It’s a risky thing to mix politics and religion. It’s too easy to confuse the two. And if I remember correctly, one of the major bones of contention during my predecessor’s tenure was over that very thing: whether or not it was proper to have the American flag in the sanctuary.
Many people do seem to think of America as the new Israel, the Promised Land, partly of course because of the fact that New England, at least, was settled by people seeking freedom, Not only religious freedom, but the chance to build a whole new society, one based on Biblical principles. The Puritans who settled in New England had a vision of a City on a Hill, one whose light would be seen by all nations, living out Jesus’ words to the disciples:
You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. [Mt 5:14-16]
And if that is the case, if America really was supposed to be a new Israel, then Moses’ words to the Israelites are even more to the point as we look back at where we’ve come from, and forward to where we’re going. Now, I do not think that America is the new Israel; the new Israel is the church of Jesus Christ. But America was founded on Christian principles, and the freedom we enjoy is a gift from God. Patrick Henry - remember the great orator who preferred liberty to life? - said, “It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded not by religionists, but by Christians: Not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” When we forget who it was who gave us our freedom, we start down the road to a new kind of slavery.
Remember where they were, those first Israelites, when Moses was speaking these words? I think of the whole book of Deuteronomy as Moses’ final sermon series on their wilderness experience to prepare them for their entry into the promised land. God had freed them from slavery and oppression under the Egyptians, given them the law, defeated innumerable enemies, fed them in the wilderness - and yet their record wasn’t anything to write home about. Every time things didn’t go just the way they wanted it to, they started complaining and wanted to turn back:
The rabble among them had a strong craving; and the Israelites also wept again, and said, “If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at." [Num 11:4-6]
They were free, but it wasn’t what these former slaves, newly freed and uneducated in self-government, had expected. The escaping tribes weren’t much like the rowdy and self-willed sons of Jacob who had gone down to Egypt ten generations before; they had grown soft. Even when Pharaoh started killing off their firstborn, did anyone notice that they never appeared to have thought either of rebelling or pulling up stakes and returning to where their ancestors had come from? They were used to having someone else tell them what to do and where to go, used to having someone else be responsible for the condition of their lives, used to having someone to blame when things went wrong. And so they blamed Moses. They were really rebelling against God, of course, but Moses was a softer target. The non-Levite tribes targeted Moses again later on, because they were jealous of the status he and his brother Aaron had in terms of access to God, conveniently forgetting two things: one, that Moses and Aaron had earned their places, and two, that being in charge meant more work, more responsibility, more risk, not less.
When the Spaniards conquered Peru some 500 years ago, they also enslaved the native population. But the Spaniards weren’t as evil as you might think: because most of the people were already slaves when the Spanish got there. You see, the Inca empire had conquered and enslaved the Andean and could direct their labor as he liked. tribes about seventy years before the Spanish had gotten there, and their king was also their god, and therefore owned them. Anyway, the moral of the story is, that when popular liberation movements began taking shape in the last fifty years or so, the native Quechua and others thought freedom meant being not having to work, meant that they could do what they liked and go where they liked and spend what they liked. They didn’t know how to plan ahead, how to decide what to plant and when, how to market their produce or manage disputes with their neighbors. And so they became very easy prey for the promises of violent Marxist revolutionaries and later of the drug lords.
Freedom isn’t easy. As a matter of fact, if you think freedom means being able to do whatever you want whenever you want, you’re well on your way to losing whatever freedom you thought you had when you started. Were ever any two people more free than Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden? They had a job to do, yes, but one ideally suited to their skills and temperaments and under the best working conditions ever devised. Were they content? NO! They didn’t want God to be in charge; in fact, they wanted to be their own gods - that is, they wanted to make up their own minds about right and wrong. They didn’t want to take God’s word for it. And the way they got out from under the obligation to obey God was by forgetting that he had made them.
