The Problem with the George Floyd Riots

2 Corinthians 11:14-15
“And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness.”

America is a sinful nation. Do you know why we can say that with certainty? Well, that’s rather easy…it’s populated with people and people are sinners. All of us. Every single person. That’s the biblical message or, if you prefer, the bad news. The good news is that Jesus Christ saves sinners. But cosmic rebels (sinners) don’t want to face this truth about themselves and prefer to blame the conundrums and conflicts of life on other people or on their circumstances. Adam started this right there in the Garden of Eden when he blamed both Eve and God for his sin.

This plain truth of Scripture, hard to swallow as it is, nevertheless allows for us to understand the times and right now we truly, desperately need the biblical perspective. The way forward is for us to examine ourselves and institutions, reject the claims of absolute human autonomy which leads to sin, both personal and societal, and pray to know and apply God’s word/law in our lives. Presently, as protests and riots run through our cities, the narrative is that the answer to racism and oppression is through bigger and bigger government. That’s a colossal falsehood. The answer is in recognizing that God alone is the ultimate authority. This leads us to understand that all people are, therefore, image bearers of the most high God. This leads to the understanding that everyone is equal. No race or group of people are intrinsically superior to others. To this end, God has established civil governments to punish interpersonal crime – that is, violations of individual liberty such as murder, assault, rape, theft and fraud. God commands that the civil authorities “bear the sword” to punish people who commit crime against one another and that’s the end of his (the magistrate’s) mandate.

The government cannot make people good. Government is God’s avenger in the New Testament age. It isn’t the church, which is tasked to bring the gospel to the world. The misuse of these two primary institutions in life has caused countless miseries through history. This is God’s world and we are His creation. When we arrive at contradictions and troubles we must learn to see that as evidence that we’re out of accord with His will. Because the human race has fallen in sin God sent Jesus Christ to pay the sin penalty. The church is established to bring news of Christ to the world so that men and women everywhere would turn to Him and be saved. At the same time, the civil magistrate is ordained by God to punish crime. This allows for there to be order and relative safety so that the church can do its work.

If the church tries to make people obey the gospel through force it has exceeded its mandate in the Great Commission. You simply cannot force someone into salvation; it’s a horrific contradiction. On the flip side, if it doesn’t preach Christ and the repentance of sin to the world then it has renounced its great and high calling. The state too may err to either extreme. On the one hand, it might try and force people to be good (income redistribution, welfare schemes, drug laws, etc.). On the other, it might ignore crime and/or declare some crime legal (as is the case with abortion and was true of slavery).

A proper understanding of this critical foundation of civil life is the only path to consistent peace on earth. This isn’t to say that we will experience some utopian state. Perfection, that is, sinlessness, won’t happen until the age to come – when Christ returns. But it is the only non-contradictory philosophical-political structure in which all men enjoy the blessings of liberty. That these principles won’t be fully realized due to the sinful impulses of corrupt individuals and governments doesn’t invalidate them anymore than a bad vocalist invalidates all music. Thus, all calls to justice must be, logically, a call to the biblical principles of liberty and limited government. Government must submit to God’s mandate or else it becomes a criminal and violates the rights of citizens rather than protect and avenge them. Limited government is a logical necessity because sin is real. Find the perfect person, the sinless person, and that would invalidate this argument.

The true problem, the root evil, that plagues mankind, regardless of income, race or sex, is sin. The rejection of God’s will casts a dreadful pall over our lives and leaves us living in a sin-sick world. The great thing to note about the Bible is that even as it decries the injustices of evil men and unjust governments, it shows the way out of the trouble. It surely does. It declares the answer on every page, in every book. The answer is to turn from our sin and follow God in truth and faith in Jesus Christ.

To follow God requires increasing conformity to his word/law. In our personal lives it will yield practical holiness. In our social lives it will produce liberty for all and color blind rule of law. This is what it means to pray that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The rules and principles of Christ are the only thing able to lead mankind out of the deprivations spawned by sin. All attempts to correct the problems of sin without the Bible’s remedy of the gospel is like painting one side of a burning house.

