The Perfect Law of Liberty
But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass [mirror, NASB]: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed. (James 1:22-25)1
The law of Yahweh2 is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of Yahweh is sure, making wise the simple. The statutes of Yahweh are right, rejoicing the heart: the commandment of Yahweh is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of Yahweh is clean, enduring for ever: the judgments of Yahweh are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb. Moreover by them is thy servant warned: and in keeping of them there is great reward. (Psalm 19:7-11)
If only this had been the intent of the Declaration’s signatories and Constitution’s framers, six of whom signed both documents. What a different nation we would have become contrasted with what we are today.
The Declaration Speaks for Itself
Paragraph #2
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.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.—That has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
Paragraph #2, Sentence 1
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.
Self–Evident
Self-evident is not enough to prove anything—except in the minds of those with whom something’s claimed to be self-evident. What’s self-evident to one man is often a contradiction or an incongruity to others. For example, there are many people to whom it’s self-evident that Thomas Jefferson’s God and Creator is one and the same as the God of the Bible. However, when examined by the Bible, it’s biblically apparent that Jefferson’s God and Creator is one of his own making.3
There are, furthermore, a great number of people to whom it’s self-evident that all men are not created equal under the Constitution and its Criminal Justice System, especially when compared with the Bible’s Criminal Justice System.4
Created Equal
Is it true that all men are created equal? It all depends upon what’s meant by “equal.”
If by “equal,” it’s meant to say that all finite humans come into this world as naked babies, it’s of course a true statement. However, anything beyond this is simply a figment of man’s fertile imagination, especially regarding alleged unalienable rights, often depicted as God-given rights.
Self-evident is not enough. But how many Christians5 when hearing or reciting the first sentence of paragraph 2 of the Declaration of Independence (or any part of the Declaration for that matter) stop and ask themselves, “Is this biblical?”
God–Given Rights
The Declaration’s alleged rights might be god-given by anti-Christ6 Jefferson’s god, but they are not God-given by Yahweh God of the Bible. If they are, they must be validated by the Bible. The Bible is devoid of human rights of any kind.
If they are biblical, they’re guaranteed by Yahweh. If they are not biblical, they’re “guaranteed” by someone else who can and has incrementally taken them away.
In Understanding the Constitution: Ten Things Every Christian Should Know About the Supreme Law of the Land, David Gibbs, Jr., and David Gibbs III argue for unalienable God-given rights:
Our rights come from God, not from the state. Therefore, the state cannot take them away. What Uncle Sam gives, Uncle Sam can take away. But our nation’s birth certificate, the Declaration of Independence makes clear that our rights are unalienable because they come from God.7
This oft-parroted claim sounds wonderful, but is it true? The State has certainly taken away and even helps finance unwanted infants’ right to life. The State has incrementally taken away gun owners’ Second Amendment rights.8 The State has taken away the right to own property.9 Because rights come from the State, the State can take them away at its pleasure, and it has done just that.
Not only are rights an entirely non-biblical Enlightenment concept, there is not even a Hebrew word for rights in the Hebrew language.10
America was sold down the river when the 18th-century “founding fathers” replaced the Bible’s non-optional responsibilities (based upon the Bible’s explicit moral laws11) with optional Enlightenment rights based upon the whims and wishes of anti-Christ Jefferson and his fellow contemporary Enlightenment and Masonic theistic rationalists (aka constitutional framers and “founding fathers”). This was done in a futile attempt to make man his own Sovereign:
But thou, O man of God…. Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, whereunto thou art also called…. I give thee charge in the sight of God … and before Christ Jesus … that thou keep this commandment without spot, unrebukeable, until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ … who is the blessed and only Potentate [NASB Sovereign], the King of kings, and Lord of lords. (1 Timothy 6:11-16)
Human sovereignty is what Enlightenment rights are all about: the rights of man versus the authority of Yahweh.
The Only One With Rights
Jefferson’s Declaration claims it’s self-evident that every man has a right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Are life, liberty, and happiness your right? Or are life, liberty, and happiness meant to be corollaries—in fact, blessings—of knowing Yahweh as our Sovereign, Christ as our Savior, and His perfect law of liberty as society’s standard and rule of life?
