”Yet the fool multiplies words, though no man knows what will happen, and who can tell him what will come after he is gone?“
Ecclesiastes 10:14 AMP
Rejecting God’s word-law has astonishing consequences downstream. When Jesus was asked if the people of Israel should pay taxes to Caesar, note the irony of it all.
”Then the Pharisees went and plotted how to entangle him in his words. And they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are true and teach the way of God truthfully, and you do not care about anyone’s opinion, for you are not swayed by appearances. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. And Jesus said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” They said, “Caesar’s.” Then he said to them, “Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” When they heard it, they marveled. And they left him and went away.“
Matthew 22:15–22 ESV
The Jews were the ones who wanted a king rather than God in the first place. They didn’t notice the contradiction at the core of their gotcha question because sin tries to make sure we have a short attention span. To wit:
”But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, “Give us a king to judge us.” And Samuel prayed to the Lord. And the Lord said to Samuel, “Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. According to all the deeds that they have done, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are also doing to you. Now then, obey their voice; only you shall solemnly warn them and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.” So Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking for a king from him. He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.” But the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel. And they said, “No! But there shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.” And when Samuel had heard all the words of the people, he repeated them in the ears of the Lord. And the Lord said to Samuel, “Obey their voice and make them a king.” Samuel then said to the men of Israel, “Go every man to his city.”
1 Samuel 8:6–22 ESV
You see, the subject of work/vocation and all that is much deeper than we’d like to believe. In fact, we like to lie to ourselves. We like to say, “yeah, sure, present yourself as a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1),” but we don’t always follow the implications all the way through. We say, “Christ is Lord” but relegate Him to the shadows. We’ve become convinced that the Lord of the universe isn’t allowed into the halls of power. The myth of neutrality has convinced us that Jesus and His word-law are sovereign on Sunday morning but not at the boardroom, or at the HOA meeting, nor on Wall Street. But a god who has competition isn’t a god at all…and he’s certainly not the God of the Bible. In other words: the whole of the problem of economics and labor is that man is a sinner. Thus, any attempt to fix problems downstream of sin, save the cross of Christ, only exasperate the problem. To “solve” a problem outside of Christ only (at best) shifts the burden elsewhere.
Wall Street’s false god is that bull, by the way. He has a statue, doesn’t he? A bronze calf. Baal was the false god of wealth too. He was often depicted as a bull. Fascinating, isn’t it? When the newly delivered from slavery Israelites fell into a sexual frenzy of false worship while Moses was up the mountain, note that they gave up all their gold, which God had given them as wages from Egypt…lost wages from their slavery…and they melted it all down for their false god of wealth, Baal.
It’s the same thing today. New times. Same false gods. Do we think that Israel struggled with syncretism but that we don’t? Is it for nothing that Revelation 1-3 was written? Whenever we reject the true King we exchange the freedom in God for the slavery of things like sexual sin and greed. And, yes, they’re all slavery. All sin is slavery (Romans 6:14). What we do with our body sexually, and with our “hand” – that is, economically – is worship. The Pharisees rejected the King because they loved their power rather than the Father. This is the irony of their gotcha question about taxes. Later, oblivious to the judgment they’re calling down upon themselves, they openly renounced God!
”Now it was the day of Preparation of the Passover. It was about the sixth hour. He said to the Jews, “Behold your King!” They cried out, “Away with him, away with him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Shall I crucify your King?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar.” So he delivered him over to them to be crucified. So they took Jesus,“
John 19:14–16 ESV
If the Pharisees were so thoroughly duped, how can we be sure that we aren’t? Well, one sure test is greed. Our approach to work and economics must be biblical. We must be steadfast in prayer. R.C. Sproul remarked once that of all the counseling he’d done of Christians in his life never did someone say to him, “Pastor, I’m struggling with covetousness.” It’s the carbon monoxide of sins and the alarm is our gratitude and thankfulness to the Lord. Grumbling and complaining are painfully easy for fallen man and praise hard. But they are the key indicators of spiritual health. Griping in our time is easy (as in all times) but the mature Christian watches their words and stands guard over their heart. Sin is crouching at the door and its desire is for us, but we must master it.
