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Chapter 8
Mutative Dynamics
The Politics of Power that Lowers
Unruly Ruling and the Regality of Majesty
Poverty,
Internationality, Sexuality and Prodigality:
Ridden for Ruin
Line 2 above is not low-er, as if to make more low, but lowers, to rhyme with power and to manifest threatening gloom.
There has been much talk of poverty. There is a lot of it. There has been an Australian report of a special edition of the Bible, of some kind, publicly favoured by leading politicians, to emphasise this aspect. It is indeed good to be kind to the poor, for many a latent Milton may lie deprived of opportunity, many a zealous worker repressed from realisation and much suffering can come through untoward events, stripping money, reputation or scope, like the bark of a tree. The Bible is not only keen on concern here, but scathing on ignoring the need! Thus in Isaiah 1, Israel is asked to "rebuke the oppressor", such people being a major cause of poverty, and to "defend the fatherless, plead for the widow", applications of human concern in godly grace.
In Amos 5, you find this excoriation: "Therefore, because you tread down the poor and take grain taxes from him, though you have built houses of hewn stone, yet you shall not dwell in them ... for I know your manifold transgressions and your might sins, afflicting the just and taking bribes, diverting the poor from justice at the gate..."
Here there is exposure of heartless suppression, selfish extravaganzas of personal fulfilment without even considering; while another category of the 'poor', those afflicted by misled politicians or lawyers or judges or potentates, who through bribes disturb justice, even robbing the just of due opportunity, scope or funds, and seeking some political or personal gain without regard to strict equity. Politicians, for example, who wish cardinally to redistribute wealth on grounds of interference, not justice, class or other concepts, not realities, making compassion State-run and the object of tawdry philosophies, may well be in this category.
Indeed, in Amos 5, we find this: "Hate evil, love good; establish justice in the gate..."
Concern for justice and poverty is a joint matter; it is not a lordly power to manipulate mankind as if God, that is in view, in helping the poor, but JUSTICE and EQUITY and HONESTY and INTEGRITY in ALL dealings.
ALL must be treated justly, and within that, there is to be realism for the poor, to engage hearts to their need and aid to their condition. This is not the same as helping indulgence to sprout, decadence to soar or laziness to find comfort under the heading of compassion.
That brings in the moral aspect. LOVE GOOD, it says. What is good ? It is what God deems it, who made us, and if you are going to the Bible, you can leave this out only if, as a doctor, you left out the heart in seeking understanding of the body. There is no excuse whatsoever for talking of the poor and their relief, in terms of the BIBLE, while ignoring God's definition of what is good, for GOOD is what must be sought, and JUSTICE, concertedly. You cannot dismantle God if you want to talk about Him honestly.
What IS good ? what is the will of God concerning ethics and morality and His regality applied to our humanity, our human condition ?
You have to be fair to all, not manipulating things according to class concepts, or preferred dynamics, like some kind of maverick pseudo-deity, manufacturing morals and establishing blind ethics of self-will. Therefore you are not at all free, in the name of helping poverty, to twist truth or blight these or those, in mistaken concepts of righteousness. ALL must be considered and need met; but the government of man in biblical terms, is a work of subordination to God (Romans 13), and His perspective, not to man and his 'neutral' profanations. If the Bible is honestly to enter into it, then it is BECAUSE of His will in ALL things, that you attempt this in ANY thing.
Hence the 'poor' in such a setting, are not those who through drink and drugs and immorality (biblically defined) bring upon themselves unremitting ruin. These may be helped, indeed, but not as if they were a category of prime regard as poor. They are self-oppressed, and need help in social concern, but anything which increases their dependence on government and lust, or does not disturb it, is mere palliation, not productive concern for the poor; and it can become aggravation through enablement of the continuance of wilful ruin. Equity is not found in slaying what is good, in order simply to indulge what is bad. There has to be a stringent moral integrity in these things, not a political pap which suffers anything with a moral neutrality, such as is most common.
