In the last century, more than one hundred million people perished from the wars, starvation, disease, and mayhem unleashed by a gallery of evil rogues. The list is a portrait in

horror: Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Mussolini, Hussein, Kim Jong, and countless others. We are right to wonder why Christianity, Islam, and Judaism provided scant assistance during the last century’s monumental struggles between good and evil or, for that matter, during the horrific evils of the preceding two thousand years.

In this new century, brutal life-and-death struggles play out in the lands of Middle Eastern tribal cultures from whence scriptural monotheism first arose. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, and other nearby killing zones, the bloodletting in God’s name and from evil’s gun barrel continues. Terror for the sake of terror is in play. And tomorrow, the conflicts’ proponents may spill rivers of blood in other neighborhoods as the world nervously anticipates the next catastrophe.

But wherever future terror is outsourced, it is a near certainty that the Near East’s three ancient scriptures will fail in their original divine missions to restrain evil. Absent profound change, the world will experience again and again the trademark brutality of the ancient desert Bible belt.

The Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Koran are hand-me-downs revealed to superstitious tribes millennia ago. Their world is not ours. Nevertheless, the three brother faiths still call us back in time to the same Father via three antiquated lines of communication. Judaism’s text is three thousand years old, Christianity’s approaches two thousand years, and baby brother Koran was delivered to the Muslims fourteen centuries ago. The truths of centuries past—if they ever worked—are broken swords in the modern struggles against evil and for liberty. Consider these truths of the ancient Near East:

If two men are having a fight, and the wife of one tries to help her husband by grabbing hold of the other man’s genitals, show her no mercy; cut off her hand. (Deut. 25:11–12 Old Testament)

Everyone must obey state authorities, because no authority exists without God’s permission, and God has put the existing authorities there. Whoever opposes the existing authority opposes what God has ordered. (Rom. 13:1–2 New Testament)

Allah has promised the . . . unbelievers the fire of hell to abide therein; it is enough for them, and Allah has cursed them and they shall have lasting punishment. (Koran 9.68)

So it was in those ancient times when most people still worshipped idols and child sacrifice was not uncommon. Today this book offers a new and hopeful way. The Final Testament. It is liberty as the faith that was delivered by America’s divinely inspired Founding Fathers. It is a dramatic and powerful new course that traditionally faithful and independent truth seekers will find inspirational.

It is the last best chance for a peaceful world.

We know how man’s story began at the dawn of time in the biblical garden of Eden. Had we been present, our voice of collective experience would have implored, “No, Eve, no, don’t do it. Don’t listen to the evil snake. Please . . . no . . . don’t!”

But there were no such words of caution for the young naïf, naked in mind and body. Such complete innocence swims without the life jacket of worldly restraint. So the worst occurred—Eve plucked the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, and for 5,768 years thereafter (according to the Hebrew calendar), God has struggled to subdue the resulting evil.

The battle has been maddening. Not long after the Garden of Eden became a dangerous neighborhood, the ancient Lord grew despondent, and when he

saw how wicked everyone on earth was and how evil their thoughts were all the time, he was sorry that he had ever made them and put them on earth. (Gen. 6:5–6)

What’s an ancient God to do? First, the unimaginable—annihilation:

I will wipe out these people I have created, and also the animals and the birds, because I am sorry that I made any of them. (Gen. 6:6–7)

Save for Noah, his family, and their animal pairs who sailed a huge ark through the great flood, the Lord’s execution proceeded:

Every living being on the earth died—every bird, every animal, and every person. Everything on earth that breathed died. (Gen. 7:21–22)

God soon realized his mistake: that as long as even one man lived, evil would continue. While the horrific cataclysm wrought by forty days of biblical downpour drowned mankind, hydra-headed evil swam to safety. Evil survived. Thus, the intended remedial prescription of a flood holocaust had been a divine error of incalculable dimension. So the Lord said, “Never again.”

