In this episode, Pastor Chase Davis joins me to discuss the El Salvador Constitution allowing for multiple presidential candidates to run for re-election. What does the Bible have to say about this? Is this a good or bad thing? And what does it mean for Christians?
00:00:00.500Hey everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
00:00:07.540So in the last week or so, a story came out of El Salvador that the Constitution has been changed to allow the leader there, Bukele, multiple options for re-election.
00:00:19.020There used to be some level of term limits, how many times you could be president of El Salvador, and they have changed the Constitution to allow for multiple re-elections.
00:00:30.640Now, this is the way the American Constitution worked until after FDR, so literally for almost the entirety of America's existence, this was the law of the land.
00:00:41.740And there was an unspoken rule, there's an unspoken tradition that because George Washington stepped down after two terms, you stepped down after two terms.
00:00:49.660But that was not the law of the land until FDR violated that norm and ended up getting elected for a fourth term, of course famously dying in office.
00:00:58.000Now, this is the American tradition and it has nothing to do with other democracies in which many, many democracies allow for as many elections as you want.
00:01:06.920Think of several different democracies like Israel, where people have, you know, run the country for decades, right, without changing the government.
00:01:15.140This is very common across many different democracies.
00:01:18.560However, I had a weird experience, which I like I still knew this was out there, but I wasn't aware that it was as prevalent as it was.
00:01:25.740I had several Christians tell me that this is dangerous and unbiblical and that kings are a deeply unbiblical thing.
00:01:33.180And there, of course, Bekele is not a king in a technical or real sense.
00:01:38.020But there, you know, the idea that he could get elected for, I guess, more than two terms made him a king.
00:01:43.440And so, therefore, this is like some deep grave sin.
00:01:47.780And not only is this evil, but me noticing that Bekele is actually a pretty good president, has radically changed the country, and maybe it would be a good thing if he continued to run the country, got me all kinds of accusations of being like a terrible character, a deep sinner, ignorer of the biblical truth.
00:02:03.980And so I figured perhaps I should bring in someone to help me go through the relevant scripture and understand what the biblical truth is.
00:02:11.240Does the Bible actually tell us that we have to have a liberal democracy in which the president is specifically limited to exactly eight years in office?
00:02:19.580That seems to be the belief that many people have out there.
00:02:22.320So helping me to sort out this apparently very complicated issue is Chase Davis.
00:02:33.300And yeah, this is an important topic to address because, you know, you might have been surprised by the reaction, but to me, being a pastor on the ground, for many evangelical Christians, this is an area that they're not really educated on, you know, and for good reason.
00:02:48.360Pastors should focus on what they're preaching that week, but that leaves a lot of room for other voices to weigh in.
00:02:55.420And so for a lot of American evangelicals, they've never really been trained.
00:02:59.320You know, they've been trained maybe in a civics class one time on the American system.
00:03:03.300But not a lot of political philosophy, especially not political philosophy in the Bible.
00:03:08.260And so it's something I've taught on at my church multiple times to just help Christians think more wisely about God's word and how we should apply it to not only our civil sphere, but also our personal lives.
00:03:22.360Of course. And to be clear, I don't blame anyone for default saying, hey, I think that democracy should be the norm or I prefer democracy or, you know, this is the best system I can think of.
00:03:33.700That's fine. You can you can hold that opinion.
00:03:35.920And also you can feel like reflexively that's the correct answer because of your tradition.
00:03:41.080I'm fine with that. I am someone who believes in tradition and following tradition.
00:03:45.840And so you default and say this is part of my tradition.
00:03:49.620And so I believe this to be the best way.
00:03:53.260The problem becomes when I have people telling me, no, this is what the Bible dictates.
00:03:58.500This is God's unequivocal truth to every nation and every time throughout history.
00:04:04.500And so if you disagree or you question this, you are in some way in violation, not of my personal preference, not of even our tradition inside this particular situation, but you are in violation of God's truth.
00:04:18.820You are in some way sinful and erring in your understanding of the Bible.
00:04:23.100And so that's that's really what I wanted to get into today, because, again, I have my own problems with liberal democracy, but I understand people who, you know, knee jerk say this is the system and this is what we have done for many years and this is what we should do.