To serve GOD relative to the poor does NOT mean this, to give to the poor and indulge immorality, indeed extend it. Rather it is to honour the God of all creation, in attending in moral integrity and godly perspective to the entire situation where poverty is, WITH the honour and commandments of God in mind. To rectify evil with evil, to do moral actions with immorality, it does not figure, except for a profusion of confusion. One well remembers one social worker (not that this article concerns itself with any one race by any means), saying that when she was dealing with certain persons, and aborigines may have entered into it, she would go through the procedure, and if this failed, simplly do it again and so on.
There is no moral rigour; yet righteousness is not laxity, nor is amorality the basis of divine morality. These mix like the ingredients of a bomb, destructively rather than constructively, and can lead to needless heaps of waste on the one hand, and mockery of administration by those who may manipulate its woolly thought, bringing government into disregard. Such indeed has been observed.
Nor does internationality have a free rein, or indeed reign, once you talk of the Bible, as if that revelation of the mind and will of GOD were vital, while this is bypassed in whole arenas of discourse. It is not that others must follow your principles, if you mean to live as you say, but YOU must. Others have their principles; you must follow yours, if not a turncoat. It is in one way like a leg of mutton. It is not just one thing about it, which makes the dinner: it has to be understood as to weight and size, purpose and intended result, and served to the right people. Detachment of bits of morality because they are popular or possible in your view, ignores that there is a spirit and a word of God and you are not free to dissect Him.
It is one WHOLE book and to extract one thing and deny the rest, or ignore it is like being passionate about keeping to the left side of the road when driving, but uniformly driving on highways at 160 m.p.h.. It would seem ... ludicrous.
Thus the new thrust of political leaders Rudd and Obama into internationality brings similar concern. Their great stress on that moral failure, the UN, which
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has left undone so much and been
pompous about so much more, |
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has such immense favour from those
who happen to have a plurality or push of voting power |
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has been so treacherously adverse to
Israel for so long, |
what of this ?
It becomes selective marketing of preferred cultural norms, with scarcely any regard for the self-revealing trinitarian God - the God of the Bible, only testable, verified and validated uniquely - who is so excluded, that one might be forgiven for thinking this a new amoral Moses, inventing his own thoughts, a detached retina rather than sight.
Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ,
WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES
AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS
Bible or Blight, Christ or Confusion:
The Comprehensive Resolution of Man's Intractable Problems
is Found Only in the Bible, the Word of God;
The United Nations organisation is so made indeed, that some are able to stop this and that, by one simple vote, each one at will, and with no room for God, let alone the Christ of this SAME Bible. This species of pseudo-morality, it is a disjointed sort of conjunction of disparates and revision of rejections. It is a false alliance, biblically, if anything ever COULD be. Indeed it is and has been such that Shirley Hazzard in her Death of an Ideal and People in Glass Houses exposed a rottenness in depth, in the UN, from personal knowledge and experience as working in it. Morality is not cultural proclivity; that can change and be imparted by all types of sectional interests and philosophic pre-occupations. It is from God or it is a name misappropriated.
Thus whether to sink a nation in amoral efforts to remedy poverty or to remedy ideals in spontaneous and autonomous international action (for racism is pre-occupation with one race, this UN is the same with many, as a genre of quasi-divine proportions) is as foolish as to put a racing car, meant for the circuit, into mid-town traffic and ask its driver to show its powers. It does not belong there. The UN is no friend of morals, but of ideas divorced - speaking of the Bible - from the Bible, from its God, from Jesus Christ, while it is founding itself on itself, and its goodness on what appeals. Indeed, it is very much what Paul so scathingly condemned in II Corinthians 10, in speaking of those who founding themselves on themselves, are not wise.
Thus man as master is not the same as God as master, and man as moral-maker is not the same as God, the Creator, as revealer of morals. These are infinitely apart in power and in wisdom, and hence in truth and in justice, and hence in dealing with the poor, in purpose-driven purity and understanding of priorities, principles and procedures. It is rather like a Primary School student undertaking to develop a new form of geometry, so to authorise oneself with man the arbiter and God the more or less explicit absentee.
