Two hundred and fifty years ago, fifty-six men gathered in the Pennsylvania State House — we call it Independence Hall now — 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.
I have spent seventeen years reading early American history — not because anybody made me, but because I picked it up and could not put it down. Here is the first thing that astonishes me. 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.
Let me say plainly where I stand, because this room is full of flags tonight. I love my God and I love my country. I worship my God. I do not worship my country. My God is perfect. My country is not. We do not confuse the flag with the cross.
The greatest sentence
Walter Isaacson calls this 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.
I would beg to differ. I 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, I will grant him that one.
Look at the line just above it — the laws of Nature and of Nature's God. That is Jefferson doing something nobody had done in a nation's founding document: setting reason and revelation down side by side, in one breath. The Enlightenment gave him the supremacy of reason. The Bible gave him the supremacy of God. He took both.
And notice what follows. To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men. Not to grant them. To secure them. If you remember nothing else tonight, 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 — to alienate is to take away, and these cannot be taken away. What a constitution gives, a constitution can take back. Only God hands out rights that no one can remove.
Which makes us citizens rather than subjects, and makes the people in office public servants who answer to us.
Romans 13 tells 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.
The thing I did not expect
Now let me show you something you have almost certainly never heard.
I owe this to Dr. Richard Pratt, my Old Testament professor at seminary. He taught us that 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. And ratification by the people. That is the shape of a covenant — the shape of Genesis 15, and the whole book of Leviticus is written on it.
I had read the Declaration of Independence I do not know how many times before it dawned on me.
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 on my arms. 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 after he wrote it. 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.
Two nations in the history of the world have been founded on covenants. Old Testament Israel, and the United States of America.
The thing we did not do
I will not stand here and pretend the covenant was kept. Slavery is our original sin — our national birth defect, as Condoleezza Rice has called it. 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. 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.
Two kingdoms
Somebody asked me tonight 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, as the believers in Thessalonica did. We have no king but Jesus.
One last thing. 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.
