Gary discusses several recent articles about the new Speaker of the House and how he claims that the “Bible is his standard.”
All talk about human rights comes from those nations that have had a Christian base. The most familiar philosophy of human rights is found in the Declaration of Independence (1776). “All men,” it states, “are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The philosophy of rights is intimately tied to the reality of the Creator who alone grants rights. No God, no rights. The Declaration makes it clear that these inalienable rights are not granted by governments; rather, they are an endowment, a gift, of the Creator of the universe. On the other hand, there is the French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) and the more recent United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights (1948), which are indicative of governments as the grantors of rights. If governments can give rights, they can just as easily revoke them. “The State giveth. The State taketh away. Blessed be the name of the State.”
Some institution takes on the divine attributes, usually civil government, the State. The State then acts as a tyrannical and capricious god: controlling lives, confiscating property, closing the borders of the country in order to keep its “subjects” from going to what the State perceives to be another god. Conde Pallen’s utopian novel Crucible Island depicts what happens when the true God is rejected. Man looks for a substitute provider so that “the individual should have no thought, desire, or object other than the public welfare, of which the State is the creator and the inviolable guardian. As soon as the child is capable of learning, he is taught the Socialist catechism, whose first questions run as follows:
Q. By whom were you begotten?
A. By the sovereign State.Q. Why were you begotten?
A. That I might know, love, and serve the Sovereign State always.Q. What is the sovereign State?
A. The sovereign State is humanity in composite and perfect being.Q. Why is the State supreme?
A. The State is supreme because it is my Creator and Conserver in which I am and move and have my being and without which I am nothing.Q. What is the individual?
A. The individual is only a part of the whole, and made for the whole, and finds his complete and perfect expression in the sovereign State. Individuals are made for cooperation only, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth.[1]
A biblical worldview understands the state to be a servant of God (Rom. 13:1–4) that has only a limited civil role.
Thinking Straight in a Crooked World
The nursery rhyme "There Was a Crooked Man" is an appropriate description of how sin affects us and our world. We live in a crooked world of ideas evaluated by crooked people. Left to our crooked nature, we can never fully understand what God has planned for us and His world. God has not left us without a corrective solution. He has given us a reliable reference point in the Bible so we can identify the crookedness and straighten it.
Buy NowGary discusses several recent articles about the new Speaker of the House and how he claims that the “Bible is his standard.” The Southern Poverty Law Center, former Press Secretary Jen Psaki, and many others are piling on the disinformation and propaganda to scare Americans about the “radical” views of Speaker Johnson.
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[1] Conde Pallen, Crucible Island: A Romance, an Adventure and an Experiment (New York: The Manhattanville Press, 1919), 109–10.