How is God's Government Different?

This is yet another Spiritual Snack inspired by the food safety conference that I attended the other day. At this forum, there were speakers from the food safety agencies of the federal governments (FDA, FSIS, and CDC) as well several from state food safety agencies. For those of you who are not aware (as I wasn’t), the state of North Carolina has pretty much the best food safety program in the country, so it was kind of a big deal. Anyway, as I was learning about all of these different government agencies and how they were structured, some important points of God’s government came to mind.

First of all, God’s founding principle, so to speak, is that leaders should be servants.

Matthew 20:25-28

Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave – just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.

When God established His church, He appointed Christ to be both the head of the church and the foundation of the church. In man’s government, the leaders are in charge and everyone else is beneath them. They may say that they are “civil servants,” but their salaries and job perks speak otherwise. Do you know that every single member of Congress is exempt from the healthcare bill that passed earlier this year? Not only that, but that they all get their top-quality healthcare paid by the government for the rest of their lives when they leave office? The problem is that our leaders do not have God’s Spirit, so they cannot truly serve us selflessly because they are slaves to their human nature, which is enmity against God’s law of love (Romans 8:5-7).

God builds His church from the bottom up (meaning that those in authority are servants to those they are over), whereas men build their governments from the top down. No wonder every government in history has failed! It’s like trying to build a pyramid starting with the top stone – any time you want to make the pyramid larger, you have to lift all of the other stones up to put the next layer underneath. Any time a human government passes a new law and creates a new bureaucracy, it increases it’s own authority, thus lifting itself up. Even with the best of intentions, corruption eventually ruins the system. Man’s government always seeks to build itself up so that it can have absolute power over its people for the sake of having power.

To contrast, God’s government has been prepared from the foundation of the world:

Matthew 25:34

Then the King will say to those on His right, "Come, you who are blessed by My Father; take your inheritance, the Kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world"

God’s law is fully established, and He rightly claims absolute authority over everything, because "through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made" (John 1:3). There won’t be corruption in His Kingdom because everyone who rules in it has been "refined, purified and made spotless until the the end, for it will still come at the appointed time" (Daniel 11:35). Furthermore, God doesn’t submit us to His authority for the sake of having people serve Him, as men do; instead, He submits us to His authority so that He may "bring many sons to glory" (Hebrews 2:8) because He cares for us, "not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9).

The Kingdom of God won't be mired in scandals and philosophies - it will be about people living right, loving their God with all their heart, and helping each other, loving their neighbors as themselves.