Decision Making in the Voting
Booth
Lesson #3
We always need to start out with a little insight as we get into our
series. Once again somebody sent me a piece of wisdom from Maxine.
“Voting is like choosing your favorite mosquito out of a swarm.”
The assumption that I am bringing to this is that the Bible, as God’s
revelation to us, is sufficient in every area of the Christian life. That
means that we can go to the Word of God to find a framework that we can apply
to any issue, any challenge, any situation in life, whether it has to do with
problems at work, problems in life, financial problems, understanding
history, or politics, law or ethics. Every single area of human
intellectual activity comes under the umbrella of God as the creator. As
the creator, He has addressed all of these things and supplies a framework that
we can derive from His Word, and by studying His word, we learn this
framework. We have to mine this framework in order to come to understand
how to go about making wise and proper decisions in life.
Part of this assumption that I’m bringing to this study is also that
when we make decisions, especially in the voting both, we are deciding who is a
good leader and who will be the best leader. Whenever you use these words
best, good, better, worse, bad, evil,
you are implying some sort of absolute value system that is the basis for your
decision making. There is something we can appeal to that has universal
implications that we can take and apply to making these decisions and that
these are somehow knowable.
As a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, our ultimate value system comes
out of the Word of God, so we can go to the Word of God to find principles that
are exhibited throughout revelation that can be applied to areas of economics,
politics, leadership, legislation that affect us at any point of time in our
lives and in history.
I’m not saying that we go to the Mosaic Law, and there is a direct
transfer of laws in the Mosaic Law to another country or even across time to our
culture. We see certain patterns; these patterns are exhibited in the
Mosaic Law, in the New Testament in the teachings of Jesus, and in New
Testament epistles. So we can trace these principles throughout Scripture
and come to understand that this gives to us certain universal truths that are
embedded within God’s creation that cannot be violated. All you have are
different instances of those universal truths – the Mosaic Law being one, the
Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ teachings to His disciples, New Testament epistles.
Last time I had three sets of rationales that summarized the first
lesson. I’m just going to cover the conclusions from each of these as a
summary. This supplies the foundation of this study.
First conclusion. “All Christians, who are citizens of the
Second conclusion. “Therefore, the
Third conclusion. “By understanding this biblical framework, which
informed the thinking of the founding fathers, a Christian can then vote more
intelligently and wisely to preserve and protect the Constitution and the
freedoms it recognizes.”
That is, there was a biblical framework that informed the thinking of
the founding fathers. I spent a lot of time in the last two sessions
establishing that because there is so much debate over whether or not this is a
so-called Christian nation. I understand that a nation cannot be
Christian in the sense of regenerated, justified or redeemed because that only
applies to individuals. But when you use the term Christian nation,
you can also use it in the sense of a theocracy. It was never used that
way by the founding fathers and in the founding documents, but they understood
that there was a worldview, if you will, that there was this framework of
values that there was a creator God, as stated several times in the Declaration
of Independence, who is the source of rights and freedoms of the
individual. On the basis of understanding those rights and putting them
within a political document, we can ensure the freedoms of the people.
John Adams and others when asked, and there is plenty of testimony to
this effect, that that which provided the source of the ideas for the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution was primarily the Bible and
the pastors. What the pastors taught from the pulpits and the phrases
they used are familiar to us and are found in the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution. In fact, McCullough tells this anecdote in his
biography of John Adams that when Adams and Franklin were reading one of the
initial drafts of the Declaration of Independence, Franklin comments, “It
sounds like a sermon.” Because that is where these ideas were normally
heard, and it was expected that the pastors during the week would address the
issues related to freedom, property and liberty, so that the people would
understand these things and that came out of their understanding of the
Scriptures.
As Bible-believing Christians, we believe that the Scripture is best
understood and interpreted in terms of a literal, grammatical, historical
interpretation. And that this idea of interpreting documents as they were
originally intended in light of the intent of the original author, taking into
account the historical context, the literary context, and interpreting these documents
in terms of normal language is the way we interpret just about anything from
our phone bill to the instructions on how to fill out our tax returns to
reading an historical document.
