God, Government & Christian Nationalism

Hello, and thank you for listening to the

Testing the Spirits podcast. I titled this episode, God and Government. God and Government.

First of all, if people don't believe in God, government becomes their God. It's obvious that's becoming a common thing these days.

Right and wrong is decided not by the Lord and giving the Ten Commandments. No, no, no. Right and wrong is being decided by government, which really means right and wrong is being dictated by a bunch of powerful rich people.

So that's disturbing, obviously. So we're going to talk about that, and then we're also going to talk about the

Christian's responsibility to government. The year 2020 was a real eye -opener.

The government started trying to exercise authority that God didn't give to government.

And 2020 saw the government, you know, enforcing the law for some people and not others.

So we'll get into all of that, but let's just first establish, so nobody gets the wrong idea of what

I'm trying to say. Let's first establish that government is an institution ordained by God.

Human government is God's idea. And we see that going all the way back to the book of Genesis chapter 9.

On the most basic level, we see government being implemented by God in Genesis 9 verse 6, which says, whoever sheds man's blood by man, his blood shall be shed for in the image of God, he made man.

So while some people say that government is a necessary evil, I think the proper way to look at it is that because of evil, government is necessary.

So instead of being a necessary evil, government is necessary because of evil.

So because people sin, and that's what was happening in the book of Genesis, because people sin and commit evil acts, the worst thing is people killing other people.

Because of that, God has ordained human government. So the most basic form of that is when a man committed murder back in the book of Genesis.

Other men, the government, right? The authorities. Other men are now in that position of responsibility to put that evildoer, that murderer, to death.

So this is where human government began, sort of in an embryonic form, and then it develops from there.

And then we could talk about government that God established through Moses at Mount Sinai, where the

Lord gave his law, etc., etc. And that brings us all the way down to the modern day.

So that's the first point, that government is ordained by God. So this podcast has nothing to do with being anti -government.

I'm glad that we have a stable government, but at the same time, government is just a group of people.

And again, usually it's a bunch of rich people. And do we trust them?

We don't want them to have too much power, right? We believe in liberty. That's the

American way. It's the biblical way, and we're going to look at that. Where the Spirit of the

Lord is, there is liberty. So we should, Christians especially, we should believe in freedom.

And of course, it's the Christians in the United States that do believe in freedom, as opposed to those who are more going in a

Marxist, socialist, communist direction. So this podcast is not anti -government.

But at the same time, we have to be realistic. It's human government that we're talking about.

So government is just a group of human beings, and human beings are flawed. Humans are sinful.

The Bible teaches the depravity of man, meaning not that mankind is as bad as he can be, but mankind is as bad off as he can be, and that man is, without the grace of God, we are totally unable to remedy our lost condition.

So what ends up happening is governments end up being just full of lost people, and they don't always obey

God. Every government should be under God. Like Jesus is Lord, he has been given authority in both heaven and earth.

We see that in the passage known as the Great Commission, Matthew 28. Jesus is Lord, we should be, every government should be a nation under God, but that's just not the way it is.

Mankind is sinful. Those verses like, let God be true in every man, a liar.

What do people say? Politicians all have one thing in common, they lie. But this is true for mankind in general.

Jeremiah 17 verse 9, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it?

So while government is a good thing, anarchy would be much worse. But while it is a good thing, it can also be used, the government can be used for wicked purposes.

This is why a government must be under God. And it was the role of the prophet, and I believe it's the role of a preacher today, to speak, pastors today should speak prophetically and call upon our governing officials to do right in the eyes of God.

America is supposed to be a nation, you know, one nation under God, right? That's the pledge.

Presidents get sworn in, putting their hand on a Bible. In God we trust is on our currency.

So this gets into the next thing, how we have gotten away from that.

Today, and I'm not sure when it happened, it's been happening for a long time. People who are of a

Darwinist, you know, they believe in Darwinian evolution, they're of that mindset, a

Marxist mindset that is very common ever since the 1960s. It's sort of infiltrated the country and gone mainstream in the 1960s, 1970s, and it's only gotten worse from there.

