Rights

"For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith- and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God- not by works, so that no one can boast."
-Ephesians 2:8-9
      The 2012 presidential election is coming up, and I've been thinking about it more than I do most elections. One thing that came to mind was these things called rights. According to our constitution, all men have the right to vote. We also have many other rights, such as the right to bear arms, life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Today I want to really explore what rights are and what rights we have.
      Rights according to dictionary.com are claims or entitlements, based on legal or moral principles. The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are all based on moral principles. The right to bear arms and the freedom of press are more based on legal principles. What does this really mean though? What do legal and moral principles even mean? I believe that the reason we can claim these "rights" are because we believe that we somehow deserve them based on what we believe. If we can be honest, moral and legal principles are both based on what we believe to be true and just. This brings up an interesting question, how can we all agree on rights if we believe in different things? I discuss this in another post on morals (http://aforbes.blogspot.com/2012/04/morals.html).
      If we claim to have certain rights, then we also claim to deserve certain entitlements. We are saying that we are worthy of something. For someone to deserve something, they have to have done something that makes them worthy of it. A person deserves to go to prison because they have committed a crime. But what have we done to deserve our rights? Nothing at all, except exist. We don't deserve rights, they are given to us. However, if we don't deserve them, than they are no longer rights, but privileges. Some people may argue that they have done good things and therefore deserve rights. According to Romans 3:23, all have sinned, and according to Romans 6:23, the wages of sin is death. The only "right" that we have is death, because we all deserve it.
      I can't end this post on a bad note, and thanks to God, I don't have to. When I said that we don't have any rights, I meant that we have done nothing to deserve them. If we look only at ourselves, we truly only have the right to die. If we look at the cross, we have the right to eternal life. When Jesus died on the cross, He gave us the right to be in His family. How? I said earlier that rights have to be given because we don't deserve them. Jesus took the punishment for our sin, and in turn justified us. What does that mean? We now deserve life because Jesus made us worthy. We are no longer considered sinners, but God's children. He has made us new, and we have rights that can never be taken from us.  
-Smart