Critiquing post-modernism is just so easy. In post-modernism, you
have these writers who write about interpretation and say that the meaning is
ultimately determined by the reader. The reader can read something and
assign any value he wants to it. The discrepancy is that the reader
cannot just assign any value he wants to to what that post-modern writer is
saying. He is writing assuming that the reader is going to understand his
intent and his meaning, otherwise, why would he even engage in the
activity? It is just such a logical fallacy that is embedded in the whole
way of thinking in terms of relativism and subjective interpretation.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in his lecture he gave just last
Thursday put it this way. “Let me put it this way; there are really only two
ways to interpret the Constitution – try to discern as best we can what the
framers intended or make it up…” That is the same issue that came out of
the 19th century in terms of biblical interpretation: You
either interpret the Bible the way it was intended, or you make it up.
What we have today in judicial activism is this idea of just making it up as
you go along.
One thing I failed to point out last class is back at the end of August
when Rick Warren, who is the pastor of
Tonight we are going to develop the framework that we use in making
these kinds of decisions. That comes out of something that is familiar to
everybody – the divine institutions. I have taught on this at different
times in different series, and every time I teach this, my thinking develops a
little bit. We are going to use the divine institutions as a framework
for analyzing political positions.
In the background of this, we have to understand that the Bible
emphasizes ethics over economics. By that I mean, we have been influenced
through the worldview shift to paganism over the last century to century and a
half to think in terms of pragmatics and to separate ethics from the practical
aspects of politics and leadership. The founding fathers never saw that dichotomy,
and that dichotomy is not in the Scripture.
Proverbs
That addresses an issue that comes out of the paganism of our culture
where we have allowed the culture to influence us into creating this false
dichotomy. I remember back in the 1990s when there was the debate over
the election of President Clinton. People were trying to make an issue
out of character, and they were not getting anywhere because the culture does
not believe that character matters and that we just have to have someone who
knows how to handle the economics. That is a pagan idea that is not a
biblical idea.
We will tie economics into some of this in a different way that I think
will probably surprise some of you. At least, it is going to present it
in a way that I have not talked about before.
We are going to start with understanding what the divine institutions
are. The term divine institution has been used by Christians and
theologians to speak of those absolute social structures established by God and
embedded within the social structure of the human race. The essence of
these is more social than it is economic. As God creates man as a social
being, there is embedded within his makeup as an image-bearer of God certain
social realities. If those are breached, then there are negative
consequences because that is the way man was made by God.
Thus, these are for the entire human race – believers and unbelievers
alike. These are unbreakable realities. Once we try to start
engineering society away from these, then there is going to be a
collapse. It just does not work. One simple illustration of this is
just the 7-day week of creation. You have had both in the French
Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution in
There is a difference between conventions and institutions. The
pagan idea is that these are simply conventions. The first one is individual
responsibility. Over the years, you have heard this referred to with
different labels from different teachers. Some have called it volition,
some have called it volitional responsibility, some have called
it responsible labor. As you will see, the key element is
individual responsibility; each individual is accountable to his creator for
what he does with what God gives him. There are some fabulous
implications that come out from that and the episode in Genesis 2.
The second divine institution is marriage. God defines what
marriage is; it is not something that man invented to fit a need. That
only comes out of paganism or Darwinistic culture that as man works his way up
from being an ape to a hunter and gatherer, finally decides it works better if
there is some sort of connection established between men and women, and that
family sort of develops from that. It is all trial and error over
thousands of years. That would make it a convention.
There is a difference between a convention and an institution.
Tommy Ice’s son came up with this illustration, and I think it is a great
one. Some people in
You can read literature in the classical period of
The third divine institution is family, and the fourth divine
institution is government. I put the word judicial there
because it comes out of the delegation of judicial responsibility for dealing
with murder in the covenant with Noah.
