But If Not
Sermon delivered at the Ebenezer Baptist Church
Atlanta, Georgia, November, 1967
And I say to you this morning, that if you have never
found something so dear and so precious to you that
you will die for it, then you aren't fit to live. God grant
that we will never bow before the gods of evil.
We Will Not Serve Thy Gods
There was a day when many of the Israelites found themselves in bondage in Babylon. There was a king of Babylon by the name of Nebuchadnezzar, you read about him a good deal in the book of Daniel, and it stands as an epic that will remain stenciled on the mental sheets of unfolding generations. Nebuchadnezzar was a mighty king, and when he ruled, he ruled and when he issued an order he meant business. And Nebuchadnezzar issued an order. He made a golden image and his order was that everybody under the reign of his kingship had to bow before that golden image and worship it. Now those of you who read the Bible remember that story. One day Nebuchadnezzar called in the judges and the governors and the sheriffs, and they had a dedicatory service for this golden image, and then he said to them, "I'm instructing you to see that
everybody bows before this golden image."
But there were three young men around there. One's name was Shadrach, the other one's name was Meshach, and the other name was Abednego. And they answered--and I read it from the scripture--and said to the king "O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in this manner. If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up." Now I want you to notice first, here, that these young men practiced civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is the refusal to abide by an order of the government or of the state or even of the court that your conscience tells you is unjust. Civil disobedience is based on a commitment to conscience. In other words, one who practices civil disobedience is obedient to what he considers a higher law. And there comes a time when a moral man can't obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust.
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"O king, we will not serve thy gods, nor
worship the golden image which thou hast set up." |
Moral Law of the Universe
And I tell you this morning, my friends, that history has moved on, and great moments have often come forth because there were those individuals, in every age in and every generation, who were willing to say, "I will be obedient to a higher law." These men were saying, "I must be disobedient to
a king in order to be obedient to
The King." And those people who so often criticize those of us who come to those moments when we must practice civil disobedience never remember that even right here in America, in order to get free from the oppression and the colonialism of the British Empire, our nation practiced civil disobedience. For what represented civil disobedience more than the Boston Tea Party? And never forget that everything that Hitler did in Germany was legal. It was "legal" to do everything that Hitler did to the Jews. It was a law in Germany that Hitler issued himself that it was wrong and illegal to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany...but I tell you, if
I had lived in Hitler's Germany, with my attitude, I would have openly broken that law. I would have practiced civil disobedience.
(Continued)
