The Building Blocks of a Flourishing Society

May 19, 2022    Don Willeman

Transcript:

Hello! This is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective!

In a Christian way of thinking, government authority is not a necessary evil. It was established by God as a necessary good to facilitate a safe, functioning, and flourishing society. However, just because government is a necessary good doesn’t mean that it is the most foundational of social institutions. There are some things that precede government authority.

Biblically speaking, marriage and family life (i.e. the husband-wife and parent-child relationship), our obligation to worship and obey God (i.e. our spiritual/church life, if you will), and our personal responsibility to love our “neighbor” and do him no harm all precede the role of government.

Without the proper functioning of these “mediating” institutions and expectations, then all we are left with to keep society well-ordered is government force. Coercion becomes the ground of social cohesion. But this is not the way God intended it. Rather, love and trust nurtured in the home, church and with one’s neighbors is always the best building blocks to a free and flourishing civilization.

A government that does not respect and support these institutions, or worse seeks to destroy them, is a government that is sowing seeds of social disintegration. And a people that does not pursue the good ordering of these basic building blocks is asking for tyranny. The Law of the God, not the Law of the state, must always be primary.

Something to think about from The Kingdom Perspective.

One of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”

~ Matthew 22:35-39 (NASB95)

“Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. The Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.’

Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.’”

~ Genesis 2:15-18 (NASB95)