“….claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man…” Romans 1:22-23
Sin is self-destruction.
Because of God’s kindness and forbearance, and the fact that He doesn’t immediately judge every sin with death and hell as it deserves, it can be seen as a sort of slow suicide. Either way, the truth is that as soon as we break from Him we set ourselves on a course for destruction. The rejection of God and His word/law also results in a continuing deterioration of values and personal judgment. Without the transcendent standard Scripture provides, we’re cast into a crazed world of limitless particulars with no way to wisely adjudicate right and wrong. This leads to pragmatism in our affairs but the great winds of life, and the tempests of crisis, drive us evermore into strange reasonings and foolishness. Since God is the creator and the source of all things, rejecting Him and His law/word leads us to embrace moral and intellectual insanity.
This verse tells us plainly about the reality of what we’re seeing around us every day. In rejecting God, we’ve made the “great exchange” of the truth for a lie. As His creation we still act according to our nature but now that nature is warped, twisted and counter to what we were created for. We were created to worship Him and that instinct is still there; we still worship. We simply worship false gods. Nothing can escape its designed nature and neither can we. Moreover, we were designed to seek the truth in God, which is to say obey Him. Though we pridefully reject Him, we nevertheless still rely on a word/law, it’s just the foolish word of men. In previous generations it was kings or seers or things like that.
Today, it’s the so-called expert.
For an example of exchanging the glory and authority of God for images of men (and women), look no further than Saule Omarova, our government’s latest false prophet. Born in Kazakhstan and educated in Moscow, Madison and Chicago, she’s President Biden’s nominee to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Ms. Omarova is the latest in a string of foolish experts that secular man is ready to follow off the cliff of irrationality in the clown-car that is modern America.
Why is she foolish (and dangerous)? Well, you see, Ms. Omarova plans to “effectively end banking as we know it.” Those are her own words. Now, you may not know this but banking is biblical. Real banking goes like this: a person has worked and saved money. They’d like to invest that savings to earn a profit, so they go to a “middleman” to invest the savings. The middleman is a bank. Another person wants to start a business and needs a loan. Let’s say that the one who saved is willing to risk $100,000 and wants 8% return. The one who wants the $100,000 is willing to pay 10% interest in order to have access to the real savings. The two-percent “spread” is how the bank earns money.
This is Biblical. Everyone involved has “skin in the game.” The $100,000 is real and represents actually wealth that it took time for the investor to earn. The bank only makes money if it unites lender and depositer through productive economic activity. Interest rates represent the risk and reality of time over against business plans. Interest rates are set individually (by the market, so to say) and represent the risk/time relationship of economic investment. In times of rapid expansion, for example, interest rates would rise due to the demand on savings (which is always limited…a fact that sinners despise). Low interest rates like we have now are only possible with “funny” money created out of thin air but that’s another blog for another day.
But, anyway, banking and finance are Godly activities and part of God’s dominion mandate to us. Proverbs teaches us to work, save, and plan for the future. The first part of “loving our neighbor” is using our God-given talents and opportunities in our vocation to the glory of God. A Godly society has an economic system that’s fueled by coercion free “win-win” transactions between neighbors. The state is only involved in instances of theft or fraud just like an NBA referee only calls fouls, he doesn’t score baskets. Banking falls under the stewardship commandment and is not outside of Scriptural authority. The paper currency we trade today (the dollar) has printed on it “In God We Trust” which is a vestige of a past generation that understood that God owned all things and that man’s authority was, therefore, limited. The truth is that we may not create economic laws anymore than we can create sexual ethics. “For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things…(Romans 11:36).”
But back to Ms. Omarova.
She intends to eradicate the existing financial structures and replace them with a financial-Frankenstein creature of her own wisdom. We should know that she never bothers to explain where she derives the authority over property and money to do such a thing. The assumption underneath it all is that the god-state may do as it pleases and she, as its agent, is a Demi-god. She wants something for nothing; she wants to be the judge of right and wrong. Indeed, she wants to be as God; she wants fiat power. The trick for every Christian today, lest they be swept away in the tsunami of idolatry overtaking the land, is to hear what the authorities say and train yourself to ask, “by what standard?”
