Axe to the Root with Bojidar Marinov | Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Network

Welcome to Episode 30 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 20 minutes we will be talking about fear. Fear as psychology and as motivator of personal behavior and reactions. But also as collective psychology and as motivator of collective behavior and reactions. Fear as a government policy. Fear also as a political motivation and – very important – manipulation. Last, but not least, fear as a spiritual state of the soul of man, and from there, as a religious and moral commitment. And, following from that, fear as idolatry and rebellion against God.

I want to start with the following two questions: First, what is the most powerful motivator for man’s behavior, and the most powerful factor behind man’s action, mentioned in the Bible? And, second, what is the most commonly repeated commandment in Scripture?

The answers may surprise you.

A little over a year ago, while writing an article titled “Terrorism: Biblical Analysis and Solutions” (you can find it on ChristendomRestored.com), I conducted a small experiment, asking a dozen of Christians these same questions. I picked only people who were Reformed seminary graduates; two were church elders, preaching on weekly basis. The rest of them had some active ministry of one sort or another, even if they were not professional ministers of the Gospel. I asked them to answer based on their knowledge so far, without doing a special research on the questions. The answers puzzled me somewhat; only one got it right. The majority of the rest picked “love” as the most powerful motivator, and the commandment to love as the most commonly repeated in Scripture. I am not trying to criticize or judge these men, I can assure you, but this does show we need a better understanding of Biblical psychology.

Indeed, far from judging or criticizing these men, it is understandable why they would think that love should be the most powerful motivator mentioned in the Bible and why the commandment to love should be the most commonly repeated commandment. After all, God is love, and for us to be faithful to the image of God in us, we should be expressing God’s love to our fellow human beings. The commandments to love God and love our neighbor are indeed the two greatest commandments – if we measure them by hierarchy, according to Jesus’s words in Matt. 22: 37 and Mark 12:30. obviously, God Himself would want our whole being and action would be controlled by this motivator of love – love toward God and love toward our neighbor. That’s what Jesus came for, to demonstrate the love of God in the strongest and most direct manner, by giving His life not just for his friends, but even for His enemies (John 15:13; Rom. 5:8). God wants us to be motivated by love first and foremost, and such must be the foundation of all our action and thought. As it was in the example of Jesus, love as a motivator requires a negation of self, a self-sacrifice. When we are driven by love, we are not seeking our own, we are seeking the welfare and success of others. In Scripture, God doesn’t forbid self-love and self-preservation; otherwise, God’s promises wouldn’t make any sense, nor would the commandment “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” And yet, true love goes beyond that, namely, we are given a new commandment, to love out neighbor more than we love ourselves, and to love God with all our heart and all our strength – which would naturally leave next to nothing to loving ourselves before God.

And yet, after the Fall, while love remains the most important motivator and commandment, it is not the mots powerful motivator. Something else is.

The correct answer is: fear. Fear is the most powerful motivator for man’s behavior. It is everywhere in the Bible; it seems to control every man in it. Every single character in the Bible – whether good or bad, righteous or wicked – is at some point motivated by fear of something or someone. (With one notable exception: Samson.) Even righteous men, men who in everything else loved God and obeyed God, succumb to fear at one or another point of their lives, showing that they don’t have the perfect love of which 1 John 4:18 speaks: “perfect love casts out fear.” Even Abraham, for all his faith, was overcome with fear twice – in Gen. 12 and Gen. 20 – and lied to local rulers that Sarah was his wife. (She must have been a gorgeous 90-year-old lady, a natural object of desire for the heathens.) If Abraham, the father of all who believe, could be so overcome with fear, fear is obviously a very serious challenge to all men, including the most faithful ones. And even those who have almost perfect faith and love can be sometimes overcome by fear, we should expect that the rest of mankind would be driven by fear in a much deeper and more powerful way.

Fear, indeed, is ubiquitous in the world after the Fall. A simple statistics shows that the word “fear” in all its variations (“fear,” “dread,” “terror,” “dismay,” “distress,” etc.) is mentioned more than 1,400 times in the Bible. To compare, the next most mentioned factor for human behavior, “love” (including “charity,” “affection,” etc.), is mentioned only about 700 times. If we take in account the multiple cases where fear is not directly mentioned but is clearly implied as a motive for action or public policy, we will have an even greater margin in favor of fear as the most important factor controlling all human behavior.

In fact, God used a form of fear even before the Fall. If we define fear as a feeling or mindfulness of imminent danger, then God’s warning in Gen. 2:17, “in the day that you eat of it you will surely die,” was meant to strike some form of fear in their hearts. Of course, it was not meant to be the defining characteristic of God’s covenant with man – that defining characteristic was the Dominion Covenant in Gen. 1:26-27 – but it was still present. In the same way, after the Fall, God does use a limited form of fear to move man to repentance and obedience: Deut. 28:15-64, the cursings for disobedience are a clear evidence of it, as is the definition of wisdom in many places in the Bible: Fear of God. Just as in the Garden, that fear, as righteous and beneficial it is, is not supposed to be the defining factor of our behavior: we would become legalists if it was. But it is still there, in the life and the motivation of the covenant people of God.

It is to be expected, therefore, for fear to be a much greater part of the life of the reprobate. The New Testament, in fact, specifically describes the bondage of the reprobate in terms of fear, and salvation as deliverance from that fear; Heb. 2:15 says that Jesus “frees those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives.” Indeed, if it is love that casts out fear, and if the unbelievers are devoid of God’s love, they are left with nothing against their fear of death. If God is not on their side, and if they can’t bank on the promises of God for the world after their death, what else is left but an expectation of judgment. And what else is that expectation of judgment if not the very definition of fear of death? We should expect the unbelievers, therefore, to be almost entirely dominated by such fear.

If fear is such a defining characteristic of the slavery of the reprobate, we should also expect that human rulers who are in rebellion against God and want to take God’s place in ruling over their fellow human beings, to try to imitate God by sowing fear in the hearts of men. Cain left God’s presence in fear of what might happen to him after he murdered his brother. Five generations later, Lamech, a descendant of Cain, was now openly bragging of his ability to kill other human beings: “Listen to my voice, you wives of Lamech, give heed to my speech, for I have killed a man for wounding me, and a boy for striking me” (Gen 4:23). And what’s the purpose of this bragging? It is to issue a threat against anyone who would dare stand against Lamech, in the very next verse: “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” God’s threat of covenant sanctions which was supposed to use fear to warn man against disobedience was now transformed by a rebellious man into a man’s threat against his neighbor. From there, it was a small step to powerful men using fear as the mainstay of their political rule.

