“Don’t you realize that you become the slave of whatever you choose to obey? You can be a slave to sin, which leads to death, or you can choose to obey God, which leads to righteous living. Thank God! Once you were slaves of sin, but now you wholeheartedly obey this teaching we have given you. Now you are free from your slavery to sin, and you have become slaves to righteous living.”
Romans 6:16–18 NLT
As America celebrates the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it’s fitting for Christians to contemplate our role in the degradation of true freedom. Yes. It’s the church’s fault. President Biden and the wokester Left are symptoms of God’s judgment upon the land and not the cause. Make no mistake, America was a Christian republic but we’ve lost it for the very reason that Rocky was pummeled by Clubber Lang in their first fight. Of course, Rocky was in pretty good shape as he took his beating…muscles rippling, abs a-plenty. The church? Not so much. In way too many pulpits the perspicuity of the gospel – of our dire need of repentance, grace, and faith – is obscured by worldly preaching. Indeed, how are we to call on Him who saves unless we hear that precious message from His church (Romans 10:14)?
How can we be salt and light when we don’t know sound doctrine, nor live by it? How can we call the nation to repentance and holy living by faith alone when we’re strangers to it ourselves? No, this isn’t a call of attack on the woke Left but upon the church and its agonizing self-absorption. You see, the idea of political liberty as it was passed down to us rested upon the foundation of Scripture and as Madison said, the Constitution is written for a Christian people and none other. This isn’t to say that atheists and Muslims and Buddhists can’t and don’t reap the benefits of it, but that the only foundation of liberty is the true gospel of Jesus Christ. Why? Because this is our Father’s world and to understand it correctly we must go to His word/law. The gospel is not the Republican Party. It’s the repentance of sin and trust in Christ alone for salvation. This simple truth does and must proceed all else because any system of government built atop moral rebellion and autonomy is doomed. Freedom can’t proceed from humanism and sin. Thus, to be consumed with disgust for the Democrat Party rather than false doctrine is a sign of theological confusion at best and polytheism/unbelief at worst. Legalism, the prosperity gospel…these are far more damaging to the cause of freedom than AOC or Bernie.
The idea of freedom is one that, like all others, must be brought into submission to Christ and His word. This is to say that only in light of the standard of God’s truth (the Bible) are we able to rightly think about this thing called independence. In all manner of seeing it today, it’s clear that Christians have lost the idea of political liberty as a Christian doctrine. They rarely talk of it as a philosophical concept for the same reason that I don’t talk about mechanical engineering. They don’t know it. And this is why, pure and simple, that the country is descending with greater and greater speed into the abyss of Marxist tyranny. After all, if Christians have lost it, we can only expect the rest of the world – since the salt has lost its saltiness – to regress into the deepest fathoms of tyranny.
The most important thing to know is that there’s no such thing as absolute independence.
Metaphysically speaking, man is either, as our verse shows, a slave to sin or a slave to righteousness. Nothing is more antithetical to Scriptural truth than the crazed notion that liberty is absolute for man. Paul everywhere states that he’s a bond servant/slave to Christ. Even Christ Himself submitted to the Father. The sad, tragic truth is that most of the time we don’t really love truth…we love getting our way. “Your will be done…” is a very misunderstood and unbelieved prayer.
The mark of Christian life is humility as much as it is love. Independence is not, contrary to contemporary opinion, having the right guy in the White House. It’s far greater than that and the reason we’ve lost it and sitting in the dressing room with our head spinning from Clubber’s, well, clubbing, is that we’re stupid. Yes, stupid because we’re drunk on worldly thinking and comfort. So many of us don’t take our personal battle against sin seriously at all because we’re too busy fighting the so-called cultural battle. It’s as though in Romans 7 Paul stops to talk about Nero instead of himself. Isn’t it interesting that the Holy Spirit, who didn’t need an editor or counselor, with all the social issues in Rome, focused on personal sanctification and church health so much? The discipleship of nations is impossible if our theology is as deep as a parking lot mud puddle.
The real history of America is that we rebelled against the principle of absolutism in men or governments because we understood, at long last, that only God and His word/law are supreme. All human authority is derivative of God’s authority (Romans 13:1).
The Declaration was addressed to King George, not Parliament. You see, untaught in our philosophically vacuous and anti-Christian schools is that the issue was one of charter, not specifically taxation. The colonists saw themselves as, in Christ, independent in legislature due to the fact that they had a feudal style covenant with the King. The contract was broken when he, the king, allowed Parliament to legislate the affairs of the colonists. Due to the damage of historical illiteracy, we need to really slow down and study the writings of the Revolutionary generation in order to understand this fact. The proof of this assertion is that it alone unlocks the Declaration and why the Continental Congress accused the King, not Parliament, of tyranny.
The colonies resisted the religious tyranny of Parliament in that they would not allow themselves to be brought under, nor financially support, the Church of England. Nine of the original 13 colonies had an established church! The modern concept of the separation of church and state is rooted, not in historical fact or even logic, but in the tyranny of secular humanism. The root of the War for Independence was for localism and religious freedom. Why then, on the heels of that, would the founders’ draft a constitution that allowed the federal government to suppress states’ religion? Again…it makes no sense when you think about it, which is why the schools and media don’t want you to thinking at all.
