Rights Part 1

I thought I would take a few moments to talk about rights. Someone told me this morning that I had told them that they didn’t “have any rights.” While I can’t remember saying that to them, I can imagine saying that to someone in a particular context. So, here’s the first of a couple of posts on the topic of rights.

It seems like everyone starts here, so I will too. The declaration of independence says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

While I don’t disagree with this statement, there are a few things that need pointing out.

First, these rights come from God. This means that he gets to do the defining as to what the rights actually are. It also means that before we go to trying to claim our rights we need to know and understand what God says about rights.

What he says about rights is that we have the right to do what he says as opposed to doing what he hasn’t said. We have the right to serve. It is right for us to serve. We serve him first, because he is God. We serve others second, because he is God. Rights always have a sense of right as opposed to wrong. “It is right for me to do X” and “I have a right to do X is saying the same thing.

So, when Paul said, “Do we have no right to eat and drink? Do we have no right to take along a believing wife, as do also the other apostles, the brothers of the Lord, and Cephas? Or is it only Barnabas and I who have no right to refrain from working?” (1 Cor 9:3–6) he was saying that he and the other apostles had rights and here were a few of them listed.

The casual reader will also notice that the word right has with it a sense of authority. In fact, the word translated right in these texts can also be translated as authority and in fact is translated that way in the NKJV a few verses later in 1 Corinthians 9:18, “What is my reward then? That when I preach the gospel, I may present the gospel of Christ without charge, that I may not abuse my authority in the gospel.”

Paul’s main point in bringing these rights up is that though he has them, he has set them aside for the betterment of the Gospel. It is right for him to eat and drink, take a wife, and to make money from preaching the Gospel (cf. v. 6-7), but in order that the presentation of the Gospel not be hindered he didn’t use the rights (9:12), he set them aside, he relinquished them, he yielded them, he didn’t claim them. Did he still have them? I think so, he was just not asserting them. He didn’t push his rights on others. He was not entitled.

Like Jesus,

who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross (Phil 2:6–8).

Jesus was man and God at the same time, but when he came to earth, he set aside, laid aside, didn’t claim, didn’t use, relinquished, and yielded his rights to the point where sinful people killed him on a cross of wood. Did he still have them? Could he have exercised them had he wanted to? I think so. Instead, he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly (1 Pet 2:23).

On top of that, the point of the text is that though we have rights, even rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” there are important times when we need to lay them aside for the sake of the people we are surrounded by. In this case, Jesus left heaven, came to earth and as an active act of love, let the people he was dying for, kill him. True, he had the rights of God, but he sacrificed them on the tree for his bride at the hands of his bride (cf. Acts 2:36).

Let’s talk practical application here for a moment. Just before the text I just quoted, Paul gave us the reason he mentioned what Jesus did

Therefore if there is any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and mercy, fulfill my joy by being like-minded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind. Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself. Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others. Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus (Phil 2:1–5).

This is a passage that is calling all of us to lay down our rights for one another. As I just mentioned, these are the five verses that told us how Jesus didn’t claim his rights as God. The point is that we are all supposed to stop thinking so highly of ourselves, love one another, consider others more important than ourselves and care for one another more than we care for ourselves. Does this verse say we have no rights? These verses aren’t talking about rights. They are talking about living with one another in a way that honors God, lifts them up, and allows the fruit of God’s spirit to flow through us to others.

But what if I’m reading this through the lens of rights. Is the text saying that we don’t have rights? This context and the larger context is saying, submit to God. Rights only exist because God gave them to you, and they are only rights as long as they are right, and they aren’t right if you are claiming them as a way to control or use others instead of serving one another.

As long as you are maintaining your rights over and against obeying God, there is a sense in which you no longer have those rights. God said, thou shalt not murder (Ex 20:13). If a person were to ignore God’s command and murder someone else. He would be relinquishing his right to life because God also said that if someone breaks the command by murdering someone else, they should be executed (Ex 21:12). The only reason people have a right to life is because God gave them that right. People are always subject to God’s will and when God overrides a person’s rights because he broke God’s Law, he has taken their rights away. A murderer no longer has a right to life.

What happens when two people’s rights oppose one another? If you are both living in the will of God, that is, submitting yourself, serving one another, looking out for the best of everyone around you, your rights will not come into conflict with his rights. It is only when you are grasping at what you think you deserve that your rights crash into his rights. It is only when you think you are entitled to your rights—you are at the center of your life—that the issue of rights ever comes in to conflict. When I don’t stand on my rights in order to love you, and you do the same, we have few problems.

More to come.