This progression, towards using fear as a government policy, is clearly visible in the OT. In his journeys, Abraham as a private citizen – although, quite powerful himself, given that he could defeat four kings using just his own resources – met only rulers who were still ruling in a benevolent way, as popular leaders. Some of them feared God to the point of voluntarily repenting of their actions and even paying restitution to Abraham for the crimes they committed against him. In the times of Joseph in Egypt, the Egyptian state already used prisons used as a government policy – and that policy, judging from the examples, had nothing to do with justice but with the whims of politically powerful men. Still, even then, Joseph as a ruler could not institute a compulsory government policy of confiscation of life, liberty, and property; he had to bargain them with the people of Egypt, using their desperate condition as a lever. (Contrary to those who claim that Joseph was acting as a modern socialist. He wasn’t. The Egyptians voluntarily surrendered themselves. Each one of them had the opportunity, during the years of abundance, to follow Joseph’s example and save his own grain instead of selling it. Or sell it at a higher price to Joseph. None of them read the signs, and none of them acted on them. They were too short-term-oriented. This is what enslaved them, not government compulsion.)

After Joseph, things went downhill quite quickly. In a few generations, the Egyptian state was now using fear on a large scale. The Egyptian state was motivated by fear of the Hebrews: Exodus 1:12, the Egyptians were in dread of the sons of Israel. The response of the Egyptian state is make the Hebrews fear the Egyptian state. More and more, fear entered the picture as a motivator and a policy. In the final account, the Hebrews, without God and having forgotten God in their prosperity, were so overcome by fear that the thought of resisting the Egyptian state never even occurred to them.

Fear continued increasing its hold on the nations after that. The entire journey of Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land was a battle between faith and fear. The opposition of the pagan nations to Israel was entirely motivated by fear. Fear was the number one motivator of the people of Jericho, as reported by Rahab to the spies in Joshua 2:9. Fear was also the reason why Israel did not complete the conquest of Canaan in Joshua’s time, according to Joshua 17:16. At every step from now on, we will see fear as the chief, and sometimes the only motivating factor in the life of nations and of individuals.

It became even uglier when it was adopted as official government policy by the surrounding pagan nations. We often wonder in our own day, sanitized and sanctified by two millennia of Christendom, how the ancients could tolerate the unspeakable cruelties of the ancient empires. The Assyrians were particularly cruel to their enemies, to the point of flaying alive thousands of prisoners. Why did they have to do it? The answer is: Their only way of forcing obedience was through fear. Fear was the preferred policy of Rome from its very beginning. In fact, the very founding myth of Rome has one of the founding brother, Romulus, killing his brother Remus for his mockery of Romulus wall and his leaping over it. Romulus words after the murder of his own brother remind us of Lamech and his bragging and threats: “So perish everyone who leap over my wall.” Rome developed this to the point of sentencing to torture and death everyone who in one way or another displayed any kind of defiance or disagreement with the Roman state. Out of this policy came the cross, and out of this policy came death by wild animals in the Coliseum. The cruelty so endemic to the Roman society – to slaves, to gladiators, to conquered nations, ultimately, to Christians – was a deliberate policy of sowing fear in the hearts of everyone who would stand in the way of the Empire. The Romans themselves were not without fear; when Augustus became and emperor, his propaganda was entirely addressed at the fear of his fellow Romans, promising them to not allow anything to change, and keep things as they have always been. The Roman society was the ultimate pagan society, the final version of what Satan could produce as a kingdom upon the earth. And its cohesion was entirely . . . fear. Not love, not honor, not even greed or desire for growth; it was all fear. By this we know the perfect pagan culture: it is driven by fear more than anything else.

It is for this reason that the most frequently repeated commandment in Scripture is . . . “Do not fear!” Being used by pagan rulers and their gods to produce worship of the pagan state, fear is not simply a state of mind or a feeling; it is not religiously or ethically neutral. In a pagan context, fear now becomes worship in itself; it is a religion rival to the faith in the God of Scripture. Fear itself becomes idolatry, for a man who has surrendered to fear, has nothing to surrender to God, he is entirely under the power of the enemy. So antithetical is fear to faith that Israel was condemned to wander 40 years in the wilderness because of fear – which was interpreted as lack of faith. And if you think this was a little too harsh, wait until you find out who is the first to be thrown in the lake of fire. That’s right, folks, Rev. 21:8 describes all the types whose portion is in the lake of fire, and the list starts with the . . . cowards, that is, the fearful. Some of Christ’s most important lessons to His disciples had to do with training them to courage in the face of adversity and persecution; when they failed, his reply was, “Ye of little faith.” Very obviously, fear is not considered a religiously neutral feeling or state of mind; it is a religion itself, an idolatrous religion, and God does not tolerate it in His worshipers.

In the face of the pagan culture of Rome, entirely dominated and motivated by fear, Christians threw a gauntlet: A faith which not only did not succumb to fear, but actively detested and rejected fear and defied the threats of the empire. Not even the worst punishments could shake their faith, not even death. It is not that Christians rebelled against the Empire; they just defied the very foundation of its power, that same fear of death which, according to Hebrews 2:15, keeps all unbelievers in slavery. Despising death and overcoming fear, they became too dangerous for a world which had known no more powerful motive than fear of death.

As it is to be expected, then, once Christianity became the dominant religion, it started changing the policy of civil government. And the first victim of the victorious march of Christianity was to be the politics of fear. The early Christian emperors were still willing to use fear to produce obedience – the pagan habits don’t die easily. But against their policy of fear they had a powerful opponent: the church, which taught that fear was sin, and the politics of fear was injustice. When Emperor Theodosius sent their troops to kill 7,000 protesters in Thessaloniki – a clear expression of the same old pagan politics of fear – Bishop Ambrose fearlessly criticized the Emperor and excommunicated him from the church for the use of this pagan policy. When the Emperor threatened to come and seize his church – another pagan act of sowing fear – Ambrose responded with double courage: “You don’t have the right to enter a private person’s home; what makes you believe you can enter the House of God?”

Gradually, in Christendom, the politics of fear started being replaced with politics of hope and courage. The Visigothic Kingdom in Spain, converted to Christianity under Isidore of Seville, and later Charlemagne’s Empire, demonstrate the first signs of what today could be called a policy of integration and co-operation, instead of fear. Neither kingdom survived long, but the seeds were sown. On the other end of Christendom, Byzantium, for all its shortcomings and remnants of paganism, was also developing a legal and social system which offered to its subjects more hope and dignity than fear and terror. Even the foreign policy of Byzantium changed compared to its predecessor, pagan Rome. Rome’s foreign policy was entirely focused on the number of legions it could muster; Byzantium’s was based on the number of missionaries and theologians it could train and send out.