The fifth divine institution, nations, is distinguished from that
because it does not come along until the
These are institutions. Conventions relate to fashions or styles
or personal preference. People in
Those first three divine institutions (volition, marriage, family) are
all established in Genesis 2 before the Fall. That is important.
They do not start having a family, but the idea is there and the mandate to be
fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. These three divine institutions
that are established before sin enters into human history have a different role
than the next two. These are established to promote productivity and
advance civilization. Embedded in what is sometimes called the dominion
mandate of Genesis 1:26-28 is that man is to be fruitful and multiply and to
rule and subdue the earth. He is to extend his influence over the earth,
and this involves productivity, which is at the very core of the whole concept
of labor and economy.
Then the next divine institutions (government, nations) come along after
the Fall and after the flood, and they are designed to restrain evil.
There is a difference in their basic function. The first three are to
promote productivity, which is key. As we will see, marriage and family
are intimately connected to individual responsibility, and then government and
nations are designed to restrain evil.
Another thing we can say is the role of government is to restrain evil
from restricting the first three divine institutions, so that government is to
protect individual responsibility. Man wants to dump responsibility and
to claim victimhood. We have subsections and subcultures in our country
that want to trade on their ethnic victimhood based on things that happened
historically. This comes out of pure paganism, and they want to make the
solution government, the fourth divine institution, rather than individual
responsibility, the first divine institution. They want to reverse things.
These have to operate in the proper order and within the proper sphere.
Our founding fathers understood this. Even though you are not
going to find places where they outlined or systematized it this way, but you
read what they wrote, and they understood and developed this in numerous ways.
In Genesis 1:26-28, we learn that God created man in His own image.
Verse 27 “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him;
male and female He created them.” So that male and female are both in the
image and likeness of God. That is important. We are reflections of
God. We are representatives of God and, as it were, a finite replica of
His nature in an infinite sense. To really understand and unpack this, we
have to understand a little bit about who and what He is.
Verse 28 is the basic command to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the
earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of
the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” This is
responsible rulership and is a totally different framework for how man should
handle the environment than what we have in modern pagan
environmentalism.
Let’s think a little bit about this idea of man being in the image of God
because the first thing we ought to note is that there are two ways to
understand the Trinity. God exists eternally as a triune God: Father, Son
and Holy Spirit. Three persons who we say are coequal, coinfinite and
coeternal. It is what is referred to as the ontological Trinity.
That has to do with their very essence and in terms of the very being of God,
they are equal. They are persons and relate to one another.
Throughout all of eternity, they have loved one another. They socialize
together, just to put it in another term that may jar you, and they have a
society there. That is what a society is – more than one person.
The three persons of the Trinity relate to one another, love one another, and
enjoy one another. In their being they are completely equal. They
share identical attributes. None of them knows more than another, none
can do more than another, none can love more, none is more just or
righteous.
In terms of their function, there are distinctions in terms of their
roles. The term that theologians have used to describe that is the economic
Trinity. We are not out of the Trinity yet, and we are already
talking about that there is an integral relationship between social reality and
economic reality. The reason I say that is that you will often hear it
said by some people today that they are economic or fiscal conservatives, but
they are social liberals. As if economics can be separated from the
social. What I am showing you is that if you are a Bible-believing Christian
where you are building your view of reality out from the nature of God as your
starting point, you cannot bifurcate social and economic. Social and
economic come together in a perfect unity within the Godhead.
That is fundamental to understand what happens to the image of
God. When God creates man and places him in the garden, He is going to
assign labor to him. It does not become toil until after the curse, so
labor is a part of that first divine institution. Of course, that was not
laborious, but it was a responsibility to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the
earth and to subdue it, and to rule over all of the animals. That is
labor; it is not tainted by sin yet, so there is no resistance from
nature. That is what happens after the Fall when thorns and thistles grow
up, and there is a fight.
