REJECTING THE KING (Dispelling Theo Politics Pt1)
February 9, 2018
THE POLITICS OF JESUS (Dispelling Theo Politics Pt3)
February 11, 2018
POLITICAL IDOLATRY
Part Two of Three of the series “Dispelling Theo-Politics”
By Vinnie MacIsaac
“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5)
There were two great sins in ancient Israel:
1) Wanting a King like the other nations.
2) Wanting Gods like the other nations.
It is important to understand they are intertwined. When God’s people rejected God as their only sovereign King[1] they rejected all forms of Godly Political Leadership. All types of Human leadership, since, have been but a marred reflection of who God is and what God meant the nations to become. Israel, in their great sin of demanding a king like the nations, actually doomed all the nations because the Gentiles were intended to learn to have a King, like Israel, and not the other way around. Understand that this great sin did not go away. It leads them to reject Jesus just as It leads us right to this very moment in modern politics and what will bring about the final great persecution of the church foretold in Revelation 13. It is the sin of rejecting God’s political leadership that we have all, and will all, continue to do that gives The Beast the ability to take full control as we have been warned:
“And The Beast was given a mouth uttering haughty and blasphemous words, and it was allowed to exercise authority for forty-two months. It opened its mouth to utter blasphemies against God, blaspheming his name and his dwelling, that is, those who dwell in heaven. Also, it was allowed to make war on the saints and to conquer them. And authority was given it over every tribe and people and language and nation, and all who dwell on the earth will worship it, everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who was slain. If anyone has an ear, let him hear: If anyone is to be taken captive, to captivity he goes; if anyone is to be slain with the sword, with the sword must he be slain. Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints.“ (Revelation 13:5-10)
What is Idolatry? Idolatry comes in two basic packages:
1) Declaring yourself to be God
2) Giving worship to something or someone else that is not God.
As far back as Egypt’s Pharaohs, and even further back into Imperial cults and tribal cults kings, chiefs, and shaman were associated with, if not outright identified as, deities[2]. So it follows, then, that when Israel was demanding a King, they were doing much more than rejecting God’s political leadership but desiring new gods. It is no wonder they kept falling into literal idolatry all the years of their existence.
How different are we today than Israel of old? Do we think the Government can solve our problems? More to the Biblical point, do we believe there is a form of government that can solve our problems? What is our real hope in? All human types of government are rooted in some sort of idolatry because they, in essence, seek to fix problems only God could fix[3]. You can have big government, you can have small governments but both will be rooted in human reasoning. We have tried tribal governments, monarchs, dictatorships, democracies, republics, socialist states, mixed democratic socialism and straight up communism, and all of them eventually break down.
The reason they break down is as simple as Sociology 101. I learned this basic lesson from my freshman college professor, Steve Arvey, who drilled it into my head, “Rational systems break down when you introduce irrational variables; and humanity itself has always been, and will always be, an uncontrollable, irrational variable that creates chaos in reality where order seems logical in theory.”[4] The point I abstracted from my teacher’s wisdom is there is no form of governance, that man can create, that can restore the broken (or irrational) nature of the fallen man. If a man is unable to govern himself in a fallen state then on what logic would he be able to govern others? Did the great and wise Rabbi not already tell us that the blind cannot lead the blind? (Luke 6:39, Matthew 15:14)
We cannot return to Eden until the Earth is made new, and we cannot return to true theocracy until Jesus restores all things;
“And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God, himself, will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” Revelation 21:3-4
Furthermore, the central crisis of the end of the world and Satanic persecution of the church in Revelation 13 stems exactly from man’s irrational attempts to restore a theocracy on man’s terms; which is the only terms from which fallen men can function. This is the race the world is running towards with every change of government and political season or movement;
“And it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast so that the image of the beast might even speak and might cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain.” Revelation 13:15
So what does God expect us to do? Well, prepare for the coming Kingdom of Jesus Christ, the only truly fit ruler of the universe, of course! However, I have also become convicted that to avoid falling into the snares of the Revelation 13 crisis; we need to understand we cannot invest all hope and all salvation in any political affiliation that comes from man. For they all lead to national and global idolatry that we find outlined in Revelation 13, 17 and 18.
