Created Equal
By Hal Lindsey
The American republic was built on the “self-evident” truth “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Take the words “created” and “Creator” from that sentence, and it becomes nonsense.
It is nonsense to say, “all men are equal.” We are not born with equal levels of intelligence, athletic ability, or good looks. We are born to different kinds of parents and into different circumstances including various levels of wealth or poverty. But add the word “created” and it makes sense. We are created with equal value before God—each one made with His image stamped into our very being (Genesis 1:26).
Our nation’s founders were steeped in these beliefs. That’s why they wrote a constitution which protects even the vilest criminal from “cruel and unusual punishment.” In our system, searches and seizures are to be sanctioned by a court of law after careful assessment of “probable cause.” The Constitution insists that the accused receive a public trial before an impartial jury. All human beings are due this kind of respect because each carries innate value before God.
It’s all built on the words “created” and “Creator.” Our country was founded on a theological idea. We have a Creator. We have standing in the universe. Remove God from our country, and you remove the intellectual and spiritual underpinnings of democracy itself.
The new atheism sweeping our land is intent on removing God’s name and His standards from our institutions, philosophies, and entertainments. Those who propagate such notions do so in the name of freedom. But real freedom requires a foundation. To remove freedom’s foundation means the eventual destruction of freedom itself.
And that’s what’s happening. The super-elites have lost trust in the common folk, and therefore in democracy itself. They have always tried to put their thumb on democracy’s scale. But in the past, they focused their power and influence on promoting their own ideas. Today they increasingly use their power to crush dissent and end debate.
“We the people” still have our ballots, but ballots mean little without the free flow of information. In our system of government, free speech is not a luxury but an absolute necessity. Democracy only works when people are trusted to sort through the noise and find the truth.
It’s a messy form of government. No doubt about that. In a perfect world, the people would be governed by a perfect Person — perfect in love, perfect in wisdom, perfect in justice, and perfect in every other way. That Person, Jesus, is coming! The Bible says, “The government will be upon His shoulder.”
But until that glad day, we should be thankful for what Lincoln called “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” And we should work and pray that it “not perish from the earth.”