00:04:35.740Totally get that. But let's get into, I think, for the first thing, the best place to start.
00:04:40.240I have two sources I want to pull from today.
00:04:42.800First is going to be the relevant Bible verse that I think most people, the relevant passage most people are pulling from.
00:04:49.420So I'm just going to read this really quickly.
00:04:51.000Everyone, bear with me, we are reading the scripture on a podcast.
00:04:54.420I know we're probably violating several rules, but hang on, YouTube.
00:04:58.220So this is going to come out of First Samuel, chapter eight.
00:05:03.300And it says, and it came to pass that that when Samuel was old and he made his sons judge over Israel.
00:05:10.100Now, the name of his firstborn was Joel.
00:05:12.160The name of his second, Abijah, I'm going to say the name is wrong.
00:05:15.180They were judges in Beersheba and his sons walked in, not in his ways, but turned aside from Lucre and took bribes and perverted judgment.
00:05:25.840And then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together and came to Samuel at Ramah and said unto him,
00:05:33.240Behold, thou art old and thy sons do not walk in thy ways.
00:05:36.660Now make us a king to judge us like all the nations.
00:05:41.160But the thing displeased Samuel when he said, give us a king or when they said, give us a king to judge us.
00:05:51.480And Lord said unto Samuel, hearken unto their voices of the people and all that they say unto thee, for they have not rejected thee, they have rejected me, and I should not reign over them.
00:06:01.480According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them out of Egypt, even to this day, wherewith they have forsaken me and served other gods, so do they also unto thee.
00:06:14.440Now therefore hearken unto their voices, however, yet protest solemnly unto them and show them the ways of the kings that shall reign over there.
00:06:23.780And then Samuel gives the famous speech about how the king is going to take your sons and your daughters and part of your field and demand all these things of you.
00:06:33.420All the things that they're warning about what a secular kingdom will ultimately do.
00:06:37.620Now amazingly, amazingly to me, Chase, people look at this verse and they see it as specifically an attack on the idea of a king itself, that the particular form of monarchy is the form that is being rejected here.
00:06:55.780And instead, I guess they assume that God was telling us that we should have a liberal democracy.
00:07:00.640Now, perhaps it would be best to provide some level of context for what's going on in Samuel here, a little bit of biblical history.
00:07:08.080Were the Israelites operating under a liberal democracy before Samuel was asked to instate a king like other nations?
00:07:33.160These were people God raised up to deliver his people from the hand of the enemy.
00:07:36.640The people kept deviating, and God kept raising people up like Samson and Gideon and others.
00:07:41.080And so after the period of the Judges, now you've got Samuel as the last judge, and his sons are corrupt, and things are corrupt in Israel.
00:07:49.660And so what was happening then, and I think this is one of the challenges you're going to get into, Warren, and this is where I want your help, is when we have these modern frameworks for understanding how politics works, these words that are loaded with meaning, and we don't want to play too many semantic games, but it's important.
00:08:06.760Words like monarchy, liberal democracy, dictatorship, whatever it may be.
00:08:11.500We typically try to read back into the Bible, you know, what, well, that is this, one-for-one comparison, and that's not a really helpful way to understand the Bible.
00:08:22.340What's happening in this passage particularly is that people are crying out for a king.
00:08:26.060God is obviously displeased with that, but he eventually installs a king, and that's where we get King Saul and then King David.
00:08:31.500Interesting kind of deviation there is that Saul's son Jonathan should have been next to the throne.
00:08:36.840Jonathan is a great, great man of scripture, someone to emulate, shows great faith in God, and yet instead of doing the typical kingship, hereditary, the prince becomes the king, God chooses someone else, and Jonathan doesn't try to kill David.
00:08:53.020They actually make a covenant with one another, and they form an alliance both politically and out of friendship, a spiritual alliance as well, and then David becomes king.
00:09:01.740So the idea that monarchy on itself is unbiblical is laughable for two reasons.
00:09:07.160One, we know that Christ rules in a type of monarchy, not just spiritually, but over the nations today.
00:09:14.720So Christ is, you know, understood to be king.
00:09:25.300And then we also see that even though it displeased the Lord that the people wanted a king, he still let them have a king.
