Welcome back to the Fourth Wave Podcast. Though this is the fifth episode in the season on government here, it's actually one of the last ones that I'm recording. And this gives me an advantage of being able to provide an informed bird's eye view of things early on in the season because I'm creating this episode after surveying the field. Before we get into the nitty gritty of this episode, I want to discuss a few caveats about it as well as lay out my intended scope here. The scope of this episode is to survey the Bible as a whole from a bird's eye view.

We spent the first part of the season so far discussing some very specific examples of how earthly kingdoms and authority plays out in the Bible. However, there's always a danger in pulling out pieces and proof texting as one can justify almost any position by taking a smattering of proof texts without giving an overall context. I think my case so far is composed of some pretty significant and numerous examples, and I don't think it's proof texting at all, but you might think so. So I thought that an episode which seeks to take an even broader look at the issue would be a good due diligence on my part. So this episode is meant to provide you with some more context to the specifics that we've already talked about in the previous episodes, and it will be a good point of contact for you to do further research.

I'm including links to resources in the show notes for you to reference as well, links which have been very helpful to me, books, videos, etcetera. With that scope in mind, let me talk about a few cautions and caveats here. First, this episode should be seen as a very rough draft, and it's based off of the idea that I had to go through the Bible and specifically look for indications of what the Bible says about governments and such. I compiled this concordance over the course of a very busy year of my life. There were moments where I read very thoroughly through the Bible, and moments where I read while I was distracted by other things, or moments where I read sleepily, and moments where I listened to portions via audiobook.

Reading in this fashion over the course of a year, I know I missed many, many items which should be included in this concordance. Not only because I just plain out missed them, but because there are many references which are kind of judgment calls. I didn't include most references to kings or rulers here because most don't make any value judgments as to rulers in general, but merely describe specific rulers. But those lines can be very gray at times. I also know from reading more that there are many political references, especially in the Gospels which I missed or due to redundancy just didn't include over and over and over again.

I mean, every time Jesus is called the Christ, I don't put all those in there because it was just cumbersome. Jesus is bathed in political language like the Son of Man, Son of God, Savior of the world, etcetera. And the vast majority of those instances, I haven't categorized. So please know that this document that I've created is a starting point, and that there are likely references which should be removed, and many which should be added. Therefore, I'm making a copy of the document editable so that you can make notes or add references in this living document, as well as help create a better system of categories which represent the passages best because I recognize that my categories are faulty.

Or maybe I shouldn't say faulty, maybe I should say incomplete or not super representative because when I created them, you know, it seemed good for the book or two that I was going through, and then as I read through more, I was like, oh, there really should be this category and that category, and but yeah, I just didn't change it. As I said, this is a living document. So as a final caveat, I decided not only to read through the Bible, but also the Apocrypha because I think the Apocrypha provides important information as to how intertestamental Israel was thinking during that time. I know that there was a lot more that I could have pulled from the Apocrypha, but as I was crunched for time and also because I have very little background knowledge of the Apocrypha, I'm sure I missed quite a lot there. So I'd really like to read more thoroughly through that literature, and I'd also love to extend my reading to the Septuagint as I understand that the Septuagint has some very significant differences in some passages.

So the Apocrypha and Septuagint are two particular lacunas here in this concordance of government. Okay. So now you've got the scope in mind, and you've got caveats. Let's go ahead and jump in with a review of kind of where we've gotten so far by by going through the Bible before we jump into some observations I've made from from the concordance. So far, we've looked at how government has been destructive since the first example of it at the Tower Of Babel, or the Tower Of Babylon, really.

We eventually make our way to Egypt where Joseph himself creates a system which strips all of the citizens of their money and land, and gives these things to Pharaoh. That's something that is usually missed about Joseph because we hold him up as being just, you know, a paragon of virtue other than that little bit of pride that he had at the beginning of his life. But really, Joseph is responsible for enslaving Egypt, for causing them to have to give up all their things to the Pharaoh. He maybe helps to create the empire that Egypt ends up being. Joseph's descendants end up being enslaved by the empire which Joseph himself helped to create, strengthen, and empower through his policies.

In Judges, we see that Israel is constantly invaded, not because they don't have a king, but because they keep refusing to submit to God, their king, which leads them to ask for a king like all of the other nations rather than submit to God. God warns them that this is a rebellion against Him, and He warns them of the consequences of enslavement and conscription, but He gives in to their wicked desires, permitting them to suffer the consequences of human kingship. We see a tongue in cheek acknowledgment of these consequences in the supposedly magnificent rule of Solomon. We see Solomon spend double the amount of resources building his palace as God's temple. He enslaves his own people, or at least mandates their labor.

