March 28, 2024

Comments from John Eidsmoe, Peter Lillback, JFK on Our God-Given Rights

“Endowed by Their Creator” is the latest episode to come out in Jerry Newcombe’s Foundation of American Liberty series, distributed through Providence Forum. “Endowed by Their Creator” shows how the Declaration of Independence says our rights come from God. God-given rights are non-negotiable. Here are the last three comments in that documentary.

 

John Eidsmoe, Law Professor, Author of Christianity and the Constitution

Has America forgotten its roots? We’ve moved away from the views of the Declaration of Independence that we are entitled to independence by the laws of nature and of nature’s God, and that all men are not evolved but created equal and endowed not by their government with certain negotiable privileges, but by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. And as we move away from that and we see the view that government is merely the creation of men and laws are merely what men, i.e., the state, i.e., the courts in many cases want it to be. We’ve really laid the framework for tyranny, because once you say that government is the source of law, you eliminate any basis for saying that this law is unjust. Whatever the government says then is just.

 

Peter Lillback, Ph.D., Founding President of Providence Forum

There’s never a last word for a nation until God’s Providence says “You’re done.”  I’m not ready to give up on America, there’s too much treasure of great freedoms, of wisdom, of biblical truth, of even of sending the Gospel out to the nations. There’s always a chance for revival, reformation, new beginnings. It’s a dangerous time. We are deciding, even as we are here today, will there be a future for America? We will make that decision, whether we choose as Washington once said, “To follow the Divine Author of our blessed religion.” We are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. If each of us in our own place choose to do that which is right, we begin to change history. America’s not finished unless we die by suicide. That’s what Abraham Lincoln once said. He said, “No foreign nation can ever take a step on the Blue Ridge Mountains or take a drink from the Ohio River or visit the Shenandoah Valley in a contest of a thousand years, unless we let them do it. A free nation will live forever, or it will die by suicide.”

 

Narrator

Despite the problems and challenges we face as a nation, the foundation of the nation is still clear, as John F. Kennedy said so well in his Inaugural Address.

 

John F. Kennedy

And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe–the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God. [John F. Kennedy, January 20, 1961]