THE EMMAUS WALK PRESENTS:

"The Ten Commandments,"

How We Have Broken Them All in America,"

by Ronald Ginther

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Sixties against the Ten Commandments, outlawing them from U.S. public schools on the basis, not from over two centuries of legal and judicial precedent that favored the Ten Commandments in all our Christian-founded public schools, but on the advice of a liberal, secular-humanist psychologist who testified to them that the Ten Commandments displayed in a school might be "psychologically damaging" to a child who saw them! The secular humanist court swallowed this, hook, line, and sinker--and DOWN WENT AMERICA, MORALLY, CULTURALLY, AND SPIRITUALLY, with this single ruling inspired and originating in hell. The U.S. Congressional Record registers the statistics of all the major areas of national life, and it shows without question that the incidents of teen pregnancy, violence, murder, and all kinds of mayhem shot up exponentially from the date of that ruling. The schools declined scholastically too--at the same catastrophic rate. This was the ax that cut and swept away the very foundation, not only of education, but of our national life and our nation's health and welfare. This ruling was an act of war not just against America but against God--it was outright rebellion.

The Ten Commandments--what are they? Why must our nation ignore and shun and forbid them to its peril? The first thing is that they are the laws of God, given to man to govern individuals, societies, and nations--all of them!

These divine laws supersede all human laws and civil law codes. America is not exempt! Psalm 103: 17-19 declares to the world: "But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him, and His righteousness to children's children. To such as keep his covenant, and to those who remember His commandments to keep them. The Lord has established His throne in heaven, and his kingdom rules over all."

The Word of God, which is binding for all the earth and all its people and nations, holds us all to the Commandments of God--and these include the Ten Commandments, which codify all his commandments in ten "Thou shalt not's".

This is the greatest and best formulated law code that has ever existed. It is perfect and absolutely flawless, in fact. It is complete in every respect and comprises every aspect of human life on the planet. No human being devised it--it came out of the mind of God, who is Justice in one of his divine attributes. How could a flawed, fallible, fallen human being ever devise a completely just law code. Hammurabi, Justinian, Suliemen the Magnificient, Napoleon--their law codes are flawed simply because they are human-created. No committee could do a better job, no legislature either. Only God could create the glorious Ten Commandments--and our Founding Fathers in America recognized that the Ten Commandments were the best legal code in the world upon which to base our legal institutions, our society's morality and education, and our laws governing the nation. They were absolutely correct, as the results have proven--America rose to become the freest, most prosperous, and greatest nation on earth. But all this we have thrown away, thanks to the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Congress's failure to turn this around.

How does America measure up to these commandments which it has foolishly, defiantly, thrown away and trashed?

I THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME

America has many gods--among them money, academic credentials, power, celebrities, drugs, awards, sex, mobsters and Marlon Brandoesque "godfathers," material things, prestige--the list is almost endless. These gods rule Americans and make them slaves who then commit every sort of sin and abomination that God hates and tells us in the Bible he hates. We broke this commandment as Americans, and are breaking it every minute of every hour of every day--and we are still not repenting. Nobody can judge us, we tell others, even the people we have wronged. Victims all across America cry for justice--and there is virtually none in America, because the justice system is so perverted for the sake of money-grubbing lawyers and secular humanist judges and juries who blame the victim and condone the criminal.

Verdict: GUILTY! Sentence: DAMNATION, DESTRUCTION, AND HELLFIRE FOREVER.

II THOU SHALT NOT MAKE TO THYSELF ANY GRAVEN IMAGES

All other the country we build lavish, hundred-million-dollar "Presidential libraries" and "Halls of Fame" to immortalize and exalt our various leaders and cultural idols--and give them far more attention and reverence than we ever give to God who alone deserves such praise. One sports celebrity, for example, is given a bigger salary than the entire income of a mega-church--we are talking 70 to 100 millions or so for a few years of ball playing! We lavish hundreds of millions on world-class art museums, on concert halls, on casinos at Biloxi, Mississippi or New Orleans, on sports arenas, on Olympic Games sites, on flight museums, on racetracks, on the space program and the space station--while the billions of people in the world goes unevangelized because only a trickle of Americans' money goes to God's work. Our images are shining fool's gold, indeed, just like the images of Rome, Assyria, Greece, India, and China--nations that forgot God and were destroyed.

