“Many seek the face of a ruler, but it is from the Lord that a man gets justice.” Proverbs 29:26
The new Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, recently handed Fox News’ Tucker Carlson over 40,000 hours of surveillance video from January 6. Mr. Carlson, bless his heart as they say, had his team scour through the material. Earlier this week he reported on his findings. What he found is that the Democrat Party, which was in control of the House, Senate, and Presidency for the last two years, is as corrupt as any tinpot dictatorship. How so? Consider the case of Jacob Chansley the so-called Qanon Shaman who was sentenced to nearly 4 years in prison for his violent insurrection.
Well, according to the video shown by Mr. Carlson, Jacob Chansley is seen literally strolling through the Capitol on that critical day. Not a single video shows him destroying anything. He didn’t throw so much as a pebble. He overturned nothing except, of course, for good fashion sense but that’s hardly a crime. Not only that but, alas, video exposed the fact that Capitol police were escorting him throughout his travels – even opening doors as he went. At one point the dreaded face of insurrection (as we’ve been told he was) was with nine, yes nine, police officers in a narrow hallway. One wonders what George Washington and his officers would have done had Benedict Arnold passed so close. More video shows the evil Mr. Chansley praying over the gathering of protesters and assorted sight-seeing folks. In the prayer, we note, he thanked the police for being so kind. Such a revolutionary! Che and Mao and Robespierre he was not.
Well, Mr. Chansley, as we said, is currently serving a prison sentence for his behavior and his lawyer says that he requested the footage Tucker Carlson released but was denied. This means, in no uncertain terms, that our government has conspired to deny Mr. Chansley his constitutional right to a fair trial. If there’s evidence of him doing something violent it must be shown and considered. A man put in prison for violence must have, you know, actually committed violence. Where’s the video of that? Where’s the evidence? We have now seen evidence of him not doing anything violent and logically wonder what evidence there was to convict him. Christians should demand that the government produce such evidence or release him. Not only that but if there isn’t such evidence then everyone involved in his conviction must be immediately fired and brought up on charges themselves.
The thing to note about this whole sordid episode is that it isn’t political. It’s theological. The cause of the corruption (and the Democrat party is now indubitably a corrupt and evil party) is the wholesale rejection of God’s sovereignty. You see, when we claim to be our own highest authority we inevitably spiral into a moral abyss. Calvin wisely said once that God very often judges sinful and rebellious people with corrupt leaders. Indeed. The lies and perversion of justice evident from Mr. Carlson’s reporting merely prove this. The source of the problem isn’t the Democrat party but the unfaithfulness of the people. Since that’s the source of it, the answer must be – and always is – turning back to Christ. We must resist the temptation to fix the problem ourselves, absent repentance and prayer. We must recognize that politics is downstream of theology. What we think about God determines how we live. Man cannot challenge the laws of gravity and win. Likewise, God’s moral law is immutable and absolute too. What we’re seeing are the headwinds of judgment’s storm heading our way. The sovereign creator God calls all men everywhere to faithfulness; He calls us to repentance of sin through faith in Christ. And despite our not liking it, He offers no third way: we are either faithful to Him in the covenant of grace, or unfaithful. And unfaithfulness, just as gravity pulls one down, sends us hurtling toward the hard floor of judgment.
God is not mocked.
God is the ultimate authority and there are no authorities or authority structures without Him (Romans 11:36; 13:1). The modern American, we should be clear, accepts as his religion the premises of secular humanism, which is to say that all matters of right/wrong are settled by his own mind. That’s the moral/intellectual motive behind new sexual revolution and it extends, in politics, to the idea of modern democracy. There are no fixed principles of morality, they say; it’s the will of the people that reigns.
In our verse under consideration today, the issue of many seeking the face of a ruler is that of unbelieving man trying to remake the moral order in his own image. Scripture tells us, and rather plainly at that, that we can only get justice from the Lord. What this means is that man, in sin, in the attempt to rule himself and the world, and avoid God’s authority, tries to use the civil magistrate to legislate his will. But no order of government, nor ruling, nor any man’s law can be justice if it isn’t righteous and it can’t be righteous if it’s contrary to God’s law. In all, justice without righteousness is impossible.
