First, the primary identifier for a Christian should be “I am a Christian”. All other descriptives of beliefs and viewpoints a Christian has should be secondary.
Therefore, it is most proper to say you are a “libertarian Christian”.
So many people with wildly diverse beliefs call themselves Christian today, many doctrines of devils included, but a “Christian” in the context of this forum is most properly used for Bible believers. “Study to show thyself approved”. “To the word and to the testimony, if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them”.
I have lived many years, and I have been through the whole “spectrum” of beliefs, atheist and Communist after public school and Ivy League indoctrinations, then a missionary during the “Jesus People Movement” days, and now, working a secular job.
It now seems most apparent to me that the Biblical, godly view for a Christian’s relationship to society as a whole is the libertarian view. Of course before allowing myself this view, it had to check out with Scripture.
I’ll share some verses that are the basis for this, and it is not a new view in Christendom at all, but ancient. But in today’s modern times, paganism and atheism are so strong in the world that just as God has unleashed even stronger science as testimony to himself, and even so, this as Christian doctrine gets confirmation as being the best approach for society in general from secular theoreticians of the Austrian economics school of philosophy. (Which also has a great many Christians as well, Gary North and Laurence Vance being good examples.) I speak of the late Ludwig von Mises, the late Murray Rothbard, and Walter Block. Ayn Rand, rabidly anti-God anti-socialist author, is superfluous and irrelevant to the point. The three named economists are friendly to Christians in history, and even see Christianity as a historical driver in the advance of individual freedom.
In the times of the book of Joshua and Judges there was NO KING in Israel. There was NO government at all. The last verse in Joshua was both good and bad: “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes”. Good because there was no government, bad because it does not say they did what was right in God’s eyes.
When the elders came to Samuel and demanded a king, God told Samuel they had rejected God himself and not Samuel, and confirmed Samuel’s warning, that the king would send their sons to war and take their daughters to his palaces to prepare his “dainties”, and would confiscate burdensome parts of their increase to himself.
In Daniel 2, Daniel interpreted the king’s dream as a prophetic vision, showing the most important future empires to come, but then God sends down a rock that smashes into pieces all these kingdoms and replaces them all with his own eternal kingdom.
That means every one of those empires is NOT of God: Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome, the two empires (Rome and Constantinople) that grew from the Roman Empire, and still to come, the Beast’s kingdom.
It is impossible to view America with God’s eye today and claim that it is a godly nation, or a Christian nation. The Israeli kingdom is not of God either, because they deny God’s own son.
Jesus showed the coin and said “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.” But can one say that Caesar actually “owns” in that sense what he takes by force, or else?
Then in Matthew 18 Jesus gives a lesson on taxes asking whether the children of the kings and rulers and the ones that tell you what to pay, do they children have to pay them? No, just the fact that they take taxes by threat of force (theft) makes it a corrupt and sinful act. Nonetheless, pay them so as not to “offend” them, lest you get the other side of “Agree with thine adversary quickly”.
In other words, pay taxes as much as you must, so you can use the rest to do God’s work.
As to Romans 13, the authorities Paul describes there do not describe rule by Caligula, or Nero (who beheaded him).
There is one Baptist pastor of a mega-church in the United States today who is telling whoever listens that Trump can do anything because Romans 13. NOT SO!
“Here a little, there a little. Precept upon precept, line upon line”. So does Romans 13 discredit First Samuel, Daniel 2, and Elijah’s pronouncements against Ahab and Jezebel, and his killing of 300 prophets of Baal –the official religion of the land? NO!
To qualify for Romans 13, a government must follow the description of it in the passage.
Does the Trump administration qualify? It looks increasingly like he’s either boxed in by the government he supposedly heads up, or he was not being totally sincere in his pronouncements, or something in between.
Some of us know there is not only an entrenched “Deep State”, that the Federal Reserve is the most visible Money Changers rulers in the land today, but there is also a “shadow government” (that Oliver North mentioned), but “people of the Prince that shall come” (Daniel 9), and more.
Jesus told the apostles that he that wants to be great among the Gentiles seeks power, seeks to rule over them, but in the kingdom of God he that would be great will be the servant of them.
“Thou shalt not steal” is the commandment that makes taxation a sin.
The Mark of the Beast will tell the tale anyway.
–trutherator
