America 250: The Declaration of Independence

By Dr. Kent Keller, Teaching Pastor, Christchurch Miami

I did not have a single history teacher who made the subject come alive. Not one. For most of my life I thought history was dull - a gray parade of dates to be memorized and forgotten. Then, about seventeen years ago, I started reading American history for no reason other than curiosity, and I could not stop. The more I read, the more one word kept surfacing that no secular textbook would print: providential. As we come up on America's 250th birthday, I want to hand you what I found - because the story of the Declaration of Independence is not only a political story. It is, at its root, a theological one.

Two hundred fifty years ago, in a room in the Pennsylvania State House, fifty-six men signed a document they knew could get them hanged. And the deepest claim in that document is a claim about God.

The founding was a providential miracle, not just a political one

Gather in your mind the room where it happened. In one place, within a short carriage ride of Philadelphia and within a single lifespan of one another, sat the largest collection of political philosophers and statesmen the modern world has ever produced - Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and dozens more. Historians can explain a lot. They cannot fully explain that. As I told our church, "amazing what God has done, and it is a providential miracle what God has done."

The signers themselves said as much. The Declaration does not end with a flourish about human genius. Its final sentence pledges "a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence" - capital D, capital P - and on the strength of that reliance the signers stake "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." These were not careless men. Every one of them understood that putting his name to that page was, in the eyes of the Crown, an act of treason.

Two hundred fifty years ago right now, fifty-six men gathered in the Pennsylvania State House and pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor - on a firm reliance on divine Providence.- Dr. Kent Keller, "America 250: The Declaration of Independence"

That is not the language of men who believed they were the highest authority in the room. It is the language of men who believed there was a higher one.

Were the founders believers? What faith actually stood behind the founding

People ask me all the time whether the founders were Christians, and the honest answer is: it's complicated - and the complication is the interesting part. At its inception the country was roughly ninety-eight percent Protestant, with a smattering of Roman Catholics, Jews, and a handful of self-described free-thinkers. Even the founders who would never have passed anyone's membership interview - Jefferson and Franklin among them - were steeped in a thoroughly biblical moral universe. The intellectual water they swam in was overwhelmingly Calvinist, and the political theory they leaned on, especially John Locke's Second Treatise of Government, was itself built on the scaffolding of Christian assumptions about law, conscience, and the God-given dignity of the person.

You can see it in the words they chose. When Jefferson wrote of "the laws of nature and of nature's God," he did something no founding document in human history had done before: he bound reason and revelation together in a single breath and set both under the nation. John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, spoke without a flicker of embarrassment about God's providence over the young republic. Benjamin Franklin - no one's idea of an orthodox believer - proposed that the national seal depict Israel crossing the Red Sea, because the story of a people delivered by God was the story he thought best captured what had just happened in Philadelphia. These were not men trying to build a wall between faith and public life. They would have thought the wall was madness.

Where your rights come from - God, not the government

Here is the sentence the whole American experiment turns on, and it is worth reading slowly: "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."

Notice where the rights come from. Not from a king. Not from a congress. Not from a majority vote that could be taken back next season. They come from a Creator, and that single word changes everything. Your rights come from God.

Why the source matters

A right that government grants is a right government can revoke. A right that comes from God stands above every human power - which is precisely why it is "unalienable," a word that means it cannot be signed away, sold, or stripped from you by decree. The founders were not inventing that idea; they were echoing a much older one. Scripture says every human being is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). Dignity that high has to have a source that high. Take God out of the sentence and "unalienable rights" becomes a lovely phrase with nothing underneath it.

And that word - unalienable, sometimes written inalienable - carries the whole weight of the argument. It means a right that cannot be taken away, cannot be separated from you, cannot be voted, taxed, or legislated out of your hands. Think it through. If your rights are a grant from the state, then the state that granted them can amend them, suspend them, or quietly withdraw them the moment it finds them inconvenient. If they are a gift from God, no earthly power has the standing to lay a finger on them. The whole architecture of American liberty rests on which of those two sentences you actually believe.

What government is actually for: Romans 13

If the Declaration tells us where rights come from, the Apostle Paul tells us what government is for. Our text for the evening was Romans 13:1-7, where Paul writes that "there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God." Government is not an accident and not a necessary evil. It is an ordained instrument with a God-given job description, and Paul names three duties.

Promote the common good

Paul calls the governing authority "God's servant for your good." Good government exists to serve the welfare of everyone under it - not to enrich the powerful, but to make ordinary life livable, safe, and just for the whole community.