The ultimate expression of that eradication of fear from the life and fabric of Christendom were the Crusades. We today can’t really fathom the real situation of the day; at the time of the First Crusade, the Muslim world 6 times the territory and 15 times the population of Christendom; a relevant comparison today would be Poland against the United States. It’s not that Christians at the time didn’t realize the power of their opponent; they did, for they had fought Muslims in Spain and they had seen the devastation of the Muslim armies on the powerful Eastern Empire. Had they been controlled by fear, as the pagans around them, the Crusades would have never started. But by the 10th century, Christendom as a culture had almost completely lost the ability to experience fear, even in the face of superior enemies. It was their enemies, the superior Muslim forces, who retreated for two centuries, for they were just as controlled by fear as any other group of pagans out there. The Age of Exploration, following in the footsteps of the Crusades, was also rather an Age of Fearlessness; it took lots of courage for whole populations to leave the security of their native lands and journey to the ends of the earth. The growth of the Christian faith meant more and more perfect obedience to the Scriptural command, “Do not fear!” And this obedience created a unique cultural attitude, which changed the world.

Even after the West started its apostasy from the Christian faith, courage and rejection of fear remained cherished ethical values, even for the neo-pagans. It has been interesting for me to study the psychology of Marxism and its dynamics over the last 150 years. Marxism started with a deep appreciation for the ethical values of Christianity; character traits like courage, self-control, rejection of fear were not only valued highly, they were self-consciously taught to the best cadres of the Communist parties. Marx insisted on such training, and much of the movement of socialist realism in arts in the Soviet Union had to do with teaching the young generation these values. Fear was just as condemned as it was under Christianity. For the first several decades of its existence, Marxism still hoped that it could capture the high ground of courage that Christians had occupied since the days of the Roman Empire.

Fear, unfortunately for the Marxists, can be cast out only by perfect love, and perfect love is a fruit of the Holy Spirit. Whatever inertia Marxism had from the legacy of Christendom in the West, it dissipated within a generation after its political victories in Eastern Europe. Stalin’s regime couldn’t maintain its power based on positive values; it had to restore the old pagan ways of ruling a people. The GULags were not something new. They were simply another incarnation of the Roman crosses and coliseums. There is only one way for pagan governments to control their subjects, and that is fear. Predictably, with the abandonment of Christianity, fear returned as the mainstay of government policies.

But don’t be quick to come to the conclusion that this resurrection of fear as motivator was limited to Communism. It has been resurrected in America today. As early as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, politics of fear was instituted in America, to this very day. I often suggest to people to read two inaugural addresses by US presidents, separated by 100 years: that by Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 and that by George W. Bush in 2005. Theodore Roosevelt is certainly far short of being a Christian politician, but in 1905 he was addressing a nation that was still predominantly Christian. There is not a single trace of manipulation through fear in that address; Roosevelt’s listeners were people who had no feeling of any imminent danger, and they wouldn’t be impressed if anyone promised them protection from danger. Fear was not a factor for them. In comparison, Bush’s speech of 2005 us directed at a nation which is in the grip of fear; the president promises that nation paralyzed by fear: “Don’t worry, I am here to protect you.”

So much is the politics of fear a part of our social life today, we don’t even realize it. The media just picks up one scare after another, and continue bombarding our minds with them with the purpose of training us to be obedient to the government which will protect us. Terrorism, ebola, the flu, anthrax, the refugees, global warming, etc., etc., more and more appear every day. The staff in government agencies are trained to be ethically insensitive and brutal by being indoctrinated with fear; police today are conditioned to think that the whole world is in a war against them, and thus they should be willing to shoot and kill people without any moral scruples. Even Christians today call for indiscriminate bombing of whole populations simply because we have been fear-manipulated by government propaganda. And why go in such depth; the last election campaign was entirely motivated by fear on both sides. Even one prominent Christian Reconstructionist author, calling for Christians to vote for Trump, admitted he is entirely motivated by fear. His exact words were: “It is not that I like Trump, I dislike him. But it is Hillary I fear, and therefore I believe we should all vote for Trump.” In one discussion, Christian apologists of Donald Trump were asked to provide one single positive reason to vote from Trump. After two weeks of arguing, not a single one of them was capable to give a single such reason; they all resorted eventually to their fear of Hillary Clinton. In a very direct, Biblical sense, Clinton is the real winner of that campaign, for she made Christians worship her through their fear of her.

We know we have become a pagan culture – even in our churches – when we are all motivated by fear. And we will know when the restoration of Christendom starts: and that will be when fear is cast out.

The book I will assign for reading this week is R.J. Rushdoony, Politics of Guilt and Pity. We as Christians need to start understanding how our faith affect politics, and how paganism affect politics. The sorry state of our civil institutions today is caused by our ignorance in this area. Time to start reversing the trend.

And remember my work in building an intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Bulgaria. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to the newsletter, and donate. For Christ’s glory and Kingdom.

Welcome to Episode 29 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 20 minutes we will be talking about one of the most cherished delusions of modern Americans, and especially of modern American church-goers, namely, that the Biblical function of civil government is to provide safety and security for its citizens. I said delusion, but I could as well say idolatry, for that delusion is not morally neutral (no delusion ever is), it is self-consciously based on a perverted view of the Covenant of God, and thus, on a perverted view of the Law of God. I know, I know, if you are one of those who believe that the government should provide for us safety and security, you are now confused or even inflamed, “Wait a minute! How is it idolatry to say that God created civil governments to provide safety and security for their citizens? Isn’t this what Romans 13 says about the ruler, that he should provide that safety and security? How would we be safe from criminals if the civil government doesn’t provide that safety? Etc., etc.”

A few listeners responded to previous episodes of Axe to the Root – specifically the episodes about police – with the same questions: If we don’t have police, who is going to oppose criminals? Who will protect us from criminals? You see, in the minds of modern Americans – and especially American church-goers – if the state is not there to prevent crime, no one will prevent crime, and therefore crime will skyrocket, and there will be no law-enforcement and therefore no respect to the law. Anarchy will follow. How is it idolatry to say that civil government is charged with fighting crime and providing safety and security?

