Image by Grok
"Give us Barabbas!"
Dateline Jan. 2026.. Minneapolis, Minnesota: There's a pattern that repeats itself in every age, as old as Babel and as fresh as this morning's headlines. You can see it in the crowds, in the slogans, in the strange fever that takes hold of otherwise ordinary people. You can see it in the way a single spark of outrage becomes a wildfire, how a chant becomes a creed, how a grievance becomes a god.
We like to imagine that these things are new, that our moment is uniquely unhinged. But Scripture has been telling us the same story since Genesis: the human heart is a restless, fallen thing, and when it gathers with other restless, fallen hearts, it becomes something more dangerous than any one person could ever be alone.
For those of you who have not read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, I suggest you do. She sketched this truth in the sharp lines of her novel's characters—Wesley Mouch, the bureaucratic opportunist; James Taggart, the moral posturer; Orren Boyle, the crony capitalist; Cuffy Meigs, the brute enforcer. Her prophetic 1957 novel was full of the same characters that are destroying our nation today. Although she was writing fiction in secular form, she was naming what Scripture had already diagnosed.
Because the truth is this: Every one of those characters lives inside us: The bureaucrat who avoids responsibility. The moralizer who hides envy behind compassion. The crony who wants an advantage without effort. The brute who thrives on chaos. The genius who sells out. The producer who carries the load quietly, unwilling or afraid to make waves. The wanderer who withdraws in despair. These are not bugs; they are features—the many faces of our fallen nature.
And when a culture forgets the One who restrains that nature, those inner characters don't stay inner for long. They seep outward. They take root in institutions. They become policy, bureaucracy, street movements, and national moods. It becomes the air that people breathe.
The founders understood this better than we do. They were not naïve optimists. They were sober students of human nature. They built a system not for angels but for men—men who would grasp for power, evade responsibility, rationalize their desires, and form mobs when it suited them.
So, they anchored freedom in something higher than human will. Not in kings. Not in committees. Not in the passions of the crowd. But in "the laws of Nature and of Nature's God."
Rights given by God, not granted by government. Responsibilities commanded by God, not invented by man. A moral architecture strong enough to restrain the boiling cauldron of chaos beneath the thin crust of civilization. Without that architecture, freedom becomes license, license becomes anarchy, and anarchy becomes tyranny. The mob always promises liberation. It always delivers chains.
James Madison, often called the "Father of the Constitution," said it best: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." But men are not angels. And when they forget that they are not angels, they become demons.
So on this quiet morning, I find myself returning to a simple truth: A free people must first be a formed people. Formed by virtue and humility. Formed by the Word that tells us who we are and who we are not. Without that image, the soul has no wings. The demonic mob takes over. And the culture begins to drift toward the very abyss it insists it is marching away from.
But with that foundation—with hearts anchored in something eternal—freedom becomes more than a political arrangement. It becomes a way of life. A stewardship. A calling. And perhaps that is the reminder we need this morning: that the greatest safeguard of liberty is not found in Washington or in Santa Fe, not in courts or constitutions, but in the quiet, unseen work of the human heart turning toward God—everything else flows from there.
Every river has a source—what will yours be?
