Pagan Principles Have Infected the Church Through the Portal of Property
We have argued that the constitutional documents of Jerusalem place the primary responsibility for welfare for both family and extended family firmly upon the shoulders of the Family itself. We have also argued that the State has no place at all to play in welfare, except indirectly, through restricting what it takes in taxation and through protecting the property rights of the Family. In fact, as we shall see in future essays, the State is explicitly forbidden by the constitution of the Kingdom of God to have any regard at all for the socio-economic situation of its people at all.
To the extent that modern Athens everywhere, not only disregards this divine prohibition, but is deliberately and relentlessly built upon the diametrically opposite principle—that is, that the State is the primary organ of welfare and that it must make the socio-economic condition of citizens its primary regard and concern—only serves to highlight just how far modern Athens has progressed in its rebellion against the Living God.
Since the Family is primarily responsible for social welfare, it follows that the heads of households must give themselves to ensure that all family members work diligently and effectively to achieve financial and material independence, so that they are not dependant upon welfare and charity from others. This is repeatedly insisted upon in the Scriptures. Hard work, diligence, thrift, and self-reliance are required. This is so fundamental that if anyone shows himself or herself unwilling to exert effort in these ways, they are to be allowed to starve—that is, no-one has a responsibility to take care of or extend welfare to them. This underscores more powerfully than anything else the importance of needing to strive to take care of oneself, and one's dependants, to the very best of one's ability.
But there is a very important constitutional corollary to this injunction to become self-supporting and independent: one of the most important reasons why we need to work hard to ensure self-support and self-reliance is that we then might have the resources and be able to help others who are less blessed and who, at least for a time, cannot make their way without help. These responsibilities and duties are repeatedly placed firmly upon the head of every household in the Scriptures.
We have also seen that these duties extend not just to the current generation, but thought and provision is also to be made for our children and grandchildren. In order to carry out these duties, it is necessary for the Family to amass and transmit capital down through generations. The modern Athenian State has set itself up as the greatest enemy and obstacle to this duty. It has put in place a phalanx of measures to strip capital away from the Family into its own coffers in order to carry out its own designs to be the primary dispenser of welfare. These measures include progressive taxation rates, high levels of taxation over all, capital gains taxes, and various estate tax measures to prevent wealth being left in trust to children and grandchildren. Once more we see the modern Athenian State being built upon principles of Unbelief and pagan values—forcing Christian citizens to comply with its ungodly, unjust, and rebellious actions.
Now this does not unduly alarm the citizens of Jerusalem. The Scriptures are very clear that this is to be expected. But He Who is with us is greater than he who is in the world. The Kingdom of God is coming despite the best exertions and endeavours of Unbelief. Every nation is going to be discipled and made obedient to the King of all kings. As the number of citizens in Jerusalem increase, and as they take up their God-given, constitutional responsibilities for family based welfare, the Athenian State, with its unjust dictats and institutions will eventually decay and wither away.
In the meantime, it is vitally important that Believers clearly understand their duties and responsibilities. Every Christian family must conform as much as possible to the stipulations and requirements of the Family as laid out in Jerusalem's constitutional documents. In order to do this, it is essential that we “clear the decks” so to speak of those pagan and idolatrous ideas which have historically insinuated themselves into Jerusalem, and done so much damage.
We would argue that the most debilitating influence has come from the syncretising of the Christian faith with pagan values and ideas. This attempt to blend two absolutely contradictory positions has poisoned and enervated the City of Belief for centuries. With great sadness we must acknowledge that much of Christendom to this point has reflected an attempt to build a superstructure of Christian faith upon a pagan foundation. It has failed—as it always will. If the foundation is not correct, the building will eventually collapse.
