Personal Grace Orientation, Generosity: Not Socialism.
Selected Verses. Acts
The passage that we get into
in Acts 4:32 is a passage that speaks of the early believers in
Two books have been written
that have been very influential at promoting a view of socialism among
Christians. They are not the only ones but they are some of the most prominent
ones. It has been very enlightening to discover the breadth and the depth of
socialist thinking among mega-church evangelical leaders in the
The comment has been made: “Most
serious is the unjust…” Key word. That is a value
word, an ethics word. “… there is not a righteous
division of the earth’s food and resources.” Well “righteous” means according
to some standard, so whose standard is he talking
about here? Is he talking about God’s standard? According to this comment God
must be unjust because God is the ultimate sovereign who oversees the distribution
of agricultural fertility. So this must be God’s fault. He is not saying that
overtly but that certainly is the sub-text. Continuing, “Thirty per cent of the
world’s population lives in the developed countries but this minority of less
than one third eats three quarters of the world’s protein each year.” But a lot
of nations and cultures don’t eat protein, you can’t change them. And if you did
they would have a lot of problems. “Less that six per cent of
the world’s population lives in the
There are cultures that ultimately
are based on religious foundations—religious views of animals of the world, of
work—that because of those distorted and perverted views have never produced
and never will produce, and that is why they only consume a small amount. It’s
because they don’t have the resources because they don’t work, they don’t
produce; they don’t develop technology to enjoy that in those countries. So
socialists and others who try to put us on a guilt trip and say Americans
consume too much, we are going to run out, and all of this other stuff, fail to
ever mention the fact that we are simply consuming what we produce. We have
every right to do that and, in fact, we should enjoy greatly and celebrate the
consumption of what our culture has produced. It is the result of the hard work
of our people. There is nothing ethically wrong with that unless you are
operating on an anti-biblical ethic, an anti-biblical view of righteousness.
One passage that has almost
always gone to support some from of Christian socialism, that we should be
taking care of the poor, is found in Matthew chapter twenty-five. When we study
the Bible it is always important to understand the context—text without a
context leaves us with a con job. We have people who will go to the end of
Matthew chapter 25 where there is the story of Jesus and the judgment of the
nations, usually to verses such as verses 35ff.
Matthew 25:35 NASB “For I was
hungry, and you gave Me {something} to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me
{something} to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in;
The issue here is,
what is this all about? Is Jesus laying down a principle that we should be
feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, and taking in any stranger off
the street, clothing the poor? Is that what this is talking about, or is He
talking about something else? The most important thing is context and the
context for Matthew 25 actually begins in Matthew 24 where we find Jesus
leaving the temple and is question by His disciples about all the beautiful
buildings and architecture that Herod had developed for the renovation of the
temple. And Jesus said to them, “Do you not see all these things? Truly I say to
you, not one stone here will be left upon another, which will not be torn down.”
Then they ask when this will happen, and what would be the sign of His coming
and the end of the age. They want to know what would happen prior to the coming
of Christ. So Matthew chapter 24 is answering that question, and it moves into
chapter 25 because the parables that Jesus begins to tell all relate to the
future kingdom. Matthew 25:1 “Then the kingdom of heaven will be comparable to
ten virgins…” is talking about that future kingdom; v. 14 “For {it is} just
like a man {about} to go on a journey…” All of this is talking about something
in the future. Then in Matthew 25:31, our immediate context, and the first
verse to set this up says, “But when the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all
the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne.
Matthew 25:32 NASB “All the
nations will be gathered before Him; and He will separate them from one
another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.” Then He
establishes the basis for this judgment. This judgment has to do with the Gentiles
who survive the Tribulation, not the end of time judgment at the great white
throne, and not the judgment seat of Christ which takes place in relation to
the church immediately after the Rapture. This is a judgment that comes
immediately after the second coming when Jesus is judging the Gentiles who have
survived Daniel’s seventieth week or the Tribulation period.
Matthew 25:34 NASB “Then the
King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed of My Father,
inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.
