Friday, June 24, 2022, will long be remembered as the historic day when the US Supreme Court ended a 50-year reign of terror on unborn children.

Nationally and in our state, we are turning a page on the abortion issue. All you have to do is read the last few lines on the first page of the two-hundred-plus page opinion to know the essence of what the court decided: “Held: The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.”1

Those are twenty-eight powerful, long-awaited words—and we praise God for His goodness and grace to us in giving us this decision. But let’s be clear. God didn’t owe us this right opinion. It’s not as if nation- ally we’ve experienced a revival and are at a point where we can say that righteousness is exalting us. We should acknowledge the goodness of God in this moment—and we also need to be good stewards of what we have been given.

Liberty and freedom are words that even adults often have difficulty defining. Any definition is likely going to be yet another abstraction of these abstract words. Thus, we look to concrete symbols to help us explain these important words. It is fitting during this month when we celebrate our nation’s 246th birthday that we reflect on a few of these symbols.

Fatherhood—It’s a concept about which we rarely hear anything positive in our current cultural moment. And yet it is a paramount theme in Scripture: God the Father, God’s instructions for fathers, admonitions for children to obey their fathers, the joys and pains of fatherhood, the relationship between the Father and the Son.