The Privilege of Rights

Anyone living in today’s society is bound sooner or later to hear discussion concerning the ‘rights’ of a group of people or people in general. The idea of inherent right is something that many people embrace but for the believer, God demands in Scripture for all rights to be relinquished in favor of the freedom of Jesus Christ. In the book of Job God showed definitely that even a righteous man has no rights to the lives of his children, the money he amasses, the houses and lands that are his, no, not even his own health and well-being. He might have legal rights before man but he has no right to make demands over what is his before Almighty God.

When the Bible talks about rights it’s usually talking about God’s command for man to do right before Hm. One of the only places that Scripture talks about the rights of man is in John 1:11. There John asserts by the Holy Spirit that Jesus, “ … came to His own, and His own did not receive Him. But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God …” The right to become children of God is the only right that can survive inflation, disease, abandonment, divorce, bankruptcy, even death. It is the only right that can never be taken away by anyone, ever. For, Romans 8:37-39 says that nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. The Lord brings to my mind the lives of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Ghandi and others who were willing to lose their lives for the right of people who looked like them simply to be treated as human beings. There are rights that are worth dying for but only because they are born of the fact that we are all unique creations of God.

Jesus left the rule of heaven and earth and traded it for servanthood. He relinquished omnipotence and traded it for a human body with all its limits. He suffered and sacrificed the life that He had taken upon Himself for the very sinners that shouted for His demise. He said in John 10:17 that, “Therefore My father loves Me, because I lay down My life that I may take it again.” The message of the cross is to lay down even the most basic rights for others if it be God’s will. The only right that can survive death is the right to be called a son or daughter of God and that right is a privilege.