If however these things blight and are blatant in the current political mood and mode, it is no less so in the area of sexuality. The Bible is important ? indeed so important that its words on poverty, out of context as we see (but this is by no means to LESSEN the need to help, rather to show the WAY to do so), are emphasised in a special addition ... Very well, then perhaps its words also matter, those on how to avoid the kingdom of heaven, to be an enemy of God, to be excluded from HIS provision for the poor - and we are all poor in His sight, in ourselves, for as Paul puts it, "in me, that is in my flesh, dwells no good thing". Man, biblically, is in need not of repair but of regeneration, not of relief alone, but of restitution to Regality, the the Redeemer, of faith in His power, as a spiritual surgeon and trainer, counsellor of grace and Shepherd of skill, of reliance on His provision, definitively and once only incarnate as Jesus Christ: that and nothing less is biblical Christianity, as distinct from endless presuppositional robberies, mouldings, remakings and mouthings, such as were predicted by Peter and Daniel, by John in Revelation alike (II Peter 2:1-318, Daniel 7:25, Revelation 13:5 cf. II Corinthians 11:4ff.).
We are a soiled and spoiled race, as the Bible reveals (Romans 5:1-12, Ephesians 4:17-19, Psalm 51, Romans 1-3), this very same Bible, and need nothing so much as regeneration, not political but personal, and if it is to come to politics, we need what is righteous, for righteousness exalts a nation and sin is a reproach to any people (Proverbs 14:34).
If then the Bible, as in I Timothy 1:10, Leviticus 20:13 and I Corinthians 5 and 6, abominates what it deems sexual perversion (Romans 1:26), as it does; and since it makes such practices a last gasp failure in folly without God (as developed in sequence in Romans 1:17ff.), a mode of excluding oneself from the peace and inheriting the wrath of God (just as does adultery for that matter), designating it as something 'against nature' and design, a mockery of God in this, that it is based on ignoring His mouth, His commandments and His mode of constructing our race: then it would seem strange if those of biblical claims, biblical morals, forwarding the same, were to forward this method of dealing with that aspect of life, governmentally!
If, moreover, this line of conduct is actively eased into a more exuberant political life, that would be a flat contradiction. That is, more legality and even endorsement and privilege for this conduct replaces exclusion of recognition as righteous by law ? such a change is 'morally' endorsed ? then assuredly the moral spectrum is far from that of the Bible, and any use of the same is episodic, if not a mere convenience! Such a governmental action becomes so anti-biblical as to make reference to biblical authority seem ludicrous, as to any form of acceptance.
It would be like saying the Lord's prayer but always leaving out the part about "lead us not into temptation" and replacing it with this, "lead us always into selected temptations, and STILL deliver us from evil." It would be mere mockery.
If then you wish the Bible to figure, it is well to have all things in its total context, and in its mode of behaviour and in its stress on justice, equity, righteousness and goodness, biblically defined. Otherwise it is as if you took Einstein's famous equation E=MC2 and DEFINED E to mean 'elegance'. It would make the whole thing meaningless. Nor is this illustration misleading; for the stress of the Bible is on this, that one obey ALL of the Lord's word (obedience is better than sacrifice, and rebellion is as witchcraft - I Samuel 15:22-23). Indeed, Jesus Christ declared this: If you love Me, you will keep My words, and this out of love (John 14:21-23). "He who does not love Me does not keep My words," He announced, and added that this word was from His Father.
It is not that one 'love' in such a way that one obeys precisely what one feels like; that has nothing to do with the Bible AT ALL. Taking up your cross and following Him, without which one cannot be His disciple (Luke 14:27). This is not a pleasure of participation or a guide by fulfilment, pleasure or desire: the cross simply is not like that. In fact, Jesus Christ said this: "So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple" (Luke 14:33).
He does not ask you to give all your goods to the poor, though this was therapy on one case, but He does ask you to put all your eggs in His basket, and having no retention of self-will, to follow Him in all things, nothing omitted ... such as a sexual 'preference' for man or beast, adultery or perversion, for new morals and anti-design liberties.
Nor is prodigality any freer for the political entrepreneur who wishes seriously to relate to the core and pith of the Bible; and that central and basic feature, foundation, it is Jesus Christ, and as to Him, His word is clear that ALL of His word is to be fulfilled (Matthew 5:17ff.), and that His commandments are to be kept (John 14:21ff.). Indeed (cf. SMR pp. 1175ff.), He makes it clear that the one who teaches and does His commandments will be called great in His kingdom, while "whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commamndments, and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven."
