Opportunity to Return

Opportunity to Return.  The Fourth of July wasn’t the day that the famous signer of the Declaration of Independence, John Adams, predicted would become a day of festival for the newly formed nation. He naturally thought it would be July 2^nd, the day that the Second Continental Congress agreed upon severing all political ties with Great Britain, a decision which was considered an act of treason against King George III. Because the dozens of corrections that Congress suggested took until July 4^th for the Committee of Five, principally Thomas Jefferson, to incorporate—the document bore its revised date. It took another month (August 2, 1776) for the 56 signers to contribute their ink, a point of no return.

Of the 56 to follow John Hancock, who was the first to sign with such large letters so that the king would certainly see his name, only one reached extreme old age: Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland (age 95). Yet even Carroll, like the rest of the 56, was not exempt from paying the ironic price of independence. Literally or figuratively or both, “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” often cost these men and their families life, liberty, and happiness. A quick review of their losses is worthy of review, but they saw and were sustained by the thought of a better tomorrow and a better country. All were men of means and well-educated who could have easily sent others to do the dirty work of fighting but didn’t. Famously imperfect and/or perfectly infamous in other ways (41 of the 56 were slave owners), they each did their part in the Revolution. Most of them paid dearly for it before they were ever rewarded by it or honored because of it.

Far from saying, or even implying that America or any part of it is “God’s Country,” which is theologically ridiculous to suggest, there is yet something vaguely similar between those 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence and those countless others in biblical history who dared to believe in a future that their present conditions could not feasibly support, except that they believed what God had promised more than what their eyeballs could see. “These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city” (Heb. 11:13-16). Faith was, and is, considered an act of treason by this world’s rulers.