Never again will I put the earth under a curse because of what people do. I know that from the time they are young their thoughts are evil. . . . I promise that never again will all living things be destroyed by a flood. (Gen. 8:21, 9:15)

Tragically, in that first great confrontation between God and Satan, mankind lost. Evil continued. However, God was ready to try again, and the second effort is recorded in the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible). For its day—about three thousand years ago—it was a uniquely progressive strategy. Instead of drowning evil beneath a flood of water, he would destroy it with a flood of statutes. Thus, from Mount Sinai in the Egyptian desert, the Lord decreed a tablet of ten famous commandments—along with six hundred lesser-known others—to form a complete body of laws

for holy living. Evil would be legislated out of existence:

Condemn to death anyone who offers sacrifices to any God except me, the Lord. (Exod. 22:20)

If a man has sexual relations with another man, they have done a disgusting thing, and both shall be put to death. (Lev. 20:13)

Whoever curses his father or his mother is to be put to death. (Exod. 21:17)

Do not mistreat any widow or orphan. If you do, I the Lord . . . will become angry and kill you in war. Your wives will become widows, and your children will be fatherless. (Exod. 22:22–24)

The Lord dramatically field-tested his new anti-evil weapon in the Sinai Desert and then in ancient Canaan (now Israel). Twelve Hebrew tribes were chosen to receive and live according to the stringent demands of divine law. They tried. They failed. Sheriff God was often brutal in enforcing the law, but in the end, evil was still everywhere.

Then the Hebrew Bible ends with the announced coming of the end. Evil was winning, and a new cataclysm would wipe the slate clean; but it never happened.

So what’s a God to do? Try again? Jesus was born, and there began yet another cycle of divine war against an invigorated Satan. The epic battle of good versus evil was again fought in the parched barrio known as Canaan. But was it really divine? Was a creed of loving pacifism the Lord’s ultimate weapon against virulent malevolence? Christianity offered vague hope against evil in this world while emphasizing the grand prize of salvation in the next. Under a strategy of love and retreat in the earthly battle against Satan, the army of Christian faithful was to reassemble in a heavenly dimension, but until the coming apocalypse

love your neighbor as you love yourself. If you love others, you will never do them wrong; to love, then, is to obey the whole law. (Rom. 13:10)

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may become the children of your Father in heaven. (Matt. 5:43–45)

Were these New Testament revelations the Lord’s sharpest spears against evil? “Of course,” goes the response of the Christian faithful, but are they right? We shall see.

Jesus and his apostles preached that the end was very near. God had had enough of Satan and earthly battles against him. The good news was that the formula of faith in Jesus for the reward of eternal salvation was available to all. Heaven was wide open for business. The bad news? Eternal damnation was the price for refusing the offer—or for never receiving it.

Whether divine or merely inspired, Christianity was a new declaration of war against evil with a promised victory lap in an unseen heaven, not on earth. Divine intervention? In any event, goodness remained a rare oasis in the Bible belt.

So what’s a God to do? Try again? Islam asserted that the Lord (pronounced Allah in Arabic) finally got it right centuries later. Detailed new war plans in the fight against Satan were angelically delivered in secret to the Prophet Muhammad during the years AD 610–630: it was the Koran. That complex scripture offered much that was progressive in its time, especially in its place—the same rough Near East neighborhood which had been the devil’s playground since the beginning of time. Nevertheless, the question needs to be asked, has Islam slain the beast?

Ironically, many now argue that Islam is the beast.

What did God do next? Apparently, not much for a least a millennium after Muhammad. Then, in 1776, the world changed when these words were written:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

Most people recognize these words as a passage from America’s Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson and formally adopted on July 4, 1776. Usually unrecognized is that this Declaration, the Constitution of the United States with its Bill of Rights, and the essays known as “the Federalist Papers,” completely revised mankind’s relationship with God and with each other.

More than a revolution of war, Jefferson and his colleagues were inspired to author a revolution in rights. The divine right of kings gave way to the divine right of liberty. For the first time, man was viewed as a sovereign being to whom God gave broad freedoms and liberties that neither man nor nation may deny or diminish. In the eighteenth century, such ideas were as radical as anything Moses, Jesus, or Muhammad had ever offered their tribesmen.

Could it be that between 1776 and 1791 the desert’s ancient scriptures were superseded by a new world’s new covenant—the final covenant—one delivered not in secret but in sunlight to an astonished world? Or had God retired after giving a message to Muhammad, or even earlier? Are the faithful forever bound by ancient revelations ordering death for insolent sons, love for those who would kill you, and a heavenly paradise to martyrs for mayhem?

