Part 3 of 4
Review
In Part 1 we considered the covenantal structure of God’s relationship to man; both its political outworking in terms of the state and providential outworking in God’s dealings with his people and with nations was considered. We saw that the covenant is the legal basis for God’s government over men, moral and political. And on that basis, applying the covenant sanctions, God sent Israel – as a nation and an ecclesia – into exile. Hence, application to both church and culture.
In Part 2, to understand our cultural moment and the relevance of a Christian worldview, we took a wide-angle view of recent intellectual history, using Germany as a case study.
We then considered the landmarks of the Christian worldview – Creation, Fall, Redemption – discovering there are only two directions for mankind—recreation or decreation, either covenant-keeping or covenant-breaking. We also saw that the structures of creation can be taken in either direction.
We saw that the fountainhead of every apostate culture is our first parent’s response to the Creator/creature distinction. We then explained the Fall as man opting for autonomous-reason, which engages with four covenantal spheres – the individual, family, church, and state – in a decreational direction. Rooted in the dislocation of the Creator/creature distinction through man’s usurpation of godhood we have considered the nature of unbelief and its dualistic worldview.
We saw that this plays out in politics with the resuscitation of the pagan power-state. Through the Renaissance and Enlightenment, Europe and the West have turned their back on God and returned to a pagan pre-Christian world.
The State through the Christian Worldview lens
Returning now to the landmarks of the Christian worldview – Creation, Fall, Redemption – one cannot be consistently Christian without viewing the state through its lens. To do so though requires viewing the creation-fall-redemption schema as a unified whole, a system. All things that were created fell, and all things that fell are redeemed. The flow of world history moves from creation > decreation > recreation. There is thus no doctrine of salvation without first a doctrine of creation. Salvation in other words is nothing less than a recreation, a restoring of the created order. It is not only personal salvation but also corporate and cosmic. The Gospel is, therefore, comprehensive in its reach, as Paul explained to the Colossians:
For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.
Colossians 1:16–23 (author’s emphasis)
Paul’s Gospel is a comprehensive one of the lordship of Christ over all things throughout the created order. This is especially the emphasis of sphere sovereignty which we briefly considered in Part 2.
Nevertheless, most evangelicals do not view salvation through a creation lens. Salvation is a dualistic upper story event. It is exclusively the salvation of their souls that God is concerned with, not the lower story realm of matter, but perhaps for some the maturity of the church and concern for justice, for the poor and marginalised. There is at best no cognizance of the possibility of Christ’s dominion in the affairs of men or at worst an outright rejection of the notion as abhorrent, an abnormality.
Exile or Dominion?
Many evangelicals use the ‘Exile’ or ‘Wilderness’ trope as a descriptor of the church’s normative status in the new covenant era. Either ‘returning to the land’ (from exile) or ‘entering the land’ (from the wilderness) are therefore relegated to heaven or the millennium, to either the intermediate or eternal state, but never in history. In other words, the church does not receive its inheritance this side of the second coming. Instead, the experience of the church throughout her earthly sojourn is meant to be one of marginalisation and suffering, never one of success or dominion. If she ever experiences the latter it is not normative and therefore fleeting.
For example, Preston Sprinkle’s new book, Exiles: The Church in the Shadow of Empire, is desirous of cultivating an “exilic lens” in Christians as a solution to the left and right wing divide of politics and Christian promotion of partisan politics. While his intention is desirous in some respects his solution is not. He and others like him manifest an allergy to power that is not Christian. It is the equivalent of the argument that guns should be banned because they kill people. The problem however is not guns but the people who use them. Do we ban cars because they kill people? No, instead, we teach drivers to be proficient and law-abiding, subjecting them to a period of driver education and probation before licensing, and even then sanctioned by penalties for failure in their responsibility. The power of a gun or motor vehicle to kill is not a moral issue, but the handling of that power by people is.
