Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Spiritual political warfare - by Carey Appling


Often, the most difficult aspect of convincing Christians to get involved in politics is to convince them that though they are physically present, they are spiritually absent. This is not to say Christians in America aren’t involved in the political arena, but that they are waging war in that arena without God and disarmed of their spiritual power. Most Christians willfully disarm themselves by seizing the power structure that currently exists and trying to “Christianize” it with prayers around flagpoles and Ten Commandment monuments outside court houses. These, in the mind of too many Christians, are victories. Christians in the political realm largely think and act just like their enemies. They often side with “conservatives” who are meanwhile members at local liberal denominations. They think they have a winning strategy. How can Christians reject spiritual liberalism when it’s a Gospel issue, but embrace it when it calls itself Christian under a “Conservative” political banner? I believe I can explain.
Christians are now in dire need of approaching politics from a Christian apologetical worldview. We must address our opponents, even in our own parties, as those peddling a new religion. This may take some time to unpack, but it’s worth the effort, and perhaps can radically change the way you approach local, state, and federal politics.
Spiritual Political Warfare
The Scriptures say that we do not wrestle with flesh and blood but with spiritual principalities and powers (Eph. 6:12). Which is to say that when we are fighting evil, no matter where it is, it has manifested itself from the spiritual to the material. Nothing that manifests materially, good or evil, got that way without first finding its origin in the spiritual realm. This is critical to understand. Christians are foundationally powerless in politics because they view political theory and political action like pagans. In other words, they believe that God has not spoken to the political realm, or that God, in the New Testament, has abandoned the governing of men to neutral theories apart from biblical truth. If they do believe there are biblical answers to governmental issues, it is vague and almost always ambiguous enough to endorse whatever candidate says they are a Christian and doesn’t like “Socialism.” That’s about the depth of the Christian approach at large.
But what if we approached political theory like we approach cults in religion? What if you approached politics the way you approach false religions? What if Statism and Collectivism were cults in the mind of Christians? What if Statism and Collectivism must be confronted for falsely convincing mankind of another way to salvation apart from Christ? What if humanistic politics is not merely theories on how to govern mankind, but is man trying to save humanity as a false second Adam? If Christ is the head of his church as the new Adam, then humanists are claiming to be head of a satanic order by ruling all of humanity under their centralized headship.
One of the greatest blows to the Western Christian Worldview has been struck when we believe that the endeavors of humanists to centrally plan our lives was not spiritually motivated, but reasonably and logically concluded apart from our fallen natures. The false idea is that man may be fallen, but his devices and theories are neutral to his fallen nature. He may have bits of evil, but he has the capacity to conceive of a good thing in the neutral realm of politics. These devices and theories change from time to time to match the desired need of the people and culture. If the steel industry is going bankrupt because of foreign competition, it is not thought to have anything to do with the spiritual realm to attempt to remedy that problem by either subsidizing it or penalizing the competition. This isn’t evil, in their rationalization, and since God has assumedly not spoken as to how we should specifically govern ourselves in this area, it’s just the humanist’s word against the Christian’s. Whoever can convince the most senators or citizens to their cause is clearly right and providential as well. So, Man governs the earth through his endeavors and God moves him about via providence in history.
Humanistic Salvation
The humanist and socialist are already upset. You can imagine: “I don’t believe that! In fact, I don’t believe in the spiritual realm at all! I don’t believe in your God, nor do I claim to save anyone’s soul through our government.” How would you answer these rebuttals? Let’s begin the apologetic, shall we? Of course, in the rigid sense, these people are not saying they are going to make us acceptable before the God of the Bible and that through their governing we will be reconciled to God. No. Their “soteriology” is different because their spiritual blindness has morphed their idea of salvation from one of God’s sovereign grace to one of submission to man’s law. They only believe repentance is needed when man’s law is broken, not God’s Law. There is no neutrality. It is either Theonomy or Autonomy. God is building His Kingdom now. The Humanists are building their little kingdoms which they believe will be the salvation of man. Those humanists have a law that governs their kingdom.
Just as man has his own counterfeit law, just as he has his own counterfeit kingdom, so too does he have his own counterfeit hell in the form of the penal system. The prison system is man’s vain attempt, here on earth, to create a material hell for man to suffer in. This his purgatory by which his suffering will eventually rehabilitate him for reentry into the kingdom of man. This system is created to brainwash the inmate into sympathizing with his captors by admitting that man’s law was right and he was wrong. This society also believes that once a man “does his time,” he is exonerated from his crimes and reconciled to the false Adam, the State. In fact, his crimes will almost exclusively be (Inmates Name) v. The State of Texas (or whatever State you live in). That is to say, his crimes are not against God but against man, in the form of the State, and he must repent and face justice on its terms. This is their soteriology.