There are conflicting accounts of whether or not Solomon enslaves the Hebrews. And he does just about everything that Deuteronomy 17 mandates for kings not to do. We see one Kings lay out Solomon's rebellion. One Kings seems to be praising Solomon if you just look on the surface level, and if you're unfamiliar with Deuteronomy seventeen's mandates. But Solomon acquires many wives, he acquires a standing army and many horses, he goes to Egypt to buy horses, and he acquires much wealth.

He does the very things that God warned Israel a king would do, and he does everything that God commanded a king of Israel not to do. In the years of kingship in Judah and Israel, there were 43 kings in total. Only seven of those kings were ever evaluated at one point in their lives as having done right in the sight of God. Israel's rebellion of God against God in being like the other nations led them into exile by none other than foreign empires and kings who sought domineering power just like Israel wanted. Israel awaited a Messiah and maybe they thought that they had found them in the Maccabean times when Israel rose up against foreign invaders, yet Israel could never get out from under the thumb of empire.

But then Jesus, the Christ came. He was surrounded by Messianic titles like Son of God, Son of Man, The Christ, The Savior of the World. He proclaimed that the Kingdom of God was at hand and that He was going to sit at the right hand of God, and that He was the long awaited Messiah. But it became evident to all parties involved that Jesus' salvation wasn't one which produced a more domineering empire to overthrow the oppression, but one which transformed empire from the inside out by first transforming the oppressed. Loving enemies, however, isn't as fun as running them through with a sword.

Israel, like most people, had no problem with empire so long as it was their empire and the one which gave them the power to domineer. So, they crucified Jesus. Yet, the epistles proclaim that Jesus' crucifixion and subsequent resurrection validated His kingship and established His reign. We have all gifts in the heavenly realm now because Jesus reigns in power now. His call is for all peoples from every tribe, every tongue, and every nation to recognize his universal kingship and bow the knee and to live under this truth.

Because Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not. Yet because the Christ's kingdom is an upside down one, we are not to seek to overthrow Caesar ourselves through violent means. To do this would be number one, to deny the type of kingdom that Jesus runs, and number two, to be living in unbelief about the truth that Christ already rules in power now. We don't have to force Caesar from his throne because as Buddy the elf says, he's seated on a throne of lies. His throne is an illusion because Christ is the one who's truly reigning, though it may not always seem that way to us who like to see reign through power and force and violence.

Paul and Peter especially encourage us to submit to rulers where it doesn't conflict with God's law and transform the empire through our changed lives, acknowledging no Lord but the Christ Jesus. With that synopsis in mind, let's take a look at some observations that I've made while reading through the Bible this year and the Apocrypha, and kind of just some of the things that stood out to me. And so the first thing that I think you might be able to see through this document and that I pulled out is that if you specifically look at the categories that I've used entitled Qualification of Rulers and Authority of Rulers, you can see how rulers derive their authority. Now, many of the instances where God appointed a ruler are instances where the ruler is not good but someone raised up for judgment or for example. So seeing how God's appointment of rulers works in the Old Testament should help us to recognize that God's determining of rulers in Romans 13, which is an extremely popular verse among people who love wielding government, it's by no means a necessarily good thing when God appoints ministers or rulers or what, you know, whatever you want to call it, whatever word you want to use.

But often, the God's appointment is something which indicates God's judgment and disapproval of something. Second, while there are a number of portrayals of kings or kingship in a good light throughout the, the Bible and especially the Old Testament, most of these assertions of good kingships come in a very limited number of books. Either the books written by kings or, you know, under kings, or books written about the monarchy. So Psalms and Proverbs are filled with how one who's a king ought to rule best, but these descriptions should not necessarily be viewed as an endorsement by God that kingship should exist in the first place, especially in light of his clear disapproval for kingship's establishment in one Samuel eight. Similarly, God saying that He's going to work through the Davidic line or the observations that some kings did follow God seemed to me along the same lines as God saying that He's going to work through polygamists and their children, through multiple wives, or to bring about the Messiah.

God constantly works through flawed and evil human institutions or corruptions of good institutions because God works through humans. Descriptions and prescriptions, allowances and endorsements are very different things. I think that when you not only look at common anti empire and anti king thread throughout Scripture, but you see all of the ideas about government laid out, I think it helps to prevent someone from taking some observations of positive kingly actions and turning them into prescriptions for empire. Finally, I want to pull out three interesting sections which may have some weight in our discussion on Christians and government. These are just kind of individual passages that stuck out to me from the whole reading of the Bible.

