In recent weeks America once again has been awakened to the hand of God in such a way that only fools can deny it. Irrespective of your political beliefs, former president Donald Trump was miraculously saved from an assassin’s bullet. Trump, himself, said, “it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening. We will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness.” Even the news media, well at least FOX commentators were saying it was the hand of God that saved Trump from death. Democrats, however, were calling for a ban on guns and blaming Trump for riling up hate as a predictor of his own assassination attempt. But what of the hand of God?
From the time of Plato to Thomas Hobbes to John Locke in the 1600s, to our Founding Fathers in the 1700s to Marx in the 1800s, men attempted to define the need of government in society. Plato wrote of an utopian communistic society as did Hobbes, using Biblical imagery in his essay “Leviathan” to describe the all-powerful government. These men used the fallen nature of man to justify strong central authority to control man in preventing man from destroying other men. Marx wanted to ban all religion. Their systems essentially focused on the idea that man is inherently evil and must be strongly governed by a “benevolent” sovereign. But this is against God’s will for mankind. In Genesis 2, God put Adam in the garden, giving him the rules…the law, if you will. And he said in verse 17 if you violate this command, “you will surely die.”
Locke, however, saw that God created man in his own image, gave him dominion over the earth, and gave him laws by which to live. Locke believed these inalienable God-given rights were those of life, freedom, and property. He believed that man generally wanted to get along with men, but from time to time, those who covet the life or labor of others would try to take their fruits rather than to create them from their own enterprise. In these cases, governments were needed to impartially enforce the laws of God. In other words, man would give up some of his freedom for the protection of government in civil society. Otherwise, he should be left to prosper by his own value add, which is his labor.
The Founding Fathers were influenced by Locke. Laws derived from the laws of God, civil society with freedom and impartial enforcement of the laws, checks and balances, were all staples of American government. Locke also wrote that if there was “a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to people…that they should then rouse themselves, and endeavor to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was first erected…” In other words, if government is not impartially enforcing the laws of God, the people should put it into the hands of those who would rule as such. In America, we have the choice of our leaders. Christians are still a majority. We must decide if we are to be slaves to tyranny or benefactors of Liberty.
