Why Should God Be Part of Our Laws?

"God will not favor everything that we do. It is rather our duty to divine His will." Lyndon B Johnson

"...the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God." John F Kennedy

"The way is plain, peaceful and generous...if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless." Abraham Lincoln

"With God's help, we can and will resolve the problems which now confront us." Ronald Reagan

Continuing his two part series, "God and Country", Andy Stanley reminds us that sometimes when things surface nationally which intersect with things we find in scripture, people that do what he does (minister) have to say something in response. The question Andy poses is, "Where is God in the national conscience?" Every nation has a conscience. As individuals, our accountability to God speaks our conscience, but who or what speaks to our national conscience if not God?

Just a few weeks ago, we saw a great example of our national conscience. The insurance giant, AIG, received money from the government to bail themselves out of a financial meltdown and then it was made known that the high level executives were still going to be receiving enormous bonuses!! Obama, in sharp response, said something very interesting. He essentially said, "the executives that receive those large bonuses ought to give the money back." But it was an "ought to" and the public seemed to come together and agree. But what was behind the "ought to"? Where does the moral conscience come from; the President?

We are a nation that continues to appeal to something that guides us, but what is it? Last week, Andy pointed out that clearly, the national conversation involving God has fallen out of favor. The reason that it isn't cool or politically correct to mention God on the national stage is not necessarily because it's not fair or because it's not comfortable nor is it because we've intellectually moved past God. The primary reason God has been pushed out is because of our own wealth and affluence.

In Proverbs, we see that affluence and humility are not good mixes. The more stuff we have, the more we tend to give ourselves credit, the less humble we are and the more we push out God.
"Give me neither poverty nor riches, but only my daily bread." We have far more than we need as a nation. Increasingly, as a nation, we continue asking "Who is God?" We've become less dependent on Him, more arrogant because of "our own achievements" and hence, not in need of God. The reason we have moved God out is because we have been so incredibly blessed by Him!

In Deuteronomy 8:6, Moses is about to lead the former Israelite slaves into the Promised Land, but before they enter, Moses wants to remind the people there's two things they have to remember;

1) There's law
2) There's accountability to God

Our forefathers stated that we would be a nation not of a king, but a nation in awe of God. Moses, as the leader of Israelite's Exodus, warned the people as they reached the Promised Land. He implored them, that when they were blessed, not to forget the Lord God. Moses knew that prosperity and humility don't coincide very well. He warned that, with prosperity, they would lose their humility and forget their need of a God.

"Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. He led you through the vast and dreadful desert, that thirsty and waterless land, with its venomous snakes and scorpions. He brought you water out of hard rock. He gave you manna to eat in the desert, something your fathers had never known, to humble and to test you so that in the end it might go well with you. You may say to yourself, "My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me."


When we think that all we've accomplished is purely with the strength of our own hands, we are at that moment not accountable to anyone. When we are unaccountable, we become more unjust as we look out more and more for our own interests. When a nation loses any sense of divine accountability, it becomes more and mores unjust to its people. Read about history. The natural overflow of unaccountability to God is the exit of justice. Free enterprise, capitalization the American way of life is awesome until we lose God. Then free enterprise becomes an excuse to hoard as the executives of AIG did. At this point, "free enterprise" becomes a symbol of injustice because of the hoarding. The only way to push back on hoarding and injustice is to then impose more laws in an attempt to "legislate morality". But with so many laws that can be broken even because people are unaware that such laws exist, that is when a nation loses its freedom. The American view of life is wonderful until we factor God out. Injustice becomes part of the culture. We forget our God.

"But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your forefathers, as it is today."

If any nation in the world believes this, it should be us. It should be America because we have truly been a blessed nation. It is God who designed our nation.

"If you ever forget the Lord your God and follow other gods and worship and bow down to them, I testify against you today that you will surely be destroyed. Like the nations the LORD destroyed before you, so you will be destroyed for not obeying the LORD your God."

At this point, we might say to ourselves, "Boy, I'm glad we're not a nation that had a covenant with God! I'm glad I'm not an Israelite! Does God really punish destroy a nation because it pushes him out? Read history; it happened time and time again. Israel was eventually destroyed. Perhaps the arrogance that comes along with forgetting the Lord our God doesn't need the overt intentional judgment of God, perhaps it carries an intentional judgement of its own. Maybe a lack of humility has its own implications. Perhaps it's just sowing and reaping. Moses reminded the people that, like nations before them, there would be a price to pay for leaving out God. It was ultimately the people's decision.

