Civil government’s assault on our liberties has taken over just about every aspect of our lives, including our economic activity. On today’s Liberty Cafe, we discuss the biblical foundation for taking most economic regulation away from politicians and bureaucrats and turning it over to families and civil courts.
This podcast was transcribed by a robot called Otter.ai. Please forgive any errors in the text as robots still have a lot to learn:
A number of Christians these days are learning more about the biblical concept of different spheres of government. So this begins with the fact that God has deigned for specific types of government. These four types are individual, government, family, government, church, government and civil government. To each of these, then God has delegated some of his authority. Largely separate, but also overlapping. There’s a lot to be discussed there, but we’re just gonna go on pass that right now. So one benefit of understanding this biblical delegation of authority to different spheres of government, is that it undermines the idea that many in this world have today and even a lot of conservatives, that civil government is the supreme governing authority in our world. On today’s episode 108, in the Liberty cafe, we’re going to look at, specifically at the the authority of family government. And to help us understand why civil government is not this overarching supreme governing authority, and specifically, why civil government has little to no biblical authority for most of the economic regulation it does today. Hi, this is Bill peacock. Welcome to the Liberty cafe. It’s a blessing to have you here today, as it is each week that you come and listen to the Liberty cafe. Thank you for taking part in what we’re doing here. When I say we, I mean, not just me, but the folks over at Texas scorecard, who sponsors the Liberty cafe. So I’m just grateful that we all together can be looking to God’s word and looking how we can fight the fight for liberty and remove oppression from this world. So let’s get back to this family government concept that I that I brought up at the beginning. So there have been there’s really no doubt. I mean, we can all look around us and see that the civil government has basically taken over our lives, thinking that it is a supreme authority over everything. And because it regulates in some way, just about everything that we do. And as Christians and conservatives, we have to be realistic about this. If we’re going to stop this, if we’re going to limit this, if we’re going to change this, we have to realize that this is not just a matter of the mind. Yes, we have to educate ourselves and others about what God has taught us in the various roles of government, our lives, but it’s also a matter of the heart, we really need to submit ourselves to God submit to God ourselves, and take God’s word out to others so that they will also submit to God and it’s only through that processes education process, but also the submission process that we’re going to find change in this world. So that’s what I’m trying to do here on the Liberty cafe and specifically what we’re doing today, with when it comes to the role of government regulation. So when we are doing this process, we need to kind of look both forward and backwards, we need to look back to the understanding that our Founding Fathers had about unalienable rights, and liberty. But we also need to look forward to the way that our economy will function in a world that is filled with people who understand and desire to submit to and obey God’s world. And when we do this, we’re going to see that God has delegated his authority for operating, and thus actually regulating the economy to families, and not to civil government. So where do I get off saying this? Well, let’s, let’s take a look at the role of the family. So we have, you know, just very briefly, the family has a head, and that’s the father and husband. And then the wife also has authority in the family over the children just like the father does. But she also submits to the Father who is serving her, just like Christ served the church and serving the children as well as dying to himself for that. And when we do that, we see that there are different roles within the family for each of these. And that also determines not just right within the family, but the economic activity that each one of these folks undertakes. So for instance, I’m just going to give us a couple of examples here. So we’re going to think about Jesus as a carpenter. So we don’t know much about Jesus’s life. Life before his ministry, we tend to know that he was a carpenter. But we know a lot about what carpenters might have been doing, particularly in Galilee were where he was from, remember, he was Jesus of Nazareth. So whereas we associate the Jews with Jerusalem, in Judea, Jesus wasn’t from there. He was from Galilee, was very different economic setting down there, whereas Jerusalem and Judea were were dominated by government. And government spending and government public works projects like the building the temple, under Herod, it was much more free market, private economy up in Galilee. And so Jesus is a carpenter, who likely not just worked with wood, but also was stone as the people who are designated Carpenter, the Greek word for carpenter back then likely did, he would have gone outside his family, left his family and home and gone out and worked for other people out there. likely he would have been working for other men, because remember, this was not the government out there, largely but but other private activities. So he had been going out there other men who also were doing the same thing going out leaving their family and putting doing building projects and things like that for their business. And he would hire other men from other families like Jesus, who would do the same thing. And then they