Two hundred and fifty years ago, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson were charged by the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to draft a document declaring that the thirteen British colonies on the North American continent were independent states, free from the British empire. Most of the declaration is a long list of grievances that hardly anybody bothers with any more. However, there are a few lines that have never stopped echoing across America and around the world:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal… that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights… that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.”

Two hundred and fifty years is enough time to test an idea.

Long enough to see whether it is merely popular or practical or political, or whether it rests on something more enduring. What I want to suggest this morning is simple: those words and truths endure because they did not begin in Philadelphia in 1776. They began thousands of years earlier – in Genesis.

Genesis 1:26-27

²⁶ Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

²⁷ So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

Genesis 5:1-2

… When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created.

Genesis 9:6

 “Whoever sheds the blood of man,
by man shall his blood be shed,
for God made man in his own image.

James 3:8-9

but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.  With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.

Explanation: why human equality is self-evident

The Declaration says human equality is “self-evident.” That particular term was Ben Franklin’s suggestion. By it, he meant truth so obvious that all you need to do to see that it’s true is just look at it. It’s that clear.

The question is, “why?” Why should any man recognize another man as his equal in worth? I pulled my son-in-law Noor up on this platform with me a few months ago to show you how obvious it is that he and I are not equal. He’s way bigger, much stronger, far better-looking than I am. Why would anyone think that our equality with each other is self-evident?

Scripture gives the answer: Genesis 1 has the Creator saying “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” So God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them.”

Man is made in the image of God. In the idiom of the Ancient Near East, that means man was made to represent God, with the dignity of God, to wield the authority of God over his creation, to tend it and defend it, for creation’s good and the Creator’s glory. And because we are made by and patterned after a Creator who worked at his creation for six days and then stopped on the seventh, we find ourselves to be makers and workers. Even little children are like this. Leave them alone, and they’ll inevitably start making things, or making things up, or forming things, or transforming them. Have you ever watched and listened to a group of kids making up a game and creating the rules as they’re playing it? That’s the image of God at work

Genesis 1 told us long ago that man is in the image of God. Genesis 5 repeats it after the Fall, almost word for word; that is to say, man is still the image of God even when he’s stained and scarred by sin. Genesis 9 says the truth still stands after the Flood, and serves as the bedrock for some of the most important truth God will ever teach about the value of human life: “Whoever sheds the blood of man must be held accountable, for God made man in his own image.” And in the New Testament, James brings it into the little details of daily life: “With our words we bless our Lord and Father, and with them we curse men who are made in the likeness of God. Brothers, this ought not to be.” So from creation to covenant to church to our whole human culture, the message is the same: every human being you meet bears the image of God, and so carries a value and dignity and energy that are bestowed and measured by God himself. That truth does not fade.

The equality of human beings is not grounded in ability. Not in intelligence. Not in strength. Not in status. Not in wealth. Not in social contribution. The equality of human beings is grounded in this: man is made in the image of God.

By 1776, Christian Europe and its colonies were steeped, however incompletely or imperfectly, in a millennium and a half of biblical truth about the image of God in man. That truth had led to the abolition of the brutal gladiatorial games in Christian Rome. It had driven the near-universal rejection of polygamy in most Christian realms. It had fueled repeated attempts by popes and monks and various Christians to regulate, curtail, or abolish slavery. The writers whose works formed the ideological backdrop to the American Revolution (thinkers like Locke and Montesquieu), while they tried to build their cases on human reason without divine revelation, were fully aware that their foundational assumptions about humanity were essentially biblical and Christian. The clear nod to creation and the Creator in the Declaration itself was an acknowledgement that Genesis was the deepest bedrock of their thinking. Even Tom Paine, maybe the most deistic, least classically Christian of the founding generation, openly identified Genesis as the place where the equality of mankind begins. This ineluctable truth does more than anything else to explain why the essential equality of all humanity seemed self-evident to our Founding Fathers—and still seems self-evident to us 250 years later. The Founders did not create this truth. They just recognized it, and relied on it.

