Constitution Revolution: Why the Founders Used Laws of Nature to Craft the Constitution

This post is the second in a weekly Constitution Revolution series that will cover the entire Constitution and many of the principles it was founded on.

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I have been doing the Constitution Revolution segment for TheBlaze Radio's Chris Salcedo Show for quite a while now so I decided to change things up a little for 2015. This year I am going to structure the segment so that each week builds on the last until I have covered the entire Constitution and many of the principles it was founded on. Obviously, my posts here will work together with the radio segments so that everyone who either listens to Chris’s show or reads these posts regularly will get a pretty comprehensive understanding of the Constitution.

It’s going to be awesome! So let’s get started.

Anytime you are doing anything with government, you have to keep in mind that our world was designed to work in a certain way. There are rules that govern everything. What goes up must come down, the sun rises in the east, and so on. The same is true for how people behave and how they relate to each other.

And as I explained this weekend on Chris’s show, if we want to be successful in anything we do in life, we have to work with those rules:

Just as important as understanding that there are rules for how the world works is to recognize that these rules do no change. They are timeless.

William Blackstone explained this concept beautifully in his work called the “Commentaries on the Laws of England”:

“This law of nature, being co-eval with mankind and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid derive all their force, and all their authority, mediately or immediately, from this original.”

The Founders understood the timeless aspect of natural law as well. In the Declaration of Independence, they laid out in beautiful detail what they believed several of these laws to be.

In doing so, they used a lot of phrases like “When in the course of human events…” and “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” that make it crystal clear that they were not listing rules that applied only to their specific political situation or that specific moment in history. They knew that the laws of nature they were describing are universal. These laws apply to all people and all times. (Larry Arn of Hillsdale College does a nice job of describing this in his book “The Founder’s Key.”)

That’s certainly not a popular point of view among today’s political and academic elite. But the fact is that William Blackstone and our Founders were absolutely correct on this one.

Think about it for a moment. Which of the self-evident truths that are listed in the Declaration of Independence are no longer true? Are all men no longer created equal? Do we no longer have rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

Of course those statements are still true. They have been true since the beginning of time and will be true until the end of time. And since we know that those statements are true and that they will always be true, it would serve us well to keep them in mind as we are creating governments and writing new laws.

So that’s Lesson No. 1: There are rules that govern the way our world works and those rules do not change. If we want to create an effective government, then our Constitution and our laws must be consistent with those rules.

Next week, I’m going to cover the single most important of those rules when it comes to government. Don’t miss it!

Chad Kent is an author and speaker with a unique style that makes the Constitution simple and fun. Listen to Chad every Saturday during The Chris Salcedo Show on TheBlaze Radio and visit his web site at www.ChadKentSpeaks.com.

Feature Image: Shutterstock

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