope in effigy in the streets. Which, okay, it's political protest, whatever, that's freedom of speech. But the mob, even though you may not agree with it,

I don't, but the mob between north and south end would fight. They would have these full pitched, think

Gangs of New York, full pitched battles with clubs and even edged weapons. People would be maimed and sometimes die every year for the honor of who got to burn the

Pope in effigy in the streets of Boston. Battle for the five points. Yeah, it's just wild.

And so Who holds sway over the five points? This is the last, that's the last vestige of what inner city culture was like in the

US. And so it's fascinating. But early on when the taxes first start being protested, the loyal nine, who are the nine, they are the proto sons of liberty.

They go out and they decide, they go to the south end mob that usually won, and I can't now remember the name of the guy who ran it, but he was the mob leader.

They went to him and said, we want you to stage the protest because you can turn on a crowd. And it was a foolish move because they equipped him to start rioting.

And he actually did. He actually led. And these guys, of course, they can't, they beat one another to a pulp every year. They can't wait to start wailing on the

King's tax collectors and burning stuff down and tar and feathering. And that kind of thing did start to happen. And everyone but this small mob was horrified.

And they said, what are we going to do? They said, hey, wait a minute. One of them said, I know this guy who's really well connected. He's a silversmith.

He's on the north end. He's not connected to the mob. But he knows all those guys and they respect him because he's a mechanic.

He's not a merchant. He's a commoner. And his name is Paul Revere. And they went to him and said, we are getting rid of the south end mob as soon as possible here.

Would you go out and form, use your influence to lead these guys. And so after the

Boston massacre, it was Revere who, they would make these big frames and they were usually like six or eight sided.

And they're huge. Each of those frames is like two feet across and like six feet tall. And Revere would hand draw and hand color these huge pictures with words on them.

They were like monstrous political cartoons. And then they would stretch the pictures, the paper, around these big frames so they'd have like eight of them at the same time.

And then they'd put a bunch of candles in the middle and they'd walk down the street with it. So you could read and they'd go slow and turn it.

And it was a way of disseminating information. It's called an illumination. And so they would do this and this is how they communicated to the town born.

And to communicate this is what happened. So that's how they communicated this is what happened to the Boston Massacre. And they had pictures of, and you can see those old drawings are still there.

They're a little bit hokey. They're 2D. It's like a political cartoon from the 1700s. And there are pictures of like the troops firing into unarmed women and it probably wasn't quite like that.

It was a little stylized. There were some, they were definitely making their point. Even though it was true that the women were in the crowd, it wasn't like they were all up front.

Right? And so this, those two things, eventually it led to the

Parliament of England bottling up or closing the harbor in Boston, which was starvation.

They were starving, literally starving them out. That's how they ate. They had to ship food in.

And so now they were dependent on their friends in the countryside to bring food in and they set up a guard on Boston Neck, which is the only other way into Boston.

It is almost an island where it was then. Now they've actually filled in the back bay. That's where Fenway is. And there used to be water where Revere rode across.

Really? Yeah. And so they bottled up Boston and threatened to starve them out. And this is, it continued to get worse and worse.

The last straw was the Boston Tea Party in which they said, okay, they're refusing to pay the taxes.

They have beaten us at every corner. Again and again and again, Parliament would enact a tax. The colonists would say, well then we're not buying whatever that is.

And the Parliament would be starved out. Their expenses would overrun their income and they would repeal the tax.

And they did it again and again until finally the tax on tea came up. They sent the ships into Boston Harbor with the tea.

The Boston authorities placed troops, the colonial troops, marching up and down on the pier saying, we're not going to let you unload that tea.

And so the governor of Massachusetts said, okay, I'll pay the tax if it sits here past this date.

I'll just pay it from the public monies and then we'll take control of the tea and we'll sell it. But you will have symbolically paid for the tea.

You will have symbolically paid the tax. And now that's all Parliament would need to say, great. Next up, this is the new church for Massachusetts and it's

Anglican. No more private association here. You're going to come to our church.

And so that's when Revere and the Sons of Liberty said, well we have no recourse. If we allow that ship to sit at the pier for one minute past whatever time it was,

I think it was midnight on that day, they will claim we have paid the tax. And so they said, we will make one final appeal to the king in the person of his governor.