Of course, Bible-believing Christians know far more: human equality is obvious, not because man reasoned his way to it, but because God revealed it. Nothing else needs to be said.

Celebration: why we praise God for our liberties and rights

John Adams, who teamed up with Jefferson and Franklin to write the Declaration, was a lawyer who was a titan of American liberty from the earliest days of the revolution. After the 8Revolutionary War was done and the new Constitution ratified, John served as vice-president under Washington for two terms, and then as president for one term. He was the one who suggested that yearly celebrations of American liberty should include parades and fireworks and other festivities, including, in his words, “solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty.” He believed that freedom was a gift of God to the American nation, so Americans should celebrate the gift publicly. And he was right.

Honestly, though, we Americans have not always lived up to this ideal of freedom and the truth of human equality. In fact, like every other society, we Americans have tolerated and even propagated more than one form of brutal repression over the centuries. The way we treated the indigenous peoples of the North American continent, the way we unquestioningly bought sold used and abused human beings of African descent, the way, to this very day, we heedlessly slaughter unborn human beings to suit our own convenience, are all blatant and brutal contradictions to our professed love of liberty and reverence for rights. But history also shows something remarkable: the truth of human equality has not stopped pressing on the stained conscience of our nation. It has been the moral engine behind the abolition of slavery, the expansion of civil rights, and the recognition of human dignity across cultures far beyond the North American continent. In time, it will also drive the abolition of abortion in these fifty states.

Why? Because once we say that people are made as the image of God, we cannot easily treat them as less than human—at least, not indefinitely. Our God-given consciences won’t let us.

And so, yes, we celebrate. Not with blind hyper-patriotism. Not with naive triumphalism. But with genuine gratitude to God above. Because the liberties we have known, the framework we have inherited, the ability to worship freely and speak freely, even the freedom to look at ourselves squarely and see and say what is true about our vices and failures, are not small things or merely earthly benefits. They are evidences of God’s astonishing grace to our land.

I just finished reading a biography of Samuel Adams, second cousin to John Adams. To be honest, all I knew about Sam before I read the book was that he was a Bostonian rabble-rouser who was somehow connected to both the Boston Tea Party and the Boston Massacre. Oh, and people from Cincinnati have been selling beer in his name in Boston for the last few decades.

What I know now is that the Founding Fathers themselves referred to Sam Adams as the Patriarch of American liberty. Sam Adams wasn’t a national hero like many of the other Founding Fathers. Before, during and after the War, Sam’s focus was on Massachusetts, and especially Boston. Contrary to current impressions, Sam Adams was not a brewer. He was a printer, and a writer, and what today we call an agitator for liberty and against the King. He was also a committed Christian. Like most of his fellow New Englanders, he was staunchly opposed to slavery. He considered it a blatant contradiction to Christian ideals of liberty and self-rule. He had a deep reverence for his grandparents and great-grandparents, generations he knew as his “Puritan ancestors.” He shared their settled conviction that the early Israelites we read about in the Bible had the only truly godly form of government: a republic. You might remember: when they first arrived in the Promised Land, the Hebrews were governed by their own tribal elders, under the supreme rule of God himself. They were assured by God repeatedly that they needed no king. They had the Law of God their King, and he had given them their elders to guide them in building a society in accordance with it. Why did the Puritans call it “the Hebrew Republic”? Because the Puritans also studied the history of the Romans. Those Romans famously took their word for “old man,” senex, and created the word “senator” to denote the elders who ruled their Republic for the good of the people. That’s why the Puritans talked about the earliest Israelite nation, ruled not by a king but by designated elders, or senators, chosen to represent the people, as a republic. In other words, at the deepest levels of the founding of our nation, our creed was “no king but God.” We aimed to be a democratic republic. You see, our earliest American founders thought their elders, or “aldermen,” as the office is still known in some American towns (including our own Annapolis) Where is the modern day parallel to the ancient Israelite tribal elders. No king, just elders or senators or aldermen, the earliest Israelites and the earliest Americans demanded.