We bow down to these images, though they can do nothing for us spiritually and rob us of our true purpose in life, which is to serve and glorify God, not man.

Verdict: GUILTY! Sentence: DAMNATION, DESTRUCTION, AND HELLFIRE FOREVER!

III THOU SHALT NOT TAKE THE NAME OF THE LORD THY GOD IN VAIN

The precious, peerless, saving name of Jesus Christ, the Name that is above all names and most deserving of the greatest respect and adoration, is the name used most by Americans to swear by in curses. His holy Name is profaned in the mouths of men, women, and children coast to coast, Canada to Mexico, by pagans and Christians alike. His Name is profaned routinely in films, on TV, on concert stages, in interviews, in government, in Congress, in the Supreme Court, in the military, in child care centers, in the ACLU offices, in NEA conferences, in publishing houses, in TV media headquarters, in newspaper offices, in financial centers, in major corporations, in the Planned Parenthood abortion-referring centers, in schools and universities, in sports venues--everywhere in America. His Name, spoken reverently by any God-fearing saint, is rejected, rebuked, outlawed, proscribed, spat upon.

Verdict: GUILTY! Sentence: DAMNATION, DESTRUCTION, AND HELLFIRE FOREVER!

IV REMEMBER THE SABBATH DAY, TO KEEP IT HOLY.

America is repealing all its blue laws, that kept the Sabbath day holy, so that it can allow business free rein on Sunday and make Sunday just like any other day, a working day, in other words. God, reverence toward Him, is thrown out of the whole week. In Washington State, a law was passed to permit state liquor sales on Sunday. Governor Christine Gregoire, Democrat, pushed this bill, and signed it. Look at all the malls and stores that are open doing business on Sunday--keeping millions at work without a Sunday off to go to church and attend to spiritual needs of their own and their families' and their church's too.

Verdict: GUILTY! Sentence: DAMNATION, DESTRUCTION, AND HELLFIRE FOREVER!

V HONOUR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER

Parents are routinely neglected by their families in America. Millions are pushed into nursing homes by their grown children, who then never visit them or see how they are being taken care of. Or they are left unattended at home without checking or calling or doing any of the loving things children should do for their aged parents to help them. This crime is ignored, denied, and epidemic. We all see it happening, though most of it goes on behind closed doors. Parents are routinely ignored, too, when it comes to their godly admonitions--children when leaving the homes routinely discard every last vestige of morality and decency and live selfishly and immorally, without thought of any consequence or accountability. They cast a thick layer of mud on their parents' names and reputations by their immoral, self-destructive lifestyles. This kind of crime is ignored, even promoted by film makers, book writers and publishers, and educators--who deliberately belittle, trivialize, ridicule, and defame (making fathers look like bumbling idiots and portraying mothers like cruel abusers or even prostitutes) them in the eyes of the children for the big money they get. State legislators pass bills to take away all parental rights over their own children in their homes--and then criminalize their attempts to discipline wayward, rebellious children, who were taught in the schools to disrespect and disregard their parents! Sex education in the schools promotes homosexuality, and portrays marriage of one man with one woman as archaic and evil, so that the children grow up and take on sexual "relationships" without any thought of marriage.

Much of the popular music--gangsta rap, punk rock, hip hop, etc.--defames parents and even tell the children to rebell and kill their parents in the lyrics of the songs (yet Americans are horrified when the children go and do just that--slay their parents in the most brutal fashion). This music also degrades women to the level of rutting dogs (encouraging the abuse of women in every respect, in ways that would make even copulating dogs blush), and promotes racism, rape, gang rape, murder, and sexual perversion. There is hardly a voice raised against it in America--despite the tremendous harm it has done and is still doing to American youth and also international youth. Why? It is a multi-billion dollar industry--violent, pornographic, abusive, racist, sexist music pays the corporations and banks and billionaires that finance and profiteer off the rock stars. But God Almighty hates and abominates it--and it is damned to hell along with all who practice, promote and profiteer--for it is used by Satan to destroy millions of young people here and the world over.