And they met, they gathered at Faneuil Hall, which was kind of the Independence Hall in Boston and they had speeches and eventually the word came back and Sam Adams got up and gave the prearranged signal this meeting can do no more to save the country.

And at that moment Revere runs out of Faneuil Hall and blows a whistle that can be heard and the whistle gets passed and blown in several places until they get over to the

Green Dragon Tavern where the guys are ready to go. They have dressed themselves up as, you know, caricatures of Indians.

They've got face paint on and the main reason was to disguise their identity. If they weren't a face paint, they couldn't blame any one person.

Revere, they knew somebody has to be responsible. If we just go as a mob, they'll be able to argue it was mob violence.

And so Revere went as himself and he said, come and arrest me. And Sam Adams showed up after a while as well.

And so they marched down to the pier. They walked up to the boat. They said, Captain, we have need of your keys. The Captain was like, here you go.

He wanted to leave. His ship is rotting in the harbor. Literally rotting for months.

He's losing money. He still has to feed his men. There's all these problems. They walk on board the ship.

They unlock all the tea lockers. They get the tea out. They cut open the bags. They dump it in the harbor.

There was one locker that the keys didn't work or it was missing or something. So they broke the lock.

They cut the lock and got the tea out. They swept everything up. They cleaned everything up. They actually pilloried.

One of the guys tried to steal some of the tea and they caught him and they locked him up. And the next day he was locked up in the stocks downtown on the green.

And they fined him for it. And the next, that next morning, Revere went back to the ship with a brand new lock that he had made and gave it to the captain.

Sorry, we broke one of the locks. Here you go. Sorry about that. Yeah, here you go. And so it is one of the most...

Pretty controlled rebellion. Oh yeah, it's one of the most fantastic examples of an economic protest that, did it require some civil disobedience?

Yes. Did it require destroying property? Well, only the property that was now in question had been made into a political tool or a ploy.

And in fact, apocryphal, we don't know for sure, but in multiple places it's reported that the governor got up the next day and said to the effect, darn it, they've done it legally.

We can't go after them. And they didn't lift a finger. Revere and Adams, everyone knew it was them. Nothing happened.

They didn't do a single thing to them. And so Boston Port gets closed up and then the governor, they give him a military governor, it's

Governor Gage, who is the general of the army, commander of the navy, Lord Gage, and he is now sending bodies of troops out to all the little farmsteads and everywhere confiscating, not privately owned weapons, though they did confiscate scum, mostly they're confiscating the stores of munitions and cannon that are owned by all the little counties and the towns.

These are municipally owned. This is like going to your neighboring, it's like the governor saying, we're going to go down to that police station and we're going to take all their stuff and we're going to go to that police station, we're going to take all their stuff and we're going to bring it all into the middle because we fear that the police in these little towns will not enforce our laws.

That's what they were doing. And so eventually, these were called the powder alarms, they happened for a couple of years.

This is when Verveer rode to all these places and he became known not only just in Boston but on all these countrysides and he knew everybody and he would ride out and warn them like it happened in Salem, the

British marched up, Salem had a drawbridge across the creek that they had, so they raised the drawbridge so the

British couldn't get across, they got all the boats and they brought them across so they couldn't use those and then they sent the parson out to negotiate with the

British, the commander of the British column, said, I know you're here to take the arms and munition, we've already moved them long before you got here, they're gone.

But we will lower the bridge if you agree that you will not do anything, but you will be able to say, you reached your the destination you were commanded, you have your honor to defend, you will come to the middle of town, you will turn around and you'll march back.

And we won't hurt you and you won't hurt us. It was this classic Puritan way of doing it and the commander of the

British column was also the son of the Puritans. He was serving in what was effectively

Cromwell, the descendant of Cromwell's army. And so he's like, okay, so they lowered the bridge, they march in there, they've got their weapons, the

American militiamen have their weapons, they turn around and they march them back out of town, basically frog march them out of town and on your way and they go back home.