Three things that where I was like, oh, that's really interesting, like I wonder if there's something more to this. The first section of importance that we see is in Zechariah and Isaiah. Now these books are kind of post monarchy ish. There's there's still kingship in view and maybe kingship desired by a lot of people, but there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff going on that doesn't look too good for for Israel. And so Isaiah and Zechariah are, you know, thinking thinking outside of the Kingdom Of Israel, it seems more so.

And these books talk about the the Messianic kingship and what it will look like. The government will be on the Messiah's shoulders. He's a Prince of Peace. He will come humbly on a donkey, and He will be the one King to rule them all. The vision of the Messianic King that we get is the perfection of all of the terrible human kings and empires that we've seen in the Old Testament.

And the Messianic kingship is also different in form. It's humble and it's peaceable. And of course, that's exactly what we find fulfilled in the New Testament if, of course, you believe that Jesus is King. It seems to me that many don't view Jesus as reigning now, not because the Bible isn't clear about that, but because they don't like the type of upside down kingdom that He brings, the type of upside down kingdom that Zechariah and Isaiah prophesied about and the one that Jesus said is here. If Jesus reigns now, then we must be the type of subjects that He desires in His kingdom.

So, like Israel in one Samuel eight, we have to seek a King like the other nations, right? We don't like Jesus' reign. We need warriors with swords rather than saviors with plowshares. We need people who seek to domineer others and establish their own empire, people who rule like the Gentiles. Anyone ever heard of the religious rite?

Yeah, they're right there in first Samuel eight. That's a lot of my group, evangelical Christians and and the way that they seek political power. We dethrone God for our own more palatable idea of what it means to rule as a king and to form our own kingdom. Ruling is swords and power, not loving enemies in submission. The second interesting section to me that that stood out overall was Judges.

Now reading of Judges might cause one to think that kings were a good thing, a solution to Israel's continual invasion problem. Judges constantly declares that Israel had no king and did what was right in their own eyes. Of course, this identifies a problem, but you can read this in one of two nuanced ways. You could read judges as saying, because Israel had no king like the other nations, they did what was right in their own eyes. The solution to the problem would then be to appoint a king, which first Samuel eight shows is clearly not desired by God.

So I think that reading's a little bit off. But that's how everybody reads it. The other way that you could read this would be, because Israel did not serve God as their king, they did what was right in their own eyes. Now this nuance would make more sense on a number of levels. First, it makes sense of what we know of first Samuel eight's denunciation of kings.

Having a king was not like the other nations was not a good thing. Second, it makes sense knowing that Israel did know what was right because they had the law at this point, And their problem was that they kept walking away from it, away from God's law, and ended up in cycles of invasion and judgment. Third, there's an internal evidence from Judges nine that human kingship wasn't the solution, not the one that God had in mind. In Judges nine, we get a parable where a king is sought but none of the fruit bearing trees in the analogy want to rule over the other trees. And who ends up seeking to rule?

The Thornbush. Now, isn't that what we tend to see in government? Who is it that seeks positions of power over others? Or what happens to those who hold power for any length of time? By and large, it's the corrupt who seek power or else power that corrupts as all men and women are corruptible.

But even if you disagree with that interpretation and say, well, that parable was really about one specific instance or one specific group of people or one one ruler who's a thorn bush, but you know, that's that's not a general statement. But the chapter goes on to show that, surprise, Israel's first king wasn't actually Saul. Israel appointed its first king in Judges chapter nine and that king was Abimelech. And how did having a king work out? It was terrible.

Abimelech was evil and corrupt and God ended up judging him. Israel was no better off with a king than they were on their own. And finally, we have no indication that the spiral into corruption we see in Judges was any worse than the spiral of corruptions we see under Israel's monarchy which led to exile. While it does seem that Israel's wickedness got worse and worse in Judges leading to a terrible rape and dismemberment towards the later chapters, we also see that there seemed to be generational bottom up repentance each time leading to God's appointing of a judge and salvation of His people. We don't see the same positive cycle of repentance under the monarchy.

Under the monarchy, repentance and salvation seem more sporadic and evil tends to be entrenched and passes on through the line of rulers who function as and view themselves as God. No king of Israel is ever portrayed as being categorically good and following God. And only about a quarter of Judah's kings are conveyed as such. So yes, judges should be read as Israel, the nation of Israel has problems because they did what was right in their own eyes because they did not have a king. But clearly, the answer is not to have a king like the other nations, but to make God one's king.

Okay. Now for the last interesting section. Now this one, I'm not so sure how to interpret, but I wanted to throw it out there because I think that there might be something to it. I looked in a few commentaries, but I didn't really find anything that explained this very well. So I'll put it here, and you may find that it's helpful or it might be a dead end.

It might be worthless and not relevant at all to this discussion. So have fun with it. Let's take a look at Habakkuk. Habakkuk one fourteen says, You have made people like the fish in the sea, like the sea creatures that have no ruler. Now, you could read this in two ways.

