Truth is a Person. You cannot have truth detached from God, as all truth (as truth) reflects God or it is a lie. So all truth is God’s truth. Truth cannot exist separate from His Person. The fundamental nature of the entire universe is personal, as it was all created as a reflection of God’s self-revelation. The key to understanding existence, of being itself, is to understand it remains rooted in someone living.
Among other things, the source of all sorrow and sin seeks to kill, to degrade and enslave all those living. Not just that, but to destroy the essence of what it means to live.
It’s all cut from the same cloth. We are aware the foundation of Western intellectual culture is mostly in Greece, with the Greek Philosophers. The two most frequent names are Plato and Aristotle. In a certain sense, we could say the entire foundation of Western Civilization really stands on Aristotle, in particular. His entire epistemology assumes nothing worth knowing can remain outside man’s intellectual grasp — given sufficient time and inclination, man can know everything worth knowing. Man is the measure of all things. Modern materialism, and lots of other “-isms” arise from these assumptions, directly or indirectly. In the process, ultimate truth becomes a dead, objective entity.
You find this assumption behind all the arguments about religion which forcefully declare there is some objective standard to which conceptions of God can be measured. In such a world, God is reduced to something made by man’s mind, or He must be rejected.
From such a background comes the modern rejection of all God has ever commanded. The notion we could remove the personality from things is the reason we have the modern nation-state, also called Westphalian Sovereignty: the notion we can have an impersonal State, which is more or less sacrosanct.
This is the foundation for creating a concept of government which does not include the persons doing the governing. We create offices and structures, and the persons carry a very limited liability for decisions made while in that office. It removes the soul from government, so that you cannot possibly come back and require accountability, except in the most impersonal form of merely changing the rules and laws. As if that fixes things.
It also allows the legal fiction of corporations as “persons” under the law. This means the evil of the corporate officers will never cost them, so long as what they do can be found by some twisted logic to be legal. Instead, it costs the corporation, which means the stockholders and customers. The crooks running the thing get off with a golden parachute.
It presents the fiction no one needs to be concerned with standing before God, at least not in this life, because there is probably no God. If there is, it’s of no consequence because it won’t affect you here and now.
That’s the ultimate lie. That people seem to grow old and die unscathed is only apparent, but that issue is used to hide from accountability to God for the good fortune of being in the driver’s seat. Just as surely as God promises various levels of reward in Heaven, so there are various levels of punishment in Hell, though such could hardly be understood on this side. Worse, that lie tries to ignore how wrath accumulates to the nation as a whole.
Not a single government operating under the principles espoused in the Peace of Westphalia — that whole business of the modern nation-state — is acceptable before God. Each of them begins with a rejection of God’s requirements under Noah. Only the tribal nations have any hope.
Rising up in revolt against the nation state, an organized armed rebellion, is nothing more than one criminal government replacing another, trading one sin for another. There is no compelling requirement under Noah to do that. However, there is a compelling interest in resisting the unjust demands of such a government. To have standing before God when opting for such resistance, you must first embrace Noah, not so much in the fulfillment, as in the commitment and intention.
Some implications of such resistance can be found in this article, Biblical Rebellion. As you would expect, the discussion includes both earthly and spiritual applications. If you are going to take that route, you might as well do it right. When you seek to resist bad government God’s way, you can fully expect His support.
