”Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage!”
Psalm 33:12 ESV
In just a few days our nation will celebrate its 249th birthday. That means the Declaration of Independence is celebrating its 249th birthday as well. With the signing of that Declaration by members of the 2nd Continental congress on July 4, 1776, our nation was born, emerging from a womb of great discontent with our past and present, but also with a great hope for a new tomorrow. Whereas all of the Declaration is important, what sets it apart for me and causes it to be such a powerful, beloved document is the preamble – and not even all of the preamble. For me it is the first 106 words which pack such great power and which resonate with me and others 249 years later.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. 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 have never taken time to dig deeper than a surface reading of those words, so I decided it was time to do so. As I began, I realized that the 56 men who signed that document had a collective worldview based on key beliefs which caused them to feel justified in declaring themselves and all others living in the thirteen colonies to be free from the rule and authority of the King of England and his British Empire. That worldview which influenced the document’s primary author, Thomas Jefferson, to write such powerful words became evident as I examined those 106 words. What helped me establish those key beliefs was verifying that all 56 signers of the Declaration had Christian backgrounds, though four would become Deists – people who believe that while God created the world, He is not involved in the daily affairs of the world or people He had created. So what do I believe were the key beliefs that formed the lens they used to view and interpret life and to lead them to feel justified in doing what they did?
- Collectively they believed that the God of the Bible created the world, and not only is involved in sustaining the world He created, but is also involved in the affairs of men. That means they believed He was involved in their affairs as well. The first evidence of that belief in the Declaration is that the justification they felt in declaring themselves free from the rule of the king and the British Empire was based on the separate and equal station the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitled them. By mentioning nature’s law and nature’s God side by side, the signers were affirming their belief that God was the one responsible for their existence. The Laws of Nature are fixed (i.e. law of gravity). By speaking of men being endowed by their Creator, they identified Nature’s God to be the Creator of that nature and the one by whom Nature’s Laws were established.
- They believed that truth is rooted in the heart and mind and character of Creator God and therefore is absolute. The truth they cited was not the result of them taking a vote on which of them had the most logically sounding relative truth. The truths they cited were “self-evident.” Only absolute truth can be self-evident. They believed truth was obvious, and not something that needed to be conjured up to fit the situation. They believed that an example of that obvious self-evident truth is that 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.
- They believed in the biblical doctrine of “imago dei.” “Imago dei” is a Latin phrase meaning “image of God”, a phrase found in the Bible in Genesis 1:26-27: Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.Those who believe in “imago dei” believe that because every person is born in the image of God, therefore every person has inherent and intrinsic value and dignity. The practical results of being born in the image of God? First, every person is born equal to all others. Second, every person comes prepackaged and prewired with rights that cannot be taken or given away because God is the one who has presented them. Third, the practical results of those rights are tangible – the right to live once conceived and to continue to thrive until natural death takes us, and the right to be free, reasonably speaking, to pursue our own happiness as we understand happiness to be.
Sadly, the worldview that shaped the Declaration of Independence is no longer held by many in our nation. Naturalism, the belief that everything arises from natural causes and rejects any idea of the spiritual and supernatural, now sits on the throne of the hearts and minds of many – rejecting any idea that a Creator God even exists, let alone is involved in the day to day lives of the people and world He created. The idea of there being such a thing as absolute truth is seen as fool’s gold. The idea of someone being born in the image of God has been replaced by being born in the image of their DNA. Because there is no God, the idea of us having rights that are unalienable is up for grabs.
Let’s thank God that when a Declaration of Independence was needed 249 years ago, there were men with the right worldview in place to produce the one we have. And may we dedicate ourselves today to work to restore in our culture the basic beliefs that formed their worldview.
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