On
the day we celebrate the Resurrection of Christ, it is appropriate to remember
His commandment to us - Matthew
28:18-20 New International Version (NIV)
18 Then
Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been
given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.
And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
If this is the first
time you have seen one of the CAP Lessons, you can backtrack from here.
In
this study, Gary North makes the case that we have been delegated to carry out
God’s dominion assignment on earth. This involves every institution.
· God
is sovereign and Christ is the only link between heaven and earth.
· Our
delegated system on earth has complementary authorities. None is absolute.
· Decentralized
self-government is God’s model for mankind.
· God
delegates authority to man.
· Men
have created ‘theologies of despair’ which nullify God’s model.
· In
effect, men have actively shown they don’t trust God’s judgment of putting them
in charge of ruling His creation.
· God’s
sheep must become shepherds.
In order to transition from Study 4, I will repeat
the closing paragraph from it as a lead-in to Study 5, so there is no
misunderstanding as to what Gary North is asserting here. Very simply, this
study is an accusation of our dereliction of duty as delegates of God. We have
to repent and return to His way.
Excuses, excuses, excuses: man never runs short of
excuses. The problem is: God never accepts them. Adam and Eve didn't escape,
just because each of them blamed somebody else for the problem. God holds
His people responsible for laboring continually to subdue the earth to His
glory by means of the grace of law. That responsibility is with every generation,
and God expects His people to extend the dominion of His kingdom, generation by
generation, culture by culture. He has told us that Christians can do
it, and that eventually His people will do it. It may take a thousand
years, but they will do it. Man was created for this very purpose, and Satan
will not successfully thwart God's plan. Angels will not take the credit for
Satan's long-term retreat into his last stronghold; the redeemed adopted sons
of God will take the credit, under the sovereignty of God.
The following is from Gary
North’s “Unconditional Surrender”:
Delegating
Authority As
we have seen in earlier chapters, God's institutional outline provides for both
centered and local decision-making. God is both one and many. His rule gives
equal ultimacy to the unity and diversity of life. But it should be obvious
that God is the head. He is the final authority. He is the absolute
sovereign. He is the only true source of commands. Christ, as the Incarnate God, who was fully human and fully
divine, two natures in one Person, in union but without mixture, is the
only link between heaven and earth. No other
being, no other institution can legitimately assert a claim to divinity. No
other institution is perfect. No other person or institution is infallible.
None! Not the family, not the institutional church, not the civil government,
not the economy.
Therefore, we have a system of
complementary, competing authorities. The Bible tells us:
"Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counselors
there is safety" (Proverbs 11:14). In a multitude of lawful sovereignties
there is also safety, in time and on earth. Each authority has its
assignments, defined by God's law, but no single authority has absolute
authority in any given sphere of life. Only God has absolute sovereignty.
Therefore, the Bible
establishes a system of checks and balances, and God's law provides the pivot
point.
There must be a major
authority in any given institution, but that authority can be challenged by
other lawful authorities. A father must rule his household, but a wife can
sometimes override him, as Rebekah overrode Isaac's choice of evil Esau as the
son to receive the blessing. (She did have God's promise to guide her [Genesis
25:23; 27:1-17].) A father may not murder his children, either. The civil
government can legitimately defend them from death. Parents may choose to abort
an unborn child, but the Bible says this is murder, and the criminals must be
executed, which would include the physician who was a participant (Exodus
21:22-25).
The
authority structure in any institution is hierarchical, but it is never
absolute.
It faces lawful challenges from other ordained institutions. It also faces the
possibility of appeal from one lower on the chain of authority to a higher
institutional authority. The proper structure of responsibility is upward,
from the responsible individual to a supervisor. The man beneath is to
exercise self-government, but the man above may establish terms of performance,
if they are in conformity to God's law, and he may supervise performance. Each
institution acts as a miniature court. There is an executive function with
the head of the institution to establish general rules, goals, and standards of
performance, as well as to establish punishments and rewards. But any
functioning system which is top-heavy becomes bureaucratic, lethargic, and
unproductive. No man is omniscient. No man is God.
Therefore, a wise man decentralizes
authority, making each subordinate fully responsible for his own
performance, and a wise ruler sets up a reward system which encourages self-motivation
and self-government. Since no man can police everything under
his authority, the wise ruler acknowledges this fact and delegates authority
downward. He delegates precisely because he wants to extend his own
dominion. Delegating authority is not a retreat from responsibility, but
the essence of responsibility. Few decisions in life are more difficult, more
laden with responsibility, than the selection of a subordinate to take
over a particular task. (Selecting a wife is one example.) Yet it must be done
if institutions are to grow. Any institution which relies on a central
governing committee to achieve its goals is going to be a bumbling, blind, and
woefully inefficient organization.