The problem is, we don’t like this answer. We want to get even with our neighbors, or control them in some way – through direct force or through regulation. Either way, God demands that we love our neighbor as ourselves and then He graciously establishes the civil magistrate as a neutral agent of self-defense. But sin, alive in all of us, present in every culture and people throughout history, compels us to dominate and control our neighbor, not love him. And we use whatever means we have at our disposal. The greatest and most destructive means possible is to hijack God’s servant, the government, which He meant for our protection, and use it to enslave and bully others. It’s the nature of sin, after all, to take God’s gifts and abuse them. We do it with sex and thus tear our lives apart. How much heartbreak, how many broken homes exist because of lust? And how many millions have been enslaved, murdered and bullied because of the lust for power?

It would be easy to resist the Devil if he came at us with the obvious. If he said, “follow me, have some illicit fun for a little while but, in the end, lose your dignity, liberty and peace and then you’ll surely die,” we’d be, in the main, more reticent to follow his schemes. But he assures us that God has not truly spoken and even if He has you can’t apply what He’s said everywhere. That’s his thing. The Devil is a liar and has always been one (John 8:44), which explains his enormous success.

To this end, the Scripture implores us again and again to develop a Christian mind so that we can test everything and bring the facts of reality into orbit around the Lord Jesus Christ. The question dangling on the lips of every Christian should forever be: what does the Scripture say?

We note that the modern church has a tendency to miss the point about the anti-Christ and the number 666. We hyper-literalize the whole thing and end up missing the issue. The Devil is the mole in our camp; he’s the spy in the organization, always undermining the efforts of the believers when and where he can. He sows confusion rather than the sweet clarity that is of the Lord. The anti-Christ is a false Messiah and the 666 is a symbol of how the Devil offers us solutions and principles that are short of God’s holy standards. If God is holy, holy, holy and the number seven is the number symbolizing completeness, then 666 symbolizes the schemes of the flesh and the Devil that fall short of God’s perfect word.

It’s to this end that we must look at the recent, and desultory, happenings across America after the death of George Floyd during an arrest in Minneapolis. The offending officers were fired and one has already been arrested and charged with manslaughter. The death is a tragedy but it would appear that justice is being served. Many cities lie in smoldering ruins despite the arrest of the officer. The riotous response is, therefore, not necessarily because of Mr. Floyd’s tragic death, though it was the catalyst, but because of catastrophic ideas believed by the protesters. These ideas have the appearance of wisdom and truth but under biblical scrutiny, as you’ll see, they’re a false gospel that will lead invariably to great misery.

The Devil appears to us now as an angel of light and has convinced a good many citizens that riots and unrest are the rational response to injustice. We must ask, though, what the Scripture says about such things. We must resist leaning on our own worldly interpretations of the events in life lest we run astray. The French Revolution started with lofty promises of freedom and great exultations of brotherhood and equality yet ended in despair and bloodshed. Likewise, the Bolsheviks assured their followers that all were brothers. They told the people that though before they were oppressed and enslaved, that under Communism they’d be free at last. Indeed, many of their grievances were legitimate but their solutions (Communism) were evil and set off an epic period of human darkness and misery. The Devil transformed himself into an angel of light in the ideology of Marxism, having coopted the vocabulary of liberty. Hundreds of millions perished as a result of this abominable lie. Marxism and its variants are the great political evil and anti-Christ of our age.

Likewise, the current ideology of Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a counterfeit gospel replete with counterfeit doctrines. Instead of the sinfulness of all mankind, BLM preaches things like “white privilege” and “systemic racism.” The Bible clearly defines sin as the rejection of God’s word/will. Systemic racism, on the other hand, isn’t so easily defined. Slavery was evil – and clearly seen. Theft is prohibited in Scripture and what greater theft can there be than the theft of a person? Jim Crow laws were also an abomination and easily identified as discriminatory since God demands that we show no partiality (James 2:1-7). No Christian should ever support those great evils nor ignore violations of law against disadvantaged people. Systemic racism, on the other hand, is a nebulous bit of business and has with it a false religion of ascribing to one race a form of original sin. The answer to this new original sin is the idolatrous state – a new form of the old ruse of Marxism.