Now, I have heard such concerns before, on other topics. When we hear them, we need to remember one very important trait of collective psychology: once the government monopolizes certain area of life and action, people get conditioned to think that only the government can provide services in that area of life and action. And when they get conditioned to think that way, their response to challenges against the government is always that: “But without the government, who will provide this or that?” The most common, of course, is the roads. Who will build the roads? I have seen much of it in Eastern Europe in the 1990s. If there is no government economic planning, who will know what goods we should produce and who will organize their production? If there are no government price controls, who would know what the prices should be? Wouldn’t all prices shoot through the roof and then no one will be able to afford anything? Without a government monopoly on railroads, how would we have affordable transportation? How would we have telephones, or electricity, or running water, or anything else, without government monopolies? Without internal passports, wouldn’t we have demographic disbalance? (Travel and residency were controlled under Communism; one couldn’t just move to live in another city, a permit was needed to change residency.) Without a government employment office, how would people be able to find jobs? Etc., etc. That question, “What will we do without the government?” is always the first question people ask when someone proposes that the government should withdraw from certain area. The question is always irrational, because it is obvious that there are much better alternative. And we know from Van Til work on the Christian theory of knowledge that all irrationality is fundamentally the fruit of some idolatry. This irrationality is not an exception; there is idolatry involved in that question, an idolatry that worships the state, and sees the state as a god-provider, in opposition to Jesus Christ. We have no king but Caesar.

Of course, the most obvious answer to this is that there were times, before the governments in the West started taking over areas of public life and monopolizing them, when the government was not there to control these areas. And guess what, all these areas were well regulated, and there was no chaos, and there were no shortages. Prices were fluctuating but affordable. Transportation was available and affordable. Roads were built. Communications were established. People found employment. There were doctors, and they were affordable even without insurance. Schools were abundant and, in most places, even free for the poorest members of the society. The world’s economy developed faster when the governments were still not in charge. The slowdown of economic growth came when the governments started taking over areas of public life and monopolizing them. Education, communications, transportation, welfare, etc., all these areas of life stagnated in both quality and supply when the governments took them over. And where the government monopolized them, things went even worse.

The same applied to law-enforcement. Throughout the history of Christendom, law-enforcement was a function of the local community, of all able-bodied men in the community. A local constable or sheriff was simply either an agent of the court or just a citizen hired for specific tasks. The law was to be enforced by everyone, not by a professional class of government agents. And guess what: the laws were enforced. Crime was low, compared to today, and crimes were promptly investigated and punished. Alexis de Tocqueville testified about America in the 1830s: no professional police, and yet, hardly a crime was left unsolved and unpunished. Cities had citizen watches, not professional standing armies. When they started hiring professional standing armies, crime skyrocketed. Law-enforcement is like everything else: make the government provide it, the result will be shortage of quality and supply. Never trust the state for your safety and security.

Historical evidence is a good help for our understanding of reality, but nothing beats Biblical evidence. What does the Bible say about the role of government? Are there any specific provisions in the Law of God about safety, security, and law-enforcement? What is the proper role of civil government in the law of God? Is it to provide safety and security? How should the laws be enforced in a Christian society? The answers to these questions would take many more episodes, but we want to look at one particular aspect of them: social safety and security, and the role of civil government.

(Just as a side note, I use “safety and security” as a single phrase to denote a state of freedom from risk, danger, or injury. The etymological difference between safety and security is one of nuance, and dictionaries consider the two words directly synonymous. This, in case someone wants to nitpick on my choice of words.)

Before we answer these questions, we need to establish the difference between justice, on one hand, and safety and security and law-enforcement, on the other. Many American Christians are hopelessly confused about these two categories, and they generally believe that justice and safety are the same, and therefore they are the same government policies. But in reality, a civil government can not be involved simultaneously in justice and in providing safety and security. The two are contradictory. But let’s first explain the two categories in detail.

Justice is a category that has to do with crimes that are already committed. From the perspective of justice as a principle of policy and government action, the function of government is, first, to restore things to their original condition before the crime, and second, to punish the criminal for his crime. Thus, justice consists in two principles, the positive principle of restitution and the negative principle of punishment. I talked about it in a previous podcast, and we saw that in some cases restitution and punishment are combined in the same verdict – as in the case of double restitution. In other cases, injustice committed is only met with restitution but not punishment – as in the case of single restitution for negligence. In other cases, where the original state can not be restored – as in the case of murder – there is only punishment, that is, death penalty. In all these cases, however, one element must be present: there has to be some injustice committed – crime against life (murder), or against liberty (kidnapping), or against property (theft), or negligence against life, liberty, or property. Justice as an action and as a policy is not triggered unless there is a crime committed.

Obviously, then, a civil government that is committed to justice will generally be a passive government. When there are no crimes committed in the society, such civil government will be inactive; obviously, if the individuals in the society are just and keep the law, there is no reason for a government to dispense justice. Thus, if the government is passive, the only government institution in the society will be the courts, where the judges sit and people come to them with their cases and complaints and disputes. Government, then, as an institution, won’t exist outside the courtroom, and will certainly have no power over non-criminal individuals. The only people who will legally be under the government’s power will be the convicted criminals. Everyone else, that is, everyone who has not committed injustice against his neighbors, will be free of government interference and control.

Safety and security, on the other hand, are a category that has to do with prevention of crime. That is, to translate it in terms of time, it has to do with crimes that are not committed yet. A policy designed to prevent future crimes rather than just restore the victim and punish the criminal after the crime has been committed would necessarily require a government that is constantly active, and constantly trying to uncover attempts at future crimes, whether they are real or imaginary. It will have to know the future, or be able to predict the future based on certain data. But since a crime is not a physical phenomenon, it is an ethical decision of the heart of man, such a government will have to be able to read the hearts of men in order to be able to predict their ethical decisions.

Obviously, then, a government committed to safety and security will have to be a constantly active government. Whether there are crimes in the society or not, such government will always have to be operational, and will always have to implement in action some positive policies. It will not be limited to the court room; it will erect a multitude of new offices, and send swarms of officers to harass the people and eat out their substance. Such government will have to place under its power not only the criminals, but the non-criminal citizens as well: for remember, its focus is not on crimes already committed but on future crimes, and therefore on future possible criminals, people who are not criminals yet. Such a government which is expected to provide safety and security will have to become executive, not simply judiciary, and will have to control the lives of its citizens to the minutest detail; since it has no access to the inner heart of man, only thorough control over his actions will make it possible for the state to prevent him from committing a crime. Thus it will have to impose on its citizens regulations, license and permit regimes, travel restrictions, ID cards, and total surveillance in general. Justice will not be served anymore, because the focus of government policy won’t be the criminal, but the law-abiding members of the society. In fact, if anything, such a government would favor criminals and will probably hire them, for only an accomplished criminal could have an insight into the hearts of other criminals, and would be able to predict their behavior.

