Russell Roberts wrote:dolfan wrote:I'll wait to give you a chance to rebut however you'd like or care to. I'll give you this answer to the question, though, for now, with other questions.
What government will stand before Him on the day of judgment? What government's name is written in the Lamb's book of life?
Dolfan, governments are comprised of individual people who make decisions about these types of issues. So my answer is all of them. That no government will stand as a single entity for judgment doesn't advance your point in my opnion. Each individual which comprises a government either chooses to collude with evil, or not.
Within Israel there were those who feared God, yet she, as a nation, experienced judgment, particularly in the Babylonian exile and in 70 AD.
Israel experienced judgment not because of the torture of its enemies, but because of its abandonment of specific laws given to it specifically by God (a point of the Law which you have made many times) regarding treatment of themselves and those peaceful strangers among them. Ezekiel 22: 1-12, Malachi 3:3-5, Isaiah 1:1-23. Israel's judgment was due to treatment of its own people and peaceful strangers within its communities and its turn to idolatry.
Its national judgment was executed in the captivity, as you say. The final judgment of the righteous and wicked is not a judgment upon nations but upon people specifically, by name and by deed. Rev. 20:12-15 It will not be a national judgment of governments. ALL governments have already been condemned and there is one King whose full reign is yet to be known. Rev. 11:15.
It may be true of America that we, more than any other nation, have more input into our government. That, however, is terribly overstated. Our government has acted primarily against the will of its people for at least 75 years, maybe longer. We have, for all of our democracy, been unable to change it. We are far more like the rest of the nations than we imagine in that we are subject to the government's whimsy and not truly in a position to make it an instrument of our will. That's the reality of it.
Will Americans be judged by a different standard than, say, Moldovans, because of our democratic processes? If this is so, why doesn't Paul spend more of his writings in the NT telling people how to become better small-d democrats? Why is the NT record so silent about what makes for good civil government? Why does he not insist on the gospel of democracy? Because that wasn't Jesus' gospel. His gospel was not national reform, but of complete makeover of the whole creation, and He was the firstborn of it. We are part of the new order (2 Cor. 5:17). The nation of which we are part (1 Peter 2:9) has a complete claim on us (1 Cor. 6:19b-20, 15:58). Until we shed this corruption and put on incorruption (1 Cor 15:53-54), a process that is only do-able by following Christ in faith and obedience (John 3:16, Acts 2:38 and 3:19) because it is the only way to truly and actually "follow" Him, all efforts aimed at other purposes (i.e., "speaking truth to power", as the popular saying goes) than the very basic message of the "kerygma" are vanity. To the extent means such as "speaking truth to power" are used to further the message of the "kerygma", certainly we ought to do that, but not as a civil government. We are to do it as the church of Jesus.
So, when someone insists that the church ought to stand as a voice of righteousness and condemn the government, it is a non-sequitur. The government is not our concern. The conversion of people is.
It is a diversion of the mission of the church to instruct the civil government how to govern. Fact is, the church is no expert on civil governance. It's record in trying to do so is as abysmally bad as the record of those concerned strictly with civil government and are irreligious. And, the precise reason why is because the natures of each are at odds: the church as ordered by Jesus is concerned with empowering people to do the works of Jesus in the world until He comes; civil government, wherever it is found, is concerned with having and wielding power and control over others for the benefit of those with their hands on the machine. That our own Constitution seeks to balance that power does not change the bare essence of it; and, as time has proved and will continue to demonstrate, that balance always tips in favor of greater power, greater control in the hands of a few at the expense and detriment of the many. From an eternal perspective, our government is no better, really no different, from any other. Again, to cry against it with a message of righteousness is yelling into the wind. It really is a sort of foolishness.
The church is plenty capable of bringing its redemptive voice to the issue of harm to others, though. Let me digress for one quick second. Russell, you have very kindly and well stated before the truth that God's message of righteousness is simply that He had the integrity to bring to pass all of His promises. Without repeating the whole of that reasoning and those posts, I think it sufficient for both of us to say that God is faithful, He is just, and through Jesus Christ, He has done what He said He would do, and that IS the righteousness of God. The church is capable, then, of the kind of integrity, the kind of wholeness of message and conduct, that reflects the integrity of God and the righteousness of God. In short, we can do and be what He said and did, and even "greater" (John 14:12). The message, the solution, for the "torturers" and the "torturees", is repent and believe and follow Jesus Christ.
The message "Do not torture" is a clever way of taking the church off message. It has an element of mercy, of loving one's enemies. It also has an element of capitulation to wrongdoing. That's why it is an evil message, standing alone without explicitly demanding repentance and salvation in Christ. The whole message, the whole truth, must go to every one who you say is doing evil in this equation about torture. And, because the danger of that message extends to many people when it goes unheeded by the terrorist or terrorist sympathizer, it is a false message of how to "love thy enemy" that actually promotes evil. How so? Because the "torturer" who heeds the message of sin, judgment, redemption and faith and follows Christ, if you have your way about him, drops the instruments of his work and the terrorist/abetter ignores your message and finishes his/her work. Your version of "love" in this instance is less about the welfare of your enemy than it is about the appetite for the ugliness of sin. And, with that, I identify a lot. But, let's look at where that plays out in practical terms.
While we might try in vain to convert the terrorist heathen, there is a point of practicality we cannot ignore: people are dying at their hands. Civil government is working in its limited God-given role to stop that from happening, even if the ways in which it "stops" it are not wholly successful and involve torture. It does what it does. What of it when its tactics are counter to what we of faith find hostile to the faith, but the results of those tactics are consistent with our desire for others (innocents) to be well and alive? Seems we've been given a bit of an opportunity to move toward those still-living people with the gospel of Jesus. And, what of it when the same tactics provoke evil? All the more reason to fight into the cultures and hearts of the evil-doers with the message of Jesus. But, we can't let our way of doing that be dictated to us by people (Muslims) who are inherently hostile to our message of Christ. We can't let them tell us "speak out against torture!" That's specious at best, subterfuge at worst.
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