Our culture is built up upon greed and materialism rather than gratitude and humility before the Lord. It’s easy to believe ourselves to be healthy because no cuss words fall from our lips and yet we speak incessantly about this and that complaint. Our words indicate our true convictions. Our convictions (our heart) are exposed by whether we’re grumblers and complainers or gracious and thankful servants of the Lord. Gracious speech is so very much more than merely not swearing! The Christian heart, be sure, is obsessed with what the Lord has done and is doing for us; the fleshly heart is set upon what others (or the “system” owes us) and how to get it. Godliness with contentment is the Christian goal, not bitterness, resentment, and complaining.
Jezebel had to get a couple of “worthless” fellows (1 Kings 21:10) to help her murder Naboth in order to get her greedy paws on his vineyard. Through Marx, millions of us have been turned into worthless fellows – scheming and voting for our neighbor’s property. Our politics and our vote are nothing but “civilized” theft. In our ignorance, due to our sinful presuppositions, we claim to want a peaceful country but fail to reckon with the fact that our spirit of larceny, achieved through taxation and government schemes, makes it so that we’re in a perpetual state of strife.
Contrary to this is the Bible’s steadfast and plain presentation that God is God over all, not the state. He shares not one whit of moral authority with the state or any other institution (Romans 13:1). For this reason we see that work is commanded and redeemed in Christ and that all forms of covetousness and Marxist politicking is sinful (Romans 13:9-10). The trouble for Christians is that we must not be conformed to this world, which is, be sure, a far hardier task than most make it out to be. It’s like, “go in there and outbox Mike Tyson.” We can’t do it on our own power but need the great Champion, Christ, to fight that battle for us. Lest we find shelter and shade at the foot of the cross, His blood and sweat dripping down upon us, we will inevitably capitulate to worldly ideas of work and property. And, as we’ve said, those ideas today – the great philosophical virus of the time – are invariably Marxist. Rushdoony called them “larceny of the heart.” We have a political crisis because of the spiritual/theological crisis of the heart. This is why changing leaders in Washington is like changing tires on a car with a blown engine.
Thou shalt not covet and thou shalt not steal imply, quite logically, that every man be content in his work and possessions. It’s impossible to love our neighbor as ourselves if we covet his property and tax his labor. The Lord calls that theft. The impulse of larceny grows from the soil of a heart that’s unhappy with Him. This is the great threat. All sin grows in the nasty heart-soil of distrust of God’s goodness. Only when we’re convinced (in faith) of His fatherly love toward us will we wait on Him during frustration and/or hardship.
Learning a defense against a threat that’s not there is no defense at all. We must all fight the arrows the enemy is actually slinging. Marxism’s central lie is that God will not take care of us. The defense against this lie – the same temptation the Enemy hurled at our Lord in the wilderness – is the truth that man doesn’t live by bread alone. Thus, the ideology of Marxism is the latest variant of the same lie of the Devil, which is that man isn’t to trust God but something – anything – else. Indeed, Marxism in all its social and economic forms, is same theological battle of the ages over whether or not men will trust their Creator. Who (or what) we look toward for our future and security is who we worship.
But, alas, work can be so very frustrating. It can be hard even in this day and age of technology – although it certainly isn’t like that of our ancestors. None of us have the difficulties faced by our forbears even 100 years ago. None of us have had the privilege of crossing the Atlantic in a Mayflower, or the Great Plains in a wagon. None of us have faced a great ocean storm on a rickety wooden boat, pleading with the Lord for our very lives, nor faced down sudden raid under a Comanche moon.
If our central problem in life was economic why then is modern man so miserable? He’s miserable because sin makes men and women so, and no amelioration of circumstances will fix what only can be done at the Cross. The false gospel of Marx promises freedom from sin’s curse through government power rather than faith in Christ. This is no small distinction but literal life or death of the soul. Sin’s curse:
“And to the man he said, ‘Since you listened to your wife and ate from the tree whose fruit I commanded you not to eat, the ground is cursed because of you. All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it. It will grow thorns and thistles for you, though you will eat of its grains. By the sweat of your brow will you have food to eat until you return to the ground from which you were made. For you were made from dust, and to dust you will return.’”
Genesis 3:17–19 NLT
But the free gift of God is salvation to anyone who believes and repents of their sin.
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