Contending for the faith | Making Disciples | Equipping the Saints for Ministry

by Rayola Kelley

       Q: My question may seem out of the extraordinary, but I have been hearing how more government control means that we as citizens lose more rights. I also know I have had certain rights allotted to me as a child of God. I want to understand how such rights work in our lives and what it would mean for us to lose them.  

       A: I compliment you on your question, but I have to admit my answer may not be very encouraging as far as this present age in which we live. To understand rights (expectation or inheritance) you must do so in light of laws (environment), privileges (conditions), and opportunities (possibilities). Let me best summarize these subjects to bring them into proper focus.

       Rights have to do with maintaining a certain quality of lifestyle, which includes personal choice or preference according to a person’s moral conscience. This lifestyle includes such matters as being able to worship without fear of persecution and, if the initiative is there, seek after a better quality of life or status without being stopped by prejudicial barriers of class, money, culture, and religion. Such rights also give people the liberty to pursue, uphold and maintain such a lifestyle. In God’s economy, He has made basic rights available to every human being to pursue the best quality of life that can be obtained in His kingdom. These rights have to do with believers being His children, living in expectation as heirs to an eternal inheritance. However, His holy Law is what determines what is honorable and acceptable.

       Righteous laws will protect the rights of people to pursue and maintain honorable (moral) lifestyles. Being morally responsible protects the integrity of personal rights. Such laws protect against dishonorable people from abusing other people’s basic rights to life, property, and freedom to believe or worship God, as well as living in peace. After all, when others abuse the rights of another person, they are denying him or her of the basic rights that should be allotted to every human being. To deny, abuse or neglect the moral obligation behind such rights will cause people to end up losing them.

       Privileges include rights, but rights and privileges are different. Rights are available to everyone to pursue an honorable life in a moral, responsible society, while privileges are given as a means to benefit a person’s life. However, privileges are restricted by Law. Rights can be denied or lost through abuse of strength or power, but privileges can be revoked when the conditions are not met because government, or one who is in authority, has given them. Two examples of privileges are righteous prayers before the throne of God and being able to drive a vehicle.

       Opportunity is the final aspect of this picture. In God’s kingdom, or a free society, where people have the means to pursue the highest caliber of life and reach their potential, there are opportunities that are available for individuals to discover personal heights in relationship to character, abilities, initiative, goals, and dreams. Such opportunities do not represent free handouts; rather, they represent temporary open doors in which a person with the necessary initiative will recognize the moment and seize it. Opportunities in God’s kingdom point to His promises that we can diligently pursue and patiently wait for as we endure the testing of our faith until they are fulfilled in our lives. To seize an opportunity means one avoids losing the chance to reach a goal, have a dream realized or gain a different life. In America, we have witnessed certain groups of people who were oppressed by their former governments making a better life for themselves in this country because of the opportunities that are available. These people seized them by working hard to acquire their goal, thereby, bettering their lives.

       When Americans talk about losing their rights to more government interference, they are simply making reference to the government gaining more control over the different aspects of their lives. The more control government gains through passing oppressive laws and establishing covert policies and acts, such as a recent move to outlaw personal gardening and farming as a means to control people by controlling the food supply, the less say people have over their lives. In such an environment, rights becomes privileges, laws become select and abusive, ultimately exalting the elite and maintaining elaborate lifestyles for them while the masses are kept poor, ignorant and subservient, and privileges become so regulated that all opportunities are eventually closed down. Therefore, in oppressive governments everything becomes a matter of privilege so that such privileges can be revoked at any time in order to dictate to or control (oppress) a situation or people in any matter, including religious preference.

       Such oppressive, wicked governments break the back of freethinking people as they subdue personal initiatives and hopes, making people and their following generation slaves to the government’s dictates. In such a society, aborting unborn babies conditions people to graduate to the next stages of dehumanizing the masses and deifying the leaders with such actions as withholding necessary medical funds from those suffering from such diseases as cystic fibrosis. Eventually, this terrible digression of moral reasoning will end with euthanizing anyone who cannot serve the government’s purpose, such as the physically challenged and the elderly, as well as justifying the sacrifice of those who dare disagree with such abominable insanity.

       There are names for the humanistic, demonically inspired ideology that drives such wicked governments such as communism and fascism, but the ultimate goal is to bring in a one-world government where all people are subservient to a few. In my tender years of grade school we not only were being prepared to be bombed by communistic governments (Russia and Cuba), but we feared communistic takeover because we knew it would be death to the personal freedom that was precious to many of us. We were also aware of how fascism devalued people based on their lineage and beliefs, causing the useless death of over six million precious souls, including innocent children, during the holocaust.

       Some of us have wondered how such ideologies can gain a foothold in a society such as America. Sadly, we are seeing how it is accomplished. The main platforms such philosophies gain ground on are people’s ignorance and laziness. It seduces ignorance and offers free bread to the lazy, while it conditions our young people in its sinister ways. Since the social philosophy with its liberal attitude has taken center stage and become rooted in the educational system of America, our young people have not been educated about the destructive ways masked by these wicked philosophies. Instead of becoming discerning to the destructive traps of these ideologies, they have been dulled down and conditioned to embrace these wicked philosophies so that when politically presented to them, they will actually embrace them in utter ignorance and delusion. Such an embrace would cause America to fall into the destructive, controlling jaws of these wicked ideologies, without any one country firing a shot.

       I do not know about you, but as a Christian, I am glad that my life, hope and future is not in this present world.