These developments are inevitable once the state is charged with the task of predicting the future, that is, providing safety and security, and law-enforcing, to the society. The state will inevitably become tyrannical, and justice will be aborted in the land.

So, which government is described in the Bible as the Biblical ideal for government? Unfortunately, many Christians – including some theonomists – are quite deceived about the nature of Biblical government. Many don’t even think in terms of the Biblical purpose of civil government. Most Christians – if they even believe that the Bible gives us principles for civil government – believe that the government mandated in the Law of God is exactly like modern governments – devoted to providing safety and security. It’s just needs to be a bit better, you know, being Christian and moral, but as a whole, it’s purpose is that: to provide safety and security. None of them stops to think that if the role of the government is to provide safety and security, this will require the government to be able to predict the future, to read the hearts and minds of its citizens, and to have power over non-criminal individuals. Many may be even professed opponents of big government; but none of them stops to think that big government is based on that one single presupposition: that the government must provide safety and security for its citizens.

In contrast, civil government in the Law of God is freed from the function of providing safety and security. It is only concerned with justice, with already committed crimes. In the Law of God, there are no civil servants charged with the task of preventing crime; there are no government offices to declare government policies, no armies of bureaucrats or cops to enforce those policies. In a Biblical society, the only civil ruler a man will ever meet face to face is a judge or a panel of judges – and that only if he is charged with a crime or when he is summoned as a witness to a crime or a dispute. In the rare case of war, a man joining the military would find himself under commanders, but their powers were limited to wartime and to the battlefield and the battle camp. And that was it. In a society where the government is limited to dispensing justice – not preventing crimes – a decent, law-abiding man can live his whole life without ever having to submit to any government bureaucracy. It is for this reason that R.J. Rushdoony, when discussing the nature of theocracy, the Biblical social order described in the Law of God, described it as “the closest thing to radical libertarianism that can be had.” There are some today who are trying hard to twist the words of Rushdoony to mean something he never meant, and to use the Law of God to defend some form of mild statism where the modern state still has some power over law-abiding men. But the truth is, as Rushdoony said in that article, “The Meaning of  Theocracy,” the basic government of man is self-government. And there are more governments as well – school, family, business, etc. – but the state is a very minimal one. In fact, when it comes to safety and security from crime, Rushdoony specifically says that the state is not a solution but part of the problem. Quote:

“It is true that crime needs suppression, but, instead of suppressing crime, the State safeguards its own monopoly of crime.”

He continues by saying where safety and security is not, and where it is. Quote:

“The solution to crime and injustice is not more power to the state (!) but God’s Law and a regenerate man.”

In other places Rushdoony gives examples how law enforcement – and thus safety and security – must be done by the whole community. It is the community as a whole – not some professional government organization – which only can assure that crime is low. Community includes many different levels of social government – families, churches, schools, businesses, voluntary organizations – and none of these are civil government. Their power can’t be coercive, for the heart of man is not changed by coercion; and, as we saw, prevention of crime is an issue of the heart of man, not of policies and scientific predictions. Coercion must come only after a crime is committed, and it must be specifically aimed at restoration and punishment for the crime itself, not at redeeming the man or the society.

Any social order that comes not from the Law of God, however, must be by default collectivist and statist; it must worship the collective man as god, and therefore worship the most powerful institution of collective man as god: the state. Any system that doesn’t acknowledge the individual man as an independent moral agent under God won’t acknowledge self-government as a legitimate government – at best, self-government will be only subservient to the state. Thus, any statism – strong or mild, in any variety – comes from this idolatry of the collective man and of the state. Yes, I said, of any variety, even of the Christian variety – those church goers who object to the radical libertarianism of theocracy and want a state that will enforce some supposedly Christian agenda. Also, any ideology that places safety and security in the hands of the state is also an idolatrous ideology – for it comes, by necessity, from the presupposition that the state is capable of predicting the future, reading the hearts of men, and changing the hearts of men. Pagan governments just love to play providers of safety and security; nothing gives them a better legitimacy for their claims to divinity than the provision of safety and security. I said in an earlier article on Axe to the Root blog, titled “Political Opportunism Doesn’t Fight Tyranny, It Perpetuates It,” quote:

Those who call for the government to provide safety and security – as opposed to the Biblical task of only retributive and restitutional justice – are calling for open judicial idolatry. And since idolatry always brings tyranny, they are calling also for judicial tyranny. From the Jacobin Committee of Public Safety, through the Nazi SD (Security Service) and SiPo (Security Police), Mussolini’s TULPS (Laws for Public Safety), the Communist KGB (Committee for State Security) and Stasi (State Security), to our modern American Homeland Security, Transport Security Administration, and National Security Agency, and to the modern American cops’ “It’s for your safety” when they unlawfully arrest and torture innocent people, “safety” and “security” have been the buzzwords for the government’s terrorizing and spying on its own population in the name of taking care of them. Haven’t we learned anything from history that we want more of the same?

Once the government is given the task to act preemptively to provide safety, there is no logical limit to what it can do to anyone, including its own citizens. If a group of non-criminal foreigners can be controlled and kicked out because they are a “security threat,” what would stop the government from doing the same thing to a group of non-criminal citizens, for instance, gun owners? Such a concept of government would justify the violation of any civil rights we today enjoy, and eventually will destroy all liberty. Haven’t we learned from history? [end of quote]

The most obvious application of this “safety and security” state today in America is gun control. Those who favor the Second Amendment often complain that the gun-control advocates complain about guns used in crimes, but their proposed laws never target criminals, they always target the law-abiding gun owners. And in an amazing feat of schizophrenia, those same people then are all for supporting police and the thin blue line and praying for police, because supposedly the state – and its police – are supposed to provide safety and security. But a government that is charged with providing safety and security will do exactly that: it will target the law-abiding citizens, not the criminals, because safety and security are not about already committed crimes but about future crimes. By default, the state these Second Amendment fans want, is the same state that will target them specifically, for their insistence to have guns. This blindness and the schizophrenia of so many people in modern America is one of the most baffling characteristic of our age. Sound reason and logical thinking seem to have disappeared from among modern American Christians and conservatives in general.

