Unalienable Rights

PROVERBS 14:34  "Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people."

"We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

The group of American patriots who signed The Declaration of Independence was creating and signing a document that to them was a religious declaration of the rights that God had bestowed on men. By definition, these rights could not be sold, transferred, or surrendered. They were an entitlement of God as long as they weren't infringing upon the rights of others. In other words, they were wanting the right to live and pursue a good life by making their own choices based upon how the Bible instructed them to do it.

The key to that Declaration was that they recognized that they had a Creator and He had some guidelines for the creation He had designed. It was to be a spiritual and righteous creation and He had already accomplished a Plan to keep them from the destruction of sin.

Funny how the modern definition of "rights" is completely different than a definition I read of from 1828 in the Noah Webster Dictionary.  Rights: "confirmity to the will of God or to His law: the perfect standard of truth and justice. In the literal sense, right is a straight line and wrong is a crooked one. Right, therefore,  is a perfect rectitude or straightness, and perfect rectitude is found only in an infinite Being and His will." Rights also elude to virtue, morality, integrity, honesty and decency.

As we were riding home last evening, now unceremoniously called the fourth  of July, we were surrounded by fireworks on every side for the better part of an hour. It was magnificent and seemed that everyone was celebrating something elaborately!  I wondered if people really thought much about what the day stood for and what kind of foundation our country had really been built on.

It is true,  we all want our rights. It sounds good. We want the liberty to pursue our idea of a happy life.  But the application of unalienable(God-given rights) has been redefined. We have mistakenly interchanged the word "unalienable" with "inalienable". It is acceptable to do so in modern language.  Inalienable rights are those rights that can be exchanged,  sold or surrendered.

Isn't it sad to see what we as a nation and society have given up?  The value of our unalienable rights have been ignored.  They are still there, but shelved. The government and media are now engaged in a daily effort to find and prove what are the rights of an anti-God society. They are trying to prove that the Declaration of Independence written all those years ago was written for a nation of people who no longer have a standard. We cannot confirm to a standard that has been discarded.

The danger is that we as God honoring citizens of a country founded on God's Word,  not buy into a new standard of truth to live by.

As another Independence Day goes by, I have seriously analyzed my value system. Is it founded in God's Word,  Do I still see His standard in marriage, family, roles of man and woman, moral issues? It is so easy to set the standards by what we are surrounded by, yet the Word of God has not changed. True Freedom can only be achieved by the only signed and sealed Declaration of our Independence, The Word of God!