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Hendersonville Seventh-day Adventist Church, NC

David Wright

Freedom Squandered

The title we're working off of today is Freedom Squandered.

Here's a picture of men gathered in Philadelphia.

In Philadelphia at the Continental Congress, The future of America was hanging in the balance, if you will, 13 colonies trying to decide, should they or should they not plead for their independence from Great Britain?

Do you remember what catapulted them into this?

Well, different historians might say different things, but a lot of it had to do with taxation without representation.

Originally, the delegates urged for Richard Henry Lee to write the Declaration of Independence, but Lee was appointed to the conference, or sorry, Confederate Committee, and he couldn't serve on both, And as fate would have it, his wife got sick, he had to rush home.

And so the actual Declaration of Independence was placed upon 5 individuals, but really it came down to 3.

John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson to write it.

But the actual Declaration of Independence was back and forth between Adams and Jefferson, who should do it, and in some letters that Adams wrote to a friend Pickering, we find this dialogue.

Jefferson proposed to Adams to make a draft.

Eventually, 1 of the reasons Lee gave to not do it, or Lee, or sorry, John Adams, I should say, he says, I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular.

Besides, you're a better writer than I am.

And so Jefferson consented, all right, I'm gonna hammer out a first draft and we'll bring it together and we'll see what everybody thinks.

And so for the next 2 weeks, at 33 years old, Thomas Jefferson hammered out the Declaration of Independence.

He wasn't trying to set out to do something huge and independent and to set a benchmark, if you will.

He just very humbly states, I was trying to bring common sense into the discussion.

Yet when he brought his proposal on July 2, with very few changes necessary, in bulk, what he wrote was taken, and they said, yes, this is what we want.

And we celebrated on the 4th of July because that's after a few of the little adjustments were made, they came back together and they voted it.

And so now every 4th of July we do the firework thing and go to the lake and whatever else.

But today I wanna look at a little bit, if you will, what is the context leading up to, if you will, what's some of the thinking behind the document that Thomas Jefferson and these men put together in terms of this time period, 1776.

If you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to Revelation chapter 13.

Now, we're not going to piece or pick apart, if you will, piece by piece all of Revelation 13.

And in order for the message today, I'm going to have to make some pretty large assumptions that you understand Revelation 13.

If you do not, we're gonna break this thing down in our evangelistic series here in a few months and I would invite you to that.

If you don't want to wait that long, talk to Pastor Hyman or myself, we can get together and have a Bible study with you.

But just to look over some of the high points, Revelation 13 verse 1, Then I stood on the sand of the sea, And I saw a beast rising up out of the sea, having 7 heads and 10 horns, and on his horns 10 crowns, and on his heads a blasphemous name.

And he's described as a leopard with feet of a bear, a mouth of a lion, skipping down, had power, verse 2, and is thrown in his great authority.

And I saw 1 of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded.

And all, notice, all the world marveled and followed the beast.

So they worshiped the dragon who gave authority to the beast, and they worshiped the beast saying, who is like the beast?

Verse 5, he was given a mouth to speak great things and blasphemies, and he was given authority to continue for 42 months, we know this to be as the same as 3 and a half years or 1260 days.

Skipping down to verse 7, it was granted to him to make war with the saints and to overcome them.

Verse 8, all global again who dwell on the earth will worship him.

Here's the patience and faith of the saints.

Now for hundreds of years it has been accepted that This beast of revelation, the only thing that can follow all of these, the authority from pagan Rome, a worldwide religious power, claims equality with God, persecuting power reigns for 1, 260 years, and the number of his name, 666, you study and put various pieces together, and everybody, scholars, have agreed for decades.

Now let's take that piece of 1, 260 years.

This is when we had large persecution, didn't we?

We could say we had the opposite, the antithesis of religious liberty.

You recognize some of these faces of reformers who stood up to that system.

Now John Hus was accused by false witnesses.

He was tried for religious convictions of his conscience.

He was subjected to subhuman prison squalor for months without due process.

And he was judged by the church in a similar fashion that the Sanhedrin had judged Jesus.

Religious leaders pronounced the death penalty.

And the church appealed to the civil power to ratify their conclusion.

John Hus was significantly mistreated because of his own religious convictions, not because of some civil law that he broke, but because of a belief that he held that was contrary to the church.

Listen to this description of his time in prison.

After a short while, Hus was let out of his dungeon into a decent chamber, but his feet almost refused to carry him.

He swayed as he walked, listless and unused.

To the day was the light of his eyes, deathly pale his cheeks, and loose what was left of his teeth, since 11 had fallen out due to the damp prison.

It says the nails on his fingers were terribly long because he had been unable to bite them off.

For many weeks upon his skin was a crust of dirt which exuded an awful stench, and his otherwise brown hair fell in white ringlets upon his rotting and torn garb.

His shoes had rotted upon his feet and his shirt and loincloth had vanished.

The rounded flesh which had covered his bones had shrunken and shriveled and he had become a picture of woe without equal, unrecognizable to those who had known him before, horror filled those who looked upon him, and pitying people prepared a bath for him, brought shirt and clothing, and refreshed him with strengthening foods for which he could only thank with tearful eyes.

That gives you a bit of a picture, not a nice picture, of what the lack of religious liberty brings out.

The worst of people and the most inhumane treatment of individuals.

Case of Huss, the vote was 31, found him not guilty.

11 thought he should be excommunicated, but 45 said no, he needs to die.

And so, sure enough, he was burned at the stake.

But during this time period, they would use other means as well.

I'm trying to present this in a way that won't be too frightening to some.

If I'm saying this right, the strapado, is that how you say it?

Where they would tie their wrists behind their back, lift them up, and then drop them, and right before they hit the ground, they would tighten the rope again, and since their arms were behind them, the idea was to dislocate their arms and their shoulders and cause them pain.

This is a more recent picture, but the hands were put in stocks and their bare back was exposed.

They had no place to go, nothing to do, and they'd be whipped sometimes 50 to 200 times.

Are you willing to rekent your religious convictions now?

This 1 was known as the rack, where they would stretch the body.

Their shoulders, elbows, thighs, and ankles were slowly dislocated as more tension was placed on those rods and turning those chains.

The garret, an individual would sit in the chair, they would be tied, and they'd put a noose around the neck, and then that long wheel in the back would tighten that noose tighter and tighter and tighter.

This was what was taking place in this awful period, 538 to 1798.

This is what was taking place as the men were meeting in Philadelphia.

The constitutional fathers knew all about the history of the Inquisition, And they were also aware of how similar practices could be seen even here in America in the new colonies.

They were aware that atheists and Jews and Quakers, Baptists and others were deprived of their civil rights simply because their practices did not square with those of the established Puritan religion.

The founders knew all about Sunday laws that compelled people to attend church on pain of fines, lashes, imprisonment, and in case of 3 colonies, even death.

They knew that only members of the established church were allowed to serve in civil government.

They knew that pastors of the established churches were renumerated from taxes collected by the government from the people.

They knew about Roger Williams being banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony in the dead of winter.

For his views concerning the separation of church and state.

He found the colony of Rhode Island with its capital Providence and believed in a militant faith.

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Freedom Squandered

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