But there are many more applications. The Social . . . er . . . Security administration is the product of the same ideology, that the state should provide safety and security. In fact, all kinds of welfare are product of the same ideology. The Federal Reserve (reserve, as in security) is the product of the same ideology. The hundreds of thousands of laws and regulations are the product of the same ideology. The more Christians insist that the state must provide safety and security, the more the state acts accordingly, and enslaves them more and more. When people want safety from the state, the state becomes a god. And then God the Creator leaves such a people to their false god, enslaved, and still not safe and secure, until they cry out back to Him, and restore justice in the land.

As R.J. Rushdoony said, the solution to crime and injustice, that is, true security, comes not from the state. It comes from God and from covenant men. As long as Christians in this land continue to worship the state and expect safety from it, we are going to be losing the cultural war.

The book I will assign for reading this week is Joel McDurmon’s Commentary on 1 Samuel. Read the story of a nation that could have both freedom and security under God but chose slavery under men, and lost its security as well. In the final account, it is brambles that come to rule over them, and tyranny follows.

Eastern Europe was there. It is shaking off this horrible legacy, slowly and painfully, while America seeks to acquire it. Help me in my mission in Eastern Europe, to accelerate the process of abandoning paganism and restoring God’s liberty and justice for all. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to the newsletter, and donate. God bless you all.

Welcome to Episode 28 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 20 minutes we will be talking about modern Reformed preachers, or, rather, neo-Reformed preachers, or, even more precisely, the multitude of preachers and theologians today who pretend being Reformed but are, at the very best, the same old Pelagian ilk which in history has always, in their teaching, replaced the sovereignty of God with the sovereignty of the autonomous man. I have already spoken in a previous podcast about the ministry-industrial complex; that conglomerate of denominations, churchian celebrities, preachers, media ministries, seminaries, etc., which is geared towards consuming the billions of dollars in donations which the gullible public of American Christians generously gives away in the hope that these ministries really do something for the Gospel. This week we will be talking about a specific part of the ministry-industrial complex, namely, the Reformed/Calvinistic part, or, to be more precise, the fake Reformed and fake Calvinistic part of it. You see, in the ministry-industrial complex, there are many niches and therefore many soap-boxes for different kinds of donors with different tastes; the only soapbox that is missing is that of Christian Reconstruction and theonomy, for the message of Christian Reconstruction and theonomy calls for a comprehensive change of culture, and that is dangerous to the ministry-industrial complex. The closest to theonomy that the ministry-industrial complex gets is TULIP preachers who spend their whole careers focused on individual salvation and side issues like the mode of baptism and for or against the KJV translation, all mixed with watered-down moralism on sexual or alcoholic issues. Thus, those of the prospective donors who define themselves as Reformed or Calvinistic, listen to those TULIP preachers and say, “Well, they may not give us a comprehensive message, but at least they are saying something Reformed, right?” The problem here is, of course, that TULIP in itself doesn’t mean Reformed, and Reformed is much more than soteriology. I have written about it in an article titled, “TULIP Doesn’t Mean Reformed; City on a Hill Does.” The Reformation, to use the words ascribed to the Strassburg Reformer Martin Bucer, is nothing less than the Christianization of all of life. Anything less than that is not Reformed. And given that many of these celebrities who pass for “Reformed” not only do not preach the Christianization of all of life, but also actively preach against it and against the concept of Christendom, that is, a Christian civilization based on Biblical principles, they are not Reformed at all.

But don’t make the mistake to believe that the error of these fake Calvinist preachers consists in only having a truncated Gospel, or limiting their topics to a few propositions about individual salvation. There is a much more profound error preached from our modern so-called “Reformed” pulpits, an error that is severely misleading their listeners away from the Reformation, and away from a truly Biblical theology and worldview. It is a subtle error, and like all subtle errors it is a dangerous error. It replaces the worship of God with worship of man, while pretending to worship God. And it is an error that unless exposed and dealt with, establishes in the churches humanism dressed in correct, Reformed theological wording – which is the most dangerous kind of humanism.

The best expression of that new kind of humanism came through the words of one of those celebrity preachers who these days pass for “Reformed.” But before you are tempted to focus on that particular celebrity preacher, keep in mind that his words are not just his own, they are representative of the whole specter of supposedly “Reformed” celebrities today; and the sentiment and the presuppositions behind them run deep into the modern churches, even those who pass for “conservative” and even “Reformed,” and are at the foundation of the established practice – individual and social – of the majority of Christians today. That particular preacher expressed his views in the following way:

“The Gospel is very simple and it can be expressed just in a few words. But the Bible is big because our need [that is, the need of man] is big.”

The preacher’s name is John Piper. Again, don’t assume I am picking on Piper. This ideology is not limited to him, it is endemic in the American churches. In all of them, not just the liberal ones. Billy Graham liked to repeat the mantra that he was “just preaching the Gospel,” meaning he was limited to the personal salvation of man. His son, Franklin Graham, repeated the same mantra in an interview 6 or 7 years ago, when asked whether we are supposed to fight the cultural war and Christianize the culture; based, obviously, on the presupposition that the Gospel was small enough to not include the culture and not change it. (That was before he decided to enter the political arena and start shilling for the Republican Party.) John MacArthur repeats the same mantra in almost every other sermon; insisting that the Kingdom of God is limited to the church and therefore the Gospel doesn’t care for what is happening in the culture. Michael Horton, R. Scott Clark, and others at Westminster West in Escondido are so devoted to their notion of the separation of Law and Gospel, that they even exclude the Great Commission of Matt. 28:18-20 from the Gospel – because it requires obedience, and the Gospel is too small to include personal obedience, let alone cultural obedience. If these supposedly “Reformed,” supposedly “conservative” theologians and preachers have such a teeny-weeny view of the Gospel, we don’t even have to go to the liberal churches and theologians; who needs them when we have such “conservative” ones.

To all of them, the Gospel is something very small, and it can be expressed in six words, or in six minutes, or in one sentence, etc. The Gospel, yes, the kerygma of God, the solemn declaration of the Creator and King, the marching orders by which He restores the Kingdom and reveals His will to mankind and history, and announces the giving of all authority to His Son, and prophesies the submission of all power and authority to the reign of Jesus Christ, in history, before the Second Coming . . . is a “small thing” for these preachers, and if He had to write about it, it would be an article of one page or something. But boy, when it comes to man and his needs, they are big, I tell ya, and since God wrote the Bible not to reveal Himself – which if He did, as we said, would be only an article of a sentence or a page – but to address the needs of man, the Bible had to be so big. Because man is big, and his needs are big. Not like the small thing that is the Gospel.