You could read it as either God created people to not have rulers over them, or God created people with no initial rulers over them. So one reading would mean that humanity is not to have another rule over them, other than God of course, because they weren't made to have that, right? That's not God's design, it's not natural. While the other reading would say that God created humanity in an essential state of rulerlessness. The first reading would mean that when humans seek to rule over other humans, that's a bad thing.

While the second reading would leave the door open to human rulers arising to guide the aimless, poor, helpless fish that we humans are. Of course, I think the first reading is better because God created humanity equal and He gave them dominion over nature. He didn't give them dominion over other human beings. And Jesus seems to clarify that those of His kingdom aren't to lord power over others. That's something that the the heathens, the Gentiles do.

But the remaining verses in Habakkuk one also seem to clarify verse 14. Though again, this is admittedly where I I caution you to research and draw your your own conclusions, find some good commentaries, find people who know what they're talking about, who deal with this. Verses 15 through 17 say the following, The wicked foe pulls all of them, all of them the people who are like fish, pulls them up with hooks. He catches them in his net. He gathers them up in his dragnet and so he rejoices and is glad.

Therefore, he sacrifices to his net and burns incense to its dragnet. For by his net, he lives in luxury and enjoys the choicest food. Is he to keep on emptying his net, destroying nations without mercy? Again, there are two ways that you could read this. On the first reading, you could say that God created humanity to be without other humans lording power over them, and the wicked people in verses 15 through 17 are rulers.

No one ought to rule over another yet evil people come along and with their dragnets, their, I take it, institutions, governments, armies, know, those those institutionalized and organized things that they use to capture and ensnare everybody, they gather up the people just like at Babel and they consolidate power and they consolidate empire which always ends up oppressing many and going against God's desire and rule. The wicked, the rulers, sacrifice to this net, to these institutions because this net allows them to oppress, to enslave, and to take advantage of the fish. It allows them to keep catching fish, to keep fish in their nets so that they can just, I guess you don't milk fish, but you know, so they can milk it all day long, right? They can live free off the lives of the fish. And with the net, it conquers its own people and other nations, and then it discards them.

What better picture is there of imperialism and empire? I don't think there's any. I think it's a perfect picture if that's what Habakkuk is talking about. However, you could admittedly also read this like many conservative American Christians would probably read it today. You might be saying, Oh, those poor defenseless fish without a ruler.

Look what the evil people will do to them if there's no empire or ruler to protect them. Those who interpret in this manner would view rulers and governments as good things, as protectors, as necessary things even. Now, I have a lot of problems with that interpretation. First, it fails to understand how government and empire is viewed throughout the Bible, not to mention the time that Habakkuk is writing this and probably how he views empire. Second, it fails to look ahead to empire's denouncement as Babylon in Revelation.

Third, it ignores Jesus' mandate to not lord power over others. And fourth, it completely ignores institutionalized evil which is in view here in Habakkuk. Now, we'll discuss this a little bit later on in in more detail in the series, but wicked individuals do a miniscule amount of harm and have almost no power whatsoever in comparison to institutionalized evil like institutionalized government and religion. Maybe a good serial killer, I guess that's probably an oxymoron, a bad serial killer who's good at what he does. Let's say a good serial killer kills 20 people in his lifetime.

I mean that would that would probably be a, like I said, a pretty big time serial killer. I know there are people who killed quite a bit more, but 20 is a good number there. But a government can kill 20,000,000 people in a few years. Habakkuk one's evil fishermen with a net seems to be describing institutionalized and purposed evil with real power over a large amount of humans, not lone individuals who do sporadic evil at random. But as I said, I'm not a Bible scholar and I haven't spent an inordinate amount of time researching this particular passage.

So I'd I'd encourage you to look into that more. I think it's interesting, maybe something there, maybe not. But especially considering what we looked at in Judges, with with this idea of of the way that kings work, and, human rulers work, I think it makes a lot of sense. So there's a lot more that I could have discussed here, but I think that this is a good foundation and a good start. You've got a document here that you can add to, that you can look at for reference, download it, change it to whatever way best suits you and make it way better.

My hope is that this at least gives you some broader context for passages like Romans 13, which people like to proof text and use as a one off to say, Well, look, the state is good. And we'll discuss that two episodes from now more specifically, but hopefully this provides you with some foundation and context. Definitely take a look at the resource links I provide for each of these episodes, and please feel free to copy my concordance and start your own and send it around, send it back to me. I'm looking forward to continuing this discussion with you in the next episode. That's all for now.

So peace, and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it. This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost Network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to non violence and Kingdom Living.