Grace Emmanuel Church

Pastor Sam Chess

What if Jesus had Never Been Born?

(Part 7)

^{(Christianity’s Impact on Human Freedom )}

1) the Value of Human Life

2) Mass Education

3) on the Founding of our Country

4) Helping the Poor

5) Science

6) Human Sexuality

7) the World’s Morality

8) on Music, Art, and Architecture

Paul Harvey tells the story of an experiment in which a group of scientists were trying to teach a chimpanzee how to communicate. For fourteen years they labored, providing the animal with ways to arrange different symbols that would form the syllables of words. At last they all gathered around the cage to experience the first full sentence the chimpanzee would write. Carefully the animal spelled out the words… they read:

Every few years we all watch, with a tear in our eye, a new“ born free” type of movie about an animal that has been kept in captivity being set free in the wild and something inside us responds….why?

Is there a freedom loving gene inside us all? This current President talks often about our role in delivering various peoples in the world from oppression under bad regimes and he speaks of those people’s:

Is he right? Does mankind have inside a inner desire to not be bound under the tyranny of another? And if so…is that desire put their by God? Do we really know that people living under a tyrannical dictator aren’t having the time of their lives? And if they are not, and they do have an unspoken (for fear of death or imprisonment) desire for freedom, are we sure that that drive toward freedom is somehow linked to their Creator?

The Old Testament tells the story of Abraham who set out to find and establish the fulfillment of God’s covenant promise to find a new land, and grow up a God fearing nation of people who’s only head would be God himself. God establishes the people in their new land , there’s this little issue of a brother sold into slavery, a famine, a trip to Egypt, and the next thing the Hebrews know they are slaves, in Egypt, for 430 years. You want to know the rest of the Old Testament in one sentence….. Israel cries out to God, He delivers them from bondage, He gives them freedom and re-establishes them in the Promised Land, they turn their back on Him, they go back into captivity in Babylon, they cry out to God and, after 70 years, are delivered once again. The end! Everything else in the Old Testament sits inside that framework.

All of this, we later find out is pointing to one coming event in history. Soon after the Old Testament ends a Savior will come to earth, God incarnate to finally deliver mankind from his bondage to the evil one. The slavery in the Old Covenant is going to be trumped by freedom in the New Covenant. Jesus, in Scripture, is portrayed as the Great Emancipator.

Built into God’s Covenant with Israel was the first real “civil liberties”. In fact, God’s Commands, if obeyed, established, in a world that was largely barbarian, certain human rights and liberties that had never quite been codified before. It’s interesting that God put the right to human liberty inside of His divine Law.

God’s whole emphasis throughout the Old Testament and then on into the New is that:

It’s important that we all understand that, in God’s way of viewing life… physical freedom without spiritual freedom is not freedom at all. In the Old Testament spiritual freedom (being governed by God from within) was a prerequisite for physical freedom.

And spiritual freedom sets the stage for those who experience it to push for physical freedom as well. How do I know that?…those are the lessons that history teaches us.

Israel, a very tiny group of people tucked on the East edge of the Mediterranean Sea, largely despised and scorned by the rest of the world (gentiles); out of that tiny group on that tiny little spit of land comes, the foundation for most of the rest of the worlds belief systems on the Value of Human Life, Helping the Poor; Sexuality and Morality,

The roots of Health and Medicine, even Music. Its fascinating that one tiny group of people set the stage for so much of what the rest of the world now believes. Now we are seeing that, in a largely barbarian world, where nearly 2/3 of the people living were in slavery to the rest and even among the free people most were subject to maniacal dictators who controlled their every move and even their right to live. The idea of true freedom didn’t really take full form until the constitution of a little county called the US of A came into existence. (I’ll show you) Our Constitution was based on the moral code of that little band of people called the Jews and their law 3500 years before.

But it wasn’t actually Judaism that got the momentum rolling to the rest of the world. When one Jewish man was born as God in the flesh and he died to take on himself the sins of the whole world, then he rose form the dead victorious over sin and satan and he offered salvation from sin to all who would believe. When thousands came to believe and the gospel began to spread and Jesus and his followers wrote out an expansion of the original moral code and thousand embraced it, and all the pagan got nervous and began to persecute the Christians and the more they persecuted the more Christians there were and the more they persecuted the further Christianity was driven from where it started and within a few shakes of a lambs tail the gospel had spread all over the civilized world…..that’s what got the momentum rolling!