In the garden, Adam is looking at the trees, and while they need to be
pruned a little bit, there is this harmony within the productive sphere.
There is not a fight or antagonism between nature and man as you have after the
Fall. He does not sweat, and he enjoys the product of his labor.
Adam is created to assume responsibilities and to labor. One of
the first jobs God gives him as part of that is to start identifying,
classifying, categorizing all the animals. God is multitasking
here. He is teaching man what it means to subdue and rule over the
animals, and at the same time, He is teaching him that animals come
two-by-two. There is a male and a female, but there is no counterpart to
Adam yet. He is going to recognize this need, and then God is going to
bring him a woman to be his assistant (ezer). To understand the
role of the ezer is to understand that marriage is social, but it is
economic. The woman is created to help the man fulfill his role in labor
and that God-given task to rule and subdue.
You cannot separate the social from the economic, at least not if you
want to try to stay within the parameters of a biblical worldview of what the
Bible is teaching about how to look at all these issues in life. We have
not gotten to the Fall yet. After the Fall is when all this stuff
fragments. We understand these three divine institutions in this sense
that because man is in the image of God, the economic facets (the labor) cannot
be distinguished from the social.
You start messing with the social aspects and trying to be social
engineers and change things (such as family and marriage) as the Marxists did
in
If we are created in the image of God, then we are to represent God; we are
to reflect who He is. What is the first thing that we see God doing in
Genesis 1? God created. He is a laborer, a workman, craftsman,
artist, architect, and planner. We know from Scripture that you have God
the Father, Son and Holy Spirit all involved in creation. The Father is
the architect, the Son is the one who is the building contractor, and the Holy
Spirit who in Genesis 1:2 is hovering over the face of the earth. That is
their economic function.
Later on in John, we understand that Jesus cannot do anything without it
being under the authority of the Father, so the Father begets the Son, and the
Son and the Father send the Holy Spirit. That is their economic function,
but it is not separated from their ontological reality.
What I want you to understand from that is that when you hear people
talking about that the Bible just addresses the spiritual life. No, it
doesn’t; it addresses everything. When you hear people say that they are
all for being economically conservative (lower taxes, smaller government), but
the government does not need to address social or ethical issues, such as
homosexual marriage. From the very beginning, the Bible does not allow us
to make those kind of bifurcations and dichotomies in life. That kind of
thing really only comes out of the introduction of the Enlightenment pagan
thought that shifted our authority base in the 19th century.
The first picture we see of God is that He is a laborer, and if man is
going to be a reflection of God, then man is going to be involved in
labor. We come to the first divine institution, which I am calling individual
responsibility. It emphasizes the fact that man is accountable to
God, so there is going to be three dimensions to this that we need to think
about.
The first is the aspect of spiritual accountability. When I say
spiritual accountability, the first thing we ought to understand from that is
that it necessitates someone to whom we are accountable, which means that
authority is embedded in the nature of reality, as it is in the Godhead.
Authority is not something God said man needed to learn because of sin and to
bring order out of chaos. There was authority in the Godhead from the
very beginning. The Father is in authority over the Son and the Spirit.
The Father and the Son sent the Spirit. There is an authority hierarchy
within the Trinity: That is the economic function.
There is spiritual accountability even in paradise. In the
perfection of the garden, there is an authority structure that is established –
the creature is accountable to the Creator.
Second thing is he is given responsibilities. He is to labor, but
it is not toilsome, not negative, not from the sweat of his brow. In his
labor, he is to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and to rule and
subdue the earth. In Genesis 2, he is to tend and keep the garden.
The word tend is the word for work. The word keep has the
idea of guarding.
We get something important out of this because he has the responsibility
of producing something with what God has given him. The whole subject of
economics deals with production and labor, but also we have the idea of
protection. Production means you are producing fruit, and you can enjoy
the fruits of your own production, which is private ownership of property
whether it is physical property or, as we discuss today in the legal realm,
intellectual property. Property is not just real property; there is
abstract property as well. Man is to produce and protect.