So this is what was happening, well the temperature was going up and up and up and finally they know, okay, they're mounting another one of these for all they knew it was just going to be another powder alarm, another expedition to go out and take more stuff, only now they want to arrest

Adams and Hancock who were at the clerk house in Lexington. And so this is, we have to understand that this house was built by John Hancock's grandpa.

John Hancock's grandfather built that house because he was the pastor of that same church. And then

Hancock's, the Hancock we know, his father died when he was seven and he was sent to live with his grandpa, he grew up in that house.

Wow. And then his cousin married the parson who pastored that church. And so when they needed a place to go, he's like oh yeah, let's go to my cousin's house,

I grew up there. And so that's, they're hanging out there and so that was a new development that now they're going to start arresting us and they're going to send us to England and they're going to abuse us in their courts.

And so this was that added layer to the whole problem. But as far as all the townsmen knew, as far as everybody knew, that's why, you know, the

Lexington militia didn't form up around the house, they didn't form up across the road. When you get to, when you go downtown in Lexington the green there is triangular shaped because there are three roads coming in.

There's a road that comes in from Boston and it makes a slight left hand curve and goes straight to the clerk house. Or you can make a sharp right and go around one side of the green and then you can keep going down the road or you can make another, you can make a sharp left and go down the other side where you'll meet the road going to the clerk house.

Buckman Tavern sits across over here and so when the British column came up from Boston this way, the

Minutemen are over here by Buckman Tavern. They're not even on any of the roads.

The British were free to go down, the British troops were free to go down to the clerk house or over the other way towards Concord.

And everybody already knew that's where they're going. And so they had made sure Adams and Hancock were gone.

They were not there anymore, they were long gone. And there's this hilarious story about a trout that Hancock had got,

I think he caught it, and he'd been trying to eat for like three days. And they would get it out and get ready to cook it and something would happen, they'd have to put it away again and finally they're like Revere shows up at 2am banging on the door and he's like what?

He opens the door. Revere, what? What? And they're like the redcoat, the regulars are out. And he's like oh.

And he goes and he wraps up his trout and he puts it in the carriage and they take it with him when they leave town.

You see Hancock is used to living at a certain level and it's just not working out for him.

And Adams is champing at the bit. He is, he knows that war is coming and he's like, please

God, please don't let us shoot first. But let's get this over with. Let's get it over with.

And so they leave, they head out of town. The column comes up. It's led by the young Marine Captain Jesse Adair, who is a hard charger.

Pitcairn and Smith are in command of the column. They put Adair at the head so that he'll keep the pace and then they're at the rear, you know, bringing where you have to be to make sure your column stays together.

He comes up to the, and he sees okay, he knows there's where we're going in the Clark House. There's a body of armed troops not in our way, but if we go that way we're going to leave them on our flank.

And so he made the decision to file out onto the green and face these armed militiamen.

But they were just standing there. Just standing there and they could have gone past. And that was the whole point.

It was John Parker, the commander of the militia who said, stand firm. Do not fire unless fired upon.

But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here. They were not afraid to die. In fact, he knew he was dying of tuberculosis.

He could, and it was, he couldn't really speak anymore. He could, it was gravelly and he could talk. But if there was very much noise, he couldn't be heard.

Which is probably one of the reasons why there was so much confusion on Lexington Green. And so, the column comes up.

Pitcairn rides up to the front of the column very rapidly. He sees, oh no, we're facing off against the militia.

This is very bad. We do not want to have a war here. He is, he's a classic, you know, the worst man to deprive an

Englishman of his liberty is another Englishman. He rides up and he very cleverly gives the one order that he knows will work.

Disperse you rebels, disperse. And since the time, and I don't know how long you want to go, but there's this cool story from Henry III.

This is a thousand years, almost a thousand years before, 800 years before, when there was one of the first English peasant rebellions and a guy named

Watt Tyler was leading them. The king, he's young. He's like 14 years old and he goes,

I will go out and I will talk to these Englishmen because I am an Englishman too. And he does and he talks the, he rides up and he says, countrymen, what is, what's the problem?

Why, you know, why, and he's 14 and they're somewhat, you know, just thunderstruck that this kid is here and Tyler, who is a ne 'er -do -well rises up to club him and the king's bodyguard runs him through and the king stops him and says, stop, stop.