Notice, moreover, that offence (in doing and teaching) the least (commandment) is enough to make any the least (in person!). What then of offence in an area where to pursue it is ipso facto to be excluded altogether from the kingdom of heaven, as Paul makes so very clear in I Corinthians 5:9-11, 6:9-11, and I Timothy 1:9-10, where he places such sexual sin in a category with "murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers."
In other words, it is no good trying to 'use' the Bible to assist a perspective, empower political provisions and establish one's approach to things, if one is so selective that one takes one part of it in this way without God at its basis and HIS morals as its milieu for operation, and then rejects other parts with such operational passion and utter disregard that it makes a mockery of reference to the Bible at all.
To be sure, to take another way of handling politics, one cannot assume that all Australians are Christians, or that politicians were elected to act on this basis - though the Constitution in its preamble does make reference to Almighty God, so that it is not entirely empty in this domain. Yet if one is going to measure oneself by the Bible, it is good not to be so selective as to speak of its authority or place with sensitivity in one area, even with sensitivity to its words, while this becomes a riot of contrast with what one does to salient other features of it, even at the moral level. It is as if someone were to tell one beloved, I love your nose, but your eyes irritate me!
Mockery of the majesty and regality of the Lord can be wrought in many ways, but this appears to be one of them, intentional or other. Nor is it a political leader alone to which such strictures from the Scriptures of God, the Bible, relate; it is to one as to all. Indeed, it would be possible as seen in Journey to God ... Ch. 7, to be elected on the clear understanding that one is a biblical Christian (not an 'inventive' one), so that what one means is then clear to all, and that while one will not plan to expect non-Christians to act as if they were other than they are, or penalise them by lack of concern, yet one WILL plan to act on biblical morals and to seek such standards as a norm and exemplar of the nature of the underlying ground and principles of the society. If so, then that, rather than atheistic immersion in imaginary moral 'neutrality' which neither does nor can exist (cf. SMR pp. 375ff.), would be the popular expectation of the regime.
Accordingly, as one tests all things (I Thessalonians 5), one would not expect the current pseudo-academic monstrosity of excluding what alone meets the case in terms of the origin of man and the universe, creationism, to be excluded on the basis of untenable philosophic presuppositions! One would expect every presentation to stand or not, to be excluded or not by due evidential certitudes, not assumptions without even their own basis derivative at all logically (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7, It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, Christ Incomparable ... Ch. 2), and to be compared with the utmost rationality and care. This would represent a profound change, and bring back this area of academia from its current intolerant totalitarianism (cf. SMR pp. 140ff., TMR Chs. 1, 7-8, The gods of naturalism have no go! Deity and Design, Designation and Destiny).
Presently, the exclusion of God by the simple measure of making even rational regard for His reality and regality irrelevant in many parts of academia, in parallel with similar action in the social and political applications through Government Departments, and acting on a materialist-determinist basis, is an anti-God step. It is no more a part of freedom than is the present situation, where against truth, empirical reality and predictions, what is scientistic and not scientific is in this area frequently made in schools and many colleges the norm, necessary and required, while what is demonstrable is made, not only the subject of an exclusion notice, but a ground for negative impact in teaching and in student work. This is illustrated in some detail in TMR Ch. 8. Something of the ludicrous prejudice and delusion involved in such actions is often exhibited on this site.
(This may be seen in such references as those above, and for example, in :
Secular Myths and Sacred Truth, History, Review and Overview ... Ch. 5,
Answers to Questions Ch. 5 (second section esp.),
The Pride of Life ... Ch. 5, Dancers, Prancers ... Ch. 5,
Message of the Words of God ... Ch. 4,
Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Chs. 4, 3, and 2,
Wake up .. Ch. 4, Ch. 5, Ch. 6, Grand Biblical Perspectives Ch. 3, Appendix,
Dig Deeper ... Chs. 1, 2,
The Defining Drama Ch. 3, Calibrating Myths ... Ch. 1.)
Thus a very different academic integrity and liberty would be a result of any such political election as would come from the designation of another policy DURING ELECTION TIME, and before the vote.