Still not convinced? Go on a tour with your humanist friends to your local State capitol. What will you find? Nothing short of intense amounts of Greek and Roman symbolism either in the form of the old gods of the pagan world or symbols that represent the unseen principles of American Mythology. You will see blindfolded women holding scales; you will see massive monuments of men not even trying to hide their deification as historical figures. Christianity has its patriarchs in the form of Abraham, the prophets and so forth. Humanism has its patriarchs in the form of Abraham Lincoln or Sam Houston. Eagles grasping arrows, crests with dozens of symbols and a meaning for each symbol, State Coats of Arms, olive branches and so on. If man does not worship and obey the true God, then he will provide his own mythos and iconography by which he can bow and worship his false god. These men who are deified have finished their humanistic race (2 Tim 4:7), they have made it to their promise land, and it is your obligation to pick up where they left off. Again, it is either God’s covenant or man’s covenant. There is no neutrality.
The Clash of Worldviews
It is no wonder Christians are so powerless to affect this modern world or to bring about change. It is like they are attempting to change Mormonism not by refuting it, but by reforming it from within. It needs to be smashed, not reformed. Centralized planning at the local, state, and federal level is a Gospel issue. It’s a false salvation and will lead people to hell. Christians love God’s Law, and not just for their “personal” life choices. God never limited His Law to your personal devotional time or small personal decisions. No doubt, God’s Law even extends to these areas, but it’s not restricted to them. God’s Law is for all of life and that includes government. The humanists in Public Schools and Sunday Schools taught us by routine example, almost taken for granted, that the Law is for salvific purposes and personal devotion, nothing else. Yes, they may say it’s Jesus-for-all-of-life, but it is largely just a Jesus for personal prayer, bible reading, and “blatant” sins that are to be avoided. This is robbing us of the riches we have in Christ, making us beggars both spiritually and materially, and it ultimately leads to apostasy, generationally. It’s the outworking of a dead faith.
It’s time that the state capital and its false religion are exposed to the glorious Kingdom power of Jesus. It’s time Christians start making tracts that treat statism, socialism, humanism, communism, and other false religions as legitimate apologetic endeavors. The Mormons are not educating our children en masse. The Muslims are not killing the unborn at 3,000 children a day. The Jehovah Witnesses aren’t creating wicked practices such as Civil Asset Forfeiture that steal billions of dollars a year from innocent Americans. The Hindus aren’t passing billion-dollar bonds, locally, that further enslave our future children through property tax. The list goes on and on, and Christians either wholeheartedly partake of this new religion, or they completely disengage and pray for the Rapture. Either of these reactions is precisely what the humanists want.
All of this is the fruit of the new world religion, humanism. Taxation is the new tithe for its assemblies. Public schools are its churches. Its creed is the Pledge of Allegiance. America and the rest of the world have built an entirely new Tower of Babel that will unify the entire world under their new false Adam. Many, many Christians are a part of this new religion.
With all of this in mind, the Christian should not abandon faith by adapting pragmatic approaches to “reforming” the statist religion. Instead, he should call this new cult religion and its practitioners to repent and to turn to Christ by faith. They should repent of the false premise that the state owns the earth (Psalm 24) through property tax. They should repent of the false indoctrination that takes place in our public schools, not by putting the Bible back in school, but by abolishing the practice of state education and bringing the family back together into Covenant living. They should repent of the billions of bureaucratic laws that only make more criminals out of law abiding citizens. Slavery is alive today and is practiced at the largest scale it has ever been practiced, and the 13th Amendment itself allows creating slaves via bureaucratic laws. Slavery was never abolished; it was renamed by humanists by whom which we were generationally brainwashed. We call this Doublespeak.
13th Amendment: Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
There is only one Creator of the cosmos. There is only one faith to live in that cosmos. There is only one Lord to rule that Cosmos. The manmade, “democratic” government is a false power religion. The end goal for Christendom, as it pertains to the cult of Democracy and Socialism, is to enact a Magna Carta-esque document stripping all authority and power from elected officials and majority populaces by the truth and power of the Gospel of Christ, and restoring it to local levels. Collectivism is just another unchecked monarchy legitimized because of man’s deep-seated desire to create his own laws, no matter how devilish and wicked those laws are.