Sprinkle’s solution, nonetheless, is to ban guns and motor vehicles. He exiles the church from power, rather than subject her to driver education and sanctions. He neglects the fact that ‘Exile’ and ‘Wilderness’ are places of judgment and immaturity in the Bible, not destiny. The people of God have no place to be there. Israel was brought out of Egypt to go through the Wilderness into the Land. They are only consigned to exile or wilderness because they have habitually broken God’s law and are under covenant judgment for a duration, as argued in Part 1. Israel was consigned to a 40-year circuit in the wilderness because of disobedience and unbelief. Although Jeremiah was directed to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile” (Jer. 29:7). Even in exile God’s people were to be a blessing—to be productive and exercise dominion (e.g. Joseph and Daniel). Additionally Israel and Judah were not to rebel against God by resisting exile; they were to humble themselves under God’s hand of judgment. There are thus limitations to Christian resistance.
Israel was not mandated to stay in the wilderness but rather enter and occupy the land. And this was to be carried out “little by little” (Ex. 23:30; Dt. 7:22), progressively extirpating pagan nations and false gods. In Gospel language, to “destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.” (2 Cor. 10:5). In other words, to pursue cultural dominion. Sprinkle’s concern over political left- and right-wing divides and Christians consumed by partisan politics would be solved if he embraced the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, not as a truncated gospel of personal piety, but as one that comprehensively reverses decreation in the cosmos by proclaiming the recreation of “all things” in Christ. And this plays out in the governance of free nations under the law-word of God through a plurality of governments and sphere sovereignty. In fact, the terminology of left- and right-wing politics originated in the French Revolution of 1789. It refers to those of the National Assembly who sat on the right wing and left wing of the President. Simply, those on the right represented a slow-burn approach to the revolution and those on the left a radical fast-track revolution. The point is this: both left and right represent the revolution. As we have seen in the previous articles the French Revolution was the faultline in Western history and politics demarcating Christendom from the Enlightenment’s modern revolutionary era. Without a re-establishment of the Christian sate the humanist secular-state will continue to be an anti-Christian fact.
To be in the land therefore entails obedience and faith and sowing and reaping, resulting in productivity and dominion. This contrasted with the wilderness provision of manna. However, occupying the land is not a salvation issue but a maturity one. The driver who loses his licence for failure to obey the road rules still retains his citizenship (salvation), but forgoes the privilege and responsibility of driving (dominion). The land is not heaven but rather earth, time-space history, about which Jesus taught us to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Israel’s Promised Land is a teacher, foreshadowing the Promised Land of the whole earth (Rom. 4:13). And this is inherited in real-time history. As Jesus was raised from the dead and ascended to the Father in the reign of Tiberius Caesar, we too inherit the Kingdom in history, for “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.” (Rev. 11:15, author’s emphasis). In the Ascension and Enthronement of Christ, the Kingdom has come definitively, but in the outpouring of the Spirit upon the ecclesia is coming progressively.
This is the dealbreaker: that Jesus, in his humanity – the Son of Man – has been given all power and authority in heaven and earth, i.e. over creation. Having done what Adam failed to do, Christ as the new man is released from exile and granted the dominion that was always delegated to man as a covenant-keeper. There is a man now ruling the universe. But how does he exercise that power and authority? Through his ecclesia, a Greek political term, indicating a governing council. Presiding through that council, the Lord Jesus Christ now executes his will over the nations. So the man Christ Jesus governs through a corporate man, the body of Christ.
Missing the greatness of the Great Commission
However, a mistranslation of Matthew 28:19 has denied the ecclesia its Dominion Mandate, and hence the greatness of the Great Commission. Without going into the complexities of the Greek grammar and the limitations of English, most modern translations read “go and make disciples of all nations”, which is ambiguous. Rather, it should read “go and disciple all the nations”. On one hand the modern translations could be taken to mean what the Greek actually says, i.e. “make the nations disciples”, or on the other could equally be taken as “make disciples from among all the nations”. Because of the pietistic predisposition of contemporary Christians the latter is the usual understanding: “make disciples from among the nations”. Most therefore misunderstand the Great Commission, viewing it as a command to make disciples of individuals from among all the nations (see Stephen C. Perks, Disciple the Nations).
Nevertheless, preserving the grammar of the Greek, the KJV has sought to resolve the problem by following Tyndale and the Geneva Bible by translating v. 19 “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations…”. This not only provides a more accurate rendering of the Greek grammar but also a more accurate understanding of the Great Commission itself. While clearly individuals must be discipled, the greatness of the Great Commission is rediscovered in the mandate to disciple nations. Rather than a narrowly pietistic focus on a private faith of personal devotion and discipleship only, Christianity is opened out to the entire spectrum of human society as a public faith, shaping public policy from education to the arts, media, law, and all things else. Hence, the Christian world-and-life view advocated in these articles. In all this the ecclesia governs through its priestly teaching ministry: “teaching them [the nations and hence the state] to observe all that I have commanded you. …” (Mt. 28:19). This entails a recovery of “all that I [Jesus] have commanded”; i.e. “all Scripture”, both OT and NT, especially the law—ceremonial (fulfilled in the antitype), moral, and judicial. The law, in particular, touches on all things to do with living in God’s world, displaying his multifaceted wisdom to principalities and powers, i.e. to nations (Eph. 3:10). As John declares,
From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty.
Revelation 19:15
It is forgotten, however, that this – a comprehensive Gospel of Christ’s lordship and victory in history – was the faith of the church until recent times. For example, Charles Spurgeon, the great Victorian evangelical, often referred to as the last Puritan, was no believer that the law of God was abrogated, declaring squarely that it still applies, and especially to politics.
Provoked by the Education Bill of 1870, Spurgeon published his Christian political manifesto in which he poses, “are not all mankind under law to God, and where and when did the king of all the earth announce that nations were to be free from His control, and free from all recognition of His existence and authority.” Spurgeon was a believer in God’s sovereignty over all of life and that failure to honour his laws in the civil and political spheres was a de facto establishment of religious atheism. He continued,
“I long for the day when the precepts of the Christian religion shall be the rule among all classes of men and all transactions. I often hear it said, ‘do not bring religion into politics.’ This is precisely where it ought to be brought and set there in the face of all men as on a candlestick. I would have the cabinet and members of Parliament do the work of the nation as before the Lord. …”
Clearly, Spurgeon possessed a vision of nations as ‘Christian nations’, and the state as a ‘Christian state’.
We therefore argue that the state, as a created category, is not only fallen but is also redeemed.
Comprehensiveness of the Fall: Personal and Political
So, let us now consider the fuller implications of the Fall for one’s understanding of the state. The Reformation recovered the doctrine of the Fall through an emphasis on man’s “total depravity”. The comprehensiveness of Redemption is only fully apprehended by discovering first the comprehensiveness of the Fall and, hence, ‘total depravity’. This somewhat archaic phrase underlines the all-inclusive effect of sin in the totality of man’s being and social life. As our parent and covenant-head, Adam’s sin comprehensively affected man’s will, heart, and intellect (Rom. 1:18-31; 5:12-21). He is at enmity with God from birth (Rom. 3:9-20; Eph. 2:3; Jas. 4:4; Ps. 2; 51:5). Man’s intellectual life is especially hostile toward God, darkened, and futile (Rom. 3:11; 8:7; 1 Cor. 1:19-21; 2 Cor. 4:4; Eph. 4:17-19; Col. 1:21; 2:8, 18; 1 Tim. 6:20). He is therefore totally dependent on God’s sovereign grace to release his intellect from the dominion of sin (Eph. 2:3-9). Only supernatural regeneration by the Spirit can set man free, transferring him from Satan’s domain to Christ’s (Col. 1:13; Tit. 3:5-6; Jn. 3:3). But then the mind must be daily renewed (Rom. 12:1-2) – learning to “think the thoughts of God after him” – so that man can be reoriented individually and as a society toward the redemption of every created sphere. This occurs through the faithful preaching and teaching of the word of God applied to the whole of life – including the state – and the redeemed community’s obedience thereto. Hence, becoming the “light of the world” as its true ‘Enlightenment’.
