“For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.” Isa. 9:6.
As Israel rejected God as king, and rejected the counsel of his prophets, while still assuming the right to rule in religious things and command the consciences of men, that kingdom was gradually transformed from a true to a false theocracy.
A true theocracy is the government of God. A false theocracy is the government of haughty men, who, assuming that they are sitting in the seat of God, and ruling in the place of God, and that they infallibly know the divine will, blasphemously seek to enforce upon all men their ideas of God’s law.
A true theocracy is the highest possible ideal of government; it is, therefore, the government of heaven, and will be the government of the redeemed world.
God always knows the best thing for the good and highest happiness of all his creatures, and he, being love itself, loves all with an impartial love. His rule is the rule of infinite wisdom combined with infinite love. This is absolutely ideal.
A false theocracy is the most terrible form of despotism, for it is the rule of erring, wicked men, who, assuming that their own narrow ideas are the will of God, and that therefore obedience to them is necessary to salvation, enforce these ideas with merciless severity upon all. They stop not with seeking to control the outward acts, but they thrust themselves into the sacred inner sanctuary of the soul, seeking to make themselves lords of the inmost thoughts; and this they do because they claim to be the official administrators of that divine law which extends to the thoughts and intents of the heart.
True theocracy is the government of infinite, all-embracing love. False theocracy is the government of boundless, ambitious, and towering human selfishness, envy, and hatred, assuming the forms of love to better gain their hellish end,—the subjugation of the conscience and the soul. The selfishness of those engaged in this work is disguised even to themselves, so that they too are deceived, and the more sincere they are in their error, the more mercilessly they enforce their despotic will, believing it to be the will of God.
The true theocracy sets men free by writing its laws of love by the divine love-finger in the heart, so that men delight to do the divine will. Delighting to do what the law requires, because it is what their own conscience dictates, they can do what they please—what they delight in. They are therefore free. Mind, and heart, and conscience are cultivated to the highest possible point, and the whole man is developed into perfect righteousness.
A false theocracy rules by arbitrary force, which can never reach the heart or transform the soul. It terrifies people into an external submission, and teaches them that if they thus submit they are righteous. It crushes the individual conscience, and outlaws it entirely, assuming to decide for it in each case as to what is right and what is wrong, and then to simply compel submission. Such rule can only make hypocrites, who externally conform to the forms of religion, but who within are full of hatred and all evil.
The scribes and Pharisees and hypocrites of Christ’s time were the logical and only possible fruit of this false theocratic tree.
Jesus pronounced a woe upon them because they made clean the outside of the cup and the platter, but within they were full of extortions and excess. He said they were whited sepulchers, which indeed appeared beautiful without, but within were full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.
With direct reference to these Pharisees and their false theocratic government that made them what they were, Jesus says: “A good tree can not bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down.” John the Baptist also said of them: “Now also the ax is laid unto the root of the trees; every tree therefore which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.”
That theocracy having become a false theocracy, bearing only false fruit, was to be destroyed. The prophet had spoken of this before: “Thus saith the Lord God: Remove the diadem, and take off the crown; this shall not be the same. . . . I will overturn, overturn, overturn it; and it shall be no more, until he come whose right it is; and I will give it him.” Eze. 21:26, 27.
Here it is plainly declared that with all the overturning of earthly governments, there shall be no more a true theocracy until Jesus Christ comes in glory, and then the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdom of our Lord and his Christ. Rev. 11:15. Or, as Daniel tells it, the kingdoms of force, of intrigue, of arbitrary power, shall be as the chaff of the summer’s threshing floors, and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them, and the kingdom of Christ, set up without human hands, filled the whole earth. See Daniel 2.
Any attempt that men may make, therefore, to set up a kingdom of Christ, or a government of God on this earth, before the second coming of Christ, will result only in a false theocracy, with all its crushing despotism, and bearing its only possible fruit of phariseeism and hypocrisy.
The church leaders of the fourth century tried it. They said that they were going to set up the kingdom of Christ on earth. They quoted with glowing enthusiasm all those texts which speak of beating the swords into plowshares, and of not learning war any more. They said that on the very bells of the horses would be written, “Holiness to the Lord.” When their scheme was completed, instead of the kingdom of Christ, it was the kingdom of Satan, who, in the person of the theocratic lords,—the popes,—ruled for centuries, putting to death the true children of God, and crushing out thought and conscience, until the world was darkened down into a night of a thousand years, even to-day known as the Dark Ages.
The modern Christian citizenship movement, and the effort of some to usher in the kingdom of Christ “through the gateway of politics,” can, if carried out, result only in the same thing,—a second false theocracy, the image of the Papacy. This will be the great delusion of the last days.
People are everywhere forgetting that Christ’s kingdom is set up fully on this earth only when he comes, and that, too, without human hands. There are many efforts, all coalescing in one great scheme, to set up his kingdom for him. When they ask us to associate and to organize with them for this purpose, we have to say, in the very language of Scripture: “Associate yourselves, O ye people, and ye shall be broken in pieces.” “Say ye not, A confederacy, to all them to whom this people shall say, A confederacy!” but rather say, “I will wait upon the Lord, that hideth his face from the house of Jacob, and I will look for him.” See Isa. 8:9–17.
Christ Ruling Within.
Yet all this time since the theocracy was destroyed, there is a sense in which Christ’s kingdom has been in this earth.
When Christ was upon earth, he preached the good news of the kingdom, and when it was demanded when that kingdom should come, he answered, “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation [or outward show]; neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” Luke 17:20, 21.
It has been said that wherever there beats a loyal British heart, there is the kingdom of Great Britain. It is even more true that wherever there beats a heart loyal to King Jesus, a heart in which Christ has been enthroned Prince of Peace, there is the heavenly kingdom. By the “new birth,” the birth of the Spirit, Christ is born within. As Paul says, “The first man [that is, the result of the first birth], is of the earth, earthy; the second man [the result of the new birth], is the Lord from heaven.” See 1 Cor. 15:45–47.
Every true Christian can say, with almost unspeakable joy, “Unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder.” Learning more and more each day to cast all their care upon him, and to let him rule in each minutest detail of the life, they will have such splendid experiences in him that spontaneously, out of a full heart, they will name him, “Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.” Isa. 9:6.
Thus Christ is ruling even now in the hearts of his people. By the mighty power of his love he is winning his way in the individual heart, and gaining subjects who will even now submit to his mild will. When these are finally gathered out of every nation and kindred and tongue and people, and marshaled into the city eternal, it will be no arbitrary force that will put Christ on the throne and compel all to bow down. Each one before coming there will have enshrined Christ within, King of kings and Lord of lords, and will learn in every case to say, “Not my will, but thine be done.”
Christ will, by his life of love, and his death of immaculate love, have won for himself first place next the Father in the everlasting kingdom of love. When the redeemed, gathered out of every nation, behold him, they will recognize him as the King, and say, “This is the Lord, we have waited for him.” They will cast their crowns at his feet, and3crown him Lord of all. Dear reader, may we be there; and that we may, may we learn now to let him rule and reign in the heart and life.
