by HAILE NKRUMAH GAULT
A Child, once under the control and guidance of his/her parents, leaves home one day to go to college, join the military, get married, get a job in another part of the country, or one of a number of other endeavors. The parents have done the best they know how to raise the child, or perhaps they did not. Nevertheless the child, now of age, flies the coop in independence! An Inmate has spent days, weeks, months or years behind bars paying society for a crime he/she has (or unfortunately, has not) committed. The parole board has met and assessed the inmate's prison behavior record, or the inmate has "maxed out" his/her prison sentence. After a period of confinement and duress the inmate is released back into society to gain their independence! The Israelites sold themselves into slavery to Pharaoh in Egypt because of a very severe famine in their own land, and they remained enslaved in Egypt for 400 years. God chose a young man named Moses, a man born a Hebrew but raised an Egyptian by (the new) Pharaoh's daughter, to lead the Israelites to freedom. Most of the Israelites had only known life in slavery; the concept of liberation was unknown. Yet God used Moses to purge them from captivity via the Red Sea to independence! When Jesus Christ came to earth the entire world was in captivity to sin. It was the reason He came here, to free us from our sins. To do so He had to submit Himself to die, be buried (entombed), and then be raised from death to life on the third day. Now anyone in the world, after accepting His gift of eternal life by obeying the gospel can, from sin and eternal death, gain their independence! The Nazi Party was formed in Germany by Adolph Hitler in the early 1930's. Hitler's aim was to drive out and/or murder all "undesirables" from the country. For those whom did not escape or leave willingly, Hitler took hostage, tortured and starved with the eventual intention to exterminate. These victims were mostly Jews, however other victims included homosexuals, the disabled, the mentally ill, the Polish, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other POW's. For twelve years their incarceration and progressive annihilation took place. Yet the Soviet, British and American military forces in April 1945 won for the survivors their independence! The American War of Independence was a battle between the 13 British colonies of North America (New Hampshire, Massachusetts [including Maine], Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York [including Vermont], New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia [including West Virginia and Kentucky], North Carolina [including Tennessee], South Carolina and Georgia) versus the Empire of Great Britain. Since 1608 the colonies had been under British rule, but the North American colonies rebelled against Great Britain and on July 4, 1776 proclaimed independence! [Of course, this independence was not extended to blacks held in bondage. In 1787 and 1788 these thirteen colonies became the United States of America, and her first president, George Washington, was elected in 1789.]The year 1619 began 246 years of the kidnapping, bondage and physical/mental mistreatment of West Africans in the United States of America. The Europeans sought slave labor to plow, plant and harvest the land - and also to otherwise serve their masters - a land and native people they had raped years before. The Natives were not going to submit to this type of back-breaking treatment, so the colonists sought to gain the trust of an unsuspecting group of people on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Like the Israelites in Egypt, most of the black slaves over their 240+ years of captivity had never known freedom. Yet when the southern states threatened to secede from the United States, it cracked open the door for the thousands of captives. President Abraham Lincoln led the fight in the War Between the States, and though it was not initially his intention to free the slaves, his preservation of the Union freed them at war's end in April 1865 to gain their independence! "With liberty and justice for ALL!"  |
