A REVERSE PROPOSITION

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Mar 29, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 13.

A REVERSE PROPOSITION.

An active advocate of political religion says:

God holds man individually responsible to Him in the three principal relations of life, viz.: the family, the state, and the church. The two former of these relations are founded in man's nature—God created man to occupy them in obedience to His authority and law. The latter is founded in grace. Until sin had ruined man in the two natural relations, the domestic and the civil, God did not provide for him the ecclesiastical. Embraced in God's design when He instituted the church, after man's fall, was this; that man, redeemed by grace, might in the church be fitted for again discharging his duties to God and man in the home and in the state.

This is a marked illustration of getting the cart before the horse. The state, and not the church, is the result of man's fall. It was because man ignored God's law, or government, that a temporary human government, or state, became a necessity. God governs willing subjects by His law of love; but when man sinned, and became "enmity against God," refusing to be subject to His law, he must needs be governed by force. When men gave way to the spirit of selfishness and covetousness and envy, they had to be restrained by force from intruding upon one another's rights.

All human government is essentially of force, aptly symbolized by "Cæsar" and "the sword." But through it a measure of order is maintained while the work of redemption is carried on, and there is gathered out of the sinful mass all who are willing to return to the authority and government of God—not to the state, as the "reformers" would have us believe.

When redemption shall have been completed, and Christ will have gathered out of "every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people," such as will be saved, every vestige of human state government will be annihilated (Dan. 2:31-45). But the "church of the Firstborn, which are written in heaven," will be the subjects of His everlasting kingdom, governed by His unchangeable, indestructible law of love. The whole National Reform theory is based on a reversal of cause and effect.