Now, men, you saw he just attacked me. I'm not here to attack you. What do you want?

And they came up and they stated their grievance and he said, if you will disperse now,

I will sit here, I will camp here tonight and I will hoard court and you can come before me and tell me your grievance and I will answer.

And they did and it was the beginning of the common law that the king could disperse any body of Englishmen.

If the king said go home, you went home. That's the king's right. You don't stay there. You don't continue. Whatever you're doing, you stop.

And that became, this was before parliament, before the house of commons. So when a house of commons formed, it was under this understanding that if the king says go home, you go home.

And so the king could always disperse parliament. Well, Pitcairn knew this, of course. And so he sees a body of men, he says, disperse and they turn around to leave.

Just like that. But they don't put their guns on the ground. They leave with their guns. And he says, lay down your arms, curse you, damn you.

And they, that, they're like, no, we're not leaving. That's an unlawful order and they kept walking off with them. Well, at that point someone fired and the

American perspective was always that it was a British officer. It was an officer's pistol. There were

British soldiers who probably that we, the depositions that we have from right after that, it looks, it sounds like there was somebody who was not on the green and one of them saw, that saw

Muskett discharged. May have been a negligent discharge. Who knows? Maybe it was some crazy person. The historian

I respect the most posits that there may have been two simultaneous shots. And it is very possible.

So, but in any case, as soon as a shot was fired the British soldiers who were angry started shooting.

They started shooting right away. And Pitcairn again was horrified. He rode up and down the line. He was striking the ends of their muskets with his sword blade.

Trying to make them stop. And they ignored him and charged the Americans who had a few of them turned around.

So Jonas Parker who was John Parker's cousin was shot along with seven other guys. Some of them were bayoneted.

They finally got all the troops back together and they were there for quite a while. And then they continued on to Concord.

Well when they got to Concord their goal was to take the cannon that had been buried on this farm and the muskets and powder.

Well by the time they got there of course they had all been hidden. The Americans actually went out and plowed in the middle of the night.

They plowed up the field, laid the muskets and wrapped them up laid them in the furrows and buried them in a line so it looked like it was a freshly planted field.

They did this in the cannon tubes and the there were a couple of cannons that they couldn't move. There were these huge like bombardment cannons that the

British actually destroyed. But when they get to Concord the Americans are now on this hill up above town so they can see what's going on.

But the American commander Bartlett I think was his name intentionally removed them from town so that they couldn't fight because he had heard rumors that there had been shooting in Lexington and they were all horrified because they worried that oh no we shot at the king.

We shot at the king. The king's men. This is the king in front of us. We can't do that. God will not bless us.

And so they get there. They go about their job. They look for the cannon in town. They send a contingent over to the farm and to get to the farm they have to cross an old north bridge which is

Concord Bridge and so they leave a contingent of troops there. There's only about 90 I think.

Yeah I think it was about 90 on that bridge. And the it so happens that the American militia the town militia is up on the bluff and they have to cross the bridge to get back to town.

Well a fire breaks out and the townsmen actually get the British to stop doing what they're doing and help them put out the fire.

Yeah and they do but they can't really see what's going on. They just see smoke raising from town and so they decide we got to go back down.

They might be burning our town. And so they have to cross this bridge. Well the contingent is still searching the farm fruitlessly and the guy the commander of the troops on the bridge is not very good.

He does a very poor job. He sees them approaching. They're in two columns.

They're very peaceful and he orders his men to retreat on the other side of the bridge and to form up in this very complex formation that would allow them to amass their fire.

It's called street fire. And he gave the order to start ripping up the planks on the bridge so they couldn't cross.

Well that struck a nerve because there's this long debate do the bridges belong to the township or do they belong to the king?

Right and of course all the militia said stop tearing up our bridge. We're just trying to get over there to put out the fire.

And that angered them and so they began running still in peaceful, you know they had their weapons down and they're not marching up there to shoot.

Well the British commander gave the order to fire and it was definitely top to bottom.

This was not some kind of ragged fire. This was not one individual. This was an officer, the person of the king ordering the men to fire.

They fired hard. They didn't hit anybody. At that point the Americans who had been drilling and training and they had the right weapons and they had all the right stuff they immediately formed into their ranks, fired and took out a bunch of the

British and made them run. They broke and ran in front. So the first conflict, that's why it's the shot fired heard around the world.

