Template:Mayflower Compact

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Signing the Mayflower Compact in 1620 was not forming a government. In fact it was an agreement to prevent the formation of a government. Painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris 1899.

Over the course of time, our nation, with new members and new ideas and a new wilderness of modern civilization, has been re-formed for good and bad. To take an insightful look at the roots and realities of our nation's beginning may give us a new view of our own pilgrimage on this planet and the strangers we have become to our own ancestral forefathers.

I heard a pastor state during the Thanksgiving holidays that when the pilgrims signed the Mayflower Compact it was a great moment in American history where men came together and decided to “give their leaders the power to make laws.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. This thinking may stem from changes wrought in our modern public educational system that has often expressed a different view of history than those who actually lived it. It is also a view born out of a false biblical doctrine that suggests that all governments are instituted by God.

The original Mayflower Compact did not survive but I am pretty sure God's signature is not on that document or any other government document created by the hand of man. Governments are allowed by God, but they are instituted by men, not God. And many governments, even those created by the consent or by the voice of the people, are not only contrary to what God desires for men but in truth are historically a rejection of God.[1]

That is not to say that there is no government that is instituted by God. But simply put, except for the rarest of exceptions, most governments instituted by men are fundamentally flawed because men are flawed. The Pilgrims, like many before them and since, were simply trying to find their way back to a state of righteous liberty under God with varying degrees of success and failure.

God seems to have instituted the governing relationship and union of man and woman. But binding people together in groups of families to form nations governed by rulers seems to be an invention of Cain[2] and Lemech, if not Nimrod himself.[3] Most of these city-states were established by contracts and consent at first and later by brute force. What God established, besides the the family, was the Ten Commandments which contained a prohibition against making contracts and covenants.[4]



Audio
http://www.hisholychurch.net/kkvv/x3folder/140113societypaths04Core.mp3



Throughout the Bible we see stories of God and His prophets delivering men out of the hands of governments that are making laws and ruling over the people. Once the full extent of God's disapproval of this addiction of men to consent to rulers and grant more and more power to men is understood, it would seem strange to find any faithful minister of Christ praising the idea of giving men the power to make laws and rule over them.

From Nimrod to Egypt or Saul to the cry of the Pharisees[5] there is little biblical evidence praising the voice of the people[6] when they relinquish rights granted by God and allow men rule over those rights.

The Mayflower Compact was not a “forerunner of the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution.”[7] There is some serious question as to why passengers on the Mayflower even felt it was needed or what effect it actually had. The idea that this was the beginning of government or granting the power of any men in that place to rule and make laws for everyone else is absurd.

History is replete with men who learned to govern themselves and those who would govern their brothers or neighbors. The success stories include men who were self-sacrificing and full of virtue, and the history of the failures is born of another ilk.

In the days of early American settlements men came here for a variety of reasons and diversity of moral values. Some came for wealth and adventure, some for liberty to sin and some for liberty to serve God.

Phineas Pratt in his own narration of his arrival on these shores in 1622 said, “In the time of spiritual darkness, when the State Ecclesiastical of Rome ruled and over ruled most of the nations of Europe, it pleased God to give wisdom to many, kings and people, in breaking that spiritual yoke.”

The Separatists who came on the Mayflower were the Brownists of Leiden. Robert Browne taught that a congregation should autonomously run its own affairs. He and his brother had obtained preaching licenses from the authorities but Robert burned his in protest. By 1579, he was openly criticizing what was called the Church, its administration and leadership in Cambridge and was promptly arrested and jailed.

During 1583 a Proclamation banned the buying, selling or possession of his writings which led to the hanging of John Copping and Elias Thacker for selling Browne's “seditious” writings on faith and the Church.[8]

There had been a melding of the right arm of civil or royal government with the will of the Church for some time in England. Since men of the Church began to crown other men over their brothers, kings felt it profitable to enforce the will of men claiming to be the Church and servants of God.

These claims were beginning to be questioned by the people. They believed that the real Church was cut from a different cloth than that of those who claimed the office and often put their lives on the line just to ask the question,

  • “What does the Church established by Christ really look like?”

Other questions arise as we attempt to answer that:


Some Questions

More Questions

To find the answers, we must seek and strive to do what Jesus said the way He said to do it... Including attending to the Weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith which include caring for the needs of our neighbors and the widows and orphans of our society through Pure Religion in matters of health, education, and welfare. We are NOT to provide for the needy of society through the Covetous Practices and the men who call themselves benefactors but who exercise authority one over the other like the socialists do.

The Way of Christ was like neither the way of the world of Rome nor the governments of the gentiles who depend on those fathers of the earth through force, fear and fealty who deliver the people back in bondage again like they were in Egypt. Christ's ministers and true Christians do not depend upon systems of social welfare that force the contributions of the people like the corban of the Pharisees which made the word of God to none effect. Many people have been deceived to go the way of Balaam and the Nicolaitan and out of The Way of Christ and have become workers of iniquity.

The Christian conflict with Rome in the first century Church appointed by Christ was because they would not apply to the fathers of the earth for their free bread but instead relied upon a voluntary network providing a daily ministration to the needy of society through Faith, Hope, and Charity by way of freewill offerings of the people, for the people, and by the people through the perfect law of liberty in Free Assemblies according to the ancient pattern of Tuns or Tens as He commanded.

The modern Christians are in need of repentance.


"Follow me!" —Jesus the Christ.


Q and A
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  1. 1 Samuel 8:7 And the LORD said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.
  2. Genesis 4:17 “And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch.”
  3. Genesis 11:4 “And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top [may reach] unto heaven; ...”
  4. Exodus 23:32 “Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor with their gods.”
  5. John 19:15 “But they cried out, Away with [him], away with [him], crucify him. Pilate saith unto them, Shall I crucify your King? The chief priests answered, We have no king but Caesar.”
  6. 1 Samuel 8. Voice of the People http://www.hisholychurch.org/news/articles/voice.php
  7. Pilgrim Hall Museum, http://www.pilgrimhall.org/compcon.htm
  8. A Book which sheweth the Life and Manners of all true Christians (1582); A Treatise upon 23. of Matthewe and, Treatise of Reformation without Tarrying for Anie (1582)
  9. Matthew 20:25-26 But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister;
    Mark 10:42-43 But Jesus called them to him, and saith unto them, Ye know that they which are accounted to rule over the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and their great ones exercise authority upon them. But so shall it not be among you: but whosoever will be great among you, shall be your minister:
    Luke 22:25-26 And he said unto them, The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and they that exercise authority upon them are called benefactors. But ye shall not be so: but he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that doth serve.