Alas, our country is moving not only in this internationalised, distantly and deviously unbiblical, confusedly contradictory manner in so many topic areas, but we are now engaged and embarked on such a prodigality of method that it alerts prudence and staggers discretion. Imagine using some psychological approach (it is little more and has many opponents, since it tends to make a country less independent and more inclined to ignore dangers in good time, while submerging it in government grandeurs that can become habitual), intended to prevent an undue stilling of commercial activity, as an excuse for wild frenzies of building, as has happened in Primary School situations in recent Government grandiosity, often staggering people, sometimes Principals, and common sense. If we had not acted in this drastic fashion, the saying goes, the chance for deliverance might have passed, in the international monetary crisis.
Really ?could not the armies of public servants have done better than that, and could not intelligence have been sustained in choosing the places for increased productivity with care, while using funds with wits activated ? Must certain features where, perhaps, labour intensive care is needed, be implemented in preference to others, with less challenge of minute character ? If this is not hysteria or panic, what then is it ? Is it a dream fulfilment on the wave of a crisis ?
Is the wasting of funds, the avoidance of glaring needs, to be a daily occurrence, while what is unneeded, except in select cases, and those to be chosen with care, is fostered to the point of inanity! Not only so, but today we learn (The Australian, October 1, 2009), that the International Monetary Fund, in its latest review of global financial security, advises that excessive government grabbing of funds for national purposes can dry up the market for private expansion, and raise interest rates with undue volatility!
Prodigality of this kind merely increases the eventual cost, and that, in this case, appears not least to be the equivalent of mortgaging the 'house' of Australia to a politically strenuous, godless nation. This is in no sense to castigate the Chinese, often very likeable people, but it IS to expose the nature of the current political rule in the land, through which Australia has entered into prodigious debt.
Biblically, the borrower tends to be servant to the lender (Proverbs 22:7). Thus, if China has to lend money for us, for example, to be financially able, with our other commitments, to build weapons with which to defend ourselves against possible adventurism from that nation (and MANY nations have been guilty of just that in the past century - such as Germany, Japan, Italy, Russia, Iran, for the mood can come, like a change of wind, to a people): what then ? Is there to be no end to clash of common sense and perception of danger with 'necessary' steps, even those taken in a wild surge of inadequately prepared preferences, unfittingly followed without caution or adequate intelligence and self-control! Is it necessary to realise that if funds are brought in for one purpose, their indebtedness resulting applies to times when other needs are in view and in vogue!
The independence of a nation is a precious asset; and when it is as here being compromised - and Australia has had an excellent (comparative) record in this sphere, there is a vital loss. It is part of the balance sheet of this entire political framework: just as increasing engulfment with the UN, not in some judiciously chosen act, but in the very matrix of its development, and in the works of governmental manipulation, increasingly exercised over whole areas, ex-God because of an imaginary neutrality, do what ? They present further loss of liberty. The grandiose is not so spectacular when its onus and control becomes apparent, as dreams become realities by means which destroy dreams, and worse still, the necessities of a free nation.
As the gigantic, under the appearance of commercial action, becomes more and more a ruling feature in a land, then its pseudo-moral basis (and there always is one, for what is sought to be good, desirable, becomes the matrix when God is left out) becomes more and more blatant, or belligerent, or subtly directive if not dictatorially a matter of command.
Subjugation to big brother, especially one in such a contradictory and sometimes perverse seeming mode, this is not the desire of the Australian people, it would seem from any review of its history. Yet it is coming.
It is therefore time for actual Christians, for whom the Bible is not a lucky dip, or occasional or even convenient reference, but the word of God to be DONE, to awake to their heritage in Christ which was once so much more advanced in this nation, than it now is. It is a time to beware of delusion, deception and the dilemmas of self-contradictory rule. If the Lord be God, then serve HIM; but if Baal, naturalism and its allies, is to be your lord, then serve him and them, but know that God will execute judgment. He is neither dumb, rather issuing commandments, nor numb, but most perceptive; and what is being done is not what is being said, but what is being seen. It is therefore time for a vast new engagement of the people of God to alert this nation, whose more godly past it leaves in a plethora of new-look, new-formed gods, some of which retain biblical names, to its peril, and to revert to the paths of its peace, not where man gains dominance or prominence, but where God provides them.