“Jesus replied, “I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave of sin. A slave is not a permanent member of the family, but a son is part of the family forever. So if the Son sets you free, you are truly free.”
John 8:34-36 NLT
(excerpt from Jason’s new book, “Christian Extremism: the True Path to Peace.”
The simplest fact of all is that God, being God, is ultimate power and morality. If God doesn’t exist then neither does ultimate power and right/wrong. A derivative thing is dependent upon the original. Therefore, in a godless universe it would never occur to anyone that something would be either right or wrong. Nor would any concept of moral authority. These critical aspects of life, in which we organize all personal, social, economic, legal, and political activity, are everywhere taken for granted and yet only reconciled in Jesus Christ. To disagree with this – especially this – is to prove the point.
To be logically and philosophically consistent, the critic of Christ must account for, upon his/her own noncontradictory worldview, wherein he/she accounts for these things.
Why and exactly how does a godless universe, a mechanical one, produce moral law? It simply cannot. Why and how does a universe with a mechanical “body” but some sort of spiritual soul, reconcile the two into personal morality? It simply cannot. Such goes to death on the sword of God’s logic the great errors of scientific materialism and philosophical dualism in all their variants. Or, if you will, how could a pantheon of competing “gods” explain ultimate moral authority? They can’t…in fact, they beg the question. Such goes to death as well the fallacy of polytheism or competing ultimates. (We’ll address these again in more detail later in the book).
Suffice it to say that God’s absolute moral authority, resting squarely upon the head of the Lord Jesus Christ (Matthew 28:18; Romans 1:4), is life’s first and most needed fact.
This leads invariably to a multitude of wondrous truths downstream, chief among them in our considerations at hand is that no violence is authorized unless it is self-defense in nature.
This truth applies to all individuals, groups, organizations, clans, and governments. There are and can be no exceptions to this rule (this, naturally, excludes some, though not all, athletic competitions in which varied levels of sport combat may be morally permissible, but that is another matter for another day). It’s amazing to behold that all political, social, economic, and personal strife are solved with this simple admission. A person’s theology dictates to whom and when force/violence may be applied. In God’s world, Him being the only absolute and final moral authority, all others being derivative of Him, no one and nothing is authorized to rewrite the playbook, so to speak.
All talk of political, social and economic theory dash themselves to ragged little pieces upon this cornerstone. Men may speak of love, they may even speak of Jesus as Lord, but until and unless they lay down their sword they are liars. A man cannot carry both a white flag and a weapon. It is either-or. The reason, therefore, for a book like this is to take this fact of fact seriously and lay out its eternal, personal, social, economic, and political consequences. No one is authorized to play god over another person; all authority in life is derivative of God and any use of authority/power not authorized by the Lord are tyrannical. To this end, on this side of the cross, He has established in Scripture clear marching orders that we (even and especially His church) have been either slow to learn or quick to ignore.
Here it is the big one:
The fact of Christian philosophy is that God has made a hard and implacable separation between church and state in the New Testament age. God has done it, so it’s a beautiful and wise thing for us to marvel at.
To the church the Lord has given the “keys to the Kingdom of Heaven” via the preaching and teaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ. There is no other way to the Father except through faith in the Son and this gospel is given to His church alone. By Him, not man or any of his institutions or mechanizations.
To the civil magistrate He’s given the monopoly of retaliatory force. To be sure, the individual still has the God-given right to self-defense or else he’s some kind of slave. And, indeed, violence for self-defense is a righteous thing or else we’re left with dreadful absurdities such as saying that the rapist is less guilty than the woman who fights back.
We must make no mistake. Government of any kind is a sword…or a gun. That weapon is in God’s wisdom a tool of vengeance alone or else Romans 13 makes no sense whatsoever. In fact, to lay hold of any other theology of the state obliterates the rest of Romans as well – especially Romans 3:27-31. If man can use the state to make men go to church or to keep the Sabbath, what is all this stuff about faith anyway? If man can help the poor by using the state to force charity then Romans 15:26-29 is superfluous. If I can’t take my neighbor’s property against his will (Romans 13:9), how is it permissible to hijack God’s avenger (Romans 13:4) to do that for me? If Jesus went willingly to the cross to die for sin how is it that I can vote to force my neighbor to obey a church law?
You see, the Christian philosophy, truly understood and applied, eviscerates all political theory that refuses to take seriously the aforementioned. Violence may only be used as self-defense and governments are organized violence. The state/civil magistrate is a gun, a power, a sword…a powerful avenger with a monopoly on the retaliatory use of force in the still fallen world in which Christ has sent His church with the Good News. To this end we understand freedom and social order. To this end and for this reason the church is utterly forbidden from hijacking the state’s God-given sword for any cause not dictated by God – that is, vengeance against the criminal who has done something to a victim that may have been resisted with force but, for whatever reason, was not.
Socialism is anti-Christ in that it attempts to make society righteous and just through the denial of men’s rights to property. Sure, there are a hundred variations along the way, but the evil foundation of all socialistic schemes is the denial of God’s ownership of moral law. We may not ever violate the property rights of our neighbor because, alas, it is God who says so. Therefore, all socialistic schemes are anti-Christ.
Likewise, all attempt to use law and regulation to establish a “more Christian order” than the one God has already prescribed in Romans 13 is anti-Christ as well. So much damage is done in modern America by a politicized gospel. In truth, we should be a giving people in Christ. “Each one must give as he has made up his mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver (2 Corinthians 9:7).” This is so clear a prohibition against using the state’s power to make others give that it boggles the mind that it’s controversial at all. Only the power of sin to blind us explains how so many smart people become so bewilderingly daft when it comes to charity.
A church hijacked by a political party is no longer a church because it’s the cause of Christ that saves men, not anything else. And the question begs: to whom gets the glory of our work? Is it Christ, so that men may marvel and be saved, or us or a politician? To rail against unbiblical tax laws is fine but must also be connected to concern for biblical economics across the board. Many are the burdens of a debt-based society trapping the poor under mounds of interest payments while well-connected bankers and politicians get filthy rich.
Furthermore, we may not pass “blue laws” or any other such nonsense in order to make a “nicer” city or town. Imagine that! How fantastically preposterous and blockheaded a thing to think that the gospel of salvation by faith alone, started by our Lord freely going to the cross for us, is aided by pointing a government gun in the face of anyone who commits a sin we’re up in arms about! And that’s what all law is. A gun. To pass a law that prohibits a man from opening his business on Sunday or that stops him from selling alcohol or in any way infringes upon his God-given right to make use of his property is anti-Christ. In all, we’re free to preach to him the lovely glories of Christ and his need of repentance all while reminding him that he has the right to disagree for now because God has given it to him. Judgment Day isn’t today and that’s a hard thing for legalistic folks to fathom. To pass a law and indirectly use violence to prohibit a man from a sin God allows him to commit is to reject the gospel ourselves! Law may only be used in cases of self-defense, not personal righteousness or else the gospel is meaningless!
May I shoot a man who cusses, or blasphemes, or fornicates, or worships a false god, or is homosexual, or likes to drink whiskey on Sunday mornings? Of course, not. If he breaks into my house with his blaspheming and whiskey in order to fornicate with his boyfriend, that is another matter altogether. We all know this in our hearts because God has written it there. It’s just that we ignore it and want to rule the world rather than letting God do it.
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