God commands that we work, save and plan in order to attain wealth. Modern man wants wealth without work or risk. She says she wants “comprehensive reform of the structure and systemic function of the Fed’s balance sheet as the basis for redesigning the core architecture of modern finance. It offers a blueprint for transforming the Fed’s balance sheet into what it calls the People’s Ledger: the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating sovereign credit and money in a democratic economy.” She never bothers to answer from where she derives such authoritative power over the property of others.
Does that sound “democratic”? Does she mention God’s moral law at all? No, of course not. Secular humanism is always a law unto itself.
Interesting to know is that this is all fancy language to advocate for a total central bank – a god-bank; a bank that calls wealth into existence out of nothing. She proposes setting up a “National Investment Authority (NIA)” that would be responsible for “formulating, financing, and executing a coordinated strategy of sustainable and socially inclusive economic development.” This is what made the Soviet Union so wildly successful and wealthy – it’s a new version of their Gosbank. Indeed, it worked so well in Soviet Russia, let’s do it again.
At least Nazis never say, “the problem with Nazism is that true Nazism has never been tried…we’ll get it right this time.”
So, anyway, she’s proposing an all-powerful central bank that will act as the only arm of finance, lender, guarantor, securitizer and venture capitalist in the whole country. Oh, and did we mention that the good lady has never actually had a job in a bank? She’s never worked anywhere outside of academia, in fact. Her entire life has been academic and she’s never once had to serve a customer or bring a product to market. You see, Ms. Omarova and the other experts like her, aren’t really “public servants” – they’re rulers who get to try out their foolish ideas on everyone else in the vain attempt to overthrow God (Psalm 2). This is all so obviously ridiculous that there’s no explanation as to why the people follow such foolishness save for this verse. In our rebellion, our crazed insistence on exchanging the truth for a lie, we set up idols like the experts who’ve never had a real job, telling us how to be wealthy.
Let that settle for a moment. Could America be in such a condition politically (nearly $30 trillion in debt!!) and with such arrogant politicians in charge unless voters wanted something for nothing too? This is the rub, so to speak. We’re getting the government we deserve. Voters go to the polls and vote themselves things like kids making out a Christmas list, never bothering to ask whether they have a right to the labor/property of others (thou shalt not steal) or if the government is acting within its mandate to do such things (and rulers are not a terror to good conduct but to bad “Romans 13:3”). The root of it is idolatry.
Foolish authorities like Ms. Omarova will absolutely bankrupt the country. Her ideas will lead invariably to the mash-ups we’ve seen elsewhere through history. Venezuela. Cuba. The Soviet Union. North Korea.
Why do these stupid ideas persist? Because we’re covetous. We want something for nothing and we reject what the Bible says about wealth creation and economics. The Bible speaks authoritatively about law and economics and we ignore it because we don’t want God to be God over our entire lives – maybe on Sunday, but that’s all.
And why do we listen to “experts” who’ve never had a real job in their life? Today’s verse tells us the hard truth! We’ve exchanged the glory of the immortal God for tinpot dictator-experts like Ms. Omarova. We grant her instant credibility and don’t carefully scrutinize her ideas because in secular America we worship mortal man under the guise of “the experts say.”
“But what does the Scripture say…?” That is the question Paul asks in Romans 4:3. It should always be on the lips of the Christian who seeks God’s will, who loves truth, hates error, and obeys God by testing everything (1 Thessalonians 5:21). True faith is eminently reasonable because it’s steeped in the logic of the non-contradictory wisdom of Biblical principles. Don’t trust the experts, trust God. Test everything by comparing it to Scripture to see if the principles in play are true. This is God’s commandment for us and its our blessing to obey Him.
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