Limits of Power and Enforcement
You cannot separate loyalty to God from social stability.
The thread that ties together all biblical law regarding conduct with other humans has always been the necessity of maintaining social stability. This is the primary duty of man before God in this fallen world. The Scripture assumes you understand that starts with family integrity and stability. Your family was your society. It seems nearly impossible to get Westerners to understand that you cannot possibly obey God’s law fully without a tribal social structure. You cannot even understand biblical law without that underlying necessity. Family comes first; then we talk about how to behave as a society.
Because Western Civilization is inherently hostile to the family, we struggle to understand the death penalty for transgressing family unity. We see no problem with some government entity interfering in family business. It is impossible to overstate how wrong that is. This alone justifies God destroying the entire Western world and every human life within.
In God’s eyes, the family is your government, period. Human government was mandated by God in Genesis 9 because the fallen nature of mankind requires restraints. What most Westerners struggle to avoid is the necessity of that government restraint starting at home. The family elder was meant to be your shepherd. It was the family elder God commissioned through Noah to exercise the death penalty on murderers. Remember the warning about about men being inherently lazy when it comes to fighting sin? That figures into the passage in Genesis where God warns that there has to be some final awful penalty for the ultimate threat to social stability, and your own blood kin were supposed to carry out your execution for the crime of murder. The police are your family. It is flat out evil to pass the job off to strangers; it’s a cowardly act of defiance against God’s first Law Covenant.
Any civil government entity seeking to interfere in family business is damned. How many times do you need to read that? Anyone demanding a government that interferes with family business is also damned. Civil government is not permitted to deal with individuals if they are attached to a substantial household; civil government is required to work with the family as a single entity. Scripture regards this a self evident.
Civil laws about marriage and divorce are all contrary to God’s revelation. Laws about abortion are also evil. Having a society so horribly twisted that such things enter the picture is also begging for God’s wrath. God says all those things are the business of the extended family, and any external government is obliged to recognize the sanctity of such an arrangement. These issues are not a valid concern of any civil government. Period.
Such is God’s moral character. Naturally, we can’t pull that off under most Western governments. Jesus recognized that and so did the Apostles. They had the advantage that Rome scarcely cared about what Hebrew and Christian families did within their own boundaries.
However, Christian synagogues were regarded with varying levels of suspicion in part because the Jewish folks took deep offense at them, not Rome. Still, both kinds of synagogue followed the ancient pattern of considering themselves the only real kinfolks around. That is, your church was organized like an extended covenant family. Covenant obligations took precedence over blood kinship in God’s Laws, in that anyone authorized as head of family to participate in a covenant was obliging the family to fulfill it. Thus, the Covenant of Christ was considered more binding than any blood kinship. Your church was your real family according to God’s morality.
Things are a bit more complicated for us, since so very many of professing Christians are demanding things God calls “evil.” That is, Western Christians are easily the single loudest agitators demanding that the government destroy the family integrity. Somehow Satan has convinced a large number of Christians that the sword of evil men can somehow work God’s will, while the Christians can refuse to take responsibility for fixing what’s wrong. In God’s eyes, the people are the police, and a professional force is an occupying army of invaders. That God permits it has no bearing on the truth we are required to see.
Going back to that image of the shepherd with his limited authority and just those tools God has given him, it is upon us to rebuild what society ought to be within the limits of our authority. Sure, negotiate with the civil government if you can, but mostly it’s a matter of flying under the radar. Whatever isn’t in your hand is in God’s hands. Your commitment to His moral justice tends to bring His power to play in ways you might not expect. He may well move you far from where you planned to live, relieve you of worldly concerns you don’t need, and break lots of your personal plans and dreams.
That’s His prerogative.
