Thanksgiving 4 Centuries after Our Pilgrims’ First Celebration #323

November every year in America is historically a time of remembrance and Thanksgiving. What other culture in the world has a tradition like that?

To better appreciate the roots of this special season for us as a people, let’s unravel the chain of events that helps us understand the implications of what led to the divinely innovative beginning of a whole new national identity.

Nobody I know does that better than my friend Bill Federer – Listen as he describes parallels between the treacherous 16th century time of the Pilgrims and our time 400 years later.

You can watch this interview at: https://www.brighteon.com/ea893f37-bee7-427f-b229-2551e988dee2?t=368  Start at 6:08 of 1/22/2023 America Unhinged: Dr. John Diamond interview with Bill Federer

Here is a partial Outline of Bill Federer’s talk:

Kings typically killed some of their own country’s population that they didn’t like

The St Bartholemew’s Day Massacre described.

John Calvin wrestled with Romans 13.  What do you do when the authorities have a mandate to kill your wife and kids?

Eph 6 .. children obey your parents… is he required to obey an ungodly parent’s demand to do something against God’s expressed will.

Martin Luther King comments on unjust laws… obey government as long as it lines up with God’s word.

If you remove a king… chaos results. Another king comes in to change things… followed by more chaos.  how do you remove a king to restore order without another chaos?

The Pilgrims, following Bible concepts, began a “Covenant” form of government, where everyone follows a covenant with God and with each other. Everyone is taught the “law.” What motivates them is that they are personally accountable to God. Second, everyone is in a covenant with each other and with God.

05:35 The Pilgrims looked to ancient Israel as their model – particularly the first 400 years after Israel’s exodus from Egypt, before King Saul.

After Joshua’s time, there was no king in Israel for 400 years.

The kings of England adopted the ‘divine right of kings’ paradigm from the Biblical time of kings Saul and David and afterward.

06:35 The Calvinist puritans of New England looked to the pre-King Saul Bible period.

Kings of England were a theocracy. The king was head of the church. From 1535 onward people were required to take the “oath of supremacy” which forced all English subjects to obey the King in all matters, even of a religious or spiritual nature.

King James had several attempts on his life because of the discontent fomented by royal heavy-handedness.

Guy Faux assassination attempt.

King James was paranoid of dissenting groups whom he feared might assassinate him. This included the Pilgrims.

America’s founders came to get away from a “theocracy.”

09:36 Book of Common Prayer… The government raided those who prayed without this book being used to pray. Dissenters were officially condemned as ‘heretics’ and branded without fair trial because they dared to defy the king’s regulations of even their thoughts and prayers.

10:54 Conventical Act became The Riot Act in England because the government feared the “covenanters” could be planning a riot in their secret meetings as Christians wanting to gather in their homes to worship God.

John Bunyan was subjected to arrest and imprisonment for 12 years because of his boldness to meet privately in his home church.

Jesus clearly made following his teaching completely voluntary

Covenant churches were made of those who had no bishops and no requirement to bow to government authorized priests. They decided to not meet in church buildings but in the open fields.

17:18 The idea of having to believe the way the government believes prompted one group to buy passage from England to the Netherlands (the Pilgrims).

Federal is Latin for ‘covenant.’

The constitution is a way to prevent a president from ruling through mandates.

Thanks to Bill Federer, we can better see the powerful influence that rulers have over an oppressed people.

Do you think Jeremiah’s prophetic words speak to our generation today?

“Thus says the LORD, ‘Stand by the ways and see and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is, and walk in it; and you shall find rest for our souls…’” Jeremiah 6:16

Thanksgiving in America – a legacy worth reclaiming #316

 Dr Marshall Foster, the brilliant Christian historian, American patriot, and founder of the World History Institute, was a master teacher of the story of America’s brave pioneers. His remarkable documentary called “Monumental,” produced in collaboration with patriot actor Kirk Cameron, is a profound telling of one of the best kept secrets among the historic places in the story of the birth of the American nation.

