The church (including individual Christians and Christian families) should not pray that someone in the church (or anyone) would receive a certain socialist grant or payment. The church (including individual Christians and Christian families) should not refer sick people to the State. The church (including individual Christians and Christian families) should not refer unemployed people to the State. The church (including individual Christians and Christian families) should not refer uneducated people to the State. The church (including individual Christians and Christian families) should not refer widows and orphans to the State. I’ve read that Christians in the early church would rescue abandoned babies (left to die) and adopt them into their families. I truly believe that, in a similar circumstance today, the modern church would “call the authorities” to take care of this problem for them.
There is nothing in God’s word to support any of this. It is immoral to not do what God has commanded us to do. It is immoral to do what God has commanded us not to do. It's sin. (Deut. 5:32 , Matt. 5:19)
Some examples of socialism are:
- Unemployment Benefit/Work Share (being paid for not working)
- Medicare/Medicaid
- government-financed health care
- Social Security taxes/payments
- L and I program payments
- state financed job training or re-training
- gov’t monopolized transportation (or any business)
- graduated income taxes
- inheritance taxes
- Cash for Clunkers
- a program that exchanges incandescent light bulbs for fluorescent light bulbs programs
- food stamps
- low-income Welfare (or whatever acronym they are calling it these days)
- state-financed/ regulated educational institutions
- a fascist (monopolized, privately-owned, gov’t-regulated) central bank
- the inflation/control of the money supply by such a central bank
- state control of airline security and flights
- state control of: gun ownership, home ownership, land ownership (floodplains, wetlands, national parks, eminent domain, etc.), car ownership, reproduction/body ownership
- death taxes
- capital gains taxes
- attempts to form a one-world government, North American union, European union, United Nations
- government farm/auto/bank grants/subsidies,
- etc...
Ouch, anyone? I know; me, too.
The problems that the humanist/socialists are trying to solve by their Statist socialism should be taken care of by the family, and if it is too much for the family, then it should be taken to the local church, and then to the wider Body of Christ. Socialism makes a strong appeal to the cowardice, the weakness, the immorality, the envy, the selfishness, the fearfulness, and the depravity inherent to our sin-fallen nature. We don't want to own a clunker; we don't want to take care of our elderly parents; we don't want to take care of our sick, injured or handicapped; we don't want to solve problems; we don't want to labor all our lives; we don't want to be responsible. And perhaps we even have some doubt that God could possibly take care of us as well as the State can.
The proper role of the civil magistrate is to be terrors to evil doers and to protect the law-abiding. (Rom. 13:3-4) The civil magistrate is to apply God's law as designated to civil magistrates with impartiality. (Lev. 19:15) According to the Bible, the civil authority exists to protect those who obey God’s law and punish those who disobey God’s law, insofar as, and delimitated by, God’s law commands the lawbreakers and evil doers to be punished by the state. That’s it. Nothing more and nothing less than that.
Christians are not humanists. We worship and serve Christ--not ourselves, and not human autonomy writ large in the ersatz Daddy-State…anymore. We who believe in Jesus Christ have a perfect Father in heaven, and God has ordained in His Word how His Body is to care for the poor and needy. (Deut. 15:11 , Deut. 15:17 , Prov. 22:9 , 16, Prov. 31:20 , Ezek. 18:15-17 , Mal. 3:8-10 , Matt. 6:11 , Matt. 25:38-40 , Acts 4:32 , 1 Cor. 13:2-4 , 2 Cor. 8:1-4 , Eph. 4:28 , James 1:27 , James 2)
Free speech, for another example, is not to be punished by the state except for where commanded by God in the Holy Scriptures. All other forms of speech, including immoral, unwise, undesirable or profane/vulgar speech, should be restrained by the family and church cultures and disciplines; and God reserves to Himself to directly punish some forms of false swearing, etc.
Any humanist, Statist "law" which decrees that God’s Law-Word may not be proclaimed freely is unlawful and illegitimate. All such is man attempting to usurp God and legislate over Him, which is immoral.
May I encourage you today to believe the Word of God, even if it’s different from what you heard a man say? Pastors and others are only human and make mistakes, even serious ones, just like the rest of us.
Believe God; He is perfect. And His word is Truth.
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