Tyranny and Syncretism
We have to remember that the
ultimate source of all tyranny is the sin nature, as Scripture says. Every
single human being since Adam has been born with a sin nature and is spiritually
dead. Because we were born spiritually dead we are enslaved to that sin nature.
We have volition, we make choices, but as a spiritually dead unbeliever there
is one realm of choice that is completely foreign to every human being, and
that is a choice that is truly righteous, a choice that is truly good in the
sight of God, a choice that has any merit in terms of His righteousness. So we
are limited, as it were, in our volition and in our exercise of choice until we
are born again. At the instant that we put our faith and trust in Jesus Christ,
at that moment, we are regenerate, the Scripture says, and at that moment God
creates and imparts to us a new spirit that enables us to have a relationship
with God, to understand eternal truths and to be able to live and apply them in
our lives. In the church age we are also given at that moment of salvation God
the Holy Spirit, and it is God the Holy Spirit who is the one who energizes and
empowers us, and by whom we walk and mature spiritually. For that new life that
we have when we trust in Jesus as our savior is given to us but it is compared
in Scripture to the life an infant, a baby, and so the Bible uses this analogy
in terms of human experience in terms of growth from human infancy t0 maturity.
Everyone is born a spiritual infant, they have no knowledge or understanding of
eternal things other than what they have just learned, that God has provided
through His love a savior who died on the cross and paid the penalty for sin,
and that because of that we can have eternal life.
So bondage is ultimately an
individual problem. It is not a social problem, not a group problem, not an
education problem, not a national problem; it is an individual problem. To
solve that problem and its serious implications for all realms of human society
the ultimate solution and the only real solution begins at the cross. It is
only when people have true freedom that comes through Jesus Christ (Galatians
6:1, freedom which isn’t political but spiritual) that we can ever come to understand
what real freedom is in other areas of life. Even if we live under political
tyranny, or if we live in circumstances or organizations where there is very
little freedom, we have freedom in our soul. Every believer has true freedom in
the soul because of that relationship to God.
When we understand that as
our broad understanding for what is the basis for tyranny and bondage in human
experience, and what that solution is, then we can begin to see in history and
in the out workings of individual relationships, whether it is in a small
community or a large community, whether it is the production of the sin nature
towards corruption and bondage or the outworking of spiritual truth in terms of
understanding and experiencing freedom in the course of life. One of the things
we have in the Bible is not only a focus on the spiritual problem and the
spiritual solution, but God in the way He has put together this revelation from
Genesis to Revelation the kind of information we need in His divinely edited
observations on history so that through studying that we can come to understand
many different principles related to every area of life. The Bible is not a
mono-thematic book, it is not just focused on salvation and the spiritual life;
it is designed to teach us how to think about every area of human experience
from God’s perspective, and how to be able to bring that grid to bear to
interpret and understand circumstances so that we can then apply the
problem-solving rationales to the situations we face in life, thinking about
them in a biblical framework without allowing the circumstances we face to
overwhelm us, discourage us, make us feel hopeless and helpless.
We understand as believers that
God is in control and circumstances vary down through history. Christians have
lived and flourished under many different kinds of political environments.
Christians have also suffered and have also been persecuted under many
different political environments. In the northern kingdom of Israel at the time
of Elijah believers are going through a time of unprecedented suffering,
hostility and persecution as Jezebel, the wife of King Ahab, is sending out her
hit squads to seek and destroy the prophets of God who are living in the
northern kingdom, and to destroy any witness or evidence of the truth of God.
One of the lessons that we can learn and trace through the study of Elijah is
how God protects, how He provides for, believers who are living under not merely
a political tyranny but also in an environment of spiritual hostility where
their very lives are threatened.
One of the questions that has
been raised in the northern kingdom’s history is how they got there. How did
they get into this mess? By understanding the dynamics of the development of
tyranny in this period we can understand the connection between spirituality
and freedom. We can understand the connection between what many people today
want to isolate as religious perceptions and religious thought and social
consequences and political actions. In God’s world is interconnected; in the
mind of modern and postmodern man everything is disconnected, especially when
it comes to religion. There are many secularists in this nation of all
political stripes who do not think that religious belief should have anything
to do with how somebody thinks about economics, literature, art, music or
politics, because there things are different from religion. So somehow you
Christians, you just keep your Bible studies and your churches on Sunday
morning because these don’t have anything to do with how we make decisions in a
nation. What we see in the Old Testament is that political and economic
circumstances are the consequences of spiritual decisions, and at the very core
of life are those spiritual realities because those spiritual realities have to
do with how we understand ultimate reality. Ultimately reality is either the
God of the Bible, a personal, infinite, righteous, loving God, or it is
something less than that. And if we look at the culture around us that which is
ultimate reality is nothing but impersonal matter, and at its most extreme
opposite these are the options that are presented: the impersonal matter that
operates on principles of pure random chance or, on the other hand, we live in
a universe that was created by a personal, infinite God who designed every
aspect of the universe—whether it has to do with life, human interaction,
social institutions, or whether it has to do with the physics, chemistry and
biology of all the aspects in that universe.
What flows out of that,
understanding of ultimate reality affects how we think about knowledge; and the
ultimate issue in knowledge is the ultimate issue in the universe, in the
history of man and in the history of angels. The second issue that flows out of
ultimate reality is how do we know anything about ultimate reality? When we
come to answer that question of how do we know we have to go to the issue of
authority. How do we know something is true means what is the ultimate
authority in our life? Is the ultimate authority in our life what other people
think, the opinion of those around us? Is the ultimate authority in our life
that which is derived through the scientific endeavor, through the use of rationalism
and empiricism within the scientific method totally apart from any external
input where the universe is viewed as a closed system and there can’t be
presuppositionally any information coming into that closed system from an
external authority such as God; we have to be able to find our answers totally
and completely from within that closed system. So knowledge ultimately involves
this question of authority. What is the authority when you say that something
is right or something is wrong? Whenever we use value judgments it involves a
system of knowledge in order to make those evaluations.