It had never been done. Peasants do not form up and do a better job than the

British regulars. This is the best army in the world. And they totally screwed up the whole thing and the peasants who are these hard core puritans, their command is stand fast.

Don't shoot first. But if they shoot at you kill them all. Kill them all. I like that.

That was their perspective. Exactly. Show the black flag and that's what they did. These guys and it's their, the peasants, this is what was called the train band or the trained band goes back to the 1500s when the puritans gathered and organized every township into with the authority to train men for war.

This is where the whole idea of an army comes from. In England the army is made up of the individuals.

Now you can go back to Robin Hood. You can go back to this balance that you had between the English nobility who were

Normans after 1066 and the Saxons who were bowmen.

And so the idea of Robin Hood being able to split an arrow, they could actually do that kind of thing. But it wasn't with these little bows that you could pull back and hold.

These bows were as tall as Luke. And they were guys our size and smaller who were running these bows.

They were so hard to pull back that an English bowman they know when they find the skeleton of a bowman because his right shoulder is deformed from pulling that string back.

And you pulled it back and let it go. You did not, people did not have the strength to sit there with it like this. You're talking 170 to 200 pounds of force that it took to pull that bow back.

And it's a four yard, it's a four foot arrow. And they're massive. This is why at the

Battle of Crecy and at Agincourt which is the famous speech of Henry the fifth or the fourth, excuse me, the

St. Crispin's Day speech, the Band of Brothers speech. That is at Agincourt where they've invaded

Normandy because he has a right to the crown and they get beat. There's 5 ,000 of them.

There are 25 ,000 French Chevalier bearing down them on these huge French farmhorses, right?

They're riding their battle horses and they're armored and the English bowman wipe them out because at 200 yards they can pull back these 200 pound bows and shoot an arrow that will go, pass through a knight front to back in armor.

Wow. Yeah. And they've done it before and they could shoot up and by the time it was falling, it's reached terminal velocity, got a huge iron head on it.

Yeah, there was no, you know, that famous meme of the guy with the arrow in his visor. They didn't have to do that.

They could hit him anywhere. Anywhere. There wasn't shield, there wasn't armor for it. At this point they could shoot things heavy enough to go through everything.

So these descendants of the Puritans who have been through their great, great, great grandfathers basically fought alongside

Robin Hood. You've got them all the way through the English Civil War all the way to now. They are determined, number one, that they will not give up their freedom.

Number two, they will not fire on the king unless fired upon and when they get fired upon, that's it.

They are total badasses. And so, we're gonna smoke you.

Yeah. We will not shoot first, but you shoot at us and you will not survive. I don't start fights, I finish them.

I finish them and that's what happened. That should be on the American flag. We don't start fights, we finish them. Although it wouldn't work today as a motto because sometimes we start fights that we don't finish.

Unfortunately, and so the British have to reform, they have to flee back to Boston and now everybody knows the

British fired first. So 20 ,000, this is a column of 400 men. 20 ,000

Americans come out of the woodwork and shoot at them on the way back. And they would have, they probably would have killed them all if there hadn't been a relief force sent out of about a thousand men to rear guard them as they went back.

Wow. And so it was a huge embarrassment. They bottled them up in Boston, they corked them up in there, they wouldn't let them out.

They went up to Fort Ticonderoga and dragged the cannons down and placed them over and forced the British to leave. And this is the beginning of the war.

And so this is what impels eventually on July 4th, 1776, this is a year and a couple months later, the

Americans in Congress assemble, their representatives vote and say these states, these colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states.

Why? Because the king has kicked us out. He has abdicated through injustice and what the declaration says, a train of events that pursue, invariably pursue one end, tyranny.

And then he lists all the problems with the king. But the very fact that the king had sent troops and had actually hired foreign mercenaries, the

Hessians, to subjugate them demonstrated we're no longer English citizens. You don't hire foreign mercenaries and send them in and say you will obey at gunpoint.

You do that to protect us. You don't do that to subjugate us. If you kick us out, well then we don't owe you allegiance anymore.