00:09:31.120Now, God wouldn't allow his people to do something that was against, I mean, he would allow them to venture away from them in order to redeem them, but he wouldn't, like, install a system of government over his people that would violate some either creational norm or biblical norm.
00:09:48.440Now, obviously, he wanted direct, in the time of the judges, there was more direct, what many people today might call theocratic rule.
00:09:54.480But these judges were kind of intermediaries functioning as the ruler of God's people during that day, the deliverer of God's people.
00:10:02.980And then they moved on to a monarchy, and that lasted for many, many years.
00:10:08.100So, yeah, you really can't read liberal democracy back into the text.
00:10:12.000We can get into the New Testament later, but, yeah, it's kind of, it's hard to explain, not because it seems obvious to us, but I really want people to understand, like, when we read the Bible, we really need to be cautious.
00:10:27.060One, about taking our modern assumptions about who, what we experience and what we expect in our traditions, and then going, like, well, God must submit to those.
00:10:36.740You know, God has to fit in my framework.
00:10:38.280And I'm like, well, that's a really dangerous game to play, friend.
00:10:41.060You don't want to do that with God's word.
00:10:43.100You really want to submit your life to God's word in every aspect.
00:10:46.600And you want to obey God's word and what God has said and what God has revealed.
00:10:49.900And so what we want to do is question our systems based on God's word.
00:10:53.500So we see various regimes and types of regimes in God's word that are permitted for God's people, especially in the Old Testament when it was more theocratic.
00:11:03.480And so we have to just be careful that we don't read all these things back into scripture, which is a very common human instinct, especially as modern people.
00:11:11.640We're very, we've got that chronological snobbery where we don't like to look back and admire and respect.
00:11:17.220We want to, like, understand its relevance for today in our framework.
00:11:20.660So I hope that helps, but that's some of the context that's going on.
00:11:23.760Out of the period of the judges, 1 Samuel, there's a king.
00:11:26.200It's not an anti-monarchy screed because eventually you get King David, who was one of the greatest kings who's ever lived.
00:11:33.940Yeah, so, I mean, you can help me out here because obviously, you know, pulling, you know, the exegesis is more of your, you know, your strong suit, something that you are learned in.
00:11:43.340But when I look at this passage, what I see is a people who were ruled directly by God.
00:11:50.660Right. Like they were ruled through, as you say, the intermediary of the judges.
00:11:54.380Right. This was not a democracy. These people are not voting on what they should be doing.
00:11:58.760God is speaking in the, when you say theocratic, we mean in the truest sense.
00:12:03.920God is speaking really directly to the people in the, in the most, you know, direct form possible.
00:12:09.840It's not saying, oh, the, the molas are gathering together and, you know, sifting through scripture and trying to know, like God says, hey, here's this guy.
00:12:18.740He is going to speak for me. Here is everything I want you to do one-to-one. Right.
00:12:23.800So that was the way that they were being ruled and what they were rejecting.
00:12:28.640And this is what, you know, again, when I read this passage, it says, you, they're not rejecting you, Samuel.
00:12:33.780They're rejecting me. They're not rejecting rule by you and your sons.
00:12:38.120By the way, what do you call it? When Samuel hands down the rule from himself to his sons, what would be the system we would call anyway?
00:12:50.520So Samuel's already in a somewhat monarchical situation.
00:12:54.260He is acting as the solitary leader. He is passing it down to his blood, but his blood has betrayed him.
00:13:03.560They have not followed in his way. And so the people say, instead, give us a king like the other nations have.
00:13:10.040Well, what's the difference between the kind of the semi-monarchical relationship Samuel has with the people here and the, the kings that other nations have?
00:13:20.100They're secular, right? They're not getting direct rule from God.
00:13:24.260They're establishing a state. They're creating a bureaucracy.
00:13:27.580They're building a standing army, right?
00:13:29.820It's no longer this like quasi-anarchical relationship with one leader who is hearing divine revelation.
00:13:38.300Instead, it is a much more traditional monarchical structure in which you just have a secular king with a, with a established state passing on that power.
00:13:48.180And so the warning to me here isn't like this specific form of government.
00:13:52.440If they, if they had said we're rejecting God's government and we're writing a constitution where we all get to vote, I feel like we would get the same passage, right?