Matthew 25:40 NASB “The King
will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it
to one of these brothers of Mine, {even} the least {of them,} you did it to
So what Jesus is saying is that they are
being evaluated at this judgment on the basis of whether they treated and dealt
honourably with the Jewish people or not. The only way they would know that the
Jewish people were still God’s people is if they were
believers and had learned this from the Word of God. There’s an assumption here
that only those who were blessing the Jews were those who were believers.
Unbelievers would not do that, they would have no reason for it, and the
anti-Semitism that becomes evident at the end of the Tribulation is worldwide.
Every nation will be against
If the Jewish people have do not have
What this passage is dealing with is that
in the Tribulation period
Conclusion: How did we get in this mess
that we are in today? Because we are living in a nation today when a number of
evangelical leaders—leaders in the entire mega-church movement and the emergent
church movement—are socialist to their very core. They read each other’s literature
and they support each other, and they have as a theological foundation a lot of
subterfuge and trickery: on the one hand they’ll affirm the inerrancy of
Scripture but on the other hand in practice they will reject it. They say they
believe in free market economics but on the other hand they set forth social
agendas that are perfectly parallel to UN’s millennial
goals to end hunger, end poverty and these kinds of things.
We got into this kind of a mess because of
things that happened historically, starting in the late 1700s and even earlier.
In understanding culture and history we always have to ask three questions.
What does a group of people believe about authority? Who is the ultimate
authority in upper truth? Is it God or is it man? Is it tradition, or is it
some institution like a religious institution? Second question: What is their
view of God? Do they have a small God who just sits out there and doesn’t do a
whole lot and human beings basically run the show? Do they have a view of God who
is just a blown-up version of man? Or do they have a God who is part of
creation? Do they have a pantheistic view of God? Is God an impersonal force? Or
do we have a personal, infinite creator God who is the God of Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob? He is personal in that He interacts, communicates, has a
relationship with individual persons, but at the same time He is an infinite
God. The third question is on the view of man: Is man totally independent,
totally autonomous of God? God has no controls whatsoever. Do we have a view of
man where he is just a cosmic accident, which is what we have in Darwinism? Or
is man a specifically designed creature in the image of God? Then we have to
ask further questions: Is man basically good or basically evil? Basically evil
doesn’t mean he can’t do good things or doesn’t do good things but that the
orientation of his soul is basically towards himself.
What happened historically is that western
civilization moved out of the Protestant Reformation (1517-1650 approx.) and
went into another period called the Enlightenment. In the Enlightenment the
intellectuals in the western world rejected the Bible as the source of authority.
Part of the problem was that before that in what they called the “Dark Ages”
out of their arrogance they confused the Roman Catholic church
who said they were teaching the Bible. But that wasn’t what they were teaching.
The Roman Catholic church had taken a lot of things in
the Bible and had mixed it with Platonism and later Aristotelianism,
and later on nominalism. So what was taught as absolute theological dogma by
the Roman Catholic church was stuff that wasn’t even in the Bible, it was a
result of tradition. The authority was not God’s Word, the Bible, it was their
tradition. The Enlightenment put an emphasis on reason apart from God—we could
ascertain all truth without God telling us anything. Ultimately they were beginning
to reject the idea that there was a God who was really there. For them God was
getting smaller until He was just an impersonal force and then nothing by the
time of the late 19th century. At the same time their view of man
was getting larger and larger and more capable, until into the late 19th
century man is the definer of all truth.
Toward the end of the Enlightenment period—there
were different forms of the Enlightenment—the was one
form in
Mysticism always goes hand in hand with
idealism. This shapes the thinking in
These ideas began to be accepted more and
more by the population in the west, and these include ideas such as when there
are basic social problems it is not the private sector’s responsibility to
solve them, it is the public sector’s responsibility to solve them, government’s
responsibility to solve them. So there is a shift away from
the value of the individual and his responsibility to the corporate solution—the
corporate solution in terms of government, the corporate solution in terms of
the institutions. Therefore we are going to have a perfect peaceful
earth and a utopia which is only going to come in if government does it.
There is the rise first in