would all return home afterwards and bring generally not goods to into the home, but they would bring money back into the home, they would go out and earn their wages and bring money back in to the home. Now in the case of women, though, it looks a little bit different. And I’m just going to read a little bit from Proverbs 31 To help us understand what this looks like. This is Proverbs 3113 to 18. Describing this as a woman who is often described as the Proverbs woman. She seeks wool and flax and works with wheeling hands. She is like the ships of the merchants, she brings her food from afar. She rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household and portions for her maidens. She considers a field and buys it. With the fruit of her hands, she plants a vineyard, she dresses herself with strength and makes her arm strong. She perceives that her merchandise is profitable, her lamp does not go out at night. As you can see, this married woman in her home while her husband is out working at some other workplace. She’s very much engaged in the marketplace. She She but it’s centered around the home. Now she obviously will go out to the land, but the land is probably around her homestead or close by, she’ll should go into the town market. But it’s always with the focus of bringing things back into the home. And she’s unlike the husband is bringing money back in the home. She’s generally bringing products back in the home produce and, and clothing and things like this. And then of course, the children in the situation, when they’re early on in their lives, when they’re not getting educated. They’re going to be staying near the home with their mother and engaging in activities that are related to what the mother does, but the males, the boys and the girls, but as they grow and mature and become adults, then there they will to be going out into the world and and taking part in the world, in their own families and in the roles that males and females are designed by God to play. So if we, we see that the vast majority of economic activity in the world will at least in a in an in an economy unencumbered by government intervention through public works, projects and welfare and regulation takes place in and around the family. Now there may be certain types of business associations that undertake economic activity where groups of men get together groups of women get together. But even those, as we see are being carried out by the family. Or again, at least they would be in the vast majority of cases and aside society where the biblical view of family is valued. At this point, I hope that we see it’s clear that the genesis of all businesses in the family because all workers will participate in it in a business come from family. So let me just look at one example here. Let’s say a husband or a father As a successful blacksmith, he’s so successful, in fact that he hires apprentice blacksmith from among the older children who live within the city gates or perhaps live with their families outside the city. So now, all of a sudden, he, this blacksmith has three young men working for him. They have, and then after a while, they have succeeded and finished their apprenticeship, but they still work for him. And now they have families, their own families, young families with a wife and a mother. At home, and so what happens is that the man leaves these, all these young men now leave the city gates, out of their families and come and go do their work, but then they come back home, and their wives are doing the same thing. So but in this situation, we see the beginnings of what we might think of modern corporations, but they’re still all taking context of the in the context of the family. So now that we have this in place, this this idea that business is found grounded in the family, what obligations then do these businesses have to God, and we can place these obligations on both this this ideal model that we’re talking about, and then the modern model of corporations, because they’re a business and they’re gonna have these obligations to God, the people in them are gonna have these obligations to God, no matter what structure their business takes. Well, let’s look at a few passages from scripture that help inform us on this and how businesses might operate in an ethical way that brings glory to God. Let’s go back to the law of ancient Israel, that tells a homeowner that he has an obligation to protect his family and visitors to his home from falling off the roof of their homes. To the modern mind, that doesn’t make a lot of sense, because we have all these sloped roofs with shingles on them. And the only people that go up there are kids who like to run around on the roof and get in trouble yelled at by their parents. But that’s not the way it was back in ancient Israel. Most of them tended to have flat roofs because what would happen was, the people would go up on their roofs in the evening when it was hot, and they would be able in the hot homes, and they would be able to get the advantage of the coolness that was coming into the evening on that. Well, of course, if that were to happen, they were flat roofs, people could fall off and hurt themselves. And so the Bible commanded people to put railings around their households, the roofs of their house so that people wouldn’t fall off. Well, what does that tell us about the ethical responsibilities of a business owner and in today’s world? Well, let’s just say that that business person is a homebuilder. So in most cases, as we know, we don’t have root roots where the roots are flat, right there, they don’t need a rail around them. But yet, the obligations of these homeowners are still the same. If we look at it from like, the general equity, the intent of these laws, so home builder today, for instance, should build a rail, on the balcony of the second floor of a home that he built, he