Two years before he died, Dr Foster wrote a brief summary of some of the providential events in the story that 21st century families seldom know about the people that inspired the tradition of American Thanksgiving. It was published in the March/April 2019 issue of the World History Institute as “The Pilgrims: The Untold Story.” See it at: https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.cloversites.com/7b/7b1202d0-06c2-40f6-b287-4071ddc76a28/documents/Mar-Apr_2019_v1r2-singles.pdf

All of Dr Foster’s journal issues are archived at World History Institute | Journals or https://worldhistoryinstitute.com/free-downloads/journals

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Our Personal Quest to Reclaim a Legacy of Thanksgiving #367

by Dennis Petersen

 A lot has been researched and written about the proven personal benefits of living with a habit of expressing genuine gratitude.  It turns out that thankfulness is not typically a result of being happy, but rather, the opposite is true.  People who deliberately and openly confess their thankfulness to others are the happiest of people.  And isn’t it interesting that those who recognize that their lives have a purpose are the ones who are prone to give thanks to their Creator and to those around them.

Have you discovered your purpose?  Do you have a clear reason why you’re excited to get up in the morning?  If you have a mission to drive your daily goals, you’re a much happier person than those being driven by just a survival mode.

America is a nation of people with a centuries-old tradition of celebrating annual solemn days of Thanksgiving.  Yet, it seems that our current generation has almost no concept of the deeply personal conviction of the crucial importance of gratitude.  And it’s pretty obvious that that gratitude should most deservedly be directed to the Almighty Giver of every blessing and perfect gift in our lives.

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Tyranny or Liberty – the Choice is Yours

True Christians Obey God, Resist Corrupted Governors & Influence Their Nation for Good

Why, in 1620, did the little congregation of Pastor John Robinson’s English Christ-followers, whom we call Pilgrims, risk their lives, leaving their native land of England, to become unintended pioneers of an untamed wilderness in North America?  In a word, the motivation was tyranny – Religious tyranny.

Why, in 1776, did 30% of the British colonists in America risk their lives to declare what no people on earth had ever done to resist the ruler who dominated their private lives? Again, their motivation was tyranny – tyranny of their conscience by a greedy monarchy, preventing productive, law-abiding, God-fearing families from common natural rights.

The Role of Tyranny in God’s Providential History

Tyranny is a powerful motivator. It naturally evokes our human emotions to resist. In the 4,000 plus years since the Great Flood, almost a thousand generations of humans have experienced the rise of hundreds of tyrants.  Only among God’s chosen people, descending from Abraham, has the human family seen a divine pattern of human government! It began with Moses. It was able to inspire the Christian founders of America to form a model of human government like no other in all history.

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The Most High God raises up kings and takes down kings

The entire world of humanity witnessed one of the most pivotal events in history on January 20th 2025.  That reality of what began to happen then was well-expressed in the opening remarks of Donald Trump’s first address to our nation, eight minutes after taking his oath of office as the 47th President of the United States of America.

TRUMP: “The golden age of America begins right now!” (applause) From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. We will be the envy of every nation and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer. During every single day of the Trump administration, I will very simply put America first.

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Could celebrating Halloween be spiritually dangerous?

By Dennis Petersen
“Test all things; hold fast to what is good. Abstain from every form of evil.” 1 Thessalonians 5:21-22

Have you noticed how, even before October begins, when the pumpkin decorations start rolling out in the stores, that the dark side of the celebration becomes more obviously evil every year?

Did you know that the word Halloween can be translated as holy night? But holy for whom? What happens when a night meant to be sacred is hijacked by rituals of death and darkness?

The word Halloween comes from something that sounds sacred. It means ‘All Hallow’s Eve,’ meaning the evening before All Saints Day. In the medieval Christian calendar, November 1st was chosen to honor believers who had died as martyrs. The night before became known as the eve of this holy day. When church leaders chose November 1st for All Saints Day, that date was already marked by ancient peoples across Northern Europe. It was a time for rituals far older than any Christian observance. The church tried to overlay a holy remembrance on top of existing pagan celebrations.


