Our Nation’s 232nd Birthday
It was a tough call. Hostilities had broken out in the spring of the past year, with the battles at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. It had become painfully apparent during the rest of 1775, that there was no reconciliation between the colonies and their Motherland.
The time had come to put in writing the causes for the conflict that was brewing. In June 1776, the delegates from the thirteen colonies assembled to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia to consider the matter. Great Britain, and the world, needed to be told the reasons for the separation. For something so dear as freedom from tyranny, and the war that would ensue to secure that freedom, only the most sacred of causes could be invoked.
Rights that cannot be separated from people, rights given to them by God Himself, were being callously disregarded by Britain’s King George III. God gave every human being the right to their life (Acts 17:25). God gave to each person the liberty to make up their own minds as to their moral course of action (Joshua 24:15)(Gal. 5:1). The pursuit of God’s moral law was considered a sacred privilege that would ensure one’s happiness in life (Proverbs 14:27; 15:16; 19:23; 22:4).
The Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson and adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, expressed these Christian principles. It would be the charter of “a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition ‘that all men are created equal,’” as President Lincoln would quote from it on the Gettysburg battlefield 87 years later.
It would be a nation that God would unusually bless, a nation that would be raised up for a Godly purpose, and for encouraging Godly principles amongst its citizens, …and the rest of the world (Jer. 18:9 – 10).
Remember that this Friday. Thank God for our country!
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