Restrain evil

A just government holds back harm and preserves public order. Paul is blunt: the authority "does not bear the sword in vain." In a world east of Eden, that restraint is a mercy - it is one of the ways God keeps human wickedness from running unchecked.

Punish wrongdoing

Government is, in Paul's words, "an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer." Justice administered through the rule of law is not vengeance; it is a reflection, however dim, of a God who is Himself just. In short: promote the common good, restrain evil, and punish evildoers. That is the biblical charter for a nation - and it is the standard by which every nation, ours included, is measured.

More than a birth certificate: the Declaration as a national covenant

Here is where my study stopped being merely interesting and became astonishing. We tend to treat the Declaration of Independence as our national birth certificate - the paper that records the moment the country was born. It is that. But it is also something stranger and deeper.

The Declaration of Independence is not only our national birth certificate. It is our national covenant - a covenant between the people of this country and God Almighty.- Dr. Kent Keller, "America 250: The Declaration of Independence"

I did not see it for years. I had read the Declaration more times than I can count before it finally dawned on me that its very shape follows the form of the ancient Near-Eastern covenants - the same literary structure scholars would later trace through the covenants of the Bible. Read it again with that in mind. It opens with a preamble. It moves into a long recital of history - the "long train of abuses" that had brought the colonies to this hour. It lays down solemn terms and obligations. And it ends in ratification, the signers binding themselves and their posterity to what they had declared.

Now sit with the timing of that. The scholarly reconstruction of how ancient Near-Eastern and biblical covenants were actually built did not exist in 1776; it would not be worked out for the better part of two hundred years. The men in that room were not tracing a template they had studied. Yet our national covenant fell, almost of its own weight, into the very pattern God had used with His own people. You may call that coincidence if you wish. I have read too much history now to call it that.

A country that forgets its story cannot keep it

Which brings me to the hardest thing I said that night. We are raising a generation that knows almost nothing of this history - and what little they've been handed is a caricature that says America is the worst country in the history of the world. A people taught to despise their own inheritance will not defend it, will not steward it, and will not pass it on.

A country that hates itself cannot and will not survive. A country that hates itself won't defend itself.- Dr. Kent Keller, "America 250: The Declaration of Independence"

Notice the Christian nuance here, because it matters. Loving your country is not the same as pretending it has no sins - America has plenty, and honesty about them is itself a Christian duty. But gratitude and honesty can live in the same heart. You can tell your children the whole truth about the founding - the providence and the failures - without teaching them to hate the gift they've been given. That is the difference between repentance, which heals, and self-loathing, which only destroys.

Let me make that concrete, because this is where honesty costs us something. Slavery is America's original sin - I use those words on purpose. It was inexcusable. And yet it is explainable in a way our children are almost never told. When the first enslaved Africans were brought to these shores in 1619, the colonies were under British rule; the institution was inherited, not invented here. Several founders wanted to write the abolition of slavery into the Declaration itself and were blocked, because the southern colonies would not have signed the document - and without them there is no union to reform at all. None of that excuses the sin. But remember, too, what it finally cost to undo it: this nation spilled more of its own blood to end slavery, at a higher price, than almost any people on earth ever paid to end their own. Grief and gratitude are not enemies. A mature Christian can hold the whole ledger - the providence and the shame together - and still love the country enough to want it healed rather than hated.

Where this leaves us: two passports, one allegiance

So what do we do with all of this on the eve of America's 250th? We hold two things at once. We give genuine, God-honoring thanks for a nation founded on the confession that our rights come from our Creator. And we remember that our deepest citizenship is not stamped in a passport at all. Paul, who told us to honor the governing authorities, also said "our citizenship is in heaven" (Philippians 3:20).

That order is freeing. Because Christ is Lord, we can love our country without worshiping it, serve it without despairing over it, and celebrate it without pretending it can save us. Only one Kingdom is unshakable, and only one King went to a cross to secure your unalienable worth. The best patriot in the room on July 4th is the one whose first loyalty is already settled - and settled at Calvary.

History has run the other experiment, too, and the contrast is worth seeing. America has lived under a single constitution since 1791. In that same span, France - which staged its revolution at nearly the same moment, but tried to do it without God, enthroning human reason alone - has churned through some fifteen constitutions and drowned more than one of its revolutions in blood. Reason cut loose from revelation does not build lasting freedom; it builds a guillotine and calls it progress. Ours has endured because the men who framed it believed that both their rights and their restraints came from a source higher than themselves.

This Sunday, come sit under the whole counsel of God with a faith family that loves both its country and its Christ. Join us at 11 AM at 8485 SW 112th St, Miami - or watch the full "America 250" message below.

Common questions about America 250 and the Declaration of Independence