Over the last several years, it’s become fashionable to decry the failures of the United States of America.  That’s not terribly hard to do.  Just like any nation filled with broken sinners, there are bound to be things which demonstrate that depraved nature we all harbor within us. 

  Sadly, overlooked in this headlong rush to burn down the form of government begun this day in 1776, is that there is something so essentially wonderful about America.  It resonates within not only our hearts this morning, but it also rings in places around the world where freedom isn’t a realizable commodity.  What is wonderful is simply this – freedom!

  It shouldn’t surprise us that freedom from governmental overreach was part of the DNA of the Founding Fathers.  Where did this dominant emphasis on freedom find its source?  What were the headwaters from which the Founders were sipping?

  The answer is, very clearly, that they many of them were well-steeped in the knowledge of the Word.  There, in Galatians 5:1 we hear the first echo of freedom 0 “It is for freedom Christ set you free.”

  But it’s more than that.  Stretching back all the way into the Book of First Samuel, we hear the perils of tyranny.  You see, the people of God were struggling.  Following their own ways and not the Lord’s had seen them encounter difficult with surrounding nations.  In light of these struggles, the people fashioned what they thought would be a great solution.  A king who could bring with him a government and an army.  Ah, but God instructed Samuel to tell the people this in I Samuel 8:10-18– “So Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking for a king from him.  He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots.  And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots.  He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants.  He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants.  He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys, and put them to his work.  He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves.  And in that day, you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”

  What God knows is that humanity is fallen, broken by the power of sin.  As such any government will be entirely made up of, you guessed it, people who are themselves, deeply flawed.  Armed with the power of coercive force, a government always falls prey to the inescapable human dynamic articulated by Lord Acton, not Machiavelli as many people assume. “The historian and moralist, who was otherwise known simply as Lord Acton, expressed this opinion in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

  Jesus Christ came bringing a new kind of freedom.  One that was far more precious than freedom from the Romans.  Jesus Christ came to liberate us from our two worst enemies.  Jesus Christ became human and died upon a Cross to free us from sin and death.

  And it points to the very heart of God’s nature that such a thing simply had to be done because as his creation, we need to be free.  God alone created us.  He made us in his image.  If he’d wanted to, God could’ve designed us to be mere puppets, programmed to do precisely what he wished. 

  But God didn’t do that. 

  Instead, He created us to bear His image.