One central pagan idea which has been allowed to influence Jerusalem as a poison clutched to the heart is belief that the world of matter (the physical world) is intrinsically evil or unreal or devalued and that the immaterial world (spirit, ideas, invisible beings) is intrinsically good or real or better. You can still find this pagan view expressed everywhere within Jerusalem today, often unwittingly. This is decidedly and emphatically not the world-view of the Scriptures. This is vitally important, and if we do not get this right, we will get most other things wrong.
So, in a few brief paragraphs, let us attempt to present the biblical and truthful world-view once and for all.
Firstly, the absolute and fundamental disjunction and separation in reality is not between matter and spirit. It is between God and the creation. God dwells in unapproachable light. Everything else that exists has both come into existence and utterly depends for its continuing existence upon God. He alone is eternal, infinite, and unchangeable. All else is temporal, finite, and changeable.
Secondly, while the created order has both material and immaterial aspects and realms, these are not set against each other as if one realm were intrinsically superior or better than the other. Rather, the Scriptures make abundantly clear over and over that within the realms of the material and immaterial there are both good and evil influences. Thus in the heavenly spirit realm, there are both demons and angels—good and evil beings. In the world of matter, in our world, there are both the Righteous and the Unrighteous. There are evil men and there are justified men made perfect in Christ.
Thus, matter is not intrinsically evil. The temporal world, the world of the body, is not inferior or unspiritual or of lesser importance. It cannot be, because everything originally created by God was declared good, very good. Rather, the temporal world has been degraded because of sin; it has been subjected to slavery to evil because of rebellion against God. However, the Christ has entered into our temporal world, taken it upon Himself, and has cleansed it upon the Cross, rising again to commence a divine work of purification. In this purification, the last enemy that will abolished and vanquished will be death. The Devil and his demons and his human devotees and followers will be cast into the Lake of Fire.
But in the meantime, God's people are to strive and work as obedient servants to redeem all of God's creation, both the material and immaterial aspects. Thus, we are to redeem and purify the body as well as the mind; the family as well as the individual soul; the wider creation as well as our spirits. We are to do this in an utterly spiritual manner—that is, with all our work in all the realms of our God-given responsibility being subject to and empowered by the Holy Spirit of the Creator God.
In this scriptural frame of redemption of the entire realm of creation under Christ Jesus we must insist that wealth and capital, amassed by the Family, subject to the Spirit of God and the injunctions and laws of Jerusalem's constitution—such wealth is holy, just and good. It is a holy thing!
Now, those citizens of Jerusalem who remain infected with pagan thinking might find this a bit shocking. It is true there has been a long and ignoble tradition in Christendom to see wealth as worldly, intrinsically evil, and to be avoided at all costs. Spirituality has been seen as a call to live in poverty or degradation, at worst, or at best to see wealth as a necessary but intrinsic evil—a sort of compromise with evil as long as we live in the material world. But, says this ignoble tradition, one day, we will escape out of it. These views are infused with a pagan essence—they are more satanic than Christian.
But there are some very important issues here. If we do not get the doctrine of the spirituality of matter right; if we do not get the Bible's teaching on the importance of Family wealth and capital clear, we will consign Christian families and Jerusalem as a whole to a truncated and under resourced existence. But because “nature abhors a vacuum”, the Devil will ensure that someone or something else will take over those realms and duties which families neglect—and so his great tool, the modern Athenian secular, Unbelieving State has arisen as a perpetual enemy to the biblical Family. In part this is our own fault, for we—the citizens of Jerusalem—have nursed pagan and unbiblical concepts in our bosom for centuries. We have insisted and persisted in reading the Scriptures with the coloured glassed of paganism, interpreting them in a pagan manner.
Our next post on the Christian Mind will deal with those passages of Jerusalem's constitution which historically have been interpreted in a pagan manner, and which have been misused to claim that the Scriptures forbid the diligent husbanding of wealth and capital, or at least, if not forbid, imply that it is a second-grade, and worldly, unspiritual concern. This we believe is one of the great battlefields between the Unbelief and the Spirit of God in our day.
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