This nation's savior is only found in the Bible
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Recently, a presidential candidate made a comment about the budget for public television. In the following days, a rare little video was posted on the Internet as a result. The video shows the late Fred Rogers - better known as Mr. Rogers of "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" - defending PBS funding in front of a U.S. Senate committee in 1969, and he said something really important:
"I give an expression of care every day to each child."
The main purpose of "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" was to make sure each child knew they were valuable and capable. I doubt seriously whether anyone wonders why that is important. The chair of the Senate committee was blown away by its profundity.
At the base of Mr. Rogers' desire to tell children they are valuable, though, stands a simple truth: they are. Not just each child, but each person.
You are inestimably valuable.
Moreover, this value is not imparted to you by Mr. Rogers' whim, and certainly not because I say so. It's not because of what you do or how well you do it. You are valuable because of what you are.
Genesis 1:27 says, "God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them." Psalm 139:13 declares that God personally created you.
You are valuable because there is a God in heaven who made you and loves you and assigns that value to you.
This is why the first commandment is important. In "The End of Reason," author and speaker Ravi Zacharias even goes so far as to claim that without, "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt . . . You shall have no other gods before me," none of the rest of the commandments matter. If there is no god to assign ultimate value to each person, why does it matter if I murder or steal or lie? My victims would be worthless anyway.
Instead, the first commandment tells us that God is, and the rest of the commandments flow logically from the reality of God - the creator and rightful owner of all that exists - and the inherent value He gives to each person. Truly objective morality rests on the goodness of God and the intrinsic value He has assigned to each person He created.
This stands in contrast to a more pragmatic sort of morality, governed by the maxim of giving the greatest possible benefit to the greatest possible number of people. This is the modern, secular definition of morality. For instance, Sam Harris argues in "The Moral Landscape" that maximizing well-being is not just "good," but self-evidently so. However, he adds that "well-being" is different for everyone and ends his argument with an awfully relativistic picture of moral truth, despite his efforts.
Chiefly, he leaves open the question, "whose well-being?" To act morally in my personal life, should I be concerned for my well-being or that of others? I suppose that as long as the "others" are in the minority, the majority's well-being can oppress "the others." I suppose that as long as slaves maximize the well-being of the majority, it's OK to take away the free will and dignity of other human beings.
Am I exaggerating here? Check your history books. This is what the 20th century was all about, and it was humanity's bloodiest. While "maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures" sounds attractive on the surface, its logical outworking is rather insidious.
I suggest that the better kind of morality - loving people individually - cannot be legislated. "Love your neighbor as yourself" is not enforceable and it would be strange to write someone a ticket for failing to demonstrate self-sacrifice.
You cannot vote for the savior of this nation because He already died and was raised again nearly two thousand years ago. Love for people and affirming their enormous individual value will not come from politicians, but from the new heart of the individual people of our nation en masse. That new heart can only be found through the Gospel.
Do you know where Mr. Rogers got the idea that each child is valuable? He was an ordained minister of the Gospel. This nation and this world cannot be fixed until its citizens know that Christ lived the life each of us should have lived and died the death we all deserved to die so that, when we trust Him, we can be reunited with our Creator who values us so much.