America 250: The Declaration of Independence

Two hundred and fifty years ago, fifty-six men gathered in the Pennsylvania State House to hammer out a document that was going to be one of two things. The birth certificate of a brand new nation, or their own death warrant.

Every man in the room understood the arithmetic. What they were signing amounted to outright rebellion against King George III, and if it failed they would hang for treason. As Franklin put it: we must all hang together, or we shall assuredly all hang separately.

That room held perhaps the greatest collection of political minds ever assembled anywhere, and every one of them happened to be alive at the same moment and within a horseback ride of Philadelphia. There is only one word for that. Providential.

But start the week where Paul starts, because today's verse is not a comfortable fit with a revolution. Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. Christians have argued about that sentence for two hundred and fifty years, and anyone who tells you it settles easily has not read it carefully.

So here is the plain place to stand. Love your God and love your country. Worship your God. Do not worship your country. Your God is perfect. Your country is not. Do not confuse the flag with the cross.

That is not a lukewarm position. It is the only one that lets you love a country honestly, because you can then admit what it has done wrong without the whole thing collapsing.

Where have you let the two blur? Be specific, and be honest about which one you would defend faster.

Walter Isaacson calls it the greatest sentence ever 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 these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Kent would beg to differ, and can think of two better. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. But as sentences written by men go, he will grant Isaacson that one.

Now look at what follows it. To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.

Not to grant them. To secure them.

If you remember nothing else, remember this and teach it to your grandchildren: your rights come from God. They do not come from the government. We do not petition Washington or Tallahassee for the freedom to speak or to worship — those are already ours. The word is unalienable, and to alienate is to take away. What a constitution gives, a constitution can take back. Only God hands out rights that no one can remove.

Today's verses tell you what a civil government is actually for. Three things: promote the common good, restrain evil, punish those who do evil. Not to supply your every need. Not to guarantee equal outcomes. The founders knew that chapter, and even the ones who were no Bible students built on it.

So what have you been asking a government to be that only God is? Ask it of him instead today.

Treaties in the ancient Near East follow a fixed form. A statement of the participants. A historical prologue. Stipulations and obligations. Provision for public proclamation. An invocation of divine witness. Blessings and curses. Ratification by the people.

That is the shape of a covenant. It is the shape of today's verses, where God passes between the pieces alone, and the whole book of Leviticus is written on it.

Kent had read the Declaration of Independence he does not know how many times before it dawned on him.

Participants: we, and God. Historical prologue: when in the course of human events. Preamble: we hold these truths. Stipulations: twenty-seven grievances against the king. Public proclamation. An invocation of divine witness — an appeal to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of their intentions. Blessings and curses: if we win we are free, if we lose we die. Then ratification, colony by colony.

The Declaration of Independence follows the ancient Near Eastern covenant form.

Here is what makes the hair stand up. Scholars did not identify that form until the 1950s, and it was not widely known until Meredith Kline published The Treaty of the Great King in the sixties. Jefferson could not have known; nobody did, for nearly two hundred years. And Jefferson of all people — a man with no use whatever for the Old Testament, who took scissors to his Bible and kept only the sayings of Jesus.

God has never needed a willing instrument to accomplish something.

Where might he be working through something in your life you have not consented to yet?

Nobody should stand up and pretend the covenant was kept.

Slavery is our original sin — our national birth defect, as Condoleezza Rice has called it. And these men knew better. Jefferson wanted the Declaration to outlaw it and could not, because the southern colonies would not have signed and there would have been no union at all. So the men who knew better swallowed something very bitter to hold the thing together, and wrote a twenty-year sunset into the Constitution.

Twenty years came and went, and the answer was: says you.

We are the only nation that fought a civil war to end it, at a cost of six hundred and twenty-five thousand lives. That is worth saying plainly, and so is the other half: it should never have required one.

And there are more people in slavery in the world today than at any point in human history. Near fifty million. Which is exactly why this church is in the fight against trafficking here in Miami — not as a cause we admire from a distance, but because it is happening in this county.

Today's verse is God telling his people what fast he actually chose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to let the oppressed go free, to break every yoke.

Notice that it is addressed to religious people who thought they were already doing enough.

So do not let this stay historical. What is one concrete thing you could do this month about the fifty million — give, learn, serve, or speak? Pick one, and put it on the calendar before you close this.

Somebody asked how a Christian is supposed to hold all of this together.

Here is the answer God's people have always given. We are citizens of two kingdoms, and we should be good citizens of both — right up to the day your country asks something your God forbids. Then you say no.

That is today's passage, and notice the setting. The apostles are not rebels by temperament. They are standing before the council, having been told plainly to stop, and Peter's answer is one sentence: we must obey God rather than men.

He does not argue that the authority is illegitimate. He does not organise a rising. He simply declines, and accepts what follows — which in the next verses is a beating.

That is the shape of it. Subject in general. Immovable at one point. Willing to pay for the difference.

The believers in Thessalonica were accused of exactly this: acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying there is another king, Jesus. They were not wrong about the charge.

One last thing worth noticing. We have kept a single constitution for well over two hundred years. In that same span France has had fifteen. Their revolution was against God. Ours was for rights that God gave — and that no man may take back.

So end the week with the harder question, not the patriotic one. Where would you draw the line, if it came to it? You will not decide that well under pressure if you have never decided it at all.

We have no king but Jesus. Is that true of your Monday?