The sad thing, but the hopeful thing, is it doesn't have to be this way. We can try to factor God back into the equation. What's more, it hasn't always been this way. Andy loves to read history. Several years ago, Andy read Steven Ambros book, "D-Day". It is a big thick book about all the minutia leading up to D-Day. Ambros outlined the U.S. build-up prior to our invasion of France. It was known that we would attack France, but the secret was when and where we would strike. So on June 6, 1944, when we finally launched the invasion, the news was announced on the radio that the invasion had begun. Instinctively, when our nation became aware of the news, despite our amazing military of 130,000 trained troops and 250,000 other people who had mobilized to support the troops, there wasn't a sense of a national question, "Who is the Lord?" In fact, it was quite the opposite of today. On D-Day President Franklin Roosevelt used the radio to gather everyone and lead them in a national prayer. Can you imagine? The nation, as a nation, prayed, despite our own careful plans, despite our powerful military and despite our advanced technology. We prayed.

Here is (a segments of) that prayer;


"Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor. Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith. These men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home. Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom. And, O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other. Thy will be done, Almighty God. Amen.
Franklin D. Roosevelt - June 6, 1944

The New York Daily News threw out their other articles and printed the Lord's Prayer on the front of the newspaper. The company Lord and Taylor never opened that day. The president of the company sent all employees home to pray. The New York Stock Exchange paused for two minutes to pray. The editors of the NYT printed we pray for the boys. Special church services took place across the nation. In Columbus, Ohio, the mayor used sirens as a call for the entire city to stop in prayer.

We understood that even with our great military might, we still NEEDED the Lord. Not everyone agreed with the endeavor. There was conflict, but the people came together. A few years later, we witnessed the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King. Our nation came to a point where we understood that principles of scripture should impact the law of our nation. Luther appealed to our national conscience. Even thought it was different and uncomfortable, King was right according to scripture.

On August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, King spoke the words of his most famous speech, "Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, (quoting from the Declaration of Independence) "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Then, Martin Luther King closed with a line we all know by heart, "Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last."



Aren't you glad that after the second World War, a group rose up and said we can't talk about God in politics law and social civil service? These people said all we need is a court, a system and laws. They think we can justly rule ourselves. But, if there had not been a national conscience during the Civil Rights Movement, there very well might not have been a Civil Rights Movement!

The leverage point during these important times in history was our understanding that God created all of us equally. To remove Him is extraordinarily dangerous. We only have to look at history to see where that leads. To do so will leave us looking at ourselves, our arrogance. We think we can become unaccountable to God, but it has consistently led to injustice. It leads to moral ambiguity, which leads to the erosion of civil rights.

This is not the time to lose heart or to be afraid. We should be afraid of our own arrogance which leaves us asking "Who is the Lord?". It leads us to abandon the notion that God blesses.
Maybe it's time to end our prayers with, instead "God Bless America", with a sincere appeal to God to bless our nation despite it's gradual rejection of Him.

Does Anyone Remember the Official U.S. Motto?

Opening his two-part series, "God and Country", Andy Stanley talks about how many of us have had a few conversations with the television screen, because we agree or disagree with something we see. Many of us think that if Washington would give us an hour of their time, we could solve so much. There are many debates that we could talk about or argue. "I think there is another debate going on behind the scenes that we need to talk about", says Andy. Every once in a while, in the life of a nation, a social issue will intersect with the Bible. When these crossroads take place, sometimes it's up to us to speak up. Andy originally thought this idea would only require one week's attention, but there was so much information that he made it into two.

At the heart of this issue is our national conscience. We all have a conscience individually and God speaks to us through it. Sometimes, though, we can become calloused to our conscience. In our society, we have collective conscience which can be family values or a corporate culture. This can be easily seen when a family with one set of values gets together with a family of another set of values. Such value conflicts might surface in the areas of language, television/movie filters, video games, music or alcohol. "I was actually recently in the reverse of that which was a little embarrassing." Andy and his family got together with another family who found that movies and video games in his house weren't as tightly screened as they were in their house.

