The American Founding Fathers believed that tyranny could come from either the government or from the people. Because of this, they built a brilliant system of government that had firewalls to protect against the tyranny from either direction. They warned that if these firewalls were torn down, the Republic could not last. In the last century, we tore both firewalls down, and the system has been crumbling since. The American Republic will not last much longer if we do not implement some very radical action to turn from the direction in which we’re headed and rebuild the firewalls.
In some basic ways both Russia and China now have more liberty than we have in America. They are trending toward more individual liberty, even if they are hitting bumps on the road to this and occasionally may even run into a ditch. Even so, they get going again and are trending in the direction toward personal liberty. As impatient as many have been with their slowness in this, we should remember how long we struggled. Even after nearly a century of American democracy, we still had slavery, and America invented the concentration camps that we used for displacing and even killing Native Americans. The march of civilization has not been smooth or consistent anywhere or with anyone. So let us too give grace to those who are struggling.
However, after accomplishing so much, Western nations are now trending toward tyranny and the loss of individual freedom. There have been occasional slowdowns in this march to bondage, but then the pace gets even faster. The East and West are going in opposite directions again.
Thankfully, there is a third column. It is the kingdom of God. Every good gift that has come down to man, including better governments, has come from above. Even so, no government on earth is the kingdom of God even if they have some of the elements of the kingdom. The kingdom is yet to come to the earth, but it surely will. Many governments on the earth that have been built on at least some kingdom principles will “become the kingdom of our Lord.”
One of the things the Lord said that He would do after His return is to separate the nations as “sheep” or “goats.” He explained the qualifications for being a sheep or goat nation. For those who are here to help prepare the way for the Lord, one way that we do this is by helping our nation become a sheep nation. One of the ways that we are called to help prepare the way for the Lord is to help our nations adopt kingdom principles that would help them become “sheep” nations rather than “goat” nations. To help a nation get to where it is supposed to go, we must first know where it is.
There are other major forces in the world than Marxism and capitalism, but these have been the two most powerful counterweights in recent times. Under each of these there are nuances. For example, free enterprise is different than capitalism, but can only exist under capitalism. With pure capitalism you must have capital to have opportunity, but with free enterprise you only need initiative to have opportunity. However, if you have free enterprise and you become successful, you will have capital that you will want to invest, so you become a capitalist. The more capitalists and the more capital there is to invest, the more people have been successful in the system.
You must have capitalism to have free enterprise. But if capitalism grows unchecked, it can choke out free enterprise and destroy itself by cutting itself off from its lifeblood. Left to itself without any steering and the needed corrections from government, greed can take over capitalism in such a way that it starts to abuse and hurt people. This leads to revolution and is not in anyone’s interest to allow this to happen—except the Marxists. The lifeblood of Marxism is promoting the envy of the successful, which they call “social justice.”
Not all who call for social justice are Marxists, and there is a devotion to social justice that we must have to remain a Republic. Even so, Marx, and subsequent Marxists, have been brilliant in the way they have seized popular and even noble terms to mobilize and exploit those whom Marx called the “useful idiots.” The “useful idiots” were the idealists that Marx saw as being so easily manipulated, but which he also despised. They were always the first to feel the wrath when Marxists gained control.
That being said, The Bible is still the biggest proponent of true social justice, and requires justice for all with a special devotion to providing justice for those who are weak. It requires freedom for the oppressed, and then it requires generosity from the prosperous to the poor. However, the key distinction between Christianity and the Marxist social justice, or the liberal social justice promoted by many today, is that nowhere does The Bible demand charity from the government, but from individuals.
When charity becomes institutional it loses its basic power to uplift. It becomes demeaning, dehumanizing, and always leads to bondage. We will develop this further next week.
