Unalienable Rights

By Richard Owen Roberts

    Human government is not the invention of the fertile minds of men. The sacred record makes it clear that God Himself first instituted and regulated human government. From the beginning it was unquestionably designed to guarantee the unalienable rights of both the Creator and the created.

    The founding fathers of America clearly understood that government had the capacity to hamper or restrict the rights with which God Himself had endowed His people. Many of them had personally experienced the destruction of their own rights by oppressive rulers. It was their profound conviction that when this happened, government should be either altered or abolished and replaced by a new government.

    We need to realize that whenever government seeks to grant rights to individuals and classes that God Himself has not endowed, and whenever this granting of rights by humans to humans impinges upon the rights that the Almighty has reserved for Himself, that government ceases to be of God. Neither is it any longer truly for the people, for the best interest of the governed can never be served by a government which elevates itself to the stature of God. When this happens, either the people themselves will alter or abolish their corrupt government, or God will, in His own time and way, accomplish that nation’s destruction.

    God has clearly revealed the specific areas in which He will, throughout all time, control the rights affecting man. These restricted areas were long weighed, regarded, and yielded to by the American people. They are set forth in the Ten Commandments which were, in the early years of our nation, a prominent part of every schoolroom. Their principles were incorporated into our national laws and into the laws of our several states. Included in the realms where God never endowed man with the right of choice are His restrictions on man’s relationship to Himself, on the taking of human life, on the use of sex, on the appropriation of the goods and private property of others, and in the regulation of truth and falsehood.

God Alone Is to Be Worshipped

    When God endowed man with certain unalienable rights, He did not include the right to worship any god he chose or no god at all. God never granted man the right to worship the god of his own imagination. The God who made man has always insisted that the creature worship and serve his Creator. There is but one true and living God, and He, and He alone, is to be worshipped and served. This nation was built on the conviction that there is a Creator God whose mercy is necessary to the well-being of all its peoples. There is no reason to suppose that it was ever the intention of the founding fathers of this nation to grant the freedom to future generations of Americans to make gods of their own imaginations, to worship and serve what they made, and thus to turn this nation from Christianity to paganism. The religious freedom granted by our national documents was not freedom to be irreligious. What was guaranteed was the freedom of every denomination of Christians to practice Christianity according to the dictates of their own consciences. All that was to be required of them was that they demean themselves peaceably and as good subjects of the nation. Our fathers guaranteed that no sect or denomination should ever be established by law, but it was absolutely not their intent to guarantee the right of the godless to turn the nation away from the Christianity upon which it was founded and into a cesspool of iniquitous infidelity.

Rights Affecting the Lives of Others

    From the very beginning, God has been plain concerning the rights affecting the lives of others which He has granted His creatures. God’s command, Thou shalt not kill, is counterbalanced by clear and distinct teachings concerning the necessity of capital punishment in the case of certain carefully defined crimes. For human government to suspend God’s laws concerning capital punishment is to violate, at great jeopardy to the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of all its people, an unalienable right that God has reserved in His own hands. When human government grants the right to its citizens to murder millions of unborn children, it seizes from the Almighty one of His unalienable rights that He will never surrender. While the Creator may allow that devious nation a period of time in which such dastardly acts seem to be accomplished with impunity, that nation exposes itself to an outpouring of the wrath of God that knows no precedent.

The Sanctity of Sex

    Nowhere in all the sacred writings upon which this nation was built, nor in the laws our fathers framed thereon, is anything more explicit than the sanctity of sex. God never granted man rights in determining what usage of sex was acceptable and what usage was unacceptable. He still holds all rights in this regard. He has declared that it is totally unacceptable to Him when an unmarried man and an unmarried woman commit fornication. He has made it absolutely unlawful for a man married to a woman to have sex with a woman other than his own wife or for a married woman to have sex with anyone other than her own husband. No matter how many politicians wish it otherwise, sex between members of the same sex is an abomination in the sight of the Creator just as is sex between humankind and animals.

    No president of the United States, no Supreme Court justice, no Congressman or Representative, no individual or groups of persons have any rights in this realm. God alone holds the unalienable rights regarding sex. He has spoken! Every wicked violator of His laws and every facilitator of such violations will answer to Him.

    God established human government to guarantee that His rights were never violated and to assure its subjects that their rights would be preserved in perpetuity. Whenever government attempts to seize the rights that God has reserved for Himself, that government has failed tragically in its purpose for being and can no longer assure its subjects of their God-endowed rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Judgment for Violating God’s Rights

    Whenever the created forget the unalienable rights of their Creator or attempt to seize His rights as if they were their own, they do so at great peril to themselves and to their posterity.

    God through His Prophet Isaiah declared: "Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; who substitute bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and clever in their own sight! Woe to those who...take away the rights of the ones who are in the right!" (Isa. 5:20-23). Consider the extraordinary danger a nation places itself in when it robs not merely the rights of those who are in the right but elects, even to the highest offices in the land, those men who promise to rob the truly righteous One, the Lord God Omnipotent, of His rights by promoting such grievous wickedness as abortion and homosexuality (see Isaiah 5:24-25). No one sins against God with impunity.

    ...To suppose that because God has richly blessed this nation in the past He will do so in the future is sheer nonsense. Ancient Job knew better, declaring, "He makes the nations great, then destroys them; He enlarges the nations, then leads them away" (Job 12:23), for God Himself "deprives of intelligence the chiefs of the earth’s people, and makes them wander in a pathless waste. They grope in darkness with no light, and He makes them stagger like a drunken man" (vv. 24-25).

    "Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people" (Prov. 14:34). A government that willfully violates the rights of God is a government that disgraces itself, placing itself and its people outside the ranks of divine protection and blessing, and positioning itself for the most horrible decline and destruction imaginable.

    – Taken from the booklet Unalienable Rights. Copyright 1993 by Richard Owen Roberts. Used by permission.