These days the rabble just yell “no king.” What they want is anarchy, the total absence of all authority. But that’s not an American idea. The American cry of “no king but God” insists that there is an authority who rules over us all: the God of the Hebrews. Samuel Adams was among the first and loudest voices shouting, “No king but God!” and agitating for a democratic republic.  Naturally, the king he had in mind was George III of Great Britain. He was the king who needed to give way to God and the people’s representatives. Of course, Sam Adams and the other Founding Fathers also believed that no priest or preacher or prelate or pope, no church or synod or denomination, could be trusted to control access to God. They believed in putting the Bible in the hands of the people and trusting God to get them to the truth.

The reason we praise God for our liberties and rights is that we believe they are given to us by God. And we’re thankful for our brother Sam Adams, along with the rest of the Founding Fathers, who helped us see it.

Implication: American rights are still expressly God-given and self-evident rights

We must be very clear here. The Declaration does not merely say that rights exist. It says where they come from. There is an order:

1. God gives us our fundamental rights, That’s why they are inalienable.
2. Government exists to secure those rights.
3. When government fails to secure those rights, the people retain the right to change or even do away with that government.

No matter how confused the governor of Minnesota may be on the issue, government does not create rights, or bestow them. It recognizes and protects what God has already given.

This was not just an abstract theory to the men who framed this nation. Take Sam Adams. He was not writing and printing essays from a distance. He was standing in the middle of a growing crisis in a Boston already occupied by unfriendly British troops. As British authority tightened its control over Massachusetts, Adams argued something simple and profound: that no human authority—not even the king’s Parliament—had permission to violate the natural rights of the people. He spoke often of “the rights of the colonists as men.” Those were not rights granted by government, but rights that government was bound to respect, because they came ultimately from God.

That conviction came to a head in the moments leading up to the Boston Tea Party. Adams did not call for chaos. He did not celebrate disorder. As Boston debated with Britain about whether the Tea Tax was lawful or unlawful, Adams wrote repeatedly pressing the argument that when government ceases to secure rights—and begins to violate them—it steps outside its proper bounds. When the final pronouncement came back from Parliament that no relief would be granted, Adams told a town assembly at the Old South church: “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.” Almost immediately, Boston patriots dumped 92,000 pounds of English tea into Boston harbor. It was December of 1773.

The Boston Tea Party was not a lawless riot. It was an act of deliberate political resistance born from deep conviction. The issue had moved beyond taxation to a matter of principle. That principle was this: government does not create rights; it exists to secure rights. And when a government persistently refuses to secure the rights of its people, the people have both the right and the duty to resist its abuses.

That conviction did not remain in Boston. It reached Maryland as well. In Maryland’s Declaration of Rights of 1776, liberty is understood as something government recognizes and protects rather than creates—rights grounded in the laws of nature and nature’s God.

Yet those convictions did not originate in Annapolis, Boston, or Philadelphia. They emerged from a brief flowering of Enlightenment political thought built upon centuries of English common law—law rooted in Anglo-Saxon custom and profoundly shaped by biblical Christianity, especially the conviction that all people share a common dignity because they bear the image of God.

And that has implications we cannot avoid. Specifically, I have come to the conclusion that the American Puritans were right: until Christ himself comes to consummate his eternal and absolute monarchy, a democratically-elected republic, charged with preserving its citizens’ God-given, self-evident rights, really is God’s preferred form of government in human societies. If we find ourselves under a king or a dictator, we should do our best to submit and be faithful, loyal subjects. But if we have the ability to rule ourselves as free people under God, a republic like our Founding Fathers envisioned, we should. In America, that’s what we’ve been trying to do for 250 years.

Application: Christians in Dundalk, USA stand for God-given, self-evident rights

So what does this mean for us Christians in Dubdalk today? Five things.