What did Adam have to protect the garden from? That serpent,
Satan, who is going to show up in the next chapter. When we talk about
protection in this country, one of the things is the private ownership of
weapons. We have the right, according to the Second Amendment, to keep
and bear arms. In the Second Amendment, the idea of keeping and bearing
arms is related to a militia, which is somewhat related to what we might call
the ready reserve today. That is as opposed to regular reserves or
active duty reserves in the military. Ready reserves do not show up or go
out on weekend exercises, but at any moment, with the militia, the call is
going to go out. They will grab their rifle, go to the assembly point,
and be prepared to protect hearth and home. The individual citizen soldier
is at the essence of the concept of a militia, and he needs to have the ability
to protect himself with the latest technology in weaponry.
One of the things that he is going to be protecting himself from in
order to secure liberty is the government. That was the idea in the
Constitution is to protect from the tyranny of the government. You can go
to passages like 1 Samuel 7 where they are under the dominion of the
Philistines, who would not allow blacksmiths to operate in
That is how tyranny works: It keeps the citizenry from having the latest
technology (You can read that any way you want – assault weapons or whatever.),
so that you can protect yourself against whatever the government can bring to
bear against you in any kind of assault to establish their tyranny.
The idea of self protection is clearly reinforced by the Lord Jesus
Christ in Luke 22:36. This occurs the night before He goes to the
cross. He is talking to His disciples: “And He said to them, ‘But now,
whoever has a money belt is to take it along, likewise also a bag, and whoever
has no sword is to sell his coat and buy one [self protection].’ ” Early in the
ministry when He sent the disciples out, He said not to take food or a
cloak. God would provide for them along the way. Now, it is changing,
and a new dispensation is going to start.
In the next verse, He asks the disciples if they have any swords as they
get ready to go to the
We are applying these principles that we derive from Scripture to our
candidates on various issues related to the Second Amendment at this
point. According to John McCain’s website, he believes that “It is the
right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms, and that is a fundamental,
individual, Constitutional right. We have a responsibility to ensure that
criminals who violate the law are prosecuted to the fullest rather than
restricting the rights of law-abiding citizens in the area of gun control. Gun
control is a proven failure in fighting crime. Law-abiding citizens
should not be asked to give up their rights because of criminals.
Criminals ignore gun control laws anyway.” He believes that gun
manufacturers should not be liable for crimes, he opposes restrictions on
assault weapons and ammunition, he voted against the Brady Bill and the Assault
Weapon Ban.
On the other hand, we have Senator Obama. He is rather vague and
uncertain on some of these issues, especially after the Supreme Court ruled
against the law in
Since we do not have a lot of clear statements from Obama, I want to
read from a letter that was posted on the internet by Richard A. Pearson, who
is the Executive Director of the Illinois State Rifle Association, dated
It looks as if he does not recognize the value of the individual citizen
protecting his own private property. Once the value of private property
begins to erode, it fits within a consistent web. My thesis is Obama is a
Marxist, which is seen from many of his views, and he sat under a Marxist
pastor in his black liberation theology messages. Black liberation
theology comes out of Latin American liberation theology, which is Marxism
wrapped around the Bible trying to give it some kind of justification. If
a man is not bright enough to understand what Marxism is and cannot spot it
sitting in a pew and hearing it Sunday after Sunday, then how can he really be
bright enough to serve as president?
There are many who think it is radical to express that labor/work is
instituted before the Fall. We are so wrapped up in our own experience,
we cannot think of work as being non-toilsome. We cannot think of labor
apart from it being laborious and by the sweat of the brow because that is our
post-Fall experience. The reality is there is labor before the Fall.
