America the Beautiful

The wineskin that received this beautiful truth wasn't fully perfect at the moment.

We can see this in Thomas Jefferson himself.

who was one of the main of the committee of five charged with writing the Declaration, he did the heavy lifting.

He was brilliant.

And in Thomas Jefferson, you can see his own complex history.

These words that he writes...

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

An accurate reading of history acknowledges that Thomas Jefferson has a complex history regarding slavery.

He put a very fiery passage in the Declaration of Independence The original draft had a fiery passage about slavery.

But Georgia and South Carolina weren't on board at that point.

And so it was pulled out of the original draft to get all 13 states on.

But Jefferson did start the ball rolling.

And then later it would be Lincoln with the Emancipation Proclamation.

Almost 100 years later that would wipe it out.

But Jefferson did start it.

He was on record as being able to push against it.

But in his own life, he was a slaveholder.

And so there's that complex history of this new wine was given.

And it was beautiful.

Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, the abolitionists, they would use these very words.

We hold these truths to be self-evident.

That all men are created equal.

That they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.

That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln would use these words rightly aligned with Genesis chapter 1.