As already mentioned, sin through the Fall plays out not only individually but societally. Human rebellion and autonomy are manifest through the state as the expression of corporate man. Redemption in Christ is effectively a reorientation, not only of the individual but also human society from its rebellious direction to its original structure and purpose under God. This entails the understanding, as already stated, that autonomous-man through the Fall is in rebellion against God with the pagan power-state providing its corporate expression. The state as a fallen structure has been, historically, the dominant foe of the sons of the Kingdom. What was designed by God as a coercive constraint on evil (Rom. 13:1-7), has been perverted by sin to constrain the righteous. This demands that the true believer be vigilant in his watchfulness of sin, its encroachment and subtlety both personally and societally. Naivety is not a Christian virtue, nor is wilful ignorance. Apart from its repentance and renewal of its covenant with Christ as Sovereign, the modern state (and its agencies) is not benign; it is, in the nature of the case, in rebellion against God and malfeasant, an agent of nefarious agendas.
Western Church and State Encroachment
Tragically the church of the West has been weighed in the balance and found wanting in this regard. It has ignored the encroachment of the state over the last century, despite the Fascist and Communist horrors. While these aberrations are more obvious, those of the secular-humanist state are not. Antonio Gramsci, the founder of “cultural Marxism”, concluded that violent revolution was not feasible in the West, so developed a strategy of stealth, of the “long march through the institutions”. Consequently, the state and its agencies have been white-anted and captured. Key to this has been the promulgation of revolutionist thinking in the universities and schools, becoming state propaganda agencies. Initially nurtured by the church, education, has been conceded to the state and revolutionist thought. The secular-humanist state of the West is now a Marxist and anti-Christian institution. It is not neutral.
The covid-crisis has served to not only expose but also accelerate the slide into statist tyranny, already in the making, through the Enlightenment political project, for several centuries. After 300 years of maldevelopment this project is now culminating. Psalm 2 exposes the nature of statist rebellion against God as conspiratorial, to overthrow his constraints, i.e. his laws. Hence the covid-crisis’ return to law by executive decree—i.e. bureaucratic and positivist law replacing biblical and case law. It is revolutionist to the core. Thus, the notion of the ‘deep state’ and the global conspiring of the unelected elites (e.g. the technocrats of WEF, CDC, UN, WHO, and state public health officers) in rebellion against God. And these in collusion with the CIA, the US military-industrial complex, and international banking cartels. Not to mention elected representatives in betrayal of their constituencies and the constitutions under which they function. It is a return to the tyranny of Plato’s ‘philosopher kings’. Science and medicine, like National Socialist Germany, have become the handmaidens of the state and its dystopian political agendas.
Science and Medical Tyranny
This is rendered more outrageous by the fact that modern science emerged from the womb of the Christian West, not China or Arabia, despite their advanced knowledge. The great Cambridge sinologist, Joseph Needham, no friend of Christianity, was notably forced to this conclusion. It was the Christian doctrines of Creation and Providence that gave certainty to natural laws and hence the basis for objective science to develop. No other worldview possesses such explanatory power for the uniformity of natural law. As famously stated by Cornelius Van Til, “Man can count, but cannot account for counting”. Unlike Christian-theism, rationalism and empiricism extrapolate into scepticism and chaos, and hence the undermining of science and all knowledge. Ironically the present hijacking of science by the state in this philosophical milieu spells it destruction. Christian apologist and Oxford scholar, C. S. Lewis, sounded this alarm as early as the 1950s. It is no surprise therefore that eugenics is currently re-emerging as “transhumanism” (promoted by WEF notables, e.g. Israeli historian, Noah Harari) and plays a major role in the thinking of Bill Gates under the guise of population concern, a thinly veiled code for global depopulation. And yet, this man with no scientific credentials is the most influential in the global vaccination agenda. By virtue of their beliefs and unregeneracy, these men are haters of God and of mankind. And as such cannot but perpetrate policies of death: “But he who sins against me injures himself; All those who hate me love death” (Prov. 8:36). The overall agenda of the global elites is to depopulate the earth and take control of its wealth and resource for themselves. Those who survive depopulation will become, according to their agenda, a slave class of AI controlled cyborgs. The so called ‘climate emergency’ and fraudulent ‘viruses’ are geared to these ends. All these realties, as adduced above, beg the question as to how the UN or WHO, or any state agency in the current cultural milieu, could be a ‘noble’ institution, as claimed by the elites. Our cultural apostasy begs otherwise.
