“For the LORD
is our judge, the LORD is our lawgiver, the LORD is our king: He will save us” (Isa. 33:22).
I started watching the opening few scenes of The
Matrix to get to the blue pill/red pill scene. The truth is difficult
to accept when you’ve believed something for so long and it turns out not to be
real.
How many of us
would have taken the red pill when the world around us seems mostly normal and
not too bad? It looks like an easy choice in a film knowing that Neo (new)
was most likely making the right choice with the red pill. Taking
the red pill reveals an unpleasant truth while taking the “blue pill”
sedates you enough to keep you in blissful ignorance. Sedation and
ignorance work for a time until the barbarians are at the gates.
Concluding
that a radical change in perspective is not an easy choice to make since, like
Neo, we don’t know what that choice might bring. Ideas and choices (including the
lack of them) have consequences.
Today, the
United States finds herself in the midst of making a choice. It’s true that our
coins have “In God We Trust” stamped on them. But it’s probably equally true
that our nation puts more trust in the money where the acknowledgment appears
than in the God who supplies all wealth. Have we come to the place where we now
believe that “My power and the strength of my hand made me this wealth” (Deut. 8:17)? God’s assessment of such
presumption is not easy for an unrepentant nation to take:
But you shall
remember the LORD your God, for it is He who is giving you power to make
wealth, that He may confirm His covenant which He swore to your fathers, as it
is this day. And it shall come about if you ever forget the LORD your God, and
go after other gods and serve them and worship them, I testify against you
today that you shall surely perish. Like the nations that the LORD makes to
perish before you, so you shall perish; because you would not listen to the
voice of the LORD your God (Deut. 8:18–20).
Herod saw
himself as a god. But what is even more frightening, is that the people
accepted him as a god (Acts 12:20–24). It is no less true today that
people reject the God of the Bible and His faithful provisions of life,
liberty, and property and turn to the State for sustenance and security. Where
we are told to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven…. Give us this day our daily
bread” (Matt. 6:9, 11), we too often turn to the State for our
daily bread.
Where the Bible tells us that God is our Father, more
often than not the people make the State their father, because the State
supposedly can provide us all the financial aid we need. Of course, in order to
accomplish this miracle, the State must confiscate capital from the most
productive members of society or create money out of thin air. Both actions are
immoral, tyrannical, and self-defeating.
Liberty at Risk
Without a proper understanding of civil government’s biblical
function and limited jurisdiction, Christians can be trapped into believing
that civil government should promote policies beyond its designed purpose as
long as they are for “the good of the people.” This reasoning can lead many to
choose security no matter what the cost to liberty.
Eventually
the productive lose incentive to work when they know that whatever wealth they
accumulate will be taken from them. Infusing the economy with money that has no
backing only lessens its value for everyone.
This is why the first commandment must be our
starting point for the proper ordering of ourselves, our families, our
churches, and our nation. We must never put any of man’s laws before the first
commandment: “I am the LORD your God . . . you shall have no other gods
before Me” (Ex. 20:2–3). Adherence
to the first commandment protects us from those who would rewrite it to read
“The State is your God. You shall have no other gods before me.”
The biblical
covenant structure is as follows: (1) the absolute sovereignty of a
transcendent God who is always present (immanent) with His people. (2) He sets
up a hierarchy of earthly representatives, (3) lays down the law for all of
life, (4) judges our actions with either blessings or curses, and (5) preserves
His kingdom against all opposition. When a ruler decrees either by words or
deeds that he is independent of God’s government, or that justice is defined
according to his self-made laws, or that man looks to the State for salvation,
then God responds with judgment.
A nation
might not see God’s judgment in the same way Herod did, but time brings all
things to light. Choosing man as the sovereign ruler, independent of God, will
lead a nation to slavery and eventual destruction.
You may be saying that Christians believe all of this.
They believe it conceptually but not applicationally. Many (most?) Christians
believe we live in a two-kingdom world, much like the Matrix. The pagan world
runs in terms of natural, neutral-based laws, while the church operates with
moral norms that only apply to the church. Christians are interlopers waiting
for their ticket to paradise when hard times come via a rapture or some other
end-time event.
Too many
believe that Christians live in an ethereal upper-story realm while
non-Christian world lives in a lower-story realm . Each realm is said to
operate in terms of two distinct sets of standards.
The idea of a
Christian civilization is impossible and even heretical to consider. This is a
new way of thinking that has had disastrous results.
John Murray
(1898–1975), Professor of Systematic Theology at Westminster Theological
Seminary from 1937 to 1966, wrote the following in 1943 during a World War:
By the term,
“The Christian World Order,” I take it that what is meant is a world order that
in all its aspects and spheres is Christian, an order so conformed to the
principles of Christianity and so pervaded by the forces that are operative in
Christianity that the whole of life will be brought into willing captivity to
the obedience of Christ.
Are we
justified in entertaining the conception of Christian world order? Or, at
least, are we justified in entertaining such an order as an ideal towards which
we should work and strive? Do we have any assurance that such a world order is
attainable? And, if we have no assurance that it is attainable, are we not
mocking ourselves and others by framing the conception and, particularly, by
working’ towards the achievement of it? Should we not rather descend from the
clouds and deal with more practical and sensible matters?
*****
A Christian world order, if the word “Christian”
is applied with consistency, means an order in which the principle of
redemption and restoration is brought to its complete and all-pervasive
expression and fruition. [1]
The whole world does not have to be Christian to
have a Christian world order in the same way that the whole world does not have
to be pagan to be a pagan world order. Today, millions of Christians are living
in a pagan world and seem to be content to leave it that way.
It’s long past time to take the red pill.
1. John Murray,
“The Christian World Order,” The
Presbyterian Guardian (October 10, 1943). It’s also found in volume 1
of Collected Writings of John Murray: The Claims of Truth (Carlisle,
PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1976), 356-366).[↩]