People who think like this, who have this sort of Marxist ideology and believe in evolution, they oppose, some more than others, but they oppose

Christianity. They certainly oppose biblical Christianity. They reject the idea of an all -powerful deity that we must obey.

They want to, this should be pretty clear, many of them are open about it, that congressmen, that the will of God, the

Senate has no concern for the will of God. We don't care about any of that, that congressman from New York made a statement like that.

But it's very clear they want to eliminate Christianity from our society.

At the very least, they want to keep religious people out of public life. They cry separation of church and state all the time, even though the original meaning of the separation of church and state, it originally meant that the government had to stay out of the affairs of the church, and to that I say amen.

So separation of church and state as it was intended originally is actually a good thing, but they twist that today to mean that if you believe the

Bible, if you worship God, you can have that at home and in your church, but if you're in public life, if you're out in society, if you hold office especially, you just need to keep it quiet and it cannot affect anything.

It should not affect public policy. Well that's crazy because the liberals and the secular progressives, they have a belief system that affects their laws that they want passed.

So what, a Christian is not allowed to have their view, it's a total double standard.

But this is what they're trying to sell, this is separation of church and state, and again they're totally twisting the intent of that.

Well, how does God view things? Well, every knee is going to bow eventually, and it would be better if we bow the knee in this life.

It would go much better for us. Woe unto that nation that rebels against the

Lord. So the way the secular progressives are running things,

God doesn't see it that way, and Americans didn't see it that way up until recently.

It is very clear that in the past, our nation has had and still has,

I believe, a Christian heritage. That's why the pilgrims came here. If we were not officially a

Christian nation from our founding, we were most certainly a nation full of Christians.

But today, the secular progressives, they hate that, they hate it so much they are busy trying to paint our

Christian heritage as a white supremacist heritage. We had a

Christian school open up in our area, I did a podcast on this a while back, and that local school board tried shutting down the

Christian school, and even though they're just normal people who have normal Christian beliefs, the progressives in town who sat on the school committee, the board there, the

Marxists is what they are, they actually accused the Christian school of having a white supremacist agenda.

Of course, that's crazy, that's a lie, but let's face it, that's their play, right?

Because our nation, we did have slavery and segregation in this nation, so talking about racism, that's a narrative that seems to stick, so they're running with it.

So anyone who disagrees with the secular progressive narrative, whether it's true or not, it doesn't matter.

Most of the time, it's not true, but they're going to try to brand people as racist, sexist, white supremacist, bigot, deplorable, homophobic, xenophobic, whatever.

So anyone who disagrees with the secular progressive agenda, you are a horrible, bigot, white supremacist.

It's totally bogus, but again, that's their narrative, they're just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping it sticks.

So what's the point that I'm trying to get to? The point is, these Marxists, the progressives, and this is not progress, by the way, but these

Marxists, they are trying to eliminate Christianity. And if they do that, because people in government, unfortunately many, if not most today, have a

Marxist ideology. That just seems to be the way it is. It's certainly true in Europe and in Canada, and it's starting to become very true here in the

United States. So people who have this Marxist ideology, who are in government, they're trying to eliminate biblical

Christianity. And if they do that, if they can shift enough people away from believing in God, then government will step in and take the place of God.

And this is what they want. That the authority will not be that we're all loyal and pledge our allegiance to God.

No, we will pledge our allegiance to the state. Now the state should be under God, but they don't want it under God.

They want the state to be the final authority. So the progressives have basically taken over.

Marxists are running the big cities. They control Hollywood, Washington DC, the deep state.

They control many of the states. Some are conservative and they're not as bad, but this is becoming a real problem.

They definitely control the educational system in most of the colleges and universities. So they are working overtime to indoctrinate and brainwash people to stop believing in God.

Or if you believe in God, okay, again, you can believe in God in church for an hour a week.

You can believe in God at home, but outside of that, shut up about it and it cannot affect public life.

It certainly cannot have anything to do with what laws we pass, because that's

Christian nationalism and that's like Hitler. I saw one local, supposedly an evangelical pastor.

