When you walk into the United States Capitol and look up at the House chamber, you will see twenty-three historical lawgivers carved in marble relief along the walls: Hammurabi, Solon, Thomas Jefferson, and others. And looking directly down toward the Speaker’s chair, at the center of them all, is Moses. Not from the side. From the center. The architects of that chamber were making a statement that the founders had already made explicit: law does not arise from the will of the majority or the preferences of the powerful. Law descends from God. The Ten Commandments, which Moses carried down from Sinai, form the moral bedrock upon which all civilized law rests.

James Madison, the primary architect of the Constitution, believed that the future of American government depended not on the power of government itself but on the capacity of citizens to govern themselves according to moral truth. Self-government was not simply a political theory to the founders. It was a theological conviction. They had read their Bibles carefully enough to know that human nature, left to itself, trends toward tyranny, either the tyranny of a ruler over the people or the tyranny of the mob over the minority. The only check on that tendency was a moral framework that stood above every human authority. And that framework was the Word of God.

People sometimes assume that the Ten Commandments are primarily about restriction: a list of things God forbade because He wanted to limit human freedom. They have it exactly backward. The commandments are the architecture of a flourishing life. They protect marriage, family, property, reputation, and the worship of the only God who can actually deliver what He promises. The first commandment, you shall have no other gods before me, is not the opening salvo of a divine power trip. It is the foundation of everything else. When God is rightly positioned as God, everything beneath Him has the possibility of being rightly ordered. When He is displaced, everything begins to unravel.

This is not abstract theology. It is the story of every civilization in human history. The nations that have built on the foundation of God’s moral law, protecting life, honoring family, respecting property, telling the truth, have been the nations where human beings have most flourished. The nations that have removed God from their foundation and replaced Him with the state or the party or the ideology have been the nations where human beings have most suffered. The commandments were not written for a particular century. They were written for human nature, which does not change.

The founding generation knew this, and they built accordingly. The question for every generation that follows is whether it will honor what was laid down or quietly dismantle it. Our courts and our Congress and our presidency are not the highest authorities in the land. God is. And the freedom we celebrate depends entirely on whether the people living under it remember that.