Verdict: GUILTY! Sentence: DAMNATION, DESTRUCTION, AND HELLFIRE FOREVER!

VI THOU SHALT NOT KILL

Infanticide is universal in America. We fund it with public monies too, up to 100 million dollars a year is given to Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the world, a giant industry of death profiteering off the death of millions of helpless unborn babies. We kill the unborn without mercy, with the Democrats fighting to preserve the most barbaric form of abortion, called "Partial Birth Abortion," and now the total of slain babies is over forty million since Roe vs. Wade was ruled in favor of abortion by the U.S. Supreme Court. Before that, abortions were being done "under the bar," but without any sanctions on them--as my own mother can testify, as she was offered to abort her first child by a nurse at the hospital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, back in the Thirties! She said, absolutely not! Her son became an evangelist whose ministry has saved thousands of souls for Christ.

Murder is an epidemic in America. Schools are the venues of teenaged mass murders. Churches are attacked and children and Sunday School teachers (even janitors, as just now in Moscow, Idaho, by a sniper who invaded the First Presbyterian Church with a high-powered rifle) are slain. Life is very, very cheap in America--thanks to secular humanists, liberals, the school administrators and school boards, the Democratic Party, and the U.S. Supreme Court and the lower courts as well throwing out the commandments of God, including this one.

Parents are murdered in cold blood, even strangled, by their sons turned amoral and monstrous, thanks to their secular humanist, Evolution-teaching educators who deny all of God's commandments and any responsiblity for an individual's acts and crimes. Parents turned elderly are abused and neglected and starved, a slow murder, by their grown children who deny any wrong-doing to courts, should it come to the attention of authorities. Murder of children receives only a slight sentence--kill an animal and you receive a far harsher sentence in the courts!

Verdict: GUILTY! Sentence: DAMNATION, DESTRUCTION, AND HELLFIRE FOREVER!

VII THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT ADULTERY

Adultery is lauded as a good thing for marriage, and a psychologist advised married Americans to commit adultery to put "spice" in a marriage. Adultery is glamorized by films, by the bed-hopping of Tom Cruise, Brad Pittman, and all the other sleeze artists/stars and starlets of Hollywood. Madonna has a child out of wedlock, but doesn't marry her "partner," probably because she doesn't know which male partner was the father, or because she doesn't want a husband who will have to share her enormous revenues from her shows and appearances and concerts and even her line of children's books. Adultery is one the most popular activities in America--and is fully approved by the society, by the media, by the films, books, celebrities, and even the government leaders--who throw away their wives, as Republican Newt Gingrich and others of high profile in Congress, have done--or who (like former President William Clinton who cheated on his wife with student White House interns and denied it even to an investigating court authorized under Kenneth Starr to look into his misdeeds while in office! America did not only know about his adulteries from his Arkansas governorship on to the White House, but gave him a standing ovation, and millions voted him in for second term for more of the same!).

Verdict: GUILTY! Sentence: DAMNATION, DESTRUCTION, AND HELLFIRE FOREVER!

VIII THOU SHALT NOT STEAL

Stealing is an epidemic in America. We have to lock everything up now, and put security fences round everything, and set guards night and day. But the thieves are mostly inside the fences, acting like honest people but stealing from us all--for we all pay for what the thieves steal. Employees routinely steal at work. Government leaders and office holders steal. Bank robberies, street robberies, auto thefts, burglaries, are for small cash only when corporate heads and CEO's of the biggest firms, Enron, World.Com, and others, bankrupt huge companies for their own profit, stealing the retirements of hundreds of thousands of workers and shareholders.

