21 February 2023
Do you ever get tired of reading about it? The alternative media is awash in the never-ending blather about how to have a good stable government. Everyone has their own list of necessary ingredients and various theoretical frameworks about how to devise and maintain a government that is moral and stable, keeping social order, etc.
And they are all uniformly wrong. None of them pays any attention at all to divine revelation. They keep reading their intellectual speculations back into the Scripture so that the truth never escapes.
The Bible assumes the worst of human nature; God knows us better than we know ourselves. He doesn't offer a plan of government that claims to reduce conflicts. Rather, He reveals His protocols on handling the inevitable violence that is burned into fallen human nature. It's not a question of squelching violence, but channeling it. In other words, it is absolutely impossible to prevent conflicts. Even in the best context, people will disagree about how things should be, and fights will most certainly come.
It is Satan who proposes peace among humans by pulling the center of gravity down to a human level. God says we are wired to respond to His initiative, and that our urges to create something different, something that makes sense to us, is not from Him. To keep us chasing something that could never exist, Satan encourages us to use the words of Scripture as a weapon.
The Devil teaches us to nitpick over particular verses of Scripture, as if each stands alone as some Medo-Persian edict that must be reconciled with the rest. This teaches us to pick and choose our favorite verses. God's Word is woven together to form a single fabric of truth. Stand back and see the pattern; see the whole. The New Testament offers good advice on how to separate and build new covenant communities. The unity of the churches was not in conceptual theology, but in a very pragmatic application of divine truth expressed in symbols. Splintering factions multiplying over particulars is how we reach a wider selection of people. There's a place for everyone.
The whole point of the Apostles' discussion of various heresies is that those variations were in conflict with the fabric of God's truth. The mere existence of variations was not a sin. The Apostles refer only to those that stepped away from revelation. And you'll notice that every heresy they mention was just a repeat of some false doctrine already condemned in the Old Testament.
Go all the way back to the Tower of Babel. God's answer there was alienating everyone into their own family groups, all different from each other, and all blessed in different ways. The kind of unity humans imagine was the very essence of failure, the single issue that brought God's wrath on Nimrod's empire. The symbolism of the narrative points to an effort to reach into Eternity on human terms, rather than to call on God and wait for Him to reveal what He required. Nimrod united the entire human race at that time around his brilliant vision. The unification of that empire was itself a fundamental sin.
God had said, "Spread out and multiply." That doesn't mean just the population, but it points to a proliferation of varied cultural expressions standing on the Covenant of Noah. You go forth into all the planet and build a manifestation of the Code that fits your location and the character of the people. And you keep on splitting up periodically as things morph.
This is why I keep reminding readers not to simply absorb my ideas, but to let my ideas provoke your own search for what God requires of you. You aren't supposed to like all my answers. A consistent theme of this blog is posing good questions. The whole point of Radix Fidem is meta: How should we approach the task? Religion means trying to express your faith. Faith is ineffable; it cannot be defined in human terms, but it can be expressed. How do you manifest your faith? What does it take for you to find peace with God? We are trying to find a common theme with every expectation of differentiation in outcomes.
The best human government we could possibly have under the Code have will result in elders and priestly figures peacefully breaking off and forming new covenant families every few generations. Anything else man devises must of necessity result in oppression and war, because it will always be something less than God's design.
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