What is the source of human rights? For the Christian, this answer is easy. Our rights come from our Creator. We are made in his image and thus imbued with the dignity that flows from this. Thus, we have the right not to be killed. Since we are made in the Creator’s image, and we have been made for dominion, we are able to work God’s earth and as analogies of the Creator, we can create value and worth from our mind and the materials of earth. Thus we have the right not to be stolen from. For the Christian, human rights stem from the imago Dei, and God’s law.
However, many no longer live with the truth as their worldview. They reject the living God and embrace a materialist worldview. They believe that man is the result of a long evolutionary process, and God is a creation of man. However, these individuals quite like the Christian concept of human rights. So they want to steal them from our worldview. Of course they can’t get them from their own, for where could rights come from in a chance evolutionary system – a system that by its very nature requires bloodshed and might as right for evolutionary progress to occur.
So how do they back up their rights? With their own ‘god’ of course. And who is that God? The state! I recently heard some womble on the radio talking about the right to adequate housing. So I looked into this concept and found the Human Rights Commission espouses the right to ‘adequate’ housing. In a brochure on this, they write:
The human right to adequate housing is binding legal obligation of the State of New Zealand. This means the State of New Zealand has agreed to ensure that the right to adequate housing is progressively realised in New Zealand. It is an “international obligation” that must be performed in New Zealand.
The State has a duty to protect the right of people in New Zealand to enjoy adequate housing and a responsibility to provide remedies.
While this sounds nice, and of course we want everyone to have nice housing, God has not given us a ‘right’ to adequate housing. Nor has he given the State the role of ensuring we have it. He has given us hands and feet, a mind and ingenuity. And he has called us to exercise dominion over the earth he made. Work is how we get houses. The State does not have the right to make rights. Only God has that right, because he alone is the sovereign Creator. The State can only recognise the rights he has given people in his Word. When they attempt to make new rights, they are usurping the throne of God.
Unfortunately, we live in an age where the people have turned from the God whose yoke is easy and burden light to Leviathan who we think will look after us and care for us. And so our god State has benificently given us a right to adequate housing.
But for every right, there must be a corresponding duty. For example, I have the right not to be killed or stolen from. That means you have the duty not to club me over the head with a blunt instrument to steal my wallet. What does it mean that we all have a right to adequate housing? It means others have a duty to ensure this human right is not thwarted. According to the UN, it is the State that has this duty. Yet the State does not create wealth. Unlike the one true God, it cannot make something out of nothing, so it must plunder its people. Which ultimately means we have a duty to pay for the adequate housing of others who do not have it.
Ultimately this means that we do not have a right to our own resources, because somebody who needs them has more of a right to them than us. So this ‘human right’ is the right of the hungry Leviathan to take money from unwilling people to provide for others who do not have ‘adequate‘ (and that term is defined very generously by the UN) housing. His yoke is hard and his burden is heavy. Turn from the idol of State and come to Christ the true king of the universe.