“The Source of Man’s Rights”

Freedom is living in obedience to God’s laws. Disobedience brings confusion, unreality, poverty, and imprisonment. While man can take certain freedoms from his fellow man, he cannot make other men free. Freedom is something each man and woman must secure, by God’s help, for himself. Each generation must decide for itself the price it is willing to pay to live in obedience to God, unrestrained by sin or the tyrannical government of other men.

The founders of the United States, firmly committed to absolute and divinely guaranteed freedoms, understood these truths and built them into our founding documents. Our Declaration of Independence states the reality and source of all true freedom: 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 these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

The political battle of our age centers on this issue: Whom must the state obey? If the state is god (the final power and authority of men and law on earth), as the secular-humanist religions of socialism maintain, then those men who politically rule the state are god. The battle for the nations hinges on this question: Does man look to other men to determine his ultimate rights or to his maker? This nation once possessed the right answer. Now, in its increasing rejection of God’s laws, it is moving toward the same imprisonments of all other godless societies that worship the power of man’s laws.

We are told that freedom is given or taken away by the power of the state—that the state is given the responsibility to rule on civil issues on God’s behalf is not in question. Paul tells us this in Romans:

Let every person be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority, except from God, and those which exist are established by God. Therefore he who resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves. —Romans 13:1-2

But the state cannot control for its citizens the rights that God alone dispenses. Marxism tells us that the state is God walking on the earth; the state is where the possibility for true freedom is embodied. The state is the “will of the people” as determined by the philosopher-bureaucrat. The state tells the Church what it will and will not teach or where it will or will not meet. What is best for society, it says, is for religion to be removed from public life. The state says it has the right to so determine. It knows what is best for the people because it is the voice of the people.

We all must learn one thing: Freedom is a gift given by God to those who choose to be free by clinging to the cross, even at the threat of death. Jesus died to secure our freedom. In a lesser way, countless thousands have followed Him by giving up their lives to secure freedom for us in both war and peace. The state rules by our permission, and its only right is to obey the founding documents to which it looks as a statement of its authority. And that is…

THE BOTTOM LINE.

This month’s Bottom Line is excerpted from Chapter 7 of Dennis Peacocke’s book, Winning the Battle from the Minds of Men, available in the following formats: Paperback | Kindle | eBook | Spanish eBook

Katherine interviews Dennis on the re-release of Winning the Battle for the Minds of Men: Watch YouTube Video or Listen on Podcast