While it is true all human systems are broken it is also true that some are more broken than others and God still works in the commodity of humanities brokeness. The Apostle Paul, in Roman’s 13:1-7 suggests that God is using current political systems to hold order temporally but goes on to expound in verses 8-14 that, ideally, God’s real government would be founded on mutual love. What this means is we should prayerfully seek out the best governing systems, that reflect God’s compassion towards each other and reflect on some limited level sacrificial giving. Each of us must seek what God permits by identifying them on personal understandings of Biblical values and then trust God to unfold His permissive will even at times when we can’t understand His reasoning from our fallen human perspective. Here in the west that would mean I can’t honestly in full identify with the western political left or political right because my identity is not apart of any political ideology. Rather my political identity is found only in my unfolding reflection of Christ as it collaborates with a deepening understanding of Biblical values in a vastly changing pluralistic world context. Under such conditions, it would be foolish to see political affiliation as static.
I am personally convicted that the common practice among Christians to self-identify with either the left of the right and their ideological platforms is actually bullish Idolatry.
I am personally convicted that the common practice among Christians to self-identify with either the left of the right and their ideological platforms is actually bullish Idolatry. While there are biblical values on the left like; equality, feminism, care of those in poverty, and other general protections for the underprivileged; the right can also lay claims to being pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, and pro-protestant work ethic. To even try to identify which of these two platforms is more Biblical is to ignore the reality and certainty, that while both hold some values in common with Christianity, neither are Godly because both are steeped in philosophical humanism and therefore contain vast amounts of unbiblical propositions in their mix. Thus, the “right” direction for a Christian to vote is likely subjective to the ever-shifting paradigms in our pluralistic society at that particular time or even region. Therefore, such things as how to vote can only be decided in personal prayer and supplication with seeking the will of the Holy Spirit in that moment’s specific social, political, and cultural situations.
In other words, a Christian who finds themselves voting along party lines is likely, at times, certainly voting against the Holy Spirit and is not being sensitive to God’s leading in their growing spiritual journey. That is why we should move to finding our values first from our identity in God and the teachings of His Word, rather than from popular political ideology and debated talking points that we find on modern news outlets.
To be frank, political ideology is idolatry to the born-again Christian because a born-again Christian’s identity should ever be grounded in Jesus and his teachings; and no such political party exists. It is to make something other than Jesus your King, your solution, your Savior.
To be frank, political ideology is idolatry to the born-again Christian because a born-again Christian’s identity should ever be grounded in Jesus and his teachings; and no such political party exists. It is to make something other than Jesus your King, your solution, your Savior. Political ideology lets you say evil things about people, vote evil things that hurt people, and hope evil things to happen to people, all in the name of what you believe is right! For me, it is the start of that hate that is festering in the heart of the faithful as they march away from Jesus and are transformed into becoming Satanic Soldiers who embrace the second beast’s methods found in Revelation 13, namely, a forced ideology which leads to his forced worship.
“Hear what the LORD says to you, people of Israel. This is what the LORD says: “Do not learn the ways of the nations or be terrified by signs in the heavens, though the nations are terrified by them. For the practices of the peoples are worthless; they cut a tree out of the forest, and a craftsman shapes it with his chisel. Like a scarecrow in a cucumber field, their idols cannot speak; they must be carried because they cannot walk. Do not fear them; they can do no harm nor can they do any good.” No one is like you, LORD; you are great, and your name is mighty in power.” Jeremiah 10:1-6
CLICK HERE FOR PART THREE – The Politics Of Jesus
CLICK HERE FOR TO RETURN TO PART ONE – Rejecting The King
Footnotes
[1] I will deal with in detail in the second installment of this series.
[2] “The rulers of Egypt, first the kings and later the pharaohs, were gods as well as men who ruled by divine right. Each king was ‘the son of god’, who at the point of death became one with his father, a god in a cosmic Heaven.” Christopher Knight, Robert Lomas (August 1, 2001). The Hiram Key: Pharaohs, Freemasons and the Discovery of the Secret Scrolls of Jesus, 100. ISBN 978-1-931412-75-9. Available in print from Fair Winds. Sourced from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_have_been_considered_deities#Imperial_cults
[3] That is not to say we should do nothing but it is just to say nothing we do will hold for long.
[4] Steve Arvey, Intro to Sociology; Sheridan College, Oakville Ont, Canada.
