We wanted kings instead of God and democracy instead of kings. Will it work when man rules as God?
It took two hundred years after Israel crossed the Jordan, before they felt that God was not enough anymore. They wanted a king, just like the nations around them had their respective kings, but in choosing a king they rejected God (1 Samuel 8:7).
The transition from theocracy to monarchy was a big constitutional change for ancient Israel. It came about partly because the people felt that the prevailing system wasn’t working, but it seems the fault lay with the people who insisted on doing their own thing. That would have persisted had God not raised judges to stop the rot and restore order.
So the system didn’t really fail the people as much as the people failed the system. The inherent willfulness, restlessness and greed of people not only corrupted that theocratic dispensation, it ultimately also corrupted the next, monarchic system.
Two hundred years was all it took to forget all that had brought them thus far. That is a brief moment in historic terms and many regard is as an aberration, a period of non-advancement. Yet it took about 250 years for the kingdom of Judah to fall and another 150 years before the last flame of the age of kings fluttered and died, as the remnant of Israel was led away into Babylonian exile.
Well, would you believe that current models of government have also been around for about two hundred years and now they are also failing? The French revolted about the same time as the US won its independence but the republics that they fought so hard to establish are now crying for another way, a new world order.
Over the last 200 years, passionate people laid the foundations of the new world and opened new frontiers. Science, art and technology also flourished, bringing great waves of progress. Everything seemed possible. Great wars also happened as ambitious nations wrestled for territory to stake their claims on a brave new world.
Yet almost as quickly as it came, the prevailing world order (democracy) also reached its zenith. Like all civilizations of history, we too have come to the climactic point of this age and find ourselves peering over an abyss of dark uncertainty.
A new world order is beckoning, but it is destined to be dark, oppressive and soulless: after all, what is left after having tried theocracy, monarchy, church-state models, imperialism, democracy, oligarchy (communism). We have the T-shirts to prove we have been there and done it all. But if no other system will bring order to the humankind, then all that is left is world “order” or “control”.
We have already thrown away our freedom and sold our souls to hedonism. Now, like Israel of old, we face exile to a world order that has all the instruments of oppressive control: satellite surveillance, biometric identity, converging world currencies and god-like big-brother controls. Indeed, the final system of government, the last world order will take history to its logical conclusion: for this all started when kings displaced God and it will end when man becomes god.
At the root of western corruption is a dangerous decline in moral values, values that once gave people and nations something worth fighting for. But that is all gone now.
Similar conditions were evident at the end of the Egyptian, Persian, Roman, Greek and British empires. For over half a century, Victoria presided over a morally-centered British empire, where the sun never set. But her death signaled a decline of greatness and a moral slide that was only briefly checked by World War 2. As Britain declined, America picked up the torch, holding it high for liberty and justice, proclaiming trust in God, an egalitarian constitution and a Christian world-view. But now that last great rampart of virtue has also followed the way of all flesh and compromised her heritage.
So even when we had our kings or, as happened in the great revolution, when we exceeded the monarchy with government by the people, we remained no better off. For the problems did not start with the kings, it started when men rejected God.
We lost our way when we abandoned our divine centre. Had we kept God at the heart of our culture, we would have censured bad government and order would have been more self-fulfilling, but now the world totters to and fro like a drunken man. No wonder the Psalmist noted: “Except the Lord build the house, they that labor, build in vain” or as another wrote, “The chief cornerstone has now become the stone of stumbling”.
(c) Peter Eleazar at www.bethelstone.com
It took two hundred years after Israel crossed the Jordan, before they felt that God was not enough anymore. They wanted a king, just like the nations around them had their respective kings, but in choosing a king they rejected God (1 Samuel 8:7).
The transition from theocracy to monarchy was a big constitutional change for ancient Israel. It came about partly because the people felt that the prevailing system wasn’t working, but it seems the fault lay with the people who insisted on doing their own thing. That would have persisted had God not raised judges to stop the rot and restore order.
So the system didn’t really fail the people as much as the people failed the system. The inherent willfulness, restlessness and greed of people not only corrupted that theocratic dispensation, it ultimately also corrupted the next, monarchic system.
Two hundred years was all it took to forget all that had brought them thus far. That is a brief moment in historic terms and many regard is as an aberration, a period of non-advancement. Yet it took about 250 years for the kingdom of Judah to fall and another 150 years before the last flame of the age of kings fluttered and died, as the remnant of Israel was led away into Babylonian exile.
Well, would you believe that current models of government have also been around for about two hundred years and now they are also failing? The French revolted about the same time as the US won its independence but the republics that they fought so hard to establish are now crying for another way, a new world order.
Over the last 200 years, passionate people laid the foundations of the new world and opened new frontiers. Science, art and technology also flourished, bringing great waves of progress. Everything seemed possible. Great wars also happened as ambitious nations wrestled for territory to stake their claims on a brave new world.
Yet almost as quickly as it came, the prevailing world order (democracy) also reached its zenith. Like all civilizations of history, we too have come to the climactic point of this age and find ourselves peering over an abyss of dark uncertainty.
A new world order is beckoning, but it is destined to be dark, oppressive and soulless: after all, what is left after having tried theocracy, monarchy, church-state models, imperialism, democracy, oligarchy (communism). We have the T-shirts to prove we have been there and done it all. But if no other system will bring order to the humankind, then all that is left is world “order” or “control”.
We have already thrown away our freedom and sold our souls to hedonism. Now, like Israel of old, we face exile to a world order that has all the instruments of oppressive control: satellite surveillance, biometric identity, converging world currencies and god-like big-brother controls. Indeed, the final system of government, the last world order will take history to its logical conclusion: for this all started when kings displaced God and it will end when man becomes god.
At the root of western corruption is a dangerous decline in moral values, values that once gave people and nations something worth fighting for. But that is all gone now.
Similar conditions were evident at the end of the Egyptian, Persian, Roman, Greek and British empires. For over half a century, Victoria presided over a morally-centered British empire, where the sun never set. But her death signaled a decline of greatness and a moral slide that was only briefly checked by World War 2. As Britain declined, America picked up the torch, holding it high for liberty and justice, proclaiming trust in God, an egalitarian constitution and a Christian world-view. But now that last great rampart of virtue has also followed the way of all flesh and compromised her heritage.
So even when we had our kings or, as happened in the great revolution, when we exceeded the monarchy with government by the people, we remained no better off. For the problems did not start with the kings, it started when men rejected God.
We lost our way when we abandoned our divine centre. Had we kept God at the heart of our culture, we would have censured bad government and order would have been more self-fulfilling, but now the world totters to and fro like a drunken man. No wonder the Psalmist noted: “Except the Lord build the house, they that labor, build in vain” or as another wrote, “The chief cornerstone has now become the stone of stumbling”.
(c) Peter Eleazar at www.bethelstone.com
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