Lux Lucet

We in 21st-century America like to think of this as some aberration from the past, but the desire to silence one’s opposition using the apparatus of the state is still alive and well among us.  Just try going on YouTube and questioning ever so mildly the effectiveness of the Covid vax.  You’ll find you’ll video taken down in short order.  But the vax isn’t the only thing you’re not allowed to talk about. In many Western nations, you can’t question anything about the official Holocaust narrative without being charged with a crime.  Don’t you dare quote from the Bible about the sin of homosexuality or the absurdity of the transgender mania that’s sweeping all before it.  You can’t express doubts about the 2020 presidential election, at least not on most major social media platforms, without being given the left foot of fellowship.  Ukraine, a nation held up by the entire leadership class as a paradigm of democracy, has outlawed all opposition political parties. 

These examples, and many others, are shocking to Americans, as they should be.  They go against the basic ideas about liberty we hold dear.  And yet, the use of state power to silence one’s ideological and political opponents is a tale as old as time. 

Take, for example, the verse at the top of this post taken from Jeremiah. Were one inclined to make a list of the most unpopular men in all of history, the prophet Jeremiah has to be somewhere toward the top.  While the Babylonians were building siege walls around Jerusalem, Jeremiah was going around telling people to surrender to the Babylonians.  When crowds were coming to the temple to worship on the Sabbath, there was Jeremiah telling them they were a bunch of sinners and that God was going to destroy the temple if they didn’t repent.  The good church-going crowd did not like Jeremiah’s sermon and seized him, saying, “You will surely die!” 

Yet when Jeremiah was brought to trial, he had his defenders who even cited the precedent of a former prophet whose message was much like Jeremiah’s.  We are told that at Jeremiah’s trial, the princes and all the people stood up for Jeremiah, saying, “This man does not deserve to die.  For he has spoken to us in the name of the LORD our God.”   

This points us to the most important reason for free speech: the preaching of the Word of God. 

It was the preaching of the Word that nearly got Jeremiah murdered by the mob and did, in fact, result in the imprisonment and death of many of God’s prophets in the Old Testament. 

Take the example of the prophet Miciah.  Evil king Ahab had him arrested and thrown in jail, “because,” to quote Ahab, “he does not prophesy good concerning me, but evil.”  Ahab was a shoot-the-messenger kind of guy and not one to repent at the preaching of the Word.

John the Baptist was murdered by the state, not because of anything he did, but because of what he said. 

The same was the case with Jesus.  It was not what he did that caused the Jewish religious leaders to hate him, it was principally his words.  “The Jews answered him, saying, For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God.”  At Jesus’s illegal trial before the high priest, the concern was not with his actions, but with his doctrine, his teaching.  John 18:19 notes that the high priest questioned Jesus, not about anything he had done, but about his doctrine.  John records that one of the high priest’s officers struck Jesus because of his answer to the high priest.  “Do you answer the high priest like that?” said the officer, one supposes in a raised tone of voice.  The officer objected to Jesus’s words, not his actions.

Fast forward to the Reformation and we see a similar attitude from the opponents of the Gospel of Justification by Belief Alone.  The pope’s men wanted Luther arrested and burned at the Diet of Worms in 1521.  And it was only by God’s providence that the Elector of Saxony was in Luther’s corner and kept him from being murdered by them.  Pick up and read Foxe’s Book of Martyrs to find out what happened to many of Luther’s contemporaries to find out what surely would have happened to Luther had God not intervened on his behalf.

The fundamental reason for free speech is not to protect political speech or to allow for debate about historical matters, although those things certainly are important.  The most basic reason for protecting free speech is to ensure that the Word of God may be freely preached.  “My people perish for lack of knowledge,” said the Lord.  And the only source of knowledge we have is the words and propositions of the 66 books of the Bible.  Without them, we perish. It was the Reformation that brought free speech to the nations. If it is to be preserved in the 21st century, it is the heirs of the Reformation that will make it happen.

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