What lies behind making these
evaluations is a system of values that presupposes a system of knowledge and an
authority base. So who is our authority? Is it God, a personal infinite God who
speak to man and who has spoken to man to give man a complete framework of
thought so that he can then evaluate and understand the issues of life, or is
the ultimate reality something that is within creation itself, something that
comes out of man’s own thought based on rationalism, empiricism, or even
mysticism? When we put our ultimate authority on God who exists outside of
creation as the infinite personal creator, who stands completely separate from
creation, then that is part of worshipping God. But when we put our ultimate
authority within creation, in human opinion, in the results of a closed system,
a scientific system based on rationalism and empiricism, or the intuitive
insights of people who think that they are getting messages from God in
mysticism, then what we are doing is saying that ultimate authority lies within
the creaturely realm. And when we put the ultimate authority within the
creaturely realm the Bible has a word for it: idolatry. Idolatry is not simply
the worship of external images made out of wood or metal or stone, idolatry
ultimately derives from a mental attitude where we are putting the ultimate
authority in our life in something that is created over against the creator of
all things.
Once we get involved in
idolatry then we are basically feeding and following—the two operate
together—the lust patterns of our sin nature. We know that that which drives
the sin nature at the very core of its makeup are the lust patterns—all kinds,
such as power lust, materialism lust, money lust or greed, sexual lust, lust
for recognition and approval, which are the prime lusts. When there is no
restraint on the lust patterns of the sin nature then those lust patterns are
free to operate at their fullest extent. That’s called the tyranny of the sin
nature. The sin nature is in the driver’s seat and is in control. The only
thing that can minimize the sin nature for creatures, apart from salvation, is
going to be some form of discipline, ethics or law, all of which bring to bear
a value system. So whenever we start talking about value systems it takes us
back to the whole issue of how we know what is right or wrong and what our
ultimate authority is. It is human reason or human experience? Is it getting
insights, flashes from God? Or is it in objective revelation from God in His
Word?
That is interesting, because
all issues in life ultimately come down to this whole thing about authority. We
might scratch our heads and ask why authority is such a major issue, such a
factor in the Scriptures. It is because the original sin in the universe is the
sin of rejection of authority, the sin of God’s highest and most intelligent
angel whom we refer to as Lucifer or by his post-fall title Satan or the devil
as he sought to make himself the ultimate authority in the universe. He wanted
to be God; he wanted to be the one who would determine what right and wrong
would be, and the one to whom and through whom everything in creation would
ultimately refer. So the ultimate battle, the ultimate revolution, in the
history of the universe was an authority issue; and this is what we always have
to come down to as believers whenever we start talking about this whole issue
of freedom and tyranny, when we start seeing how these spiritual issues work themselves
out within the framework of human government.
How did
When we look at the history
of
1 Kings 11:4-6 NASB
“For when Solomon was old, his wives turned his heart away after other gods;
and his heart was not wholly devoted to the LORD his God, as the heart of David his father {had been.}
There is no concern in syncretism for logic or rational consistency. We live in that kind of era. Under postmodernism there is a rejection of historic logic. Postmodernism is really a reaction to modernism. Modernism said that man on his own efforts and energy could come to solve man’s problems, apart from God—from reason and experience using logic. Man hasn’t done that and so there was a rejection of modernism, it didn’t really solve the problem. The reaction called postmodernism makes everything relative and everything of equal value, whether it is the thought of some prehistoric or stone age tribe, or it is the thought of some educated elitists from Harvard; it is all of equal value; it all means the same thing; if it works for you it is okay. There is no ultimate reference point; it is just whatever you like, your own emotion or your own feelings.
Definition: Syncretism is the joining or
assimilating differing or opposite doctrines and practices, especially between
philosophical and religious systems, resulting in a new system altogether in which
the fundamental structure and tenets of each have been changed. Syncretism of
the gospel occurs when its essential characteristic is confused with elements
from the culture. (That is, the Christian take in all these different
ideas that are part of the culture around them and blends them because he is
not going to be in contrast or conflict with the ideas and culture around him.) In syncretism the gospel is lost
as the church simply confirms and conforms to what is already present in the
culture. So Christians don’t look and act any different from
the culture outside of the church because they have basically brought the
thinking of the world into the church, rather than not being conformed to the
world but being transformed by the renewing of their minds.
So we can say that in
syncretism the ethics that produce the virtue and integrity needed to preserve
a righteous government and honest business are destroyed. In a syncretistic
culture and when you think in a relative way you cannot produce the kind of
ethics that will support liberty and freedom because you have eviscerated
thought of any kind of ethical system that the government can rest upon. When
you remove the people from an external reference point, from their thought in
terms of absolutes, then the Constitution cannot continue, cannot stand. We
have perverted the system of this nation by an unrestrained sin nature. That is
the tyranny of the sin nature. The result of this syncretism is that nothing is
left to restrain the lust patterns of the soul. They are free to be exploited
to their fullest. The increase of the power of the sin nature increases the
tyranny of the sin nature of the nation’s leaders, whether they are political,
in business, or religious. They are operating on the unrestrained sin nature
and this leads to the tyranny of the nation.
The second stage in the
slide to tyranny in
Amos
By the time of Elijah,
just two generations from the separation of the two kingdoms the king in the
north is Ahab, and the king in the north has married into the family of the
high priest of Baal in