There is state sponsored, state-profiteering off of legalized theft, called gambling. This vice steals from the whole community in order to profit a few who own the casino. Everyone knows this. Yet Washington State is one of many sates that has legalized the lottery and gambling casinos in order to gain the revenues (saying it would go for education, but it has not gone to education)--while we all pay as a society for the money the state is raking in in order to misspend it on programs we do not need and to give the legislators pay increases when the citizens are suffering from high prices and high taxes and gouging at the pumps. The social breakdown and destruction of families from widespread gambling is very expensive, and rehab for gambling addicts has to be paid for by the taxpapers, on top of the total tab. Gambling drives out all the retail businesses too around it--just go to Lead, South Dakota, or Atlantic City, or Las Vegas. You cannot operate a viable economy around such places (what business wants to be around organized crime, prostitution, drugs, escort services, strip joints, and boozing except another casino?)--the reputable business flees, and gambling takes over like an enormous parasite or melanoma cancer that spreads rapidly and feeds on the whole society to maintain its rapid growth. Where do the taxes go?--out of the area--while the casinos, having devoured the local economy and destroyed the city's tax base, continue to monopolize the incomes of the whole city and the money of thousands who fly in on low-cost, casino-derayed air fares. Legislatures, then, become hostages to the casinos, without which they would be out of money completely! The crime lords who have their take in the casinos (for "protection" purposes, which is extortion) and the corrupt casiono owners then rule whole states! Restaurants too give a regular skim off the top to the Mafia--or they won't remain in business very long.

Verdict: GUILTY! Sentence: DAMNATION, DESTRUCTION, AND HELLFIRE FOREVER!

IX THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS AGAINST THY NEIGHBOR.

Lying is epidemic in America. Lawyers lie for huge fees. Lying in the schools by the students is universally accepted. Parents lie to their children, the children lie to their parents and teachers and fellow school mates--and the President lies and gets away with it, and the senators and representatives in Congress lie to each other, to the American people, and to the world. The State Department lies to other nations. We are a nation of liars since this commandment was thrown out.

Verdict: GUILTY! Sentence: DAMNATION, DESTRUCTION, AND HELLFIRE FOREVER!

X THOU SHALT NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOR'S HOUSE, THOU SHALT NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOR'S WIFE, NOR MANSERVANT, NOR HIS MAIDSERVANT, NOR HIS CATTLE NOR ANYTHING THAT IS THY NEIGHBORS.

We are a nation of shameless, materialistic coveters. Our cars, houses, designer clothes, designer nails, designer jewelry, luxurious lifestyles, are mostly all beyond need and display our overweening pride and dreams of prestige and self-glorification--we are determined to exceed the Joneses! And the Joneses are determined to exceed us! It is a prestige race that has devoured most of the incomes of Americans--one that is based on covetousness and greed.

Our vehicles are most sought after and popular that are the biggest, most lavishly "loaded" with TV, sound systems, plush interiors, etc.--ever devised by auto manufacturers. Practical utility is forgotten--the fastest, biggest gas-guzzling, four-wheeled monster we can buy is our choice! It also has to be better than the one we coveted that our neighbor is driving. And we must have multiple vehicles--fill our driveways and garages with them--whether we drive them or not. I knew a man who had a Rolls Royce, a Jaguar, a Lincoln, and a Suburban--and he couldn't drive any of them, due to his blindness of many years--these were his wife's choices, and to keep her happy he let her have everything she had always coveted in her neighbor's driveways, no doubt.

Verdict: GUILTY! Sentence: DAMNATION, DESTRUCTION, AND HELLFIRE FOREVER!

As Dr. Charles Stanley of Intouch Ministries has stated, you must present the justice of God before his salvation, for people to know their true plight and standing (GUILTY!) before a just and holy God, so that that they will cry out in repentance for his gift of mercy and forgiveness in Jesus Christ. Churches (and I have been present and heard this pronounced by the pastors) automatically assure their lying, thieving, adulterous, coveting, profane, murderous (you can murder people's reputations or think one hateful thought and be a murderer in God's eyes), stealing (you can rob God of his tithes, or rob your family of your time as a parent, or rob God of love and obedience, even if you do not steal somebody's money or possessions), false-testifying, and parent-neglecting congregations that they are forgiven the mercy of God, when they are not forgiven, because they are still unrepentant and unchanged and, therefore, guilty before God and on their way to punishment in hell.