For instance, the first authority structure in life that God ordains is that of the family. Parents have authority over the children (5th commandment). But if a father is abusive, the authority he wields isn’t legitimate. This is the thing to understand about rulers and government too. They may have power in God’s righteously ordained authority structures, which are meant to provide for tranquility and general peace by restraining sin, but this power is illegitimate when used unrighteously (outside God’s law/word). In the Bible, there is no separation between the concepts of justice and righteousness and it’s a mark of our fallenness that we think today of justice as merely a mechanization of law rather than an outworking of the will of God. That’s the gist of this verse. When we use politicians and lawyers to get our way, it’s not true justice we want, but legal protection for our sins. The Democrats and media who hid evidence from the American people about January 6, and illegally/immorally withheld exculpatory evidence from lawyers trying to defend those charged with crimes, were only following the logical implications of their premises. Without God the only thing that matters is raw power. Without God there’s only the twin terrors of tyranny and anarchy.
Because sinful man rejects God’s moral sovereignty over him, he must accept some form of moral/law order or else he lives in abject anarchy. A man can say that there are no moral absolutes all he wants but he doesn’t dare live in a Mad Max world. He knows he wouldn’t survive in it for one day. He wants sexual anarchy, sure. He wants his porn and his hook-ups but not the violent tyranny of other men stronger than he. So, what does he do? He turns to the state to repress the principle of anarchy. This is why politics in a sinful land is so acrimonious. The stakes are high because everyone is trying to impose tyranny on others so they can enjoy anarchy for themselves.
Indeed, the Deceiver offers absolute freedom for you through the guise of your personal ability to judge right and wrong (Genesis 3:5). But if you take the bait, if you go the way of Cain, and you slay Abel, you’ll need protection from the very principle of self-rule you embraced. The sinner goes to the polls or the magistrate the same way Cain pleaded with God in Genesis 4 when he said, “I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.” The answer to such lawlessness (sin) is the grace of God in Jesus Christ and a civil magistrate that acts as His minister by punishing interpersonal evil. The evidence of our refusal to go to Calvary for the forgiveness of sin is our insistence on manipulating the law through politics and legal sophistry. It’s evidence that we don’t want righteousness – we don’t want God. We still want our sin but don’t want the consequences of it.
All of this is, therefore, evidence that we know that God’s righteous rules are written on our hearts and into the fabric of society. It’s also evidence that there will be a Day of righteous judgment too and on that Day no one will escape unless they’ve believed on Him and repented of their sin. It’s one of the great ironies of sin that sinners always end up embracing some form of legalism in the end. Refusing to live by God’s righteous rules, they end up erecting bizarre and contradictory Towers of Babel in order to live in a society with other God deniers. Those who jettison the Ten Commandments live by the overwhelming weight of the IRS, city codes, county codes, building codes, zoning laws, local ordinances, HOA rules, and on and on. Godless men and women say they’re free from religion but social media is awash in campaigns of conformity to the latest ethical fad. The man or woman who says no to God can’t love his neighbor since he must now seek to control him through a million little tyrannies. He may smile a lot and pretend to be what he’s not, which is a false god. But he shows his true colors by going to the local rulers and trying to gain this favor and that, this advantage or that.
Real Christian living is a life of fulfilling the royal commandments (to love the Lord with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself) out of love for God. A true Christian fulfills the law without trying to do it because the motive is always love, always truth. He who has the imputed righteousness of Christ through faith alone is scared only of his own sin, not that of his neighbor. He doesn’t seek to control his neighbor’s sin through the state but by the preaching of the gospel because he knows there is no justice without righteousness. And there is no righteousness except from God. He who rejects the Lord will try and control his neighbor’s sin through the false messiah of the state. This is why American politics are literally messianic! We will worship. The question is whether we will worship the true and living God or an idol like the state.
Recent Comments