Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is teh greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
– Matthew 22:34-40
What better way to wrap up and summarize the Ten Commandment series than to let Jesus lead the way.
In my discussion on the commandments, we circled around the issues of how government assumes the role of God in our world, and often in our lives. Too many of us embrace the idea of that role being fulfilled from human organizations in place of God. Jesus summarizes for us that we are to love God with all that we are and that we have.
There is no place for any other.
Following from that, our constant worshipful attitude towards God should instill in us a love of our neighbor. In our dealings with others we are to respect them as sovereign creations of the Sovereign Creator. To assume any role in their lives involuntarily would be to usurp God’s role in all of the world. It would be to love ourselves greater than our neighbor and to establish an unnatural hierarchy.
That doesn’t mean there is no role for governance. We naturally flock towards better hierarchies. I allow the carpenter to take the lead in determining the best course for building my home, because the carpenter is an expert with experience and knowledge that I do not have. The carpenter does not get to force me to pay for his services, though, nor does he have the right to demand payment for services not received. Further, once the job is complete, that carpenter has no further role in my life in any sense of hierarchy. That relationship has ended, and that carpenter may soon be under my authority and expertise in the clinical role of a patient with me as the provider.
The entire nature of those relationships is voluntary.
Those types of relationships can constantly ebb and flow, with people working through voluntary relationships to find solutions for the problems in their lives.
What the Great Commandment and the Ten Commandments do, however, is challenge the modern formal governmental system’s morality. Those governments only exist as a staked claim on a monopoly of violence within a certain region. Since aggressive violence is, by its own nature, immoral, this is to say a formal government’s only claim to authority is immorality.
We may enjoy certain aspects of what those governments provide. We might even like the convenience of things just being done so that we do not have to involve ourselves in what we perceive as mundane details. I may not want to know how to arbitrate a dispute or how to navigate a complicated legal problem. So it is easy to just let the formal government take the lead.
That doesn’t make it moral.
In fact, “nothing worth having comes easy” is a motivational quote, once said by President Theodore Roosevelt, and used to help people overcome obstacles and to persevere in the face of difficulties. The easy button is to allow a body of immoral actors to assume a leading role in determining the moral path.
This would be akin to hiring a lawyer to build your home, or a farmer to treat your infection.
It involves the participant, you, to abdicate responsibility.
The political means to fix problems is the easy solution that doesn’t actually solve the problem. It provides the false assumption of effectiveness, giving those who aspire to succeed in that ideological temple of evil false confidence of their own value, and similarly giving others a false sense of inferiority. They willingly grant control to people who do not know how to effectively use that control and who are likely to be perverted into doing it for nefarious reasons.
The most depressing aspect is that those who fall under their control are not allowed to opt out. They cannot end the contract they never signed. They cannot set up alternative arrangements of their own volition. They cannot do this in any area that those with a monopoly on violence extend their control.
The coercive nature of state policy towards any end forfeits the moral high ground which is essential to rationalizing those same policies. No matter what they accomplish, they cannot be moral because the means in which they were implemented was immoral. When the outcomes of those policies are bad, it is just bad ends stacked on top of bad ends. Even when the outcome is good, though, the burden of proof should be on state actors to justify the means.
Our divine state as the Creation, as sovereign stewards justified by Christ, is that no man has authority over another that God does not authorize. Any other arrangement requires that the burden of proof be placed on the usurpers of God’s role.
Romans 13 was not a Divine “right of kings” or justification that God authored their authority on Earth. It is that no matter what they try to do on Earth, they are ultimately moving the world towards God’s end state which was already ordained. That doesn’t mean He blesses off on taxation, slavery, genocide or other government failures.
So the real question is why do Christians embrace these systems of failure? Why are they so afraid of the morality of their fellow man? That fear is a fruit of the wrong spirit. It is a liar. We are called to only fear God, and to place our trust in His unconditional love.
It is time to knock down our idols and repent. God is not in socialism or capitalism, but He is in a mutual and immutable love for one another that can only be manifest in freedom.
Real leaders do so from a servant mindset. They don’t just call themselves “public servants” while using insider information and lobbying funds to store up tens of millions in stocks. They should Lead Like Jesus, whose greatest example was giving His life for us all.
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