00:14:01.600Because ultimately the reason that the people of Israel are adopting this form of government is because it's really the only form of government that exists at the time.
00:14:12.280Monarchy is the oldest and most natural form of government, whether you like it or not in history.
00:14:17.700And so there, if they had picked up and said, we're going to create a democratic republic and, you know, no, thanks God.
00:14:23.460We don't care about your judges. We don't care about your word. We don't want to be ruled by you.
00:14:26.940I feel like that would have been the same kind of problem.
00:14:29.700Am I understanding the passage correctly? Is that a reasonable thing to pull out of that?
00:14:33.500Yeah, that's a reasonable thing to pull out.
00:14:34.900And one of the challenges that they were facing was that they kept having incursions from enemy forces and other nations coming at them.
00:14:41.420And they didn't trust the Lord. They didn't trust. He kept raising up judges.
00:14:45.640And instead of turning to God in repentance and walking faithfully in his ways, they became envious of the other nations because they kept seeing these incursions pop up and cities dominated, decimated, various evils taking place.
00:14:58.400And so they're like, well, maybe it's time for a king. And so they're not trusting the Lord.
00:15:02.480That's the main takeaway. Now, God will use a king and Saul becomes a type of super judge over his people.
00:15:09.200And, you know, you do reference kind of the theocracy. We talked about that a little bit, but there's still a priest involved.
00:15:14.760So at the time you have a judge, you have the priestly class, you have a priestly tribe.
00:15:20.580And so there's always going to be various offices in the Old Testament that Christ ultimately fulfills.
00:15:27.200The traditional ones are prophet, priest and king.
00:15:29.340And so you're going to have these figures be raised up amongst God's people at that time in order to both rule to to like a king would rule to speak his word, the prophet and to be an intermediary between God and man.
00:15:45.180That's the priest and offer sacrifices and that kind of thing.
00:15:47.480And so, yeah, it's it's totally fair to read it as them not trusting the Lord.
00:15:52.100Now, what the warning I think you touched on a little bit, but it gets onto it in the passages that this king will take the people aren't really he's trying to warn people that this is what will happen when you have a king.
00:16:04.120He will take he will tax. He will take your young men.
00:16:06.620He will surround himself with the best guys you've got.
00:16:09.340This is what Saul does almost immediately when he becomes king.
00:16:11.460He picks the strongest, baddest dudes and he's like, you're mine now.
00:16:15.200I can script you into my military and we're going to dominate.
00:16:18.360And they do. They have some great military victories.
00:16:20.760And God is warning them because before the way that God would achieve military victory through raising up judges and delivering them was not just necessarily through one man, but also through the people trusting him.
00:16:31.280So instead of the king himself being in right relationship with the Lord himself, except for Saul towards the end of his life, the king would now pick.
00:16:42.500Back then it was, hey, we're going this judge is raised up and we're going to follow the leader.
00:16:46.940We're going to you know, and that's an act of faith and trust in the Lord that God has raised up this man.
00:16:58.380We see this all throughout the kingship, the monarchy in Israel.
00:17:03.260So one of the things that I, you know, I think ultimately is very important is recognizing that, as you say, we don't want to read back into the Bible the things that we feel.
00:17:15.380So like, again, I, if you don't like monarchy, if you think monarchy is a mistake that ultimately it's outdated or it's not in your tradition, that's entirely reasonable.
00:17:25.220But nowhere in this passage is there a biblical endorsement of democracy, a hint that democracy even exists.
00:17:34.780The main thing, as you're pointing out, with the king taking, you know, that the warning that God gives for Samuel to then give to the people, that is a process of the establishment of a true state.
00:18:59.880You have to wear away some of the individual liberty, some of the individual nuance, the particularity of the different tribes and the way that they live their lives.
00:19:08.380Because now everybody needs to live under the auspices of the state.
00:19:12.160They need to kick things back up to the state.
00:19:13.860They need to conform their identity to the state.
00:19:16.620You know, this is everything the libertarians warn about.
00:22:16.360But we also need to remember that God has permitted the state to exist, that even in a prelapsarian Adam, before the fall, there would have been kind of a political instinct.
00:22:44.360They're going to have people that rise up.
00:22:46.700They're going to have families that are more well-endowed, all this kind of stuff.
