This morning we turn our attention to an issue that likely won’t be touched upon in one in 10,000 pulpits across the Nation this morning. We are going to spend just a few minutes, in light of the events of the last week, speaking about the Scriptural and Historical background of the obligation of self defense and the right to keep and bear arms.

We might find such a subject odd but there was a time when such an examination from the pulpit on such a subject was routine. That this is true is testified to by Will Durant, author of several volumes of World History. Will and his wife Ariel were no friends of Christianity and yet they could write,

“In Protestantism the preachers became journals of news and opinion; they told their congregation the events of the week or day; and religion was then so interwoven with life that nearly every occurrence touched the faith or its ministers. They denounced the vices and errors of their parishioners, and instructed the government as to its duties and faults.”

-Will Durant,
The Reformation

And we take up the duties and faults of the Government in its desire to dilute the Christian duty and obligation of individual self defense.

When we turn to Scripture we find in,

Exodus 22:2-3 –“If the thief is found breaking in, and he is struck so that he dies, there shall be no guilt for his bloodshed. If the sun has risen on him, there shall be guilt for his bloodshed. He should make full restitution; if he has nothing, then he shall be sold for his theft.”

This idea of self defense … defense of family, hearth, and home compels us to ask, along with Rev. Samuel West, in a sermon from 1776 if we really believe “that people please God while they sit still and quietly behold their friends and brethren killed by their unmerciful enemies without endeavoring to defend or rescue them.” West asked if the sin of murder, as committed by the pacifist by way of the sin of omission in not pursuing self defense, is any nobler than a sin of commission that finds someone involved in the butcher of unjust wars. West insisted that both sins were “great violations of the law of God.” 

Certainly Exodus 22:2-3 compels us to conclude that a threat to our life is to responded to with appropriate force.  To not respond in such a way would find us guilty to self murder or murder of the judicially innocent who were under assault.

Further the idea of self defense, as found in Exodus 22:3, when combined with the New Testament teaching from Timothy which teaches that a man who neglects to provide for his family has implicitly denied the faith and is worse than an infidel forces to ask, along with Colonial minister Simeon Howard,

“in what way can a man be more justly chargeable with this neglect, than by suffering himself to be deprived of his life, liberty or property, when he might lawfully have preserved them?”

Defense of self and family is the duty of the Christian man and if the Christian man is stripped of this God ordained duty by the State’s attempt to repudiate the Second Amendment than that Christian man is disobeying God by neglecting to provide for his family. We must obey God rather than man.

When we consider Exodus 22:3 further it is clear that self defense looks differently in different situations. Not every situation requires full lethal force. We are to be defenders of our selves and what God has given us headship over and not those who act on vengeance or without mercy. In this passage after “the sun has risen” seems to refer to a different judgment than the one permitted at night. At night there is more confusion and more uncertainty about what is going on. There seems, thus, to be more latitude given to the necessity of self defense. During the day time matters are clearer and a higher standards for lethal self defense obtains.

In Proverbs 25:26, we read: “A righteous man who falters before the wicked is like a murky spring and a polluted well.”  Should we allow our God given — and therefore non retractable by any government — right to keep and bear arms to be seized from us we are the example of the righteous man who falters before the wicked being like a murky spring and a polluted well.

Certainly it is simple to see why the righteous man who falters before the wicked is so described. It can hardly be considered the essence of civilization for good people to falter before the wicked. No one really believes that it is virtuous to allow the schoolyard bully to have his way. To believe that that righteous should falter before the wicked is to believe in Nietzsche’s little shop of horrors where the ubermensch might makes right.

That this Biblical view as barely highlighted as been the track record of Western Christian civilization can be seen by a quick glimpse of our history.

In the three preceding articles we have taken a short view of the principal absolute rights which appertain to every Englishman. But in vain would these rights be declared, ascertained, and protected by the dead letter of the laws, if the constitution had provided no other method to secure their actual enjoyment. It has therefore established certain other auxiliary subordinate rights of the subject, which serve principally as barriers to protect and maintain inviolate the three great and primary rights, of personal security, personal liberty, and private property….

5. The fifth and last auxiliary right of the subject, that I shall at present mention, is that of having arms for their defence, suitable to their condition and degree, and such as are allowed by law. Which is also declared by the same statute 1 W. & M. st. 2. c. 2. and is indeed a public allowance, under due restrictions, of the natural right of resistance and self-preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.