would be under an ethical obligation to build that we would need laws, code, building codes and things like that, to do that he should be under these obligations from a ethical moral standpoint, not to say there can’t be some, some laws about this. But But that comes from this biblical concept, not from just a set of laws that are out there. Or if he builds a pool into a home, he may have an obligation to put a fence around the pool to protect children, and the household and the children of visitors. So there’s a lot of ways we can look at this. And there’s a lot of variables, but but that just gives us an idea of that. But then we come to the situation well, what if a business owner fails in his obligations and someone is hurt? What happens then from this biblical perspective? Well, of course, today, we know how that would go, we would have probably some building code thing come along, and, and the court the regulators would come in from the city of Austin. And they would said this code, this house wasn’t built to code, and they would come and prosecute them and do all these kinds of things. But and of course, there would have been a lot of regulation going on beforehand, they would have had inspectors coming in all the way through the process and telling them now you didn’t do this right and you didn’t do this right. And you didn’t do this right So the, the enforcement of these government regulations starts long before anybody’s done anything wrong. But if we went back to the biblical perspective, that’s not the case, what we would have is a would be a builder, free to build the home in the way that he and the homeowner thought were ethical, and right, the proper way to do things according to God’s law, they wouldn’t have a bunch of bureaucrats hovering over them, guiding there every step, every step. And then, as a product was finished, and something bad happened like that, well, we would have the courts to step in. But it wouldn’t be the criminal courts that we often have today. In situations like this, it’d be the civil courts. Say, for instance, the homeowner, the builder did something that didn’t, wasn’t like the homeowner thought it would be, let’s say just the construction of the second floor balcony where it was there. But it was very shoddy, and somebody leaned against the NFL. Well, rather than having criminal charges, and an army of regulators coming in and doing something about this, the owner of the home would be able to go to civil court. And this is the way it worked in the Old Testament, you’d be able to go before the city gates and talk to the elders of the city, and bring, bring charges if you will bring his case against him and seek damages. In the case of something like this happening. We don’t you know, the Bible only had about 3000 laws in it. If you look at the Old Testament, that’s where most of them were some of the New Testament about 3000 laws. It would seem to me today, that if the Bible can regulate all of human society, to 3000 laws, the I think I can’t remember how many laws it was, but Well, in excess of 100,000 laws on the books in the United States today. I think it was a lot more than that. But we don’t need all those laws, we could pare this down quite a bit. And we could also pare down the regulators and turn most of these things over to the courts, rather than to an army of bureaucrats today. And that’s what we have today. So instead of having people being able to go to court, settle their differences, receive compensation for torts and harms against them. Instead, we have an army of regulators and bureaucrats who are just making laws, to not not just hold these businesses accountable, but to change the nature of the relationship between families out there doing business together, rather than the families to tide deciding the terms of the business relationship ships out there. Now we have a few bureaucrats and politicians making these decisions for us, they pass laws, they force laws, and often determine who is even guilty of violating these laws. They have become really not just judge, jury and executioner But lawmakers and police as well. In fact, they become the supreme authority in the land. And unlike the admonition in Romans 13, that civil authorities be a terror to bad conduct, they’ve actually become now a terror to good conduct. And in fact, they’ve made themselves to be more and more like God. Of course, this takes us back to the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve violated God’s law, and exceeded God’s delegation of authority to them in an effort to be like him. And this was, of course, the same thing that happened at the Tower of Babel, where they disobey God and instead of going out there and obeying His commandments to fill the earth, they gathered together and and tried to make for themselves a place in heaven, reaching up to heaven through this tower. Well, whenever we see a man trying to supplant God from His throne, and replace ourselves on the throne on his throne, we know that something very bad is going on. And as I hope I’ve shown today, and this is just the beginning of it, but hope at least I gave you some thought about how most economic regulation by civil government in the world today. It’s just one more example of people in authority, violating God’s prescribed order for man Time and trying to take his place. Well, thank you once again for being here with me on the Liberty cafe. And also, thanks to Texas scorecard our sponsor, please go on over to Texas scorecard.com and see what they have going for you today. Thank you for listening to the Liberty cafe with Bill peacock. This show is produced by Texas scorecard. You can learn more about this show and find other shows at Texas scorecard.com. Be sure you subscribe and rate the show on whatever platform you listen on. See you next time
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