Bill O'Reilly of Fox TV and the O'Reilly Factor program and his Talk Radio outlets--a self-styled "traditionalist"-- has put on the additional hat of theologian and stated that you cannot, like Dr. Jerry Falwell, tell homosexuals that they are going to hell and are judged by God--"you just can't do that." The Bible "begs to differ" with Mr. O'Reilly. Dr. Jerry Falwell was doing exactly what God and the Bible has told him to do--warn people going to hell that they must stop sinning and turn to God, and He will forgive and transform them and save them from hell and damnation. He was doing exactly what Dr. Charles Stanley says we must do as Christians, present God as a God of justice first to sinners before we say, "God loves you unconditionally." God's love is NOT unconditional. Yes, he loves everyone on earth, but we are all condemned sinners, guilty because we have broken His commandments, and a just God must sentence us to the full penalty if he is to remain just. We must as sinners see that we are lost, before we can be "found." The Prodigal Son in Jesus's parable had to "come to himself," see what a literal pigsty he had pigheadedly gotten himself into after he squandered his inheritance in a foreign country with his immoral friends and prostitutes, before he literally turned around and went back to his father to beg forgiveness and mercy and just be a hired man if he could. Jesus's dying on the Cross for us brings us nothing if we do not repent, like the thief hanging beside him on a cross. God still loves us, but his justice must be served first, if we reject the only way we can avoid the penalty, by repenting and turning to Jesus Christ. You cannot receive God's love and forgiveness first--then go on sinning while you sing "Amazing Grace." God's commandments will not be flouted by you or me or anyone, not even by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Congress, without impunity and punishment. God's forgiveness is free to us, but paid for by Christ's agony and death on the Cross--the only way God provided. Our good works could never pay the penalty--it is too great and our sin too great for any amount of good works to cover them in God's eyes. Only the shed Blood of Christ can cover and cleanse away all our sins in the eye of a holy, just God--this is the only way provided by God himself. Yet Americans think that they will get off somehow, that their good deeds will outweigh their bad deeds in God's scales. It will never happen! One sin, one commandment broken, makes us breakers of all Ten Commandments, Christ said. One lustful thought makes us a breaker of the Seventh Commandment and we are an adulterer, He also stated. It is for us to obey every single Commandment--and if we do not--we are condemned, guilty criminals in God's hall of justice. Again, only repentance, and forsaking our sin, acknowledging our responsibility for it to God, can gain God's ears. A shallow remorse, or a feeling or being sorry we are caught, cannot be real repentance. God is not fooled. Either we want to make a complete change, or we do not.

Won't a loving God prevent a sinner from destroying himself? People commonly say that if God is loving, there can't be a hell, or eternal punishment for sins. God couldn't possibly send people to hell, they say (which is true, since God is not sending people to hell, they have purposely chosen to go there by choosing to sin and not to repent).

As Stuart Maxwell Hawkins in his message, "Forgive Me," stated, the Prodigal Son's loving father did not pursue his wayward, rebellious, sinning son and try to persuade him to come back home, regardless of his sins--no, he waited, prayerfully no doubt, hoping his son would wake up to his situation and take responsibility and return home to sin no more. The positive thing to the story is that the Prodigal Son did in fact wake up, did in fact turn around, did in fact forsake his life of sin and folly, and did in fact return home to his loving father, who then forgave him all his sins, not ever mentioning them to his son. There was only talk of rejoicing that the lost son had returned home to the bosom of his family--no talk whatsoever of recrimmination against the Prodigal, except by the Pharisaical elder brother, whom the father soundly rebuked. So it is with our Loving Father in heaven. If we will only as a nation and as individuals, "wake up" to our terrible sinfulness, and repent (turn around), and forsaking our sins return immediately to our Father in heaven--He will run out to the road to meet us and throw his loving arms of forgiveness around us, and put a fine robe of righteousness around our naked shoulders, and order a banquet to be spread, and singing and rejoicing to be made to celebrate the return of the once-lost son.

America, fellow Americans--let us acknowledge our guilt now, this very day--for we have broken every holy commandment of God in the Ten above, have we not?--and return to God--and through calling on the saving Name of Christ Jesus we will be forgiven, transformed, and made sons and heirs. If we refuse, we will continue to bear the sentence of damnation, destruction, and hellfire forever! It is our choice.

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