When we look at this breakdown (Chart), we start with spiritual
accountability because the one negative of all the commands that God gives (be
fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, subdue, rule, tend and keep or work and
guard) is do not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Genesis
There is labor, not toilsome, and man has the right to enjoy the fruits
of his labor, which develops the whole concept of private property and private
ownership of property. We can develop this whole concept of private
ownership all the way through Scripture. For example, in Genesis 12, God
gives a piece of real estate to Abraham. In the next chapter, there is a
conflict between Abraham’s men and
What I am pointing out here is that while these things are not the point
of the text and are not necessarily the point of some of the laws in the Mosaic
Law or the point of some of the parables that Jesus gave, these stories, laws,
or parables do not work if God is not recognizing the legitimacy of private
ownership of property, private accumulation of wealth apart from government interference,
and the right of the individual to decide how to utilize his own wealth without
government interference.
When you get to the 10 Commandments, which is basically a summation of
the Mosaic Law and the 10 key principles out from which the other 603
commandments are going to be developed, two of the 10 Commandments relate to
private property. Only two subjects have two commandments related to
them: one is God and one is the protection of private property. The 8th
commandment is “thou shall not steal,” which assumes the right of
ownership of property, and the 10th commandment is “thou shall not
covet” your neighbor’s property.
But class warfare, which is often promoted in this country by various
liberals of both parties, promotes the violation of the 10th
commandment and encourages people who do not have to want to benefit from the
fruits of the hard work of those that have. They are basically being
encouraged by the government to covet the money and possessions of what others
have earned and worked for.
The famous Joe, the plumber asked a basic question. “If I buy a
business and that business is going to make more than $250,000 a year, am I
going to be penalized by the taxes that you (Obama) are recommending?”
The answer was, “We need to spread the wealth.” That is Marxism or
socialism. The path to socialism leads to servitude. The irony of
this, in case you have not caught it and at the risk of being called a racist,
is we are on the verge of electing the first black president of the U.S. and
what his agenda is is to return all of us to a state of slavery – slavery to
the federal government. And, yet, that irony has been completely lost on
everybody. Everybody is so scared that they are going to be labeled a
racist for pointing it out that nobody is going to point out the obvious.
We have to recognize that on the basis of what the Bible teaches about
economics and labor, people can be classified in one of two areas: They
are either producers, or they are consumers. A producer is someone that
when you look at the sum total of their involvement in their society, their
work adds to the net worth of the culture.
Consumers are those who take more from the culture of society than they
put into it. There are two categories of consumers. There are those who
cannot work or support themselves due to the fact that they are too old, too
young, injured or handicapped in some way. They cannot produce. The
Bible recognizes a valid provision for them, and that is the only valid provision
that the Bible has for government to provide for widows and orphans. In
the Mosaic Law, one of the three tithes was taken up only once every three
years, and this third tithe was 10% for the widows and orphans. Three and
one third percent of the gross national product of
The Bible has a consistent view that rejects the lazy person and values
and rewards the worker, the producer. The producers are owners, laborers,
everyday people who contribute to society through their work, contributions,
gifts of time, talent and treasure. These are the ones who protect and
defend the society and the ones who are valued.
The consumers are those who are classified as “wicked and lazy.”
There are 205 verses in the Bible that deal with the poor. None of these
assign responsibility for the poor to the government except for that one tithe
in the Mosaic Law.
The responsibility for the poor is divided up between three groups.
The first is the individual himself. They are to go to work, and if they
do not work, they do not eat (2 Thessalonians
The government is extremely inefficient in taking care of the
poor. The American Institute of Philanthropy, which sets up guidelines
and evaluates non-profit charities in terms of their efficiency in getting
money to its intended goal (i.e., the poor people), recognizes that at least
60% of the money that is donated to a non-profit charity should end up in the
hands of those to whom it is intended to go. That is their benchmark: 40%
of every dollar that goes in goes to covering just the basic overhead and
administrative costs. You should not donate to a charity if less than 60%
gets into the hands of those it is intended for.
