KneEmail - a devotional by Mike Benson associated with Forthright Magazine
Liberty
THE AUTHORS OF this country's freedom documents believed that Christian faith in God and political liberty were inseparable...
Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that man's three basic rights were "unalienable" because they came from God and that governments were to respect these rights. Moreover, people were not created by God to serve the government. Instead, the government was created to serve man by protecting his three God-given rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Conversely, without God, the highest law-giver, rights are not "unalienable," but are based on whatever the government deems moral. Today many of the policies of the federal government on abortion, gay rights, euthanasia, and many other issues make it clear that the government has decided that whatever is legal is moral. According to many of the Founders, if legality determines morality than dictatorship must be the result. The framers of America's Constitution understood that there could be only one true foundation for republics -- religion and morality -- because if people voluntarily accept moral responsibility for their actions, the government will not to coerce them to. On the contrary, a democracy divorced from moral and religious foundations would destroy itself in crime, corruption, and inevitably become a dictatorship to restore order. Once "freed" from the constraints of divine higher law, people enslave themselves to the rule of government, or as Robert Winthrop, an early Speaker of the House of Representatives wrote, "men in a word must necessarily be controlled either by a power within them or by a power without them, either by the Word of God or the strong arm of man, either by the Bible or the bayonet." (Lowell Hagewood)
KneEmail: "When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; but when a wicked man rules, the people groan" (Prov. 29:2).