In addition to a family conscience or a corporate culture, our nation has a collective conscience. "How many of you, if you knew you could get by with it, would still hesitate to take a big bag of fast food trash and throw it out the window on the way down the highway?" Virtually no one would do this because we, in the U.S., are very litter conscious. This is simply an area of the national conscience that has been drilled down into us as a society. It is one of our do's and don'ts.

The anti-slavery movement in England and the U.S. was led by the conscience of these two countries. The civil rights movement was another example of a war of conscience. Laws and regulations of change were made as a result. Abortion has been another example of degrees of tolerance, which the nation has accepted. Child pornography is wrong in our society. Men in our society don't marry 11 year old children. You can't marry 3 wives in our country. But what are our values based on? Why the high cringe factor when we talk about the legalization of drugs? Child labor laws are strict in our civilized society. We have naturally developed an "ought to be" conscience as a nation.


There are two general observations of a conscience:


1) When there is a strong collective conscience about something, you don't have to have a lot of rules because everything is more or less understood. In a healthy community, there simply don't have to be a lot of rules. If it is understood, for example, that stealing is inherently wrong, then there don't have to be rules to outline specifically when stealing has actually taken place. If stealing is not understood, then we are likely to be over legislated. The reason that laws are getting out of hand in our modern day is because the courts are now trying to legislate morality. Imagine a society where we define our conscience by what a court says!


2) A conscience has to be informed. Someone taught us that littering was wrong. In Romans, Paul is talking to a group of people who didn't have biblical laws . Romans 2:14-15, "Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them." This talks about how, in the absence of laws, the moral conscience takes over.


Now, we have a national conscience, but what originally informed it? A sense of personal and corporate accountability to God, our Creator. In general, it was established by a general sense that there is a God. "I'm not arguing that the founding fathers were all Christians", but Andy is stating that there was a general sense of a Creator. Look at the Declaration of Independence. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; life liberty and the pursuit of happiness." These men were saying "we are going to start a nation. We are going to break off from England and we are going to outline our identity as a nation." The second line of the Declaration of Independence invokes the presence of a God!


There was some hypocrisy of these values when slavery arose, which eventually led to the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address includes, "that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom." President Lincoln voiced the notion that we are a nation under God. In the 1950's, the phrase "one nation under God" was put into the Pledge of Allegiance. Then, just 53 years ago, something happened that eludes many of us. Our country got a brand new motto. On July 30, 1956, the 84th Congress declared it's official motto, under President Eisenhower, was to be "In God We Trust"!!


If tomorrow, you walked into Home Depot as an employee and yelled, "You can do it", the response would be "And we can help". If you walked in to the offices of the University of Georgia and yelled, "Go...", others would respond, "Dogs!" If you yelled, "Eat..." in a Chic-Fil-A office, you'd hear "...More Chicken!"


But what if every principle of every public school got on the PA system and said, "Kids, we trust God"? Can you imagine? There would be lawsuits everywhere! It's the national motto!! We have drifted so far away from God talk in our society, we can no longer say it in our institutions. Now it's strange if a public school teacher said the U.S. motto. God has, over time, been pushed further and further to the side. Did you know that every year, there is a group who sues to take the "So help me God" part out of the official oath. Why? It probably isn't the concerted effort by individuals to eliminate God. It could largely be part of the fact that some people, in the name of God, have done some ridiculous stuff.


Why is this subject so important? The reason is our national conscience is tied to the existence and the presence and the centrality of God. It has everything to do with how we view Do's and Don'ts of our society. As God is moved aside, we lose much of our sense of accountability to God. And if God, then, is no longer central to our conscience, something else has to take its place.



This is a debate between the grateful and the accountable to God, versus the ungrateful and unaccountability to God. For the ungrateful and unaccountable, in their heart of hearts, they don't feel accountable to anyone. If you take God out, there is no accountability. Look at your own life when there wasn't God in your life. Do you remember how you lived? Are we going to be a nation of gratitude and accountability or is it going to be a nation of "In We We Trust"? If we can pull God back to the center, we can finally reestablish the foundation of our national conscience.

"If our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is tied to Creator God and we remove Creator God from the dialogue, then what is the new basis or protection for those rights? We don't know where it will go, but we do have the clues as to where it has gone in other countries. Typically, when it falls onto regulations and laws, eventually those rights go away.


Homework from Andy's message which he request is for us to try and recall the last time a President prayed in public. Also, he asks if we will ask others what our national motto is just to gauge awareness.