Two Hundred and Fifty Years
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of men signed a document. They appealed to the Creator for rights they believed He gave. They said it plainly: all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.
Some of those men believed that. Some of them didn’t. That’s not a secret. Thomas Jefferson cut up his Bible with a razor and kept the moral teachings and threw out the miracles. Benjamin Franklin was a Deist who attended church for the music and the argument. John Adams feared the Senate would become a “great beast.” They were not all believers, and they knew it.
But here’s the thing: even the unbelievers among them assumed a God who establishes moral law. They didn’t agree on who He was. They didn’t agree on what He wanted. But they agreed — all of them — that rights come from somewhere above the state, and that if the state violates those rights, the state is wrong. Not inconvenient. Not unpopular. Wrong.
That assumption is what made the whole thing work. Not the Constitution. Not the separation of powers. Not the checks and balances. Those are mechanisms. The fuel was the assumption that there is a moral law above the legislature, above the executive, above the majority. Break that law and you are not just violating policy. You are violating something real.
The Puritans who came before them understood this better. They didn’t just assume God’s law. They read it. They believed it. They were wrong about a great many things — they could be brutal, they could be proud, they could confuse their tradition with God’s command. But they knew where the law came from, and they knew what happened when a people broke it. They had read Deuteronomy 28. They had read Judges 2. They knew that the blessings come from obedience and the curses come from turning away, and that neither one is a metaphor.
Now it is two hundred and fifty years later, and we are the most blessed nation on earth complaining that we are the most oppressed. We have more food than any people in history and we are hungry for things that don’t nourish. We have more liberty than any people have ever had and we use it to demand more liberty from each other, which is not liberty but a competition. We have more access to the Word of God than any generation before us — printed, broadcast, streamed, free — and we can’t be bothered to read it.
The politicians follow along. They don’t lead. They don’t stand against the current. They ride it. They measure which way the river is flowing and they swim alongside it and call it leadership. When the culture decides that marriage is whatever we say it is, they adjust. When the culture decides that a child in the womb is not a person until we say so, they adjust. When the culture decides that truth is personal and no one has the right to say otherwise, they adjust. They do nothing of consequence and demand power at the same time. This is not a party problem. Both sides do it. One side adjusts faster and the other side adjusts slower, but adjust they both do, because the river is the same river and they are all swimming in it.
And I am a product of that culture. I grew up in it. I breathed it in. I assumed what it assumed. I wanted what it told me to want. The culture didn’t force me. It formed me. That’s worse. Force you can resist. Formation you don’t even see.
But here is what Deuteronomy 28 says, and it said it before any of us were born, and it has not changed:
“All these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the LORD your God.” (Deut 28:2)
And:
“All these curses shall come upon you and pursue you and overtake you till you are destroyed, because you did not obey the voice of the LORD your God.” (Deut 28:45)
Overtake. Pursue. The blessings chase you down when you walk with God. The curses chase you down when you don’t. You don’t have to go looking for either one. They find you.
And here is what Judges 2 says, and it is the most depressing two verses in the Old Testament:
“And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers. And there arose another generation after them who did not know the LORD or the work that He had done for Israel. And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the LORD and served the Baals.” (Judg 2:10-11)
One generation. Joshua dies, and the next generation doesn’t even know who God is. Not a slow decline. Not a gradual drift. One generation. That’s how fast it goes.
We are that generation. We had the blessing. We had the Book. We had more access to the Word than the Puritans themselves. And we decided we preferred the cotton candy.
But — and this is the part that matters — the same God who spelled out the curses also provided the way back. Not a way we invented. Not a principle we discovered. A Person. “I will give you a new heart,” He says in Ezekiel 36. “And a new spirit I will put within you.” Not a new set of rules. Not a new political platform. A new heart.
The politicians won’t fix this because they can’t. The culture won’t fix this because it is the problem. I won’t fix this because I am made of the same material as the culture that formed me.
But God can. And does. And has.
“If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” (2 Chron 7:14)
Two hundred and fifty years. The document still exists. The rights still come from the same place. The blessing is still available. The curse is still in effect. And the God who offered both is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
The question is not whether the blessing works. The question is whether we will ask for it from the God who gives it, or keep demanding it from the politicians who don’t have it.