In 432 AD (St) Patrick using a Latin document called Liber ex Lege Moisi

(Book of the Law of Moses) in cooperation with his Irish converts made the Ten Commandments the foundation on which the Britons would base their civil law.

In 890AD King Alfred the Great made Moses law and Jesus Golden rule the basis of his code of Law for England and the foundation for British freedom.

In 1255 AD Archbishop Stephen Langton drawing on Britons Bible-based law system framed the Magna Carta. It reinforced the people God-given right to freedom and laid the groundwork to protect the Church from the rule of government.

The Magna Carta became the basis of the mayflower compact and later the Constitution of the United States. Our code of laws has entirely as it’s foundation the code of laws God gave to Moses that were later ratified and expounded by Jesus Christ Himself.

If you try to remove Jesus from our law code the entire law code will lose the glue that holds it together. Christianity sets people free from the bondage of sin. True spiritual liberty sets people free to search out civil liberty. Jesus is without question the greatest civil libertarian of all time.

It is interesting that today in America we have a group of people called the American Civil Liberties Union ( ACLU) who have set as their purpose to assure that all American have freedom from those who would sever their civil rights. To assure that they have set out to make sure that Christianity does not, in any way, infringe on the Americans freedom

What they do not understand is that, Christianity is the very source out of which civil liberties have risen, and removing Christianity from the equation will not ensure ultimate liberty for all.

If you went, today, to Saudi Arabia you would never hear a frank public discussion about whether or not Mohammed was really a prophet of Allah. We might refer to them as free countries, but they are not really free. In many Muslim communities a Muslim who converts to Christianity can count on being completely rejected if not eliminated.

Here in the US you have the right to go on national TV and curse Christianity and the Christ who founded it. The reason you have that right is because of Christianity! If Jesus had never been born you would very possibly have been living in a society where you kept your opinions to yourself…or else.

If you went to Israel (certainly a democratic government) you won’t hear a public broadcast discussing whether Jesus was the Messiah. Israel might be a free country, but your not actually free there.

If you were in India you wouldn’t attend a public forum on whether or not you should be able to eat the cows to stave off the starvation issue.

If you were in China you wouldn’t hear a discussion about whether or not it’s citizens should be able to come and go when they want.

In order for a person (or a country) to be able to understand the principle of freedom you must first have a grasp on the sin slavery issue of the soul, and have experience on how completely faith in Christ sets us free from the bondage of sin. Where d you come up with a thing like that Pastor?…..from the Bible…

Every one of these passages is promoting a sense of freedom that grows inside the believer. Some of them seem to be “crossing over” into how the believer is living on the outside.

It was this inner understanding of spiritual freedom that gave our forefathers the ability to establish a government unlike anything that had existed before!

I hope you do understand that when our country was founded… there wasn’t another country on the planet that had anything near the civil freedoms that were written into our constitution. We were light years ahead of England…remember we left there because of religious persecution. If you showed up in 1776 England and criticized the King… you would have wakened up in Australia.

The reason our country was light years ahead of all others in civil liberties was because, and only because, this country was founded with core Christian values.

Andrew Jackson- That Book.. is the rock on which our Republic rests… When that book falls, I can assure you, the liberties you enjoy will go with it.

Interestingly enough, it was the Pastors in New England who prodded the people to separate themselves from England. They were called the “Black Regiment” not because of the color of their skin but because of the color of their robes.

Rev. Jonas Clark was the most influential pastor in New England in the 1770’s. John Hancock and Samuel Adams were at his house when Paul Revere went on his ride. The “shot heard round the world” came a few feet from his parsonage. The first men who fell on April 19^{th were his parishioners. Why would the pastors fell so strongly about winning freedom for America?}

The battle wasn’t so much for national freedom it was for religious freedom! They believed that if they lost the battle…England would impose it’s state church on the whole of the New Land. On Roger Williams Puritans who founded Rhode Island… On William Penn’s Quaker Pennsylvania (what he called the Holy Experiment) . On the Pilgrims themselves who had given up so much to break free.

So the Baptist, and the Presbyterians, and the Catholics, and the Congregationalists and the Anglicans fought side by side. And when they won the war, they were determined to write religious freedom for all people into their new Constitution.

Alexis de Tocqueville- Frenchman (who had watched his French Revolution crack down on the church, confiscate it’s property, and write God out of it’s government...only to have his country plunged into tyranny, anarchy, and chaos) said about the US after a visit: