It is impossible to rebuild Christendom in New Zealand without the regeneration of a majority of souls. Regeneration is God's business: no creature, not even angels, can will it, or effect it. One is born again by the Spirit of God, and the Spirit alone (John 1:12-13). Now we firmly believe that days are coming when the vast majority of people in New Zealand will be truly Christian, from the inside out. This will occur in God's time, when He is pleased to stretch forth His hand, to honour His Son in this land.
Until that time, we Christians live as exiles in an alien land. These are the days of a Babylonian captivity, or of the Northern Kingdom under Ahab, or of Israel under the Seleucids. But God's call to live faithfully in such times remains clear, true, and valid.
How should we then live? On this there is much that could be said. Another way of expressing the question would be, In the light of exile, what ought to be our focus and our service priorities? Personal and family sanctification, to be sure. Pure, biblical corporate worship, essential. Strong, essentially separated covenant communities where we maintain faithful churches, families, schools, charities, and businesses--vital. Proclaiming the Gospel of God's grace to this Unbelieving generation, critical.
In being faithful to God in these things, the Christian community acts as salt and light in the world. It preserves our country from greater, more precipitous decline. With respect to the outside world, one of our frequent themes must be "leave us alone". Like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, we often find ourselves petitioning the powers-that-be to leave us alone so that we may serve our God, and in return we will be loyal citizens, insofar as conscience permits. And the Christian conscience permits a great deal in this regard, since we are allowed to obey either out of conscience, or out of pragmatic considerations (Romans 13: 5).
But--and it is a big "but"--it is essential that Christians in our day recognise that we are in a time of captivity and that we Christians, therefore, are enslaved in our own country--which really belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, we live subject to interlopers. If we are not clear upon this, we will end up thinking that the conditions under which we labour are the "new normal". We will end up siding with Pharaoh, supporting, cheerleading, congratulating, and abetting his tyranny. We will betray the Kingdom and be little more than quislings.
This is precisely the trap into which the Anglican church in Australia has fallen in its call to limit having children so as not to steal from forthcoming generations. This is the propaganda of Pharaoh, not faithfulness to our God. That it should come out of the mouth of God's people is shameful and disgraceful.
How do we know we are enslaved? Undoubtedly, there would be more than a few Christians and churches who would find the allegation of being enslaved extraordinary, inflammatory, and extreme. There are two ways to answer this question: the first is to compare the dominion and extent of interference and control of our government over our lives in the light of God's prescription for the role and responsibility of the State. This is the bottom-up, inductive approach. It leads us to identify all the illicit activities of the government--such as running health, education, and welfare systems, and reject such arrogations as idolatrous, simply because they are power grabs not allowed by Holy Writ.
The second is to use a top down argument of blunt-force trauma. The Scriptures make plain that if a civil government takes more in taxes than ten percent, it is oppressing and enslaving its people, period. (I Samuel 8: 15--17) Moreover, if the government takes our sons and daughters to be its servants, it is acting tyrannically (I Samuel 8:10--13. Think, for example, of the modern tyranny of compulsory state education--the government extracting money from us by force to pay for its education system, then using the system to indoctrinate our children according to its pleasures).
In biblical terms, our government in exacting far above ten percent, is many times over a tyrant and has enslaved its people. We are indeed living in a Babylonian captivity; hundreds of thousands depend for their daily food upon Pharaoh; others find themselves plundered at every turn. How much above the ten percent benchmark that identifies an ungodly tyrant, you ask? This graphic from the OECD tells the story.
The State in New Zealand expropriates and extracts over 35 percent of our national domestic earnings. That is three and a half times more tyrannical and enslaving than what the Scriptures present as an ungodly exaction and tyranny on the part of government.
Living in New Zealand as an enslaved Christian in 2010 is not a new-normal, but an ancient condition. It is as old as the Egyptian enslavement of Israel, and the Babylonian captivity by the River Chebar. If we get this straight, Christians will understand far more clearly how they must live in order to please God in our day. It will help us identify and banish the spirit of the quisling amongst us.
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