00:22:50.160And so the state and the biblical sense, especially with Saul and David and Solomon and so on, it is designed still to uphold the supremacy of God and that they should honor God in all of their ways.
00:23:04.820Now there's going to be, rather than more direct, it's going to be kind of mediated lordship by God.
00:23:11.120But ultimately, the king is still supposed to be serving God.
00:23:13.780Yeah, and I should clarify, when I say anarchy there, what I mean is formal anarchy in the sense of a lack of formal state.
00:23:22.060Obviously, there is still order in the sense that people are under God, right?
00:23:25.820And many people will refer to, for instance, medieval Europe as being a feudal anarchy because you had kings, you had lords, you had these fiefdoms.
00:23:35.780But there was not a centralized power on a regular basis because they just couldn't upkeep it.
00:23:43.840They didn't have the logistics to maintain it.
00:23:46.060So it's not that there was no hierarchy.
00:24:45.520It's much more tied to the well-being of the entire nation and not just taking what you want at the time.
00:24:52.160And very importantly, like we said, tied to the idea that you are ultimately still serving the divine in some real sense.
00:24:59.140Now, obviously, many kings fail in that task.
00:25:01.700But, you know, many presidents fail on their task.
00:25:04.080The point is that is the way it is supposed to be ordered.
00:25:07.040And that is the distinction we're making.
00:25:08.440So to be clear, Bukele couldn't be a king first because, you know, just getting reelected, it doesn't make you a king.
00:25:15.360But otherwise, FDR is absolutely a king.
00:25:17.940But also, importantly, he can't be a king because he is not in direct relationship with the church, to my understanding.
00:25:27.700He is not receiving his mandate under the supervision of a formal church.
00:25:34.480And that's, I think, why we don't have a lot of real kings at this point.
00:25:39.240Even the people who are LARPing as kings, like in England, don't actually act as if they are under or in relationship to the authority of a church in any way.
00:25:50.960Obviously, the English church is a little different because the whole point is they didn't want to be under the authority directly of a pope.
00:25:56.100But the point being that these monarchs that are often held up today seem so, you know, vestigial because they no longer have any authority tied directly to the divine.
00:26:09.240And that's really what makes a difference.
00:26:10.680Maybe we'll return to that at some point.
00:26:12.280Maybe at some point, you know, these monarchs will be revested with that and that might give them the legitimacy.
00:26:19.380But until then, yes, a strong man does more or less just become a dictator because there is that no divine connection, which I think is really critical for the spirit of the monarch.
00:26:30.360I have a passage from Joseph de Maester here, if you'll bear with me for a second, that I'd like to read because Joseph de Maester is himself.
00:26:49.380When it comes to this, so Protestants might run fleeing.
00:26:53.320But I think he gives us some deep insights as to what we need to think about when we think about governmental systems as Christians.
00:27:02.020So this is, I believe, from his discussions on sovereignty.
00:27:06.600He says, the same power that is decreed social order and sovereignty has also decreed different modifications of sovereignty according to the different character of nations.
00:27:15.980Nations are born and die like individuals.
00:27:18.060Nations have fathers, and in a very literal sense, and teachers commonly more famous than their fathers.
00:27:26.920Although the greatest merit of these teachers is to penetrate the character of the infant nation and to create for it circumstances in which it can develop all its capacities.
00:27:36.060Nations have a general soul and a true moral unity which makes them what they are.
00:27:41.060The unity is evident above all by language.
00:27:45.940Their creator has traced on the globe the limits of nations.
00:27:49.200These boundaries are obvious, and each nation can still be seen straining to fill entirely one of the areas within these boundaries.
00:27:56.520Sometimes invincible circumstances trust two nations together and force them to mingle.
00:28:01.320Then their constituent principles penetrate each other and produce a hybrid nation, which can be either more or less powerful and famous than it was when it was a pure race.
00:28:10.200But several national national elements thrown together into the same receptacle can be harmful.
00:28:15.280These seeds squeeze and stifle each other, and men who compose them, condemned to a certain moral and political mediocrity, will never attract the eye of the world in spite of large numbers of individual virtue until a great shock starting one of these seeds growing allows it to engulf the other and assimilate them into their own substances.