Wm. Blackstone
English Jurist

J.L. De Lolme, an eighteenth century author much read at the time of the American Revolution[3] pointed out:(p.286)

But all those privileges of the People, considered in themselves, are but feeble defences against the real strength of those who govern. All those provisions, all those reciprocal Rights, necessarily suppose that things remain in their legal and settled course: what would then be the recourse of the People, if ever the Prince, suddenly freeing himself from all restraint, and throwing himself as it were out of the Constitution, should no longer respect either the person, or the property of the subject, and either should make no account of his conversation with the Parliament, or attempt to force it implicitly to submit to his will?–It would be resistance … the question has been decided in favour of this doctrine by the Laws of England, and that resistance is looked upon by them as the ultimate and lawful resource against the violences of Power.

To nineteenth century exponents of limited government, the checks and balances that preserved individual liberty were ultimately guaranteed by the right of the people to be armed. Without an armed citizenry Republican mixed Government, with its complex and interlocking checks and balances could not be successful apart from a legitimate means of resistance. The preeminent Whig historian, Thomas Macaulay, labelled this right to keep and bear arms “the security without which every other (security) is insufficient,”

In the Republican system, with its equal parts Monarchy, aristocracy, and Democracy, as  envisioned by our Christian forefathers it was the Sate that had to convince an armed and sovereign citizenry that its ideas were not oppressive. In the system we have now it is the subject citizens that has to convince the Sovereign State that they should be allowed to have their weapons.

It is true that when you look at Western Civilization you can find epoch where gun control was advanced. In 1920 in England for example, in the context of being un-nerved by the Bolshevik threat Parliament debated a bill that sought to restrict arms from the citizenry. In that debate a member of the Commons … one Colonel Kenworthy, stood up and objected to the bill before the House. Colonel Kenworthy pointed out that historically the right to keep and bear arms had been necessary to maintain other existent political rights that the people enjoyed precisely because keeping arms allowed the citizenry to resist an out of control state. A Major Witherington objected to Kenworthy stating that it was just that kind of distrust of the state by just those kinds of people that demanded the Bill be passed.

Conclusion,

How do we turn this all then to the essence of our Christian faith? The essence of our Christian faith is Liberty from sin. This idea of being set free by the finished work of Christ for sinners such as us from the bondage and tyranny of sin in order to be free to serve Christ ended up being translated into every area of life. If a man was free from the bondage and tyranny of sin then that same man was to be free from all other tyrannies and bondage. This included political liberty. The Biblical Christian realizes that the implication of being free from the tyranny and bondage of the Devil means likewise being free of the tyranny and bondage of Usurpers who would work to put a people into the bondage of a law system and Lordship that was contrary to Christ’s Lordship and Law…. a Lordship and Law that is the essence of Liberty.

Those who have been freed from the devil are not inclined to come under the bondage of the Devil’s political henchman.

There have been those throughout history who have understood this point that I’m seeking to establish.  Protestant Christians, being spiritually set free, were not going to come into other unbiblical bondage.

Historian John Patrick Diggins writes that American historians have concentrated on political ideas while underplaying “the religious convictions that often undergird them, especially the Calvinist convictions that Locke himself held: resistance to tyranny….”

One simply can’t understand the insistence by traditional Reformed folk on the issue of the right to self defense without understanding how their macro theology is connected to and drives that visceral desire against being subjugated. Having been loosed from the Devil by the finished work of Christ from their sin they will not become chained to or by anti-Christ magistrates.

Edmund Burke is another chap who could connect the dots between the Macro theology of the Protestant Faith and the micro refusal to be subjugated.

In 1775, the Burke tried to warn the British Parliament that the Americans could not be subjugated:

“the people are Protestants, and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.” While the Catholic and Anglican Churches were supported by the government, and were inclined to support the state, the American sects were based on “dissenting interests.” They had “sprung up in direct opposition to the ordinary powers of the world, and could justify that opposition only on a strong claim of natural liberty. Their very existence depended on the powerful and unremitted assertion of that claim. All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement of the principle of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion.” 4

The fact that these quote may sound so foreign to our hears is because we have been so denuded of the convictions of our Reformed and Calvinist forefathers…. we have been stripped of their Biblical Christianity. We no longer have the ability to move from the Macro of being set free from our sins to the micro resolve that we will not be put into subjection of those political Masters who serve the ends of the one we have been set free from.  We can no longer see that if one believes where the Spirit of the Lord is there is spiritual Liberty therefore it must also be the case where that Spiritual liberty works itself out in corporeal space and time reality.