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Modern Idolatry

Federal courts are constitutional entities authorized by God to determine and apply the law to the lives and businesses of Americans, equally and without partiality. According to Romans 13 and the rest of the bible, such authorities like the federal courts are to protect the righteous and punish the wicked. This is a godly function to be highly revered and obeyed. Your interpretation of the courts’ function can easily become godless. How?

First Commandment: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt; you shall have no other gods before Me.” Second Commandment: “Thou shall not make for yourself a carved image – any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands to those who love Me and keep My commandments.”

To apply an incommunicable attribute of the one true, living God occurs by attributing to another entity such an attribute. Infallibility is an incommunicable attribute of God Almighty. If federal courts are always to be obeyed, no matter what, we are attributing infallibility to them. Throughout history, godly men have had to defy humans who applied absolute power to themselves or their governments or anything else.

The Egyptian Pharaoh claimed absolute power over the Israelites, and he bowed to no god. Moses opposed the Pharaoh to his face, and God backed him up with ten severe judgments upon the Pharaoh and the rest of Egypt. After being delivered from Egypt, the Israelites themselves suffered the true God’s judgment for applying the attributes of God to a golden calf, but Moses and the Levites didn’t follow their lead. One God, one law – for Jew and Gentile. Gideon cut down the idol honoring Baal in his hometown, and his own townspeople said he should die for that offense. Consider also the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, who commanded all the people, including his officials whom he had appointed – Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego – to bow down to the image he had built. They did not, and God saved them from the king’s judgment.

We could go on and on with other examples, but the principle applies at all times to all peoples – the one true God shares His glory with no one, and He’s very jealous of His Honor. No matter your interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, the true God even today does not share attributes like absolute power and infallibility with anyone, including federal court judges. To hold that any entity or person has absolute power or infallibility is to deny the true God; it is godlessness. To hold that any area of the world or of life is not subject to the true God’s rule is to assert that He is not sovereign over that area, that someone or something else can apply His absolute power to a part of the world, that He is not really God.  (Check out the following book containing several viewpoints on the courts’ usurpation, which equates to Judicial Tyranny.)

 

The answer to the question as to whether the federal courts are absolute or not is simple for the Christian. For the non-Christian, who must absolutize something to make it his or her god, it is impossible to deny their absolute power. Because the godless have no god, they must make one. However, what is complicated for the Christian, who respects authority as being from God, the question as to when the federal courts have gone too far is not simple. In other words, when must the Christian, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, say, “Federal court, we have no need to answer you in this situation because you have no authority in this matter?”

The Apostle Peter faced the demand of the authorities to cease obeying Jesus Christ, the recently resurrected King of Israel and the world. Acts 4:18-20:

“And they called them, and commanded them not to speak at all nor teach in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John answered and said unto them, ‘Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye. For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.’ ”

Peter spoke to the Sanhedrin, which for the Jew of that day was the Supreme Court, President, and Legislature all rolled into one body. Yes, they were subject to the Roman authorities, which means they had to turn people over to the Romans for execution, a process with which the Apostles were all too familiar based on the recent experience of the Lord Jesus. But the Sanhedrin still had a lot of power. For example, they could have people beaten, and that’s what they did to Peter.

So is the U.S. Supreme Court somehow immune from erring from the word of the living God and ordering someone to do that which is contrary to that God’s word? I don’t think so. So the question is not whether to disobey, it’s when to disobey. So where do we draw the line. We can start with Peter. Ordering the Apostle to not preach repentance, Jesus Christ’s death for people’s sins, and His rising from the dead is clearly something we are duty bound before God to disobey. But does it end there?