Since the beginning of the war on poverty back during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency
in the 1960s, nine trillion dollars has been taken by the federal
government to end poverty, but only 30% of that money has reached the
poor. According to the figures given by the American Institute of
Philanthropy, the last thing in the world we would want to do is to give money
to the federal government. It is the most inefficient way to solve the
problem of poverty that there could be. It is like using a hammer to
polish crystal.
One example that we can use on private industry handling problems like
this is that in government prisons, there is a 68% recidivism rate. In
private, faith-based prisons, there is only an 8% recidivism rate.
Government cannot get the job done, but we keep being told that that is the way
to do it. All it does is to line the pockets of those in power.
What we see summarized in Scripture in the Gospels is there are many
times that Jesus talks about land owners or the king who gives money to his
servants or to his slaves and comes back to ask for an accountability.
What we learn from these various passages is that man has the right to employ
who he will without the interference of government regulation telling him what
kind of insurance he should provide, what kind of wage he should pay (The Bible
is completely against a minimum wage.), and all the other myriads of
regulations that hinder business and destroy capital.
The place to look for this is in the parable of the landowner in Matthew
20:1ff. The landowner who gets up early in the morning and goes to pick a
few laborers to work on the house he is building. He goes back three
hours later and picks another 5-6 guys who are hanging out. Goes back a
couple of hours later and picks out another 5-6. The first guys he picks,
he says, “If you work for me all day, I will give you a denarius.” The
rest of the guys all day long, he says, “I will give you a fair wage.”
When he comes to the end of the day, he hires another couple of guys.
They show up at the house, and as dusk comes, he says he will now pay off everybody.
He starts with the guys he hired last and gives them a denarius. But they
only worked two hours. He pays everybody a denarius. It is up to
the landowner to determine how much he is going to pay. It is not the
government’s responsibility.
In a Marxist interpretation of that, the landowner would have to be the
evil capitalist who is exploiting the worker. In the Matthew parable, the
landowner is God. Marxism is inherently anti-God because of the way it
would have to handle certain things of this particular nature.
In Matthew 18:23ff, the landowner has a servant who owes him a large
amount of money. He comes to him and says he cannot pay but give him time
to pay the debt. The landowner eventually is gracious and forgives the
debt. Then the servant goes to someone who owes him a lot of money, and
he insists that he pay. The landowner finds out, and says “Since you do
not understand grace, I am going to go back and force you to pay everything
that I was originally going to forgive you.”
What is in force there is accountability. Everybody is
accountable, and ultimately it reinforces the first divine institution of
responsibility. Forgiveness of debt or how you handle the money is up to
the king or the landowner or the person who heads up the business.
In Matthew 25:14ff, you have the parable of the talents. One man
is going to go away and travel for awhile, so he calls in his stewards and
gives them different amounts of money, called talents. Two of them invest
and put the money at risk, but they gain. The third says, “He is
such a cruel taskmaster; I am not going to risk the money, and I’m just going
to bury it in the yard, so when he comes back, I will still have it.”
When the man comes back and asks what they did with the money, he rewards and
praises the first two because they risked the money, earned reward on it, and
increased its value. When he comes to the third one who just buried the
money, the man (who is the Lord) condemns him for being wicked and lazy.
He does not say he is going to exercise compassion and take away a little away
from the first guy and a little more away from the second guy and give it to
the third man. He says he was wicked and lazy, so he is taking everything
away from him and giving it to the other guys.
That is how God works. God does not have this pseudo-compassion
that we need to somehow subsidize laziness. In the early colonies, the
Puritans tried an experiment with socialism and found out that the people who
had an inclination to be lazy would become more and more lazy and ride the
shirttails of those who were more productive.
The Bible is totally against that. This is what we have in
passages such as Ephesians 4:28 “He who steals must steal no longer [that
applies to the government and to legalized theft]; but rather he must labor,
performing with his own hands what is good, so that he will have something to
share with one who has need.” You cannot share unless there is a
surplus. There has to be an accumulation of wealth in order to have the
resources to give to somebody.