I have dealt with the issue of the nature of the Gospel before, in a sermon titled “How Big Is the Gospel?” In it, I have shown that contrary to their view of the Gospel, the Gospel is all-encompassing; nothing remains outside its scope. Paul’s description of the Gospel in 1 Cor. 15 starts with the fact of individual redemption and salvation, but it doesn’t end there; the story and the description of the Gospel continues until all things are put in subjection to Christ, and all things means all things, in history and on earth. Man is the small thing, and his needs are really small compared to the Gospel; the Gospel goes way beyond the personal salvation of man, and the Bible is big because the Gospel, and the God behind that Gospel, are enormous.

This ideology of the modern preachers passes for Reformed but in reality, it misses an important characteristic of the Reformation. A number of modern preachers, when asked to define the Reformed doctrines, resort to the notion of “grace.” The Reformation, according to MacArthur, for example, was about the “doctrines of grace.” All the others agree. It is to be expected, of course, that if the Gospel is small, but man and his needs are so big, the focus of the modern churches would be on that characteristic of the Gospel which mostly suits man and his needs: grace. Grace, of course, is an important part of the Gospel, and it is an important part of the theology of the Bible, but it is certainly not the central part of it. If grace was the central characteristic of Christian theology, then it would be the underlying principle of all of God’s dealings with man and with His creation. But we know from the Bible that God’s grace is limited; He doesn’t scatter it promiscuously to all, everywhere. It is granted to some people; to others, it is not. For God to decide to limit His grace, there must be a more important factor in God’s being and God’s plan, one that defines grace and decides how and when God will bestow it. And it is this more ultimate and more important factor that should be the center of our Christian theology – and therefore, of our practice as well.

That more ultimate and more important factor is the Sovereignty of God. Grace only serves man. The Sovereignty of God serves God and His plan – sometimes in accordance with man’s needs, sometimes against man’s needs. When God stood face to face with Pharaoh in the person of Moses, He didn’t declare His grace to Pharaoh personally; he declared His Sovereignty. Pharaoh was to taste nothing of God’s grace; from the moment of Moses’s first words after his return, to the moment the waters of the Red Sea closed above Pharaoh’s head, it was a constant downhill of one judgment after another on Pharaoh and his realm. To say that the central doctrine of Christianity is the grace of God is to make the testimony of the Bible void – for there are scores of people in the Bible who met God face to face, like Pharaoh, and all they learned was judgment. But both unbelievers and believers learned of one thing: God is Sovereign. To some, He is Sovereign to life and grace; to others, to judgment and death. That was the central message of the Reformation: Not the TULIP, which was formulated much later, but the concept that God is Sovereign and He has in His hand the destinies of men. Martin Luther’s book, Bondage of the Will, which he himself considered among his most important works, was in defense of the Sovereignty of God, and every single Reformer after him continued in the same vein. And that Sovereignty was not only in salvation, as many modern preachers claim, it was in everything: from individual salvation to the way the culture and its institutions should operate.

When man and man’s needs are placed at the center of Christian preaching and teaching, and when God’s grace is made the central doctrine of Christianity, God is then reduced to a servant of man and his needs. The God of the modern fake “Reformed” theologians is no bigger than a fairy which hovers over man, eager to give him whatever he needs, salvation, justification, sanctification, everything to save his precious little hide from hell. And that’s where the purpose of God ends for these modern theologians, and that’s where their preaching stops, accordingly. When they say that they are “only preaching the Gospel,” the real meaning behind these words is, “we are only preaching a God whose main purpose is to serve man.” Not to establish the Kingdom He promised. Not to save the world, according to John 3:16-17. Not to transform the earth to mirror the order He has in heaven, according to the Lord’s Prayer. Not to make all the nations obey everything He has commanded, because He is given all authority in heaven and on earth. All of these things concern God, not man, and man has no need for any of them. He needs his salvation; he needs to save his hide from the eternal fire. And that’s what God is there to give him, and that’s all that the Bible was written for. God is the servant, man is the one who is served.

When man and his needs are placed at the center, then the very meaning and essence of teaching and doctrine – from the pulpits and in the seminaries – will change. Theology won’t be the central discipline anymore; it will be replaced by anthropology: a study of man as the ultimate goal and purpose of God’s actions, the real hero of the Bible and its message. Man and his needs will be examined in detail; after all, they are what the Bible is all about. Man can still be acknowledged to be a sinner – for this is the theologically correct language of the Reformation. But since the Gospel is now made to serve that sinner’s needs – instead of making the sinner serve the Gospel and the King of the Gospel – that sinner will be thoroughly examined so that his needs are known in detail, and thus read into the Bible. The Bible itself will be re-interpreted from the perspective of the needs of man, not of the character of God or the Sovereignty of God. Theologians who hold to such humanistic view of the Bible as John Piper and other supposedly “Reformed” celebrities, will make it the goal of their preaching to discover newer and newer elements and characteristics of man’s being and nature. Whether these characteristics are real or imaginary won’t be of any consequence: what will matter is to find man in the Bible as the purpose of the Bible, to make anthropology the queen of sciences, and to focus all knowledge on man.

The problem comes, however, in the fact that the Bible speaks very little about the nature of man. As I have pointed before in a sermon titled, “What Is Man?”, the Bible is silent about the metaphysical nature of man. Man is not defined as a static being in the Bible, he is not defined as what he is. He is only defined dynamically, as what he is created and commanded to do. He is made in God’s image, but we don’t know the metaphysical nature of that image; we simply can’t, God is beyond out comprehension as a Being, we only know Him from His works. But this image is explained to us dynamically in Genesis 1: “and let them have dominion.” We can’t find anything in the Bible on man’s static nature; we can’t find anything on his needs. We only find man defined in terms of his service to God, under the Covenant of God. You want to know the definition of man? Created to serve God by exercising godly dominion over the earth. No other definition is available.

Thus, for these theologians and preachers to find man and his need in the Bible, they have to make it up. They have to conjure man’s nature out of their own imagination, and ascribe to man imaginary and mystical properties to make him that gigantic important being for whom the big Bible was written. His psychology, his will, his intellect, his feelings and emotions, his perceptions, his well-being and welfare, his deep desires, moral qualities, even his insecurity and doubts and imperfections, all need to be studied thoroughly and combined into a science more important than theology. After all, this is what the Bible is all about, right? Sermons need to reflect this extended study of man and his needs, seminary courses need to focus on man and his needs, evangelism needs to address man and his needs . . . in everything, eventually, man and his needs must become the central point. Theology, then, or the Gospel of the Kingdom, or anything that is not directly concerned with man and his needs, must take the back seat. Man and his needs are what matters.

