Food for Thought File

Reestablishing God's Definitions into Our Mindset

(Part One)

By Brother R. Michel Lankford
 
I have long held the belief that if a person wanted to be well-educated they should thoroughly study two things. First they should thoroughly study and understand the Scriptures. Second, they should thoroughly understand history. By understanding the Scriptures one can gain insight into God's character and what He desires and requires. By studying history we have the real-life tableau of what happens when people continually violate what God desires and requires. Seeing the mistakes that others have made and the devastating consequences, the wise and discerning person should then be all the more motivated and inclined to adhere all the more closely to what Scripture teaches so that his household, his community and his nation will be much more likely to prosper and be blessed.

 

Patterns and Re-definitions

Another thing that studying history will do for us is that it will give an insight into patterns and consequence in human decisions. One crucial pattern that I have noticed in studying history is the pattern of re-definition. In studying history I have noticed a repeated pattern that whenever a culture Or society is bent on committing great evil, what it must first do is convince itself that what it is doing or planning to do is somehow good and justifiable.
For example, the United States of America was founded on the fundamental idea that the rights of human beings were granted by Almighty God the Creator, not the good will in favor of the King or government. They believed that He (the Creator) viewed all men equally and granted them the unalienable right to life, liberty and to pursue happiness. They believed that any government which infringed on the God-given rights was not a legitimate government and could legally be overthrown. That's why we fought the American Revolution.
In a glaring paradox this same people who claimed to value biblical Christianity, liberty equality and justice for all, this same society would enslave an entire race of people almost solely on the basis of their race and continue to do so for almost 100 years after the land of the free was established. So how does a nation that values freedom for all men justify enslaving an entire race of people? It's very simple. They legitimized it to themselves by convincing themselves that African-Americans weren't, "Men." So they convince themselves that the unalienable rights that God gave to all men didn't apply to African-Americans, because they were not really people, they were property, and since they were property, they had no rights and the 'Owners’ could pretty well treat them as he chose. So by redefining a whole race of people as property instead of human beings, an entire society which values freedom justified denying African-Americans the basic human dignity and justice and liberty for hundreds of years.
This re-definition of African-Americans as property became so entrenched in the Southern psyche that Southerners would actually separate from their country, they would fight, die, and even kill by the hundreds of thousands when their supposed "Right" to own another person was threatened. Even 100 years later the thought of allowing an American of African descent to vote, to go to school and to exercise the very same rights other Americans take for granted caused riots and lynchings of African Americans in the South. All of it began to seem acceptable because we had accepted the re-definition that they were not really human beings in the first place.
Has the society decided that it wants to indulge in sexual immorality without dealing with the natural consequences of unwanted pregnancies instead of exercising self-control? That's very simple. You make it legal to murder an unborn child from the womb, so that people can continue to fornicate wantonly and not have to be encumbered with unwanted children. However, in a society that has had a long tradition of valuing life and liberty, the idea of attacking, murdering, and butchering a baby in the very place that a baby ought to be at their safest quite correctly seems savage, grotesque and inhumane. So how does the idea of attacking and murdering children from the womb become seemingly justifiable in a supposedly good and just society? How does it deny a child the right to its life, the right to its liberty and the right to pursue its own future happiness? It is very simple. The society simply changes the definition of what life and what a baby is, to make what it has already decided to do seem acceptable and its own eyes.
Under the new definitions, baby is no longer seen as a baby simply because God is knitting it together in the mother's womb (Psalm 139). Now, that baby is only treated as a baby if the mother chooses to treat it as alive. Otherwise it's not viewed as a baby. Under that perverted logic, more than 53 million innocent babies have been butchered alive in the United States.
Here's another example. When our country first began, it was founded on Biblical Godly principles. So much so in fact that even our primary law books contained Scripture verses to illustrate the God-given legitimacy of various particular laws. (That's because it was rightly believed that our liberty and freedoms come from the generosity of Almighty God and not the government, and so in order to remain free, our government and its laws had to be godly and just. Therefore, in the beginning of our nation, some of our primary law books (required readings to pass the bar exam); contained the text of a particular law, some of the legal precedents behind that law, AND the Scriptural verses and references that gave each specific law its legitimacy. The belief that our laws had to be both godly and just in order for us to remain free was so strong that on more than one occasion the U. S. Supreme Court actually ruled that attacking Christianity was the same as attacking the United States itself (which it is). It was widely believed and correctly so, that no true American patriot who loved their country would dare to do such a thing.
Keeping this principle in mind, when the idea of "Separation of Church and State" was originally established, it was originally defined to mean that the United States government could not do what was then being done in other countries at the time. The government could not set up the one national Church of America and force people to attend and pay money to support it, and could not set up laws to punish you if you didn't belong to and support the national Church of America, for example. Originally, we strongly believed that our laws had to be both biblical and just, but that you could not legally set up a single national denomination and force people to belong to it under penalty of law. In 1967 the Supreme Court of the United States radically changed the definition of “Separation of Church and State.” It was changed from preventing the government from establishing a national denomination. Now it would be twisted to mean that the government could not publicly support anything Godly or Scriptural whatsoever. The definition for “establishing a church” was changed from forming a national denomination to anything having to do with God in any public way whatsoever. If you want to see how our nation was radically changed by that single change in definitions, I highly recommend the documentary:

America's Godly Heritage
David Barton
http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Godly-Heritage-David-Barton/dp/B001U5JNFC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341191193&sr=8-1&keywords=Godly+Heritage

In Nazi Germany during the 1930s and 40s they re-defined Hebrews and other so-called undesirables as non-human beings, and by changing the definition of a human being, 12 million people were hauled away and murdered, while an entire country and much of the world turned a blind eye.

Words mean things, and definitions have consequences.

It's food for thought