First, we live as morally serious people. Back to John Adams, Sam’s cousin and America’s second president. He famously said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The way Ben Franklin put it was, “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.” In fact that sentiment was a settled consensus among the Founders. It’s both a thoroughly Christian and a completely American idea.

A free nation assumes a moral people. Otherwise, liberty will devolve into either tyranny or chaos. A just society depends on hearts that recognize the authority of God grounding the authority of government.

Second, we do not invent our view of humanity. We receive it. And then we live it. Our cultural elites, following the European existentialists, scoff at the whole idea of an actual human nature. They insist that each individual must discover or construct his own truth. And they wonder why there’s such a rash of unmoored chaos in our society. We Christians have no use for such nonsense. We  do not invent our view of humanity. We receive it, from the observable realities of nature and Scripture. And then we live it.

Third, we honor every human being as someone created in the image of God. It’s in how we think about every person we meet. It’s in how we speak. It’s in how we treat others—even when they don’t treat us right. And there’s this: common sense forces us to see that babies do not osmote the status and value of the image of God by passing through the birth canal. Our fellow Americans are all in the image of God, from conception to natural death. Human rights are right for all humans, especially the most vulnerable.

Fourth, we hold fast to the full truth about our createdness. We do not flatten humanity into sameness. We do not erase real distinctions God has truly made. We affirm both the equal dignity of all image-bearers and meaningful differences among us. Some dissimilarities are inconsequential. Others are comprehensive. Consider two: race and sex.

Race is a difference that is only skin deep. Scripture is clear: all mankind are descended from one man and woman. All humans bear the same image. All of us stand before God on level ground. That means that, although racial distinctions are real, they are minor and they are not morally significant. They do not divide humanity into higher and lower classes. They are, in the most important sense, skin deep. And so any system that elevates some humans over others on the basis of race is not just socially unacceptable. It is theologically false, and morally wrong. Because it denies the image of God.

Sex, on the other hand, is a difference that goes all the way to the bone. Male is male, and female is female. This is self-evident truth, down not only to our bones but even our genes. Scripture, too, is clear: Genesis 1:27 says, “In the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them.”

That is not incidental, and it is not superficial. It is built into creation itself. It is woven into the body, into vocation, into human life. And so we must say both things together:

1. Men and women are equal in dignity because they are equally created in God’s image
2. Men and women are distinct in design because God created them that way.

The differences between male and female are not imagined, socially constructed, or optional. They are not subject to reinvention or reassignment. They can only be ignored or circumvented by pretending. Chemicals or surgery can be used to bring about the appearance that a person’s sex has been changed, but only the appearance. Inside, down to the level of DNA, maleness and femaleness are permanent. They are part of the created order. They are fundamental to our basic humanity. These days some voices sneer that this is heteronormativity. But biology itself is heteronormative—every bit as much as the Bible. So the same Bible that teaches us equality also teaches us that equality does not erase difference. In fact, it depends on it. The Supreme Court was right this week about men in women’s sports.

Both the essential equality and the superficial differences between the races are God-given, self-evident truths. Both the fundamental equality of the sexes and the comprehensive and complementary difference between them are likewise God-given, self-evident truths. American ideas of freedom and rights should be built around and on these truths, not in spite of them.

Fifth, Christian Americans understand the role of government rightly. We do not look to government as the source of truth or rights. We understand its role: to secure what God has already given. And when that order is reversed, confusion follows. The rights that our federal, state, and local governments recognize must be self-evidently God-given, and the laws that governments make should serve only to secure those rights.

Because Christians stand for God-given and self-evident rights.

Four big words for patriotic American Christians

Explanation: why human equality is self-evident

Celebration: why we praise God for our liberties and rights

Implication: American rights are still expressly God-given, self-evident rights

Application: Christians in Dundalk, USA stand for God-given, self-evident rights

The claim stands before us: all men are created equal. But that statement only holds if this one is true: God created man in his image. And that means our dignity is not granted by government, and our rights are not invented by man. They are given by God. Because they are God-given, they must not be denied, or redefined. They must be honored… and secured.

