While I’m meditating on God being in charge, not our governmental leaders, here’s a positively scary story about a sitting senator who explicitly denies government’s role to respect God-given rights. In his view, government creates rights. Here’s the relevant portion of an editorial by Al Mohler about a Senate committee meeting and remarks by Senator Tim Kaine, D-VA :

The session was largely uneventful until Sen. Kaine addressed one of the nominees, complaining about a quotation from Secretary of State Marco Rubio about human rights that was included in the nominee’s opening statement. Secretary Rubio had stated that “all men are created equal because our rights come from God, our creator, not from our laws, not from our governments.” Secretary Rubio’s point has immediate application to American foreign policy, because Rubio’s main point was that the human rights America would defend around the world—the very rights denied by many repressive regimes—are pre-political and universal, precisely because they are given to all men and women by the creator.

Kaine energetically denied such a basis for human rights and called the idea of rights as given by God is “what the Iranian government believes.” Kaine openly asserted that the claim that rights come from God amounts to theocracy. He went…back to say, “the notion that our rights do not come from our laws or our government should make people very, very nervous,” and he claimed that an acknowledgement of natural rights given by God demeaned both law and government. Kaine openly claimed that our rights come from laws and governments, not from God.

The senator was reminded that it was none other than Thomas Jefferson, another Virginian, who affirmed in the Declaration of Independence: “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 among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This is a serious problem. Mohler continues:

The acknowledgement that natural rights are endowed by our Creator means that these natural rights are real. They exist because the Creator made them to exist. They were not just assertions and claims declared by a bunch of rebels meeting in Philadelphia. No, they existed before human beings knew to articulate them and before human governments were assigned to respect them.

Sen. Tim Kaine’s argument was stunning. I was in the room when he uttered those words. If I had not seen and heard him make this argument, I would scarcely have believed a U.S. senator could say such things. Furthermore, his intentional passion made clear that he meant what he said. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas responded that he had nearly fallen out of his chair when he heard Sen. Kaine’s comments, because what Kaine had called radical and dangerous “is literally the founding principle upon which the United States of America was created.”

We’re back to little-g gods that I wrote about yesterday. When government says, essentially, we can pass any law we want and create any rights we want (or deny any rights we want), government is acting as a little-g god.

By contrast, when Martin Luther King in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” talked about “just laws” and “unjust laws,” he was really appealing to the reality of God-given rights and a God-given standard. It’s beyond disappointing that we have government leaders who deny that reality.

The word of the LORD came to me: “Son of man, say to the prince of Tyre, Thus says the Lord GOD: “Because your heart is proud, and you have said, ‘I am a god, I sit in the seat of the gods..,’ yet you are but a man, and no god, though you make your heart like the heart of a god….” (Ezekiel 28.1, 2, ESV)

The LORD reigns; Let the earth rejoice; Let the multitude of isles be glad!…You, LORD, are most high above all the earth; You are exalted far above all gods. (Psalm 97.1, 9, NKJV)