Every American schoolchild can tell you that liberty was born in Philadelphia in 1776. Fifty-six men signed a document, a war was fought, and a nation was founded on the radical idea that human beings possess rights no king can take away. It’s a beautiful story, and it’s true. But it’s not the whole story. Because three thousand years before Thomas Jefferson picked up his pen, God had already written the first declaration of independence, and He wrote it not on parchment, but on stone, at the foot of a mountain in the middle of a desert.
I think about this every year around this time, when fireworks are being planned and flags are going up on porches across America. Although my family lives in Israel now, where the fourth of July is not celebrated in the same way – I understand exactly what it means to a nation that still remembers, even in an age of confusion, that freedom is worth defending. And every year I find myself asking the same question: where did this idea actually come from? Not the political theory. Not the Enlightenment philosophy. The idea itself, the notion that a human being has an inherent right to be free. Where does that come from?
The answer is Mount Sinai, and it’s hiding in plain sight in the way God chooses to introduce Himself to the newly freed Israelite slaves. Right before the Ten Commandments, God says this:
“I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exodus 20:2).
Stop and read that again. Why does God need to say “out of the house of bondage”? Everyone standing at that mountain had just spent their entire lives as slaves. They knew exactly what Egypt was. Nobody needed the reminder. The Torah, the Five Books of Moses, does not waste words, and it certainly does not repeat information for no reason. When the text tells you something you already know, that repetition is not filler. It is a flashing sign, and God is making sure you don’t walk past it.
God could have introduced Himself as the Creator of heaven and earth. He could have said He was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Any of those would have made perfect theological sense. Instead, at the single most important moment in the history of His covenant with the Jewish people, God chose to introduce Himself as the God who breaks chains. Not the God of ritual. Not the God of ceremony. The God of liberty.
This is the root of everything America would later try to articulate. Relationship with God does not mean submission to tyranny. It means liberation from it. And here is where it gets even more radical: the Torah does not stop at freeing slaves from Pharaoh. It builds an entire structure to prevent slavery from ever creeping back in through the back door. Look at Leviticus 25 and the law of the Jubilee year. Every fifty years, land that had been sold reverted back to its original family. Wealth could not permanently consolidate in the hands of a few. No dynasty of landowners could lock everyone else out forever. God built an economic reset button directly into the calendar of the nation, because He understood something people still fail to grasp today: political freedom on paper means nothing if you are still economically enslaved to someone more powerful than you.
The Declaration of Independence did not spring fully formed from Enlightenment coffee houses in the 1700s. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” is not a new idea. It is Sinai, three thousand years later, finally being written down by men who had inherited its logic without always knowing its source.
This Fourth of July, I want to give you a way to actually go deeper into this instead of just nodding along at a barbecue. We just released a free brand new class inside Bible Plus that walks through exactly this connection, tracing the line from Sinai’s declaration of liberty all the way to Philadelphia’s. It is completely free, and it is, without question, the most meaningful way I can think of to spend twenty minutes this Independence Day.
Click here to watch, today!
