Let me say up front that any government healthcare regulation or policy that restricts the free exercise of religious belief is blatantly and treasonably unconstitutional. Simple as that. ‘Nuff said.
Careful consideration of the present dialogue about access to “birth control” and forcing religious institutions to pay for it, provide it, and support it, by administrative and bureaucratic mandate may be a trap no matter what happens next. Why? Because when the government steps back from this extreme, over-the-top and obvious overreach – and they will step back with a compromise that is the same thing in a different package – most people will sigh with relief, pump their fists and say “We showed ’em,” when the real battle has neither been won or even discussed. Most people give up more freedom and constitutional ground if the exemption is extended than they realize.
The real issue is not whether or not there should be exemptions for religious institutions but whether or not the “right to privacy” that was created by a Supreme Court justice to make abortion on demand the law of the land also creates a right to access, a right to healthcare, and a right to have these rights paid for and provided by government fiat. This is a broader rights battle than whether or not the government should extend exemptions: the need for exemptions and our acceptance of exemptions supports the error that government is, can be, or should be authorized to intrude in our freedom so much that they even have an opinion about our healthcare, birth control, and making these services any of the government’s business.
In other words, we are fighting with our government to give us permission to do something that is none of our government’s business in the first place! And, when or if government grants exemptions, we will be drained of the motivation and outrage to fight the real battle. Most people will walk away relieved, satisfied, even triumphant that we were granted permission to be free by a government who is not the source of our freedom.
The government’s job is to protect people from the very thing the government is doing, and the fundamental flaw – the fatal flaw – is that we are assuming the government is the source of our rights and the provider of our needs. Any assumption that government is our source is fatal to freedom, fundamentally unconstitutional, and much more tragic than whether or not we are being granted exemptions.
We are being played like prisoners rioting for better television reception and access to the Internet. We are demanding that restrictions to our privileges be removed when the issue is that we are prisoners of our own government. We are demanding that the fences of our prison be enlarged so we can feel more freedom, but we are still in prison.
We should immediately alter our strategy on the encroachment on religious institutions by making this issue part of a broader protest. The pushback that free people release to this issue should carry us into a new coalition of shared concerns about tyranny and treasonable breaches of the constitutional guarantees that government stay out of our private lives. The dialogue shouldn’t be limited to sound bites about the arrogance of our government or “gray areas” in providing people their rights to healthcare or some bizarre reasoning about “fairness.” This is symptomatic of much, much deeper issues and should become a wake up call for every lover of freedom.
The issues are constitutional, and the very constitution that guarantees that government is limited from this behavior is being used to prove they have the authority to govern our private lives and decisions.
This is not an argument about whether or not women will have access to “birth control,’ this is about the government thinking it is their business or responsibility to provide “birth control” in the assumption that unless they provide it, the right isn’t guaranteed. To assume that government has to provide birth control in order to guarantee a right to healthcare, privacy, or reproductive rights is to assume any of these rights have constitutional enumeration. Or, simply put, the government is restricted from being the source of our rights so we can be free; God is the source of human rights, and government must be restricted by the constitution from interfering with our exercise of those rights.
In this country, people with cause to provide birth control to people have the greatest freedom ever available to history and the world today in which to make that provision available. Access isn’t an issue. Again, I repeat, access isn’t an issue. This is not about the right to privacy, that doesn’t exist in our constitution or the presuppositions of liberty, being guaranteed by forcing institutions to provide birth control to their employees. This is about government being the source of our human rights instead of the protector of our human rights sourced in God.
To depend upon the government to create fairness won’t work because it is not possible for the government to be the source of fairness. The moment government becomes the source of fairness, its citizens become slaves negotiating for fairness with their master.
Media Information Processing
Most people have learned to process information from their experiences with modern media and process information without the conscious understanding that they are attempting to understand their experiences and information in the same way they experience news reporting, opinion analysis, and sound-bite driven updates.
Media is more real to modern people than it is or should be. While these great tools should create better dialogue, conversation, and understanding, they do not. The most obvious division and polarization in our history are upon us. We are a nation divided about issues that ignore the fundamentals we have already lost.
We argue about cutting spending with little or no discussion about cutting the debt, for example. Week after week, we argue about cutting spending with discussions of rich and poor, education and war, job and safety nets. All the while, the debt grows exponentially and the discussion has nothing whatsoever to do with paying down debt, only about how much increase there will be in spending.
What this means is that process reality in the way media outlets process information. We argue about sound bites, press releases, and teleprompter speeches while the blood drips onto the ground from our open veins. We are going to bleed out feeling like we had our say…
We are happy with moral victories that mean nothing except as perceptions of triumphant. We are like Moses presenting the children of Israel with freedom, and being booed by the slaves because they really were interested in better working conditions. Our media-based information processing empties our emotional investments into these moral victory sidetracks while the issue of getting out of Pharaoh’s ownership seems unreal.
Modern Christians need to stop processing information the same way the world does. The spirit of the world is the enemy of the Father. Processing information like the world makes us servants of our Father’s enemies, captives of the strategies of a spiritual conspiracy against Jesus Christ, measuring life with the motivations of heart more consistent with antichrists than our Messiah: demanding desires of human nature, demanding desires of physically experienced things, and the delusional pride of life that oppose the Father. [See 1 John 2.]
Don’t love the ways of this world system. Don’t love the stuff of this world’s system’s values. Love like this empties out your passion for the Father.
Understand the Kingdom of God
We stopped teaching the kingdom of God when we determined that the kingdom was so future that it was none of our business anymore. We had plenty of help from experts
Don’t love the ways of this world system. Don’t love the stuff of this world’s system’s values. Love like this empties out your passion for the Father.
Understand the Kingdom of God
We stopped teaching the kingdom of God when we determined that the kingdom was so future that it was none of our business anymore. We had plenty of help from experts. In the 1800’s a new teaching arose and took prominence that postponed the kingdom of God until Jesus returns. This dangerous new discussion had certain motivations that should be discussed and discovered, but the bottom line was that a new mainstream swept into the Body and the Gospel was emptied of its kingdom authority and power while continuing in the authority and power of salvation.
At some point, many Christians assumed they had a proper understanding of Scripture when they were agreeing to ignore much of It because It was for a future time. The assumption that Jesus came to offer Israel the kingdom and that Jesus postponed it when they rejected Him was fundamental to the idea that the “church age or dispensation” was a great hiatus in history between Israel having the kingdom and Jesus coming back to establish the kingdom.
I am being overly simplistic