All Saints’ Day, also known as All Hallows’ Day, originated in the early Christian Church as a memorial day for martyrs who were executed for their faith in Jesus by pagan governments, like the Roman Empire. The first known collective celebration occurred in the 4th century. Early believers had reverence for martyrs like the Apostle John’s disciple, Polycarp.  His celebrated model of faithfulness was documented in a written report called the “Martyrdom of Polycarp,” written shortly after his execution in AD 155.  The observance of All Saints Day was moved to November 1st by Pope Gregory III in the mid-8th century when it became a universal holy day (from which we get the word ‘holiday’ which is a festival or feast day).

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Josiah – Boy King – a model of bold humility

By Dennis Petersen

Did you ever discover something you didn’t know that made a big change in your life?

Have you ever heard of a boy named Josiah?

He lived over 2600 years ago.  He was only 8 years old when his extremely evil father (King Amon of Judah) was assassinated in his own house by his royal servants after only 2 years of being king of Judah.  Amon had followed in the grossly sinful footsteps of Josiah’s grandfather, King Manasseh. During his 55-year reign, Manasseh seduced a whole generation of God’s people to do more evil than the idol-worshipping Canaanites that the LORD destroyed by Israel’s armies in prior generations. Despite the 29-year flourishing of their people under Manasseh’s father, King Hezekiah, the people of Judah under Manasseh, followed his evil abominations to do more wickedly than God’s wicked enemies, the Amorites. They followed after immorality and idolatry that secularized the people of Israel under false gods. (2 Kings 21:2, 9, 11).

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The Creator of Mankind is regaining Center Stage of Human attention

By Dennis Petersen

The historic, providentially prepared founders of America, against all politically correct conventional wisdom of that day, defiantly and bravely declared that there are certain truths that are self-evident.

Have you noticed the very first truth they listed in the Declaration of Independence?  There’s not a hint that there was any dispute at all about the Biblical truth of the eternal existence of the Creator God.  In the 18th century, the reality of Jehovah God was undeniably embossed on the minds of virtually all thinking people.  In fact, even carelessly immoral and dishonest people, back then, would generally have agreed with the biblical truth that, yes, all humans must ultimately give an account to their Creator for the actions of their lifetime.

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Propaganda Exposed – The Make-Believe World is About to Collapse

Have you wondered recently… how much longer the insanity of absurdity can continue in our generation? What used to be understood as ‘fantasyland’ and ‘make-believe,’ has so badly dissolved many people’s ability to think rationally, that they lack the capacity to figure out that boys can never be girls and spider-man is just imaginary.

The unfortunate consequence is that we have had a large segment of society that for years has actually supposed that stores wouldn’t sell us poisons in our foods, and that corrupt politicians and unelected bureaucrats know what’s best for our well-being.

But that’s all changing.

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End of Humanity? Will you equip your loved ones to stand up against Wicked Evildoers?

Did you know there is an official agenda to replace the human race with robots, cyborgs and AI? That’s ‘artificial intelligence.’

As bizarre as that sounded just a few years ago, this agenda has been heavily promoted for decades by a coalition of many of the big-name national and corporate leaders in what is called the World Economic Forum. Their plan is to end the era of humanity and usher in a new era of neo-humanity.  They intend to make people into a blend of man and machine.  As unbelievable as it sounds, they confidently state that our thoughts and emotions will be monitored by AI – artificial intelligence – in order to combat … are you ready for it?… climate change! Is that the world you want for yourself and your children?

The more that the general public learns about this reprehensible plan, the more people are inclined to think that we might be living in the “last days” of this age or era of human history. We’re sure seeing a level of widespread evil in America like nothing since the mass exterminations of the 20th century.  

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