Our Puritan forefathers thundered, “No king but God,” and their grandchildren, our Founding Fathers, eagerly took up the cry. Today, American Christians carry on the call: “No king but God!”  And we add the clarifying refrain, “Jesus is King.”

By this we American Christians in Dundalk mean three things.

First, Jesus is God. He is the God of the Hebrews. He is the ultimate source of both our freedoms and our laws, both as Marylanders and as Americans.

Second, we mean that Jesus is our king. He is our Savior, who lived and died and rose again to rescue us from sin and Satan and death. He is our Lord, who, forty days after he rose from the dead, ascended to the heavens to be enthroned at the Father’s right hand. From there he will return, in the fulness of time, to consummate his Kingdom and bring our history to an end.

Third, we mean that Jesus Christ is reigning as king right now. He told us that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him, and he charged us to go and disciple the nations, teaching them to observe everything that he commanded. Of course that means that we will look to make disciples in Dundalk and everywhere else. It also says that, as we strive to disciple our nation, we’ll seek to shape America and its customs and laws in the likeness of the will of Christ. We love our Lord, and we love our land. So we will obey the Commission that he has given us.

The 250th anniversary of the birthday of our liberty is exactly the best time to recommit ourselves joyfully to these glad tasks.

We’ve said a lot about Samuel Adams and John Adams over the last few minutes. They were raised in the same Christian, Reformed, Puritan New England, they were both influential in the American Revolution, and they were distant cousins. However, Samuel was 13 years older, they grew up in different towns, and they had noticeably different approaches to multiple issues. What matters to us right now is that John Adams moved far away from the fervent Christian faith he grew up around, while Sam remained a devout believer throughout his life. Sam was in church weekly, and took the Lord’s Supper seriously and gladly whenever it was served. John attended church occasionally for civic or political reasons, but he conscientiously abstained from eating and drinking. He had the insight and integrity to see that, since was not a serious Christian disciple, he was not invited to partake. And frankly, he was not interested in going through the motions. He was not a saved man, but he was an honest one.

Can you guess why we added that last little bit? It’s because we’re about to celebrate the Lord’s Supper together. This is the regular reenactment of the final Passover Supper the Lord shared with his disciples—just before his betrayal and crucifixion. That was over 1700 years before John and Sam lived. Christians around the world and throughout history remember the Passion and dramatize the gospel this way because our Lord told us to. We do it with solemn reflection and trembling joy, remembering that our Lord Jesus Christ lived and died and rose again so that we might be forgiven, justified, transformed, and welcomed into God’s eternal family. Sam rejoiced to be included, and happily celebrated that inclusion with the Lord’s people at the Lord’s Table on the Lord’s Day. John deliberately, tragically, excluded himself. So far as we know, he remains away from the presence of the Lord to this day.

Please understand. It was not the Lord’s Table that made the difference. It was the Lord. Sam accepted and trusted the Lord Jesus as Lord and God, Savior and King. John saw Jesus as our ultimate moral example, but explicitly rejected the idea that Jesus is the eternal God and only Savior. So the question for you and me today is simple: will we receive Jesus as who he is or will we reimagine him and thereby reject him? Everlasting destiny hangs in the balance

Eternal Father, in this very moment, we turn again from our sin and ourselves to you and your glory,

Trusting only in your Son’s sacrifice for our sins to make us right with you.

We want to shelter ourselves in the shadow of his cross,

Bathe ourselves in the blood that he shed there for us,

Rest ourselves on his redemption

Robe ourselves in his righteousness,

Renew ourselves in his resurrection,

Lose ourselves in his Lordship,

And find ourselves in his friendship.

We want him to become for us, for today and forever, wisdom from God, and righteousness, and holiness, and salvation.

For he is the One who suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to you, our Father.