And that is why they are are and of right ought to be free independent states. And so, that entire thing, not only is it, one of the reasons

I think it's hard for us as Christians today is because we've been inculcated, indoctrinated in this idea that Christianity is above all just nice and if the government says you take pinwheels to the side of your head, then that's what you do.

So, Todd Freel. Yeah, Todd Freel. Quote, yeah. And so, no, not only is it justifiable, it's actually, you're obligated sometimes.

And so, I'm not saying you're obligated to celebrate the 4th of July. I feel like I'm obligated to celebrate the 4th of July.

That was a long answer to that question. Is it a way to obey the 5th commandment?

Yes, I would argue that it is. Don't you love it?

Do you see what I'm saying, though? You get the whole story and backgrounds and who was there and what they were thinking.

He knew what they were eating for dinner. And you guys laughed at me. More than you want. It was a stinking trout.

No, I love it. I certainly didn't get that in public school. And that's, I think, we'll finish on that.

I think one of the challenges of modern government education is just sort of bullet pointing facts.

Just take these brute facts into your head. There was a date where this thing was signed.

Here's who was there. That sort of a thing. It's just there's no background world view understanding. Why were they thinking this way? What led up to this?

What was the tradition? What were they thinking? What was the nature of the conflict? What was the defense on either side?

You don't get any of that. I went to public school. I grew up on military bases as a military brat or air force brat.

And so, they're government schools. And that's all I got. I got exactly that. History is just sort of like here's a date.

Here's a fact. Don't know anything about it. Don't know why. I don't know why that's so special. Any more of those dates and facts may or may not be accurate.

Now they'll just get altered. Because if it's just a fact anyway, it's just a change of word. And we have generations of this is just detestable because it has no meaning.

It means nothing. You just have to put it in the work and you get nothing. Get nothing. Yeah. Love Zach Launschlager.

Thanks for the opportunity, brother. Hope this was an enjoyable experience.

I know for sure that I'll be going back to listen to it several times. And no doubt. And I hope you do the same.

Don't forget everybody. Please be in prayer just quickly for end abortion now. Lots is going on around the country right now.

I just have to say it. There are no abortion free states. This fight is really just in many ways kind of at the genesis.

In many ways right now across the country ballot measures happening, including our state, Arizona, that would put the right to kill your child essentially from conception up to nine months into the state constitution.

I've said it and I'll keep saying it because I hope that it's going to stick in some way that I think we're about to enter into the bloodiest and most brutal part of this

Holocaust we've ever seen. If these ballot measures are happening across the country, we're talking about more freedom to kill than we ever had before in many of these states.

With that, please be in prayer because we are working hard. We're working hard with some organizations and some pretty big heavy hitters right now to make sure that we put a stop to these things.

So pray for that, but also we have even new states that have popped up with legislators who want to put bills of equal protection in.

So we've got a lot of work to do and we need your help. So please pray for us and go to endabortionnow .com and give financially there.

It's amazing the things that the Lord has asked us to do and he's giving us the opportunity to do. But it's also amazing when you consider what he's asking us to do to look at our size.

Like, you know, some of the things that we're doing right now that people are like, well, that's going to cost you about a million bucks to do. We're like, well, okay.

Where do we get that from? Because we you know, and we don't have it to do a particular fight against the ballot measure.

But it needs to be done. So with that, I just want to ask you to just pray. Just pray to the Lord to continue to bless and use us.

And if your church has not signed up yet to go out and get the training, if you haven't got the training yet for going out to save lives at the abortion mills and all the training and free resources join together with almost a thousand churches across the nation and around the world who are going out to save lives.

Just go to endabortionnow .com and sign your church up so we can get you all the training and resources for free so you can go out and save some lives at the mills.

And I think we're good there, right? Yeah. We're going to end it there? Let's end it. All right. So that's Luke the

Bear. Peace out. I'm Jeff, the Coleman Ninja. And that's Zachary Conover. See you guys. That's the

Zach sign. He's the Zach and Zach. That's right. Thanks for being here, Zach. All right. Catch you next week right here on Apologia Radio.

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The Academy. I am Eli Ayala of Revealed Apologetics and I will be bringing a six -part series on presuppositional apologetics.

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