With power comes responsibility
That’s a line from Spider Man. Actually, it’s the central theme that runs through that popular series, as Peter Parker realizes more deeply those words of wisdom his uncle spoke before his death. It’s also a teaching from Scripture that more is expected from those to whom more has been given. Social justice is grounded in that belief, and this reflection could go in any number of directions to see how the fundamental truth of responsibility is applied and realized.
Ben Shapiro makes that point in this interesting column on Passover and the Exodus of the Jews. That great historical freedom from slavery brought great responsibility with it, and the piece is a good reminder.
The Jewish exodus from Egypt remains the signal moment for Western civilization. It marks the first call for freedom, the first movement from the darkness of tyranny to the light of liberty. As such, it has been used by every major political movement in American history. When John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were assigned the task of creating a great seal for the United States, they considered adopting the image of Moses and the Jews standing on the beach of the Red Sea, watching the Egyptians drown. “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,” the seal would have read.
The exodus from Egypt provided the rallying image to black slaves in the antebellum South. “In America, enslaved Africans learned the story of the exodus from Egypt and set their own hearts on a promised land of freedom,” President Bush correctly explained in a July 2003 speech.
Martin Luther King Jr. constantly utilized the imagery of Exodus in his quest for racial equality. “Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever,” King said in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. “The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself. The Bible tells the thrilling story of how Moses stood in Pharaoh’s court centuries ago and cried, ‘Let my people go.’ This is a kind of opening chapter in a continuing story. The present struggle in the United States is a later chapter in the same unfolding story.”
Ronald Reagan cited Exodus as the first incident in a long line of Western resistance to tyranny: “Since the exodus from Egypt, historians have written of those who sacrificed and struggled for freedom: the stand at Thermopylae, the revolt of Spartacus, the storming of the Bastille, the Warsaw uprising in World War II. In the Communist world as well, man’s instinctive desire for freedom and self-determination surfaces again and again.
But not self-determination without the constraints of just law.
Freedom has its own demands. God brought His people out of Egypt with the express purpose of leading them to Mount Sinai, where He would bestow upon them a different code of conduct: His code of conduct, the Torah. Liberty is not merely freedom from interference — the so-called “right to be left alone” — it is the right to be left alone to pursue righteousness . There is no right to engage in evil; that is libertinism, not liberty. There is no right to participate in degeneracy; that is not freedom, but slavery to malice, greed and self-indulgence…
The call of freedom does not end with exodus from tyranny; the call of freedom demands more. It demands allegiance to the good, to the true, to the right; it demands allegiance to Him who led us from the hellish night of slavery to the bright sunlight of liberty.