It’s not as if I have nothing to say; I have too much to say. Unfortunately, most of it has been covered already.
Something haunting me frequently these days is the constant confusion between human justice constructs and God’s divine justice. Jesus said that we should treat each other as neighbors by default, but it bore a huge implication utterly missing in Western social mythology. In ancient Hebrew society, your neighbor was presumed to be a relative in effect if not in fact. In order to maintain the justice of social stability, you must have a tribal social structure. If your neighbors aren’t blood relations, you have to swear some kind of covenant to bring them under the covering of God’s justice. It’s utterly foreign and even repulsive to Westerners that we are required by God to live that way.
Western secular society presumes just the opposite. It’s considered weird and almost dangerous to live among your kinfolks. Here in the U.S. we disparage that sort of thing, but God’s entire revelation assumes it is necessary for His blessings. It’s taken for granted that you would naturally want such a life. Only in recent human history has any part of human society not assumed your neighborhood was all related. Outsiders were supposed to mind their own business. If they insisted on coming into the area, they were subject to all sorts of snooping and suspicion. No outsider had any business attempting to assert significant control over your daily life. That is how God intends us to act; anything else is rejecting His Word.
So I’ll say it again: Not a single Western government is approved by God. If you want to claim Christ, you have to reject all current secular government and law. Not in the sense of fighting and making trouble, but in the sense you know better than to suggest any part of our current Western government reflects God’s revelation. It’s a filthy, nasty and blasphemous insult to God to even think that way.
Yet Our Savior died on the Cross — that’s how we handle evil human government. We start by not taking seriously any part of this human plane of existence. The only thing on this level that matters is living by God’s Laws and reaping however much power and blessing it brings. At times it must inevitably bring us into conflict with people and powers on this earth, but we expect that. We expect to die sooner or later, and should be surprised when non-believers leave us alone.
I once explained that the only proper understanding of Satan was as God’s appointed lictor and jailer. Those who reject God’s message are handed over to Satan for discipline. There is precious little requiring Satan to uniformly treat all his captives as they might deserve. Does it surprise anyone Satan would prefer to keep at least some of his captives? Why would he not wisely make the whole thing confusing by allowing some of his charges to live a long, prosperous and peaceful life? In a broad general sense, those most tormented are folks over whom Satan has least control. If you really aren’t his property, he’s going to make sure you get the worst he has to dish out. If he’s pretty sure he can keep you under his control, why mess with you?
So this business of the blessings of the Laws of God is pretty hard to calculate from the human angle. We cannot see what goes on in the Spirit Realm negotiations as we were allowed to see in the story of Job. That part of the narrative is representative, since such things are impossible to describe literally in human terms. The whole point should be obvious when you eliminate what can’t be true: Living in God’s justice is its own reward. If you don’t love the Laws of God for their own sake, nothing in them will ever have meaning to you. That’s why I say “Law is Grace” — the path to the Spirit Realm is death in this realm. The Law comes down to us from Above and is our first taste of eternity. If your moral senses are dead, you can’t taste the sweetness.
How many ways do I have to say it? We aren’t interested in fighting human governments. Go ahead and take that government job, but bring the full holy cynicism of Christ. If your moral senses are comfortable with that job, then perform it with a clear conscience and do it as best you are able. That is the most powerful witness you’ll ever have; being upright and without the typical venality of most government employees. Of course you see through the lies, but you perform as if God signed your paycheck. We are not in the business of changing the world, only ourselves. We are not responsible for making others behave well. Rather, we fully anticipate at least a certain minimum of corruption; we never bat an eye. But we do not participate willingly ourselves.
Yep, just another generic post of the same old stuff, expressed one more time with a slightly different angle.