What if U.S. Supreme Court Justices ordered churches to hire homosexuals under certain circumstances, that it was a violation of homosexuals’ constitutional or civil rights to be excluded from positions in Christian ministries? Can we say the churches have the right to disobey? If the state has the authority to order the church to change its governmental and hiring rules, then where does that authority end? If the state can tell the church whom to hire, shouldn’t the state also have the authority to determine what is proclaimed from the pulpit? What if those words deny someone their “equal rights” or, at least, promote the denial of those so-called “equal rights?” Will the public officials of this State stand with those churches?

Therefore, the preaching of the gospel is not the only area of jurisdiction that the state cannot invade. The governing and personnel policies and rules of the churches are off limits also. And, traditionally, the courts have respected that line, but lines get crossed over time, as principles erode. What if the very thoughts I’ve expressed in this writing were to result in litigation that ended up at the highest court of this country? Would the very advocacy of disobedience to the proclamations of the U.S. Supreme Court promote an opinion to prevent such? In other words, for daring to challenge the federal courts, would the federal courts term such advocacy a violation of my oath as a lawyer, a threat to the “rule of law,” a violation of the power of the Court to speak to anything if it considered that thing to be within its jurisdiction? Of course, such an opinion would simply expose the U.S. Supreme Court’s utterly unconstitutional grasp for jurisdiction over everything, a claim to be God over us. Would the Alabama State Bar try to disbar me?

Thus far, I’ve determined for myself that the proclamation of the gospel, the personnel rules within the confines of the church’s governance, and the advocacy of disobedience of the federal courts under certain constrained circumstances are well within the prerogative of public officials to support. Notice that two of those (first and third) are under the umbrella of the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which would hopefully preserve them.

What else can we argue is within the prerogative of public officials to act in interposition to prevent an unconstitutional “evil” by the federal courts? What about changing the institution of marriage, changing its very definition? Once, when challenged by the Pharisees to defend His view of marriage and divorce, Jesus referred back to Genesis: “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?” In Jesus’ thinking, that was enough to determine whether there should be a divorce, what the basis should be, and, logically, what a marriage is. He finished with: “What God has put together, let no man put asunder.” How about the logical obverse: “What God has not put together, let no man put together.”

It is not an aspect of constitutional liberty for society to acknowledge same sex marriage perversion. First, same sex marriage perversion has nothing to do with constitutional liberty. Two men can live together in our society, have a religious commitment ceremony in certain religious traditions, and they can even have a sexual relationship without getting married. They, like anyone else, have equal rights and can get married, just not to each other. The marriage moniker has become a sort of prize or talisman for the same sex perversion crowd. They want to change the definition of the institution. They want something other than what God instituted in the beginning. Thus, they are calling for the overthrow of God’s rule in the area of marriage.

Second, this is not just about some extreme religious position of fundamentalist Christians putting homosexuals into a minority, persecuted position.   Same sex marriage perversion has never been recognized by any national or legal or religious tradition in the history of the world, unless you want to count Sodom and Gomorrah. But I don’t know if even they recognized same sex marriage perversion; they seemed like anarchic societies. This movement is about changing the meaning of marriage as established at the beginning by the Creator. Even if you think Christianity is some sect with its own viewpoint that shouldn’t be imposed on everyone else politically, what is truth? What are the consequences for altering the creation purpose for man and woman? What is the full effect of overthrowing God’s rule in the area of marriage?

Third, what is the greatest sin you can commit? No, it’s not homosexuality. It’s opposition to the Church of Jesus Christ. Paul called himself the chief of sinners. Do you think he was being self-deprecating or using hyperbole? No, he opposed and persecuted Christ’s Church, so he called himself the “chief of sinners.” To approve of the wicked and their plans is to oppose the righteous. You can’t have it both ways. To oppose marriage as instituted by God and solemnized by the Church is to oppose God, to attack the Church of Jesus Christ.

The state can deny God, but such defiance is not without consequences, no matter what the Constitution says or you say the Constitution says. God will be honored as the only absolute, infallible power – with or without you. Will you stand with the true God? Or will you fall with the men who deny God’s sovereign, infallible place as King over the Universe.