Asking the Wrong Questions About Rights and Freedom

Part of the reason why it’s so sad that many people look to the government as their personal lord and savior is that it’s replicating the problem—freedom we squandered in the Garden of Eden. 

Instead of government protecting our rights to pursue God, when government is seen as the provider of all good things, it becomes a poor substitute for God.  We do as Adam and Eve did: thinking we know good from evil, can live independently from God, and use our freedoms and our God-given rights even as a godless society.  But we do so to our own detriment.

Too many in America are increasingly worshiping at the throne of 3 branches of government and looking for them to provide.  Power and money are the offerings we give.  And we take this full freedom we already have to pursue God, find full life and pursue happiness; and we gladly exchange it for whatever limited government scraps the lesser gods decide to give.

Have I given up hope on the sovereignty of God?  Absolutely not.

Have I given up on the freedom that I have?  Absolutely not—it comes from a sovereign God.

But I have realized that we’re on a track in the United States of America to hand over the very rights and freedoms we have been given by our Almighty Creator…to a pantheon of lesser gods whose wisdom is faulty, whose generosity is always self-serving, and whose lust for power is insatiable.  And we cheer in the streets that this is victory for America.  That’s really sad.

I’m reminded of Esau.

Look, I am about to die,” Esau said. “What good is the birthright to me?” (Genesis 25:32)

It’s the same kind of bad exchange Adam and Eve made.  And that we’re making today.  In the book of Hebrews, Esau is called godless because “for a single meal sold his inheritance rights as the oldest son” (Hebrews 12:16).  We act like Esau now—and become a godless nation that serves its government—and we will reap what Esau did.  “Afterward, as you know, when he wanted to inherit this blessing, he was rejected. He could bring about no change of mind, though he sought the blessing with tears” (Hebrews 12:17).

It’s not too late to put our rights and our freedoms in their proper places.  Christians ought to be the ones leading the charge to protect our God-given freedom since we claim to worship One God and serve Him only.  Christians—of all people—should be ones to see the futility of giving our worship to any institution, selling our liberty for any temporary thing.  Christians ought to live as Jesus admonished: take up the plight of the poor, the widows, and the orphans and to care for the sick, the homeless, and those in prison.  Christians–more than anyone else–should be the ones who know the cost of freedom!

Even the famous passage in Romans 13 about the institution of government and our requirement to be subject to the governing bodies says that we respect, honor, and submit to the government.

It doesn’t say we look to the government as an acceptable substitute for God.  We head down a wrong path when we trade our God-given freedom for a smidgen of security.

When we ask the wrong question (What rights does the government give us?), we’ve already ceded our worship to a lesser god which gives and takes away lesser rights.  When we ask the right question—What is the purpose of the rights we have?—we will give proper worship to God and God alone.  We will insist that our government remain in its God-given function.  Abraham Lincoln, in his famous Gettysburg Address said it well:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

“This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom…” when we begin to ask the right question.

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