What better work has been done than the revolutionary spread of the most powerful idea in history: that the Creator endowed mankind with inalienable rights that, like our hearts and souls, are inseparable from our humanity? History provides no other act of God or man so profoundly good or valuable. Was this epochal change divine intervention?

When and through whom divine intervention has occurred in mankind’s affairs is a matter of faith; the Bible shows that the Lord cannot or will not assure the victory of goodness. He needs or wants help, but whose help? Moses? Jesus? Muhammad? Thomas Jefferson? James Madison?

As new truths emerge, faith can change. It has in the past, and it ought to today. This book’s purpose is to precipitate a worldwide revolution in faith, leading to a peaceful world in which life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are universally experienced. The idea capable of moving the world is this: the Final Testament has arrived but remains unrecognized. A miracle has occurred. The uplifting power of the American Revelation has already spread around the globe, arguably improving more lives more quickly than all prior scripture combined. By recognizing the miracle of our gift, an energized call for liberty can reach the world’s darkest corners where dictators, totalitarians, and thugs wearing cotton robes or silk ties trample inalienable rights and instinctive hopes.

The modern world is an especially dangerous place. If we believe that God exists, then history must reflect his presence for good somewhere. Faith suggests a divine eighteenth-century gift incalculably better than the failed ways of the ancients. And understandably so. The authors and historical figures of the Bible and Koran confronted trials that differ greatly from the tribulations of the modern age. Thus,

no foreigner shall eat the Passover meal, but any slave that you have bought may eat if you circumcise him first. (Exod. 12:43–44)

So if your right eye causes you to sin, take it out and throw it away! (Matt. 5:29)

When you travel through the earth there is no blame on you if you shorten your prayers for fear the unbelievers may attack you: for the unbelievers are your open enemies. (Koran 4:101)

The Final Testament—the Declaration of Independence, along with the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers—offers far greater hope than ancient scripture in the endless post–Adam-and-Eve struggle to defeat mass evil. Not all at once, but once and for all. We need no longer repeat ineffective mantras from ancient tribesmen whom we would never invite to dinner. We need no longer pray blindly in the long shadow of the Near East. No doubt, many people quietly yearn to wash their hands of that Jurassic Park of biblical conflict. However, with enough faith, we can imagine even Eve’s old Iraqi neighborhood a garden of peace.

This book steps inside the covers of the Holy Bible in order to attend the birth of evil and observe its rise to power. From one chaotic corner of a still fl at earth, the Old Testament gave the Western World a living God and his sacred rules for fighting back. We then proceed to Christianity’s dramatically amended good-versus-evil battle plan. Pillars of belief about an “all merciful” Lord may wobble, and our vision of an idealized Jesus may falter, but these realizations are necessary reality bumps on the road to a new beginning. Finally, this volume discusses a program for canonizing the Final Testament and then harnessing the extraordinary power of human liberty as faith.

Divine Intervention: Jesus or Jefferson is intended for all people, not solely those of faith. It seeks to challenge our imaginations and raise questions about life-changing matters we take for granted. It argues that no other commandment can stop mass evil—that no other scripture will prevent future Attilas, Hitlers, Stalins, boot-heeled tyrants, thugs, and crooks from tragically proving that history tragically repeats itself. It posits faith in mankind, whose invigorated congregational energies can wrestle mass evil to the ground. God and diplomats have failed at the task for at least 5,768 years; but a billion congregational voices inspired toward values-based liberty will succeed.

It is appropriate to note that your author is not a pretend gospeler but a retired business lawyer—serious, instinctively skeptical, and unattached to establishment religion. However, the goal of universal liberty amid the sustaining virtues outlined by America’s Founding Fathers is an irresistible magnet. Nothing else like it has worked since the Garden of Eden. We have been immeasurably blessed by living free in the land of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and other inspired leaders. Because of them, we owe future generations the best of our vision. We can honor that obligation by opening our eyes to a new possibility: the sacredness of our eighteenth- century gifts.

No matter your present views, you are likely to be tested, shaken, and almost certainly changed by this important journey. Truth has that effect. So does faith. Whether it is considered truth or faith, the Final Testament holds that the freedoms to speak, write, worship, assemble, and elect leaders of our choosing for limited periods are not concessions from the powerful but every human’s divine right. This book is dedicated to making this right every person’s fate.