R.J. Rushdoony rightly
asserts, “It must be recognized that in any culture the source of law is the
god of that society.”
Whenever the Law of God is
replaced by another law it means firstly, that another god has taken the place
of the True God, since all Law is the codification of religion and must come from
a divine source.
Gary DeMar explains further:
“When political systems
rule, they rule in accordance with a law system. This is inevitable. There can
be no neutral law system… If man is the source of a society’s laws, then man is
the god of that society. If society ignores the governing principles that God
has set forth in His Word, then that society is competing with the Lord of all
creation.”
Secondly, every law which is not divine, must be humanistic. Human law, which
does not mirror Divine law, is simply another tactic by sinful man to assume a
deity role. Whosoever makes the law becomes the lawgiver and that lawgiver now
has the power to arbitrarily declare good and evil. This brings us right back
to the garden of Eden when man sought to be as God to know, and to re-define
good and evil.
As a result of unregenerate man’s quest to be as God he
is forever seeking to take dominion over other men. This is especially true of
those craving political power. As it was in the days of Egypt, the State was
considered divine and Messianic and its Pharaoh was its god-man icon. Once men
gain political office, if they are not bound by and to the Law of God, they
will consider themselves a demi-god of the Divine State with supreme power and authority
conferred.
This “stateist mindset” is clearly explained by political sociologist Jacques Ellul,
“[the state] is the ultimate value which gives everything its meaning. It is a
providence of which everything is expected, a supreme power of life and earth
over its members. It is an arbiter which …declares the law, the supreme
objective code on which the whole game of society depends.”
Hebert Scholssberg
comments:
“Deifying rulers has always
been a means of legitimizing their rule. The imperial cult of Romebegan as
early as the first century and was intended to solidify the hold of the
emperors and establish their legitimacy…By the time of Domitian (81-96 AD) it had
become common to address him as dominus
et de-us…’My Lord and My God’….The idol State uses language of compassion
because its intention is a messianic one. It finds the masses harassed and
helpless, like sheep without a shepherd, needing a savior.”
This idea of statist
dominion can only be enacted upon a people who are already psychologically enslaved.
They would rather be cared for by a totalitarian regime than take
responsibility for their own well-being. American is such one nation of these
individuals.
Matthew Trewella in his
book, “The Doctrine of The Lesser Magistrate”
observes this tendency in the post-modern American mind:
“Unknowingly, Americans have accepted the role of Huxley’s servant minded
people for decades. This is due in part to the fact that people love comfort
and tend to avoid conflict. However, the other part of the equation is that
people have lost the yardstick by which they should measure the limits of
Government. As a consequence, we in American have become a slave-like people
with the Federal government acting more like a Master than as a Servant,
providing justice for the people.”
By Giving the Law to first
Israel and then to New Testament Christendom, God was introducing a completely
new concept of Mastery, very unlike Egyptian mastery. It was a mastery of
righteousness and peace. It was a Lawful mastery which was divinely legitimate,
and which had a hopeful future attached to it.
By moving Israel out of Egypt,
an historical illustration of liberation from sin, death and all manner of
political, social and economic tyranny, God was not only freeing them, He was
empowering them to take the land that was rightfully theirs. He was offering
them their promised inheritance. He had called them to be His rightful heirs
provided they remain Covenantally obligated through obedience. This means that
they were to be responsible individuals, never submitting again to Egyptian-type
welfare, which would once again result in tyranny and oppression.
One obvious and potent
example of the degree to which America has become enslaved is through
the
taxation system. God’s taxing system, through the tithe, where Israel needed
only to give God a tenth of their labors, was set up to showcase God’s
relationship with Israel as one of mercy, grace, justice and equity. It was
also set up so that through the Levitical and the poor tithe the church would
be sufficiently funded barring the state from usurping the church’s sphere authority.
The state would then be limited to its Biblical jurisdiction ensuring its
inability to become a totalitarian regime.
God ‘s tax was to remind Israel that they had a relationship with a God Who was
both their King and their provider. It was God alone Who sustained them and God
wanted to make sure they remembered that fact. The tithe was also a reminder
that God owned all things and mankind made use of the world and its bounty at
the pleasure of God. He alone was the legitimate Messiah, not the state and not
the church. Only God could rule with a system of reliable, predictable Laws
which were wholly ethical. His taxation system testified of that fact.
What Israel had been used
to in Egypt was nothing like this new tax system.They were commanded to give all to
the Pharaoh. If they were to receive any economic well-being whatsoever from
their own hard-earned labors, it was a gift of the Messianic State.The state
owned all labor and all the fruit of labor since it owned all men.
Schlossberg again explains this idea in the context of the American Tax policy.
“In the United States,
federal tax policy illustrates the government’s unconscious rush to be the god
of its citizens. When a provision in the tax laws permits the taxpayer to keep
a portion of his money, the internal revenue service calls this a ‘tax
expenditure’, or an ‘implicit government grant’. This is not tax money that the
state has collected and expended, but money it has allowed the citizen to keep
by not taking it. In other words, [or any words for that matter], any money the
citizen is permitted to keep is regarded as if the state had graciously given
it to him. Everything we have [then] is [considered to be] from the state,
to which we [should] owe gratitude. In fact we are the property of the
state, which therefore has the right to the fruit of our labor.”
Christendom, along with
every citizen of these United States, needs to understand the depth of our cultural
problem. It is not so much a political or economic problem as it is a religious
problem. If the Christian community continues to remain silent, in blatant
disregard for their prophetic and judicial duty, the end of America, as it was
once known, will be dissolved. Instead of soft tyranny and messianic statist-totalitarianism
we will be facing a shift into active oppressive censorship and persecution.
The days of being silent will finally bring the totality of God’s judgment upon
the apostate pietistic church, and America will suffer for it.