2 Thessalonians 3:10-12 “For even when we were with you, we used to give
you this order: if anyone is not willing to work, then he is not to eat,
either. [This is the Word of God – if you do not work, you do not eat.]
For we hear that some among you are leading an undisciplined life, doing no
work at all, but acting like busybodies. Now such persons we command and
exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to work in quiet fashion and eat their own
bread.”
What is interesting is when you look at the Mosaic Law, the Scripture
condemns inheritance taxes because inheritance was to be passed on to the next
generation, so there could be an accumulation of wealth over the
generations. You see this condemnation of inheritance taxes in Proverbs
13:22 and 1 Chronicles 28:8.
Another thing you see is there are no property taxes. God is the
one who ultimately owns the property, not the government, and there are no
property taxes because they come back and bite the next generation when they
inherit it. If there are any back taxes, they have to pay that off.
So property taxes are understood by the Bible to destroy the accumulation of
wealth and the development of prosperity.
Also the Bible recognizes the validity of tax exemption. In Ezra
When we look at the evaluation of the candidates in terms of all these
standards we get from the Bible, they both fall short. They fall short a
long way because we have been operating on a false system of economic
philosophy in this country since at least the 1930s with Keynesian views on
economics. We operate on deficit spending and many other things that just
continue to destroy the prosperity and the wealth of this nation.
With regard to Senator Obama, he has introduced the Patriot Employer Act
of 2007. Doesn’t that sound good? It is not good. It rewards
companies that create good jobs with good benefits for workers, but the
legislation provides certain tax incentive if they will let labor unions come
in. That just takes away from the rights of the owners.
The second thing about Obama is he told Joe, the plumber that we need to
share the wealth. We need to take away from those who have and give it to
the have-nots. But who is going to determine the line of wealth? Is
it $250,000? Why not make it $125,000 or one million or two million or 25
billion dollars? Who decides that somebody has made too much money?
How arrogant.
It is like Charles Grassley from
It is a punishment of those who are productive. The Bible rewards
those who are productive but punishes those who are lazy.
Obama wants to leave the corporate tax rate at 35 percent, which I
understand is very high within the so-called free world. He promotes
restrictions on gun ownership. He supports the raising of capital gains
tax for those who make more than $250,000. Many of his tax credits
are refundable tax credits, which will give money back to people even if they
did not pay any taxes to begin with. Forty-four percent of Americans do
not pay taxes. They get a $5,000 refundable tax credit. That means
when they file their income tax, if they did not pay any income tax, the
government will write them a check.
He is also in favor of increasing the death tax or inheritance tax
[There is no death tax in Scripture; it is against that.] for those who have
over 3.5 million dollars. He wants to increase that to 35 percent, but McCain
would set it at 15 percent for estates over 5 million dollars – he is wrong
too. The only difference is that you have a Marxist and a socialist. The
change that Obama wants, in my opinion, is a change in degree, not a change in
kind. We have had a basic trend of socialism for the last 50 years in
this country, and he just wants to intensify that.
McCain proposes to reduce spending, which is good. I heard that he
wants to increase the child tax credit to $7,000 a child, which is good.
After World War 2, Americans were given a $600 child tax credit. That
does not sound like much today, but that was a lot in the post-World War 2
environment. That led to the baby boom. Why in the 1950s and 1960s
moms were stay-at-home moms is because with the $600 per child tax credit, they
could afford to stay at home and raise children. Today’s money would have
to be a $12,000 tax credit per child in order to have the same result.
The other positive thing about McCain is he favors less restricted gun
laws. But he still has bought into the same basic framework of economics
that Obama has. The Non-Partisan Tax Policy Center concluded that if all
things are equal (that is, no new wars and nothing else changes), Obama’s plan
would cost 2.7 trillion dollars, and McCain’s would cost 3.7 trillion dollars,
but that does not factor in the 700 billion dollars in extra spending that
Obama has in his plans.
What we see in both of them is continued support for the unjust taxation
system of the