“On the wrong side of history”
This biblical and historical overview demonstrates that the Enlightenment project is “on the wrong side of history”. The 1st century coming of Christ’s Kingdom is the divide of history, not the Enlightenment nor its revolution. It is a reversion to the pre-Christian era of the pagan power-state in a vain attempt to recover Paradise without God. As a child of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the contemporary ‘global governance’ agenda through the UN, WHO, WEF and other globalist groups is anti-Christian and revolutionist in spirit and origin. Intellectually and spiritually, it originates in the rebellion of the Fall and Babel and flows through the pagan empires of the ancient world into the modern aspiration to ‘save the planet’ and ‘build back better’. Like its ancient forebears, its urge to recover Paradise autonomously and to centrism is despotic, enslaving the masses ‘for their own good’. While promising a ‘New World Order’, like all revolutions nothing is surer than its descent into a dystopian nightmare. The recent state overreach in the COVID lockdowns and suspension of civil liberties, gratuitous police abuse, and supply-chain chaos is a case in point. In terms of the biblical worldview, the current globalist dream, as the progeny of the Enlightenment and its revolution, is on the wrong trajectory: of decreation not recreation. It is philosophically and politically antithetical to the Christian position. The modern political system must, therefore, do an about face. It must bow the knee to the sovereignty of Christ and his Redemption, yielding intellectually and ethically to the orthodox Christian position. Only then can it move, under the imprimatur of God, toward recreation: the flourishing of the planet.
“Stick to your knitting!”
Even so, too many pietistic Christians believe that the church should ‘stick to its knitting’. That it has no business to speak into politics or public policy. However, the biblical worldview (as explained above) and the Christian prophet, by the nature of the case, speak comprehensively to the whole created order. There is no aspect of human affairs outside the purview of the Gospel of God’s government. This includes medicine, science, political theory, and public health, and thus the COVID crisis. Clearly, this does not entail the prophet (nor any Christian minister) being a technical expert within every discipline, but it does entail the authority of God’s word over them, expressed through the teaching ministry of the church. Otherwise, our Christianity is not only pietistic but also dualistic, succumbing to the secular/sacred divide—the belief that Christianity nor the church may address a secular sphere. The direction of Redemption in Christ is toward recreation—the restoration of every creational structure before the Consummation.
It’s time to awaken from our spiritual and intellectual slumber, to grasp the nettle of biblically orthodox Christianity, lest we be found, in the words of the great Puritan divines, to be “sentimental Christians but practical atheists”. God would then have us to blow the trumpet of alarm to awaken others to the true situation and prepare them for the battle. This battle is cosmic and to the death. It is the battle between secular-humanism and Christian-theism—of Satan’s hosts (both human and demonic) against Christ and the saints. If any institution or person is not for Christ, they are against him. Neutrality is a myth in God’s moral universe. It is not an option. If the state is not Christian it is anti-Christian. There is no ‘third way’. We are living in a major hinge of history which leads either to the abyss or to the sunny uplands of the Kingdom of God on earth. While not denying that God is sovereign and that the final victory is certain, in the meantime the choice is ours, as his moral agents.
Next week, in Part 4, we will consider what that looks like under the heads Resistance in Exile and Victory in Exile. We will also provide links to reliable sources exposing the truth behind COVID and how to take responsibility for your health and wellbeing.
Read: Part 1 | KeyNote 2024—Sound the Alarm! Understanding the Times Through a Covenantal Worldview
Read: Part 2 | KeyNote 2024—Sound the Alarm! Understanding the Times Through a Covenantal Worldview
Read: Part 4 | KeyNote 2024—Sound the Alarm! Understanding the Times Through a Covenantal Worldview
Download KeyNote 2024—Sound the Alarm! Understanding the Times Through a Covenantal Worldview as PDF