And Moses warned the Israelites against doing the same thing, warned them against taking the first opportunity to slip out from under God’s radar screen and take control of their own lives, when they got into Canaan. He warned them:
Do not exalt yourself, forgetting the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who ... made water flow for you from flint rock, and fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors did not know, to humble you and to test you, and in the end to do you good. Do not say to yourself, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.” But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth. [v. 14-18]
If they had remembered God, and honored him as they had been commanded, God himself would have protected them. But that was, apparently, too much to ask. The only way we can duck the obligation that God lays upon us by granting us our freedom is by clinging to the twin illusions that (1) we earned it ourselves and (2) that freedom is the natural condition of mankind.
You see, the fact is that we human beings have only two choices. We can be servants of God, or servants of sin. Grumblers in Moses’ camp tried to entice the people back into slavery by promising them better food. Idol-worshipers in Canaan would entice the Hebrews into joining them by promising, among other things, fertility rites and a visible, limited, and bribable deity. The Romans had it right when they discovered that most people could be bought very cheaply for a promise of bread and circuses. Some in the early church taught the new Christians that it didn’t matter what sins they committed in their bodies, since they were all forgiven in Christ. This is why Peter wrote to the churches that false prophets “... entice people who have just escaped from those who live in error. They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption; for people are slaves to whatever masters them.” [2 Pet 2:18-19]
Why do you suppose it is that people find it so difficult to understand that real freedom only comes when we obey God? If you’ve ever driven in a major third world city like Cairo or Djakarta, you understand how lawlessness makes you less free, not more. Bumper cars are fun when it’s a game at an amusement park, but when it’s a way of life it’s not only frustrating, it’s dangerous! And can you imagine trying to play any sport with no rules at all? Or trying to play two or three different games on the same field, claiming equal and simultaneous rights for all of them? Imagine the chaos of trying to play baseball while a soccer game is going on, or performing Swan Lake in the middle of the Superbowl. Power winds up winning every time.
And why do you suppose that the Israelites - who had been given the greatest laws that the world has ever known - were still unable to govern themselves?
We get a clue when God says through the prophet Jeremiah, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” [Jer 31:33]
The Israelites thought that physical or economic slavery was what they needed to be freed from, and God gave them that freedom. But freedom from Egypt was not enough. The next thousand years taught them that. They kept disobeying God, and kept falling back into slavery. They were enslaved in turn by the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and finally the Romans.
With the coming of Christ, we finally understood that the slavery which truly oppresses us, and without which no other freedoms matter, is slavery to sin. And I’m not just talking about sexual sin, although that’s what people mean when they say “you can’t legislate morality.” I’m talking about greed, and pride, and anger, and fear, as well as lust. Each one is destructive: first to individuals, and finally as we stop resisting or condemning them, to society itself.
It was our ancestors the Reformers, with their insistence that each person was responsible for his or her own soul. I am not responsible for your soul, you are not responsible for my soul. We are responsible TO each other, but not FOR each other. That is what is meant by the priesthood of all believers, and it is that kind of world view which created a society capable of self-government. They emphasized learning God’s word, they showed how each part of our lives can be lived to God’s glory, from work to marriage to recreation. They understood better than we do - because they had to fight for every ounce of it - that freedom is a difficult and precarious condition. Because when the law is not written on our hearts, then more and more laws must be passed in a futile attempt to control - or satisfy - the sin into which we naturally fall. That is why they created a republic, not a democracy.
They feared democracy, and with reason. Because to be ruled by a people who are not in turn ruled by God is to become the servants of the sins of the mob, which are even more uncontrollable, demanding, and destructive than the sins of the individual. Thomas Jefferson asked, “Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?” John Adams said, “There is no good government but what is republican... because the true idea of a republic is ‘an empire of laws, not of men.’” Alexander Hamilton further explained this idea: “the republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they entrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests.” Fisher Ames noted that “the known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and the ignorant believe, to be liberty.” Finally, George Washington warned that “arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.”
It is not the natural virtue of human beings to which we owe and to which we can entrust our freedom. God in Jesus Christ is not only the author - the source - the giver - of the liberties we cherish, he also is the means by which we receive and enjoy them.