To be clear, BLM doesn’t point out a particular transgression of moral law as was slavery and Jim Crow, but instead decries a systemic evil. It can’t/won’t point to any systemic law that’s discriminatory. In the end, because of this, their position is that “the system” is one that unjustly favors one race over their own. We must note that there’s no specific law they cite to prove this. The charge is that racism is intrinsic to America, part of its DNA. This makes all white people either directly guilty of the intrinsic sin of racism or, at least, benefactors of that racism. This is, in the absence of actual discriminatory law, a horribly sinful charge. It’s a judgment on a whole class of people that ascribes a guilt through which there is no recourse and no salvation. The charge of sin is a serious one and it must be soberly brought forth according to God’s standards. If there is a discriminatory law, a legal oppression, Christians must seek its removal. The only law Christians should support is that outlined by God in Romans 13 – that of the civil magistrate as the neutral avenger. Proper government cannot play favorites and it can’t “right wrongs” lest it create new ones. It can only, by God’s decree, punish interpersonal evil.

BLM doesn’t accept this, though. The “solution” to prejudice, they say, isn’t the grace of Jesus Christ and the sanctification of the believers, nor the increasing impact of Christ upon culture through the adherence of His word, but increased state power. Where Christ tells His believers to be salt and light before the world, preaching the grace of God and the forgiveness of sin through faith, BLM preaches the sin of racism with no grace. The gospel shines the light of God on sinful hearts and offers the balm of Jesus Christ. BLM preaches that one race is evil and presents no grace whatsoever, only government power to balance the scales of justice. But if white people abused power over blacks, how does BLM figure that they won’t abuse power too? If power was used to stifle the freedom of some, why isn’t BLM’s message the application of freedom to all instead of a shift, a mere changing of hands, of that power? This is how the Devil counterfeits the gospel and presents his ideas as liberty when, in fact, they’re a putrid ruse.

The answer to all of this is that we must realize all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. This will lead all people to humbly submit to the law/word of God and a proper understanding of the role of the civil magistrate. The state, as it were, is not for one race or another.  The government and all authorities are servants of God for the good of all people. Once again, we need to be clear that true government does not serve man but God. Slavery and Jim Crow were the results of tyrannical government acting upon the premises of sin rather than submitting to God’s law.

The glorious and liberating reality is that no self-help program will fix the problems caused by sin. Trying to achieve racial harmony or social justice outside of the law/word of God will only lead to new oppressions and evils. Should we correct an old tyranny with a new one? Should we build a new America on the putrid foundations of sinful reasoning? How does BLM, a quasi-Marxist organization, expect to solve the oppression of the few by the many (racial discrimination) by instituting the oppression of the many by the few (Marxism)?

BLM decries systemic racism like a Christian would bemoan the reality of sin. But BLM’s doctrine has no forgiveness. Like all false gospels there is merely a grasping for government power to achieve a counterfeit liberty. It demands universal healthcare and seeks to outlaw all private education. It demands financial reparations for past sins. In all, it promises only more and more government – which will produce less freedom and more division.

But the answer is not this counterfeit gospel and a new government of men but a repentance and desire for the government of God. Only when the government is properly seen as God’s minister will we come close to achieving, so far as sin is diminished, this thing called justice. And what can justice be save for liberty for all protected by God’s impartial civil magistrate? Unless we let go of the Devil’s stratagems we will move from one oppression and injustice to another. The victims may change names and colors but victims there will always be until we repent of the sin of using power to control and get back at our neighbor. We must accept that no government program or educational scheme will ever stamp out sin and perfect our neighbor. The grace of God alone, in Jesus Christ, does that.

In all, let this serve as a warning to America. When Jesus told Peter to put down his sword He meant that mankind cannot fight its way into righteousness. Only Christ at the cross provides for that. Thereafter, thankfully, the sword can only be used in self-defense by the civilian and as vengeance of direct crime (assault, murder, rape, theft, fraud) by the civil magistrate. If we fall for this lie that because of racism we must embrace a new Marxism, the sword will fall against us again – and it will sever our ear, it will sever our peace, and the blood will run just as it did in Soviet Russia, in Maoist China and Castro’s Cuba.

Christ offers us peace. He carried our cross for us if we accept it. If not, we will demand our neighbor carry a cross and Marxism will be there to pound in the nails when we reach the hill.