If you are tempted to conclude that I am exaggerating, look at the results. The results today are obvious. A recent study on the theological convictions of church members in the US showed that the vast majority of them either have no clear theological convictions, or where they have them, these convictions are rather heterodox and even heretical. Another study showed that, among churchgoers again, a majority believes there is nothing wrong with sodomite marriage. Another study some time ago showed that in the South, in the very Bible Belt of the nation, a significant number of women who go to church have had at least one abortion, and see no problem with that. It is easy to blame the unbelieving world and liberal theology and the seeker-sensitive church and the younger generation, and many Reformed preachers and seminary professors have indulged in such criticism. The problem is, they are just as much to blame for it as everyone else; for it is from their pulpits that that truncated, humanistic Gospel focused on man and his needs comes from. Man and his needs are made the center, God is made subservient to man’s need, then why wouldn’t all of man’s needs be considered, whether real or imaginary. (And who says which are real and which imaginary?) If two men feel the need to be married, God wouldn’t have anything against it, would He? If a mother doesn’t need a child now, she is justified to get rid of it, right?

Christian literature that comes out of these supposedly Reformed circles is no better, even when it is filled with theologically correct language. Evangelism in the modern church is less based on the commandments of God and more structured along the lines of modern psychology and sales techniques. Think of the altar calls in so many churches whose purpose is to psychologically manipulate the attendees in the service to come forward; all of modern evangelism utilizes similar manipulation techniques. If you think such manipulation is limited certain denominations – like the Southern Baptists, for example – I will reply that I have seen Presbyterian missionaries using similar techniques on the mission field. Man and his need is placed at the center, evangelism then addresses mostly man and his need, and very little Christ and His Kingdom. We have today thousands of books coming from our seminaries and theologians that cover some obscure topics of personal spiritual betterment or sanctification; books on psychology and counseling and the sacraments and the emotional needs of Christians and on personal relationships etc., etc., etc. But we have almost nothing on building and expanding the Kingdom of God in history, on earth. Outside the books of the Christian Reconstructionists, the overall motive for the majority of authors is what man can get away from the glorious salvation God has given him.

It should be obvious that the Prosperity Gospel is also a product of this view. Yes, yes, I know, many modern preachers have denounced the Prosperity Gospel . . . but is their own gospel any different in essence, or is it only different in the details? If John Macarthur insists that the Gospel is only the good news of salvation, and Joel Osteen says that it is of salvation and prosperity, there is no essential difference between the two; both declare that the Gospel is about the needs of man. The only difference is that one defines the needs of man narrowly, as only the spiritual need of salvation, the other more broadly. (As a side note, Osteen has it on Macarthur, because the Bible does speak on material prosperity as a legitimate need of man.) Macarthur and others like him may protest loudly against the Prosperity preachers but the truth is, they are guilty of the same, by limiting their own view of the Gospel to man’s salvation and by making God subservient to man. One only follows from the other.

But the influence of this humanistic gospel goes even further, into our modern social and political ideologies and practices as well. We are used to hear both conservative politicians and church leaders say that America has abandoned God. Some even go as far as calling for us to restore God in American politics and American civil government. This was a Christian nation; it is not anymore, at least by what we see in our legislation and our courts today – but also in our economic endeavors, and in our government regulations, and in our welfare, and foreign aid, etc., etc. We do not serve God as a nation. But let’s be honest, this trend didn’t start with the offices of our politicians, it started with the pulpits in our churches and our seminaries, where this humanistic, truncated gospel of the Needs of Man was substituted for the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. In a previous episode, I showed how the emasculation of man in Hollywood movies didn’t start with Hollywood, it started with our churches. In the same way, this apostasy in politics serving man rather than God didn’t start with the politicians; it started with our churches. Obviously, if the main point of the Bible is the need of man – whether for salvation, or justification, or sanctification, or anything else – then there is no problem if the main point of politics and government is not the Kingdom of God but the needs and the desires of man. Blame the church. And no, I am not speaking of the liberal churches. I am speaking of the good old Reformed conservative churches. They know better, and they bear greater responsibility.

But contrary to this “only the gospel” mentality, contrary to this truncated gospel of the needs of man, Jesus declares how we should view ourselves in relation to Christ and His Gospel of the Kingdom, in Luke 17:7-10: “Which of you, having a slave plowing or tending sheep, will say to him when he has come in from the field, ‘Come immediately and sit down to eat’? “But will he not say to him, ‘Prepare something for me to eat, and properly clothe yourself and serve me while I eat and drink; and afterward you may eat and drink’? “He does not thank the slave because he did the things which were commanded, does he? “So you too, when you do all the things which are commanded you, say, ‘We are unworthy slaves; we have done only that which we ought to have done.’”

As scandalous as it sounds in our humanistic age, man, in relation to the Gospel, is like that slave: his needs are not taken in account, except at the end, after he has served his Master. Even after we have returned from a long and tiresome day of work, we still have obligations to Him. He has won a kingdom to Himself, we are His property. He doesn’t serve us, we serve Him. We exist for the greater purpose of the Kingdom of God, and this Kingdom far exceeds our need to save our precious souls from hell. We have the obligation to bring His glory and reign to every aspect of our lives and our culture; whether this will serve our real or imaginary needs is of no consequence. We may eat and drink afterward. Preachers and teachers who teach that we and our salvation are the focus of Christ’s Gospel are preaching another gospel, not the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And unless we reject heir preaching, we will see our culture sinking deeper and deeper into ignorance, darkness, and rebellion against God. Ideas have consequences.

The book I will assign for reading today is R.J. Rushdoony’s A Word in Season, a 7-volume set. While you may know Rushdoony as a heavy-duty theologian, this set will surprise you. It is actually devotional literature. But these are not self-serving, introspective devotions, like the theology of he modern fake “Reformed” preachers, where the “devotion” is to nothing else but to the individual salvation of the person. These are true devotions to God offered by a man who sees himself as merely a servant, and Christ as all in all, worthy of ultimate glory and personal loyalty. Read these books, and teach your kids from them.

And keep our mission in Bulgaria in your prayers, and also in your considerations for donations and support. There lots of secular humanism to be fought in Eastern Europe, and we have been making progress. With your help, we will continue. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. God bless you all.