Worse, though, is that Christians don’t know this. In my experience it’s usual that they think getting a Republican in office is all there is to it. Or, they’re so angry with the Left that they champion former president Trump because he fights back. But he fights back often in the way a blind man with a gun does. The cause of liberty is harmed, not helped, when we try and “win” through the very means of consolidation of power that’s the heart of the issue. Again: the issue is absolutism over against localism. The political struggle is rooted in the theological truth of man’s need of a savior. Outside of Christ, they turn to the messianic state. To “win” we must know, logically express, and advocate for the blessings of localism in government…stronger families (rooted and built up in local churches), county governments accountable to these families and able to resist tyranny from state and federal encroachment. To “win” we must understand the reality of God’s radical sovereignty over all affairs and its logical implications (Romans 12:1-2).
The lack of faith has caused the increase in dependence upon the state.
The thing about a Christian republic is that only Christians understand both nature and the nature of man aright (metaphysics and anthropology). Over against the idea of American liberty was the French Revolution. It was as though God, in His great wisdom, gave us these two events nearly simultaneously because, being sheep that are slow to understand, we needed our faces pushed in the mess. In America where the doctrine of man’s sin and God’s radical sovereignty reigned in the soil of men’s minds/hearts, the concept of separation of powers logically arose. In France where the supremacy of man’s mind and his radical autonomy reigned, the bloodbath of ‘93 ensued. The liberty of a republic grew from the soil of the gospel applied to politics; the tyranny of hatred and envy grew from France’s revolution of autonomous reason. America had Christ as Lord; France had the ideas of Rousseau.
What did this mean?
In Christ we know that we’re born in sin and saved by grace. We can then say, with former Congressman Ames of Massachusetts, that government must be small and checked and restrained by God’s eternal decree. If no man can be as God, then no government can either. If man has a Savior in Christ, he won’t make a false one out of the state.
In Rousseau we’re told that we’re born free but everywhere in the chains of life’s fences. This isn’t God’s world, but ours and thus starts a never ending struggle of revolution against frustration toward the utopia of absolute freedom. Rousseau is before Marx and the French Revolution precedes the Bolsheviks and the woke Left both historically and philosophically.
Thus, for Christians to demand that we get “our guy in Washington” betrays their ignorance of constitutional liberty. Notice how we speak of “our democracy” (it’s a republic, for crying out loud) and say, “it’s a free country” (we’re a free people…how is a country free? It’s an anti-concept). We don’t need a Trump in Washington. Or a DeSantis. Or whomever. If we have a Spurgeon in every pulpit rather than the “nice” pastors teaching “nice” sermons that never mention man’s depravity and absolute need of a Savior we will have what we need! What we seek to save us shows what we believe is wrong with us. Our problem isn’t our tax rate, though that’s certainly a symptom. Our problem is weak-sauce theology and self-righteous smugness. Our problem is that we’re often more political than theological and think of Breitbart before we think of Scripture.
We’re like Jonah sitting outside of Nineveh waiting for God to judge all those horrible sinners “in there” instead of praying for them and remembering that God is patient and kind. Homosexuals, who absolutely must be called to repentance, rarely look at a Christian home and see the type of love that compels them to wonder about our theology. More still, if they ask political questions we don’t know what’s under the hood! We give them Republican talking points rather than the Scriptural principles of true liberty. It’s appalling. Our political discussions lead to Trump or some other candidate rather than Christ. No wonder the world doesn’t want to hear what Christians say.
To understand the theological nature of the political problem is the way back to liberty. Like Rocky had to go back to real training in order to beat Clubber Lang, the church needs to go back to it’s first love, Jesus Christ (Revelation 2:4), and the sweet repentance of sin. We call out sexual sin in the culture and yet tolerate divisiveness, backbiting, jealousy, gossip, slander, and pornography in our midst. We’ve lost the culture because we’ve compromised with sin. We won’t “win back culture” through this candidate or that for the simple reason that we aren’t supposed to be trying to do that anyway. A culture war through politics is like fighting a roach infestation with hairspray.
On the contrary, if we, the church, turn back to Him humbly and through grace fight personal sin, we will be fit and ready. We will emerge in the power of righteousness ready to give an answer to those who ask questions. Do we want a revival of the spirit or of the political machine? As Ames said, our government should be such that it can be trusted to the worst of men, not the best. Our aim, therefore, isn’t for the best man in Washington but the best in the pulpit…and the best in the home. The former is far downstream of the latter. Imagine a town or city where the vast majority of men lead their children in prayer and Bible study? Imagine a thousand, no…a million “kitchen seminaries” bubbling up like a flowing river from every dining room table where humble men of God teach their families of God’s greatness and mercy!
Imagine a city where the women are Proverbs 31 gals and like Priscilla, able to correct poor doctrine with clarity and grace. Do you think then that we’d be so prone to obsess about politics?
You see, the independence of America or any other nation rests upon righteousness by faith and that alone. A Christian republic with weak, ineffectual Christians is like a boxer who doesn’t train. Liberty is a consequence of righteousness, not politics. Liberty comes when men repent of sin and follow Christ, not a political party or candidate. A political party and/or candidate may be more or less consistent with biblical principles but they are not Christ. Localism, to the founders, meant that the county had as much power as the state and the state more power than the federal government. We now see greater and greater consolidation of power because that’s what sin causes…a running from God leads to a race to tyranny. Because sin is so bad, we must never think we can organize anything outside the principles of Christ. The Spirit of 76 was that of the Christian Spartan…of men and women who were slaves to Christ and none other. That America was/is a system of checks and balances was due to the acceptance of man’s sin. Real freedom, therefore, requires real men and women of God. And that requires a lifestyle of repentance and the mortification of sin. Do that and we will have had our revival. Continue in our lazy self-righteous ways where we think dressing nice and avoiding tattoos and cuss words makes us right with God while we’re petty and jealous and we get what we deserve. The slavery of sin and the tyranny of man. But turn to Him and humble ourselves and He will indeed bless this land again.
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