God delegates authority to man. He tells man to subdue the
earth. If a sovereign, omniscient, omnipotent God delegates authority to a
creature, then it is imperative that men follow God's lead. Most government
should be self-government. In fact, most government is already
self-government, and a system that isn't built on this assumption cannot
hope to succeed in the long run.
By
creating theologies of despair, men have encouraged the creation of a huge
central government, meaning the State or the institutional church, or a
combination of the two. If we insist that God failed in His choice of a
competent subordinate when He delegated authority to man, then we become
hesitant to delegate authority ourselves. If God Almighty selected man to
subdue the earth, and man was not only immediately deflected from his
assignment, but was permanently deflected, despite the grace of God,
then what possible hope can mere men have in locating subordinates who will
become dominion-minded and reliable self-governors? If God's plan for man to
subdue the earth was permanently deflected by Satan, then only a fool would
delegate much authority to a subordinate. A wise man under such a theological
assumption would hold onto every shred of power he had, as if his future
depended upon it. He would never develop institutional arrangements that foster
independence among subordinates. He would delegate only as a man delegates to a
machine or a totally submissive servant. He would choose only breathing robots,
rotting machines, known as bureaucrats, to fulfill his purposes.
This is
basically the kind of blueprint for the millennium that millions of Christians
have today.
God supposedly chose the wrong being to exercise dominion. Satan rules in power
on earth, and poor, pathetic man even (we might say especially) regenerate
man cannot hope to triumph, in time and on earth. So Christ will just have to
intervene directly in the historical process, remove man from all ruling
authority, and return physically to start giving orders to His servants. If God
has to intervene directly in the process of history, and change the rules of
history to establish His kingdom on earth (for example, by intermingling
Christians in transformed bodies with Christians converted after Christ's
return, not to mention the devil's servants tares who never were removed from
history), then we should expect a bureaucratic kingdom on earth, the
likes of which mankind has never seen. Egypt's bureaucratic consolidation
becomes a joke in comparison with Christ's supposed coming kingdom. No more
delegated authority. No more responsible individuality. No more personal
maturity through self-government. Just a massive, unquestioning system of
bureaucratic government - the hierarchy to end all hierarchies - the pyramid to
end all pyramids!
All this follows directly
from a particular theology of despair. This theology of historical defeat, this
cosmic pessimism regarding the abilities of regenerate men under God's
sovereignty, leads inescapably to the acceptance of bureaucracy. Those who hold
this theology of historical defeat and who also belong to some
non-denominational church, which has no institutional chain of command or which
any one will admit to anyway, have become pessimistic with regard to reversing
the socialist world's march into bureaucracy. Satan is a consummate
bureaucrat, who wants direct power, but who has no law structure that is
reliable and no subordinates who can be trusted. Yet his kingdom in this
century has pushed around Christian cultures, precisely because the Christians
have become reconciled to the idea of the triumph of bureaucracy. They see no
defense against it, except a bigger and better bureaucracy to be established by
Jesus when He comes to rule in person for a thousand years. "It you can't
beat the system, join it. If you can't join it, imitate it."
Because
Christians just don't trust God's judgment in selecting them to rule the earth,
without God's physical presence, they don't trust themselves.
They don't trust in their own judgment. They have no faith in their own
dependent and responsible efforts to subdue the earth, under God and by means
of His law. They want directions. They want to be told what to do. They are
afraid of responsible self-government.
We are sheep. The Bible calls us sheep. But we are to be
obedient sheep, and we are to strive to become shepherds, as the apostles
become shepherds. Because of self-government under God's law and under
God's lawfully constituted authorities, we sheep can become shepherds. We
can then become rulers. As sheep, we must never forget the voice of the Good
Shepherd (John 10). He is the source of our strength. The means of advancing
from sheep to shepherds is through self-government under God and in terms of
His law. We are not to become spiritual bureaucrats the ultimate human sheep
but law-abiding shepherds (John 21:15-17). We must learn to trust the
judgment of those who assign us new responsibilities, just as deacons are
supposed to trust the judgment of elders who assign them responsibilities (Acts
6). The way to advance from sheep to shepherds is by continual delegation of
responsibility downward, not by the continual expansion of centralized,
bureaucratic power at the top.