He was comparing Christians who want the government to obey

Christianity and he said, that's like Hitler. That's what Hitler did. This is insane. Literally, this is insane.

But if this happens for these people who are buying in, they're buying into this narrative.

If that ever happens in this country, you want to talk about Hitler, look at those nations that replaced

God with the state, Soviet Union, Mao's China, you know, the actual

Nazis. That's what they did. They got rid of God and government became

God. And how did that end up? 100 million people dead in the 20th century because of this

Marxist ideology. Oh, you think it's such a great idea because that's what your college professor told you.

You know, we still have a lot of time left in this century. You know, it's only 2023, almost 2024, we could double that 100 million dead number if the

United States ever became, you know, communistic. We're headed in that direction. This is serious stuff.

So what's the solution? Believing in the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus literally is the only one who can save us.

If we go in this godless direction, again, government becomes

God. Thankfully, there are still tens of millions of decent Christian people in this country, salt of the earth people.

And what does that term even mean? Salt of the earth. Basically, Christians are the ones preserving against the rot.

But things are getting bad. So that said, since things are starting to go bad, and since they might get worse, we saw a little glimpse of this.

You want to know what things will be like? Look how things were for six months, you know, back in 2020.

Remember when the government was just dictating everything, what you can do, what you can't do? Yeah, that's little, little taste of what communism is like.

Okay. So Christians, we'll say this, Christians have a duty to obey the governing authorities.

I think if you had, but 2020 totally changed everything. If you had asked me prior to 2020 what

I thought about God and government, I probably would have quoted Romans 13, submit to the governing authorities and do what they say, unless they tell you to sin.

So obey the government, unless they tell you to do something God forbids, or unless they forbid you from doing something

God commands. That's what I would have said. And that's generally true. But does government really have the authority to tell you to force you to get injected with medicine?

Do they really have the authority to demand that you wear something over your face everywhere you go?

Well, there's no Bible verse that talks about it. Not so sure it's a sin issue.

So point is, Christians had to rethink some of these things that, long story short, government really doesn't have that authority, do they?

But they'll take as much authority as you'll allow them to take. People get the government they deserve, some have said.

So as far as going to church, in 2020 our church stayed open. We were one of the few churches in Western Massachusetts that never shut down, we never canceled a service.

And I didn't go along with that from the start, number one, because it was clear that this really wasn't the plague, like they were claiming.

It wasn't as serious as they said. And number two, the Bible says, do not forsake the assembly. So I was not about to tell people they couldn't go to church for three months, six months, a year, two years.

That wasn't going to happen. So we kept worshiping. And just to get straight to the point, all authority comes from God.

God has given human government a certain amount of authority, and they have basically gone way beyond that.

So Romans 13, Paul says, let every soul be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God.

Therefore, whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves.

So Christians, generally speaking, we should be good citizens. We should obey the government, and we do.

Verse three, for rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Of course, that's not always the case.

Paul is speaking generally. He says, do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will have praise from the same.

For he that is the governing authority, he is God's minister to you. He is God's deacon to you for good.

But if you do evil, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain, for he is

God's minister and avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil.

So God gave government authority to punish evil and to reward the good.

If they claim authority that they do not have, and they try to impose that upon us, do we really just have to obey whatever they say?

No. Now, we should use wisdom. Not every battle is worth fighting, but Christians, let's look at what the

Scripture says, 2 Corinthians 3 .17. Now, the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the

Lord is, there is liberty. So we should be submissive, but Christians need to stand up for what's right.

And sometimes that means not obeying the governing authority. So in conclusion,

I hope this was helpful, and really the best thing to do is to help fulfill the great commission

Jesus gave to the church. To preach the gospel to every creature, to disciple the nations, including our own, to baptize them and teach them everything that the

Lord commands. And that's both what's in the New Testament and in the Old Testament, by the way.

Teach them all things that the Lord commanded, because in our country, the more people who believe in Christ, the more freedom we will have, the better our country will become.