00:28:33.220Sometimes the nation lives in the midst of another, much more numerous, and refuses to integrate because there is no sufficient affinity between them and that preserves their moral unity.
00:28:45.980When one talks of the spirit of the nation, the expression is not so metaphorical as is believed.
00:28:51.460From the different national characteristics are born the different modifications of government.
00:28:56.220One can say that each government has its separate character.
00:28:58.980For even those who belong in the same group and carry the same name reveal subtle differences to the observer.
00:29:05.880The same laws cannot suit different provinces that have different customs, live in opposite climates, and cannot accept the same form of government.
00:29:13.040The general objects of every good institution must be modified in each country by its relationship with the spring as much as the local situation as from the character of its inhabitants.
00:29:23.720It is on this basis of these relationships that each people should be assigned a particular institutional system, which is the best, not perhaps itself, but for the state in which it was intended.
00:29:34.940There is only one good government for a particular state, yet not only can different governments be suitable for different peoples, they can also be suitable for the same people at different times, since a thousand events can change the interrelationship of a people.
00:29:48.580So he's saying here, God has gifted a particular character.
00:29:53.040Claudia was leaving for her pickleball tournament.
00:29:56.120I've been visualizing my match all week.
00:29:58.640She was so focused on visualizing that she didn't see the column behind her car on her backhand side.
00:30:04.660Good thing Claudia's with Intact, the insurer with the largest network of auto service centers in the country.
00:30:10.360Everything was taken care of under one roof, and she was on her way in a rental car in no time.
00:30:14.780I made it to my tournament and lost in the first round.
00:30:25.040Each nation has such a different character that when it transgresses its boundaries, the natural boundaries that God has drawn for it, one has to subsume the other.
00:30:32.840Because if it doesn't, ultimately there will be no greatness.
00:30:37.100And so this constant push against the different characters of the nations will keep it from forming its type of government that actually suits it.
00:30:43.180And he says there is a specific best form of government because God has placed that character on the nation.
00:30:48.640But it is different for each people at different times.
00:30:51.760In fact, he says even the same nation will have different types of government across its lifetime because it will change.
00:30:58.480And so God has ordained, yes, there is a correct form of government, but it must be understood in the tradition and conditions of that specific people.
00:31:08.140The nations are not uniform, and therefore the government that rules them cannot be similar.
00:31:21.820I mean, what we see in the people of God in the Old Testament particularly, and like I said, we can get to the New Covenant if we want.
00:31:27.680But in the Old Testament, we see different regimes, if you want to use that word, or different forms of government that are best suited for those people at that particular time.
00:31:36.240We even see this in our American tradition.
00:31:40.940I think it was John Adams who talked about the American system being best suited for virtuous people and unvirtuous people being not suited for the American system, which raises all sorts of alarm bells in my mind.
00:31:50.900Because, okay, so what is he implying then if we become an unvirtuous people?
00:31:54.220I still think we retain enough of our history and our traditions to where it can be retained.
00:31:59.140I'm not LARPing for monarchism in America or anything like that, but there is a real appropriateness to the fittiness of the people and what those people are capable of.
00:32:11.040If they're capable of self-government, that opens up some possibilities for how they experience the state, how they experience the lordship of Christ, the king of kings mediating through a king or a constitutional republic or whatever it may be.
00:32:25.260And so, yeah, it totally coheres with my understanding of the biblical text, of not just the biblical text, but how God has worked this side of the covenant, this side of the resurrection of Christ throughout time through Western civilization.
00:32:40.120I would be curious, Oren, if I can ask a question.
00:32:43.780One of the things I'm curious about, when people today throw around the phrase dictator, you know, this is very common to call people we don't like a dictator.
00:32:53.300They're acting dictatorial, especially, you know, leftists towards Trump or even with Bikile and El Salvador.
00:33:00.620What's like a traditional political understanding of what a dictator is?
00:33:04.340Because you differentiated earlier between monarchy and dictator.
00:33:07.540I would be curious to hear more specifically about dictatorship.
00:33:12.480So Aristotle's classic formulation for governments is there are three types, right?
00:33:17.260There's the rule of the one, there's the rule of the few, and there's the rule of the many.
00:33:23.720And then in each one of those three options, there's a good and a bad, right?