And it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of Yahweh thy God, to observe and to do all his commandments which I command thee this day, that Yahweh thy God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth: And all these blessings shall come on thee, and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of Yahweh thy God…. (Deuteronomy 28:1-14)
In other words, the blessings—what amount to life, liberty, and happiness—enumerated in Deuteronomy 28:1-14 are not provided us because of any self-evident alleged rights, but instead because of obedience to the Sovereign’s law.
Even life isn’t a right except to God. It’s inherent in who He is as Creator. The right to life belongs exclusively to the great and only I Am That I Am.12
For the rest of us, life (and everything that comes with it) is a gift from and responsibility to the One who granted us life. It’s inherent in who we are as the created.
If, in fact, life is our right, God was then obligated to create us, making Him subservient to us. In turn, He would have no authority to judge us for what’s our right to do with as we please.
Whirlwind Rights
[B]ecause they have transgressed my covenant, and trespassed against my law … they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind…. (Hosea 8:1, 7)
A familiar proverb declares, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” America’s “hell” has been paved with rights,13 including:
- Natural rights
- Human rights
- Civil rights
- Political rights
- Religious rights (including the right for all non-Christian religions to proliferate)
- Educational rights
- Women’s rights (including the right to murder one’s unborn baby)
- Children’s rights
- Health care rights
- Welfare rights
- Homosexual rights
- Transgender rights
And this is the short list.
Former United States Attorney General Stephen J. Markman confirmed that the unbiblical rights above are included in the Ninth Amendment’s14 unidentified enumeration of rights:
[T]he Ninth Amendment constitutes a “license to constitutional decisionmakers [sic] to look beyond the substantive commands of the constitutional text to protect fundamental rights not expressed therein.” Rights to abortion, contraception, homosexual behavior, and similar sexual privacy rights have already been imposed by judges detecting such rights in the Ninth Amendment.15
Because the framers failed to expressly establish the Constitution on biblical ethics, the Ninth Amendment has been invariably interpreted to include the above list, as well as other biblical infractions, including a woman’s alleged right to murder her unborn infant:
The Ninth Amendment was employed in Roe v. Wade in legalizing in utero infanticide. [Supreme Court Associate] Justice William O. Douglas … joined the majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe, which stated that a federally enforceable right to privacy, “whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”16
Had the framers provided a government established upon Yahweh’s moral laws, the constitutional “rights” claimed by so many people today would be recognized and punished as moral aberrations.
These “whirlwind” rights are the consequence of the “wind” rights established by the framers in the Bill of Rights. Most Christians believe the rights found in the first Ten Amendments are God-given and thus irrevocable. But there are two problems with this cherished idea:
1. The Constitution knows nothing of God (except perhaps as the Document’s timekeeper in Article 717).
2. God and His Word know nothing of optional rights. Instead, the Bible is replete with non-optional responsibilities.
Rights, Rights, Everyone Wants Their Rights
Of course, rights are much more popular than responsibilities. Everyone, including sodomites, lesbians and infant murderers, demand their rights. Few people, however, are interested in fulfilling their responsibilities.18
America was sold a bill of goods when the “founding fathers” replaced non-optional God-expected responsibilities with optional Enlightenment rights, which are easily suppressed by whatever government is in power at the time. There’s no better example than the Amendment with the wording “shall not be infringed.” The Second Amendment is the most infringed, licensed, and limited Amendment of the entire twenty-seven.19
In theory, the Bill of Rights protects the alleged unalienable rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” among other things. But have life, liberty, and happiness been advanced or protected since the first Ten Amendments were ratified? Since the Bill of Rights was adopted, have we had less government intrusion or has the Constitutional Republic grown into the behemoth it inevitably has become and merely licensed and limited those rights?
Rights vs. Righteousness
The Puritan idea of rights and liberty was quite different from what the constitutional framers had in mind:
John Winthrop [first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony] … reminded his fellow-citizens of Massachusetts that a doctrine of civil rights [as in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights] which looked to natural or sinful man as its source and guardian [as in the Constitution’s Preamble] was actually destructive of that very liberty which they were seeking to protect. True freedom can never be found in institutions which are under the direction of sinful men, but only in the redemption wrought for man by Jesus Christ. Christ, not man, is the sole source and guarantee of true liberty.20
R.J. Rushdoony pointed out the sophistry of governments based upon freedom:
….[A] society which makes freedom its primary goal will lose it, because it has made, not responsibility, but freedom from responsibility, its purpose. When freedom is the basic emphasis, it is not responsible speech which is fostered but irresponsible speech. If freedom of press is absolutized, libel will be defended finally as a privilege of freedom, and if free speech is absolutized, slander finally becomes a right. Religious liberty becomes a triumph of irreligion. Tyranny and anarchy take over. Freedom of speech, press, and religion all give way to controls, totalitarian controls. The goal must be God’s law-order, in which alone is true liberty.21
Rights have contributed to an irresponsible and, in turn, pompously cavalier public that is more interested in exercising its “rights” than in living responsibly, especially in obedience to a Sovereign God.
People who demand their rights are like children, focused only on themselves. People who pursue righteousness are focused on Yahweh and their fellow man. The former promote a government of, by, and for the people; the latter promote a government of, by, and for Yahweh.
In theory, rights are one of the “holy grails” of American Republicanism. In reality, they’re just another example of the Declaration’s signatories and Constitution’s framers’ apostasy, which continues to reap an ever-intensifying whirlwind.
Nothing New About Alleged Rights
There is nothing new about Enlightenment rights. Adam and Eve felt so enlightened they thought they were justified in rebelling against their Maker. They began claiming their alleged right to make themselves their own Sovereign God and it was for this reason they were expelled from the Garden of Eden.
In other words, not only are rights an entirely non-biblical Enlightenment concept, worse to claim what belongs exclusively to our God and Creator is a sacrilegious usurpation of Yahweh’s divine nature.22
The one thing Jefferson got right was that rights are, in fact, unalienable. They are unalienable because Yahweh holds sole possession of all rights, from whom they cannot be usurped by finite man.
No One Can Take Away What You Don’t Possess
Demanding rights is an admission of slavery to the one from whom those rights are petitioned. Every United States citizen who looks to the Constitutional Republic to grant or recognize his rights (the only place rights “exist”) acknowledges that the government is his Sovereign:
The emphasis on human rights demands the rejection of Divine Revelation in favor of human legislation. Man thinks he is capable of legislating rights. Human legislation seeks to supplant God and make statutes in areas that only God can regulate. And the rule of iniquity is framed into law. The actual trade that is made in this deal is the exchange of true freedom for human bondage…. The end result is the rule of rights rather than the rule of law.23
It’s often declared that today’s government has taken away Americans’ rights. This is untrue. No one can take from you what you never possessed in the first place. However, you can better enslave and control a people duped into believing in and ever-trying to protect non-existent rights and who have, in turn, renounced their non-optional responsibilities.
That’s the legacy the 18th-century “founding fathers” left America when they replaced biblical responsibilities (based upon the immutable/unchanging moral law of Yahweh, aka as the perfect law of liberty) for Enlightenment rights.
See Part 5.
Related posts:
“Biblical Examination of the Declaration of Independence, Pt. 1” (Blog article)
“Biblical Examination of the Declaration of Independence, Pt. 2” (Blog article)
“Biblical Examination of the Declaration of Independence, Pt. 3” (Blog article)
“Biblical Examination of the Declaration of Independence” (Audio series)
Law and Kingdom: Their Relevance Under the New Covenant
A Biblical Constitution: A Scriptural Replacement for Secular Government
Chapter 18 “Amendment 9: Rights vs. Righteousness” of Bible Law vs. the United States Constitution: The Christian Perspective
“Rights: Man’s Sacrilegious Claim to Divinity” (Blog article)
“Rights, Rights, Everyone Wants Their Rights” (Blog article)
“America’s Road to Hell: Paved With Rights” (Blog article)
End Notes
1. All scripture is quoted from the King James Version unless otherwise noted.
2. YHWH, the English transliteration of the Tetragrammaton, is most often pronounced Yahweh. It is the principal Hebrew name of the God of the Bible and was inspired to appear nearly 7,000 times in the Old Testament. It was unlawfully deleted by the English translators. In obedience to the Third Commandment and the scriptures that charge us to proclaim, swear by, praise, extol, call upon, bless, glorify, and hold fast to His name, I have chosen to memorialize His name, per Exodus 3:15, in this article.
For a more thorough explanation concerning important reasons for using the sacred name of God, see Thou shalt not take the name of YHWH thy God in vain, the third in a series of ten free online books on each of the Ten Commandments and their respective statutes and judgments.
3. For more regarding Thomas Jefferson’s God and Creator, see Part 2 and Part 3.
4. See Chapter 6 “Article 3: Judicial Usurpation” of Bible Law vs. the United States Constitution: The Christian Perspective
5. Not everyone claiming to be a Christian has been properly instructed in the biblical plan of salvation. Mark 16:15-16; Acts 2:36-41, 22:1-16; Romans 6:3-4; Galatians 3:26-27; Colossians 2:11-13; and 1 Peter 3:21 should be studied to understand what is required to be covered by the blood of Jesus and forgiven of your sins.
For a more thorough explanation concerning water immersion and its relationship to salvation, the bookBaptism: All You Wanted to Know and More may be requested from Bible Law vs. The United States Constitution, PO Box 248, Scottsbluff, Nebraska 69363, for free.
Additionally, listen to audio series “I Had a Dream: Judgment’s Coming. Are You Under the Blood?” Part 1 can be found here. Or a MP3 CD, containing all ten messages, can be requested from Bible Law vs. The United States Constitution, PO Box 248, Scottsbluff, Nebraska 69363, for free.
6. See Part 2 for evidence that Thomas Jefferson was an anti-Christ.
7. David Gibbs, Jr., David Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution: Ten Things Every Christian Should Know About the Supreme Law of the Land (Seminole, FL: Christian Law Association, 2006) p. 21
8. Chapter 12 “Amendment 2: Constitutional vs. Biblical Self-Defense” of Bible Law vs. the United States Constitution: The Christian Perspective
The Second Amendment: A Knife in a Gunfight (Audio)
9. Thanks to Amendment 5’s provision for government-confiscation of private property (via eminent domain, property taxes, and public lands) there’s not one square inch of private property left in America. All of America is owned by federal and state governments alike.
Chapter 14 “Amendment 5: Constitutional vs. Biblical Judicial Protection” of Bible Law vs. the United States Constitution: The Christian Perspective
10. Rabbi Daniel Lapin, per David Barton, 2018 speech in Torrington, Wyoming.
11. For more regarding how the Bible’s immutable/unchanging moral law applies today and should be implemented as the law of the land, see Law and Kingdom: Their Relevance Under the New Covenant.
See also A Biblical Constitution: A Scriptural Replacement for Secular Government.
12. “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you. And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, Yahweh God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations.” (Exodus 3:14-15)
13. “America’s Road to Hell: Paved With Rights.”
14. Chapter 18 “Amendment 9: Rights vs. Righteousness” of Bible Law vs. the United States Constitution: The Christian Perspective
15. Stephen J. Markham, “The Coming Constitutional Debate,” Imprimis (Hillsdale, MI: Hillsdale College, 2010) vol. 39, num. 4, p. 5
16. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, quoted in “Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
17. Chapter 10 “Article 7: More of the Same” of Bible Law vs. the United States Constitution: The Christian Perspective
18. “Rights, Rights, Everyone Wants Their Rights.”
19. Chapter 12 “Amendment 2: Constitutional vs. Biblical Self-Defense” of Bible Law vs. the United States Constitution: The Christian Perspective
The Second Amendment: A Knife in a Gunfight (Audio)
20. C. Gregg Singer, A Theological Interpretation of American History (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1964) p. 19
21. Rousas John Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1973) p. 581
22. “Rights: Man’s Sacrilegious Claim to Divinity.”
23. Dr. H. Rondel Rumburg, Foreword (21 February 1998) to Dr. Robert L. Dabney, Anti-Biblical Theories of Rights, which first appeared in the Presbyterian Quarterly, July 1888, (Hueytown, AL: Society for Biblical and Southern Studies, 1998) pp. 4-5