00:33:28.480So the rule of the many that is good is a democracy in which the people are more or less working for the total good of the society and in which they are usually represented rather than a direct democracy.
00:33:44.800And then there's the just complete democracy where it's mass democracy.
00:33:48.640Everyone just votes whatever they want for themselves and they don't care.
00:33:51.640When it comes to the rule of the few, you have the aristocracy versus the oligarchy.
00:33:57.300The oligarchy is ruling in their own interests as where the aristocracy is ruling in the interest of the people in the nation.
00:34:03.260And then when it comes to the rule of the one, the difference is between, again, you'll see in each one of these governments, it's he who's ruling in favor of the nation.
00:34:13.840In fact, this is what is identified as the best possible governments, is the benevolent king, as opposed to the dictator who is ruling.
00:34:21.220Now, they wouldn't have used the word dictator because dictator was actually an office in Rome, it was an official constitutional office that was used to suspend the two co-consuls and give one man total rule in a moment of emergency.
00:34:36.120However, tyrant would have been the word that they would have used at that time.
00:34:40.100But the point is, it's always, are you ruling for yourself and your benefit?
00:34:54.580The only difference between the best form of government, according to Aristotle, and the worst form of government is if the guy in charge is a good person.
00:35:23.200He says, ultimately, that one king being virtuous is the best form, but he acknowledges that all of these forms can be virtuous, right?
00:35:31.560And all of them can be destitute, right?
00:35:36.840They can be terrible if they are ruled not in the interest of the people.
00:35:41.480And so it's never a question of, is there just this one form?
00:35:45.880It's always a question of the character of those that are actually ruling.
00:35:50.580Now, you've mentioned a couple times the New Testament here and the New Covenant.
00:35:55.060And that's, of course, also very important because one of the things we hear on a regular basis is that desiring to rule or recognizing the need to rule is ultimately sinful, right?
00:36:06.520God said, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.
00:36:08.480And so you're just supposed to be ruled by your enemies forever.
00:36:12.260You can't have any Christian kingdoms.
00:36:24.560And that's another thing that gets thrown at me on a regular basis.
00:36:27.440If Christians desire to be ruled by Christians and live under Christian norms, Christian laws, and a Christian culture, they are somehow violating the Bible itself.
00:36:38.260In fact, I was called a man of very low character for pointing out that that is very much not what the Bible says at all here this weekend.
00:36:45.700So maybe you could tell us, is the Bible, is Jesus just telling us we have to be ruled by foreign despots who hate us forever?
00:36:54.600No, and this is one of the most disgusting misanthropic interpretations of the New Testament I see that is so common amongst evangelicals, and I believe they're well-meaning Christians today, is it's a masochistic reading of many of the things Jesus taught.
00:37:12.040But when we talk about, if we want to get kind of philosophical, when we talk about politics and regime and this kind of stuff, we always want to come back to the nature of man, anthropology.
00:37:26.580And so our soul, we need to be reconciled to our maker through Jesus Christ.
00:37:30.340And that's been accomplished by the cross, the resurrection, his ascension, where he's seated on high today at the right hand of the Father.
00:37:36.000The body, we should have rulership over.
00:37:39.260Paul exhorts us to have mastery over our own body.
00:37:42.120So rulership always starts with ourselves.
00:37:45.260And of course, we as Christians believe that that governance can truly only be found when we repent of our sins and become a new creation in Christ.
00:37:53.060And we're filled with the Holy Spirit and able to exercise dominion over our own bodies, over our own lives.
00:37:58.160And so we should be exercising rulership over our bodies and the next sense of the home.
00:38:02.480We should be, as men, the head of the home, we should be exercising rulership and authority in the home.
00:38:07.160And of course, that can get contorted in our day.
00:38:09.080That's a screed that's often thrown at Christians, which is totally not only uncharitable, but untrue.
00:38:14.920Men should exude a masculine presence in the home as a good father.
00:38:42.220What happens if that nation becomes Christian?
00:38:44.880Then we will see Christians come into power.
00:38:47.620And unfortunately, many Christians have been so browbeat about this idea of either seeking power or having ambition or, you know, aspiring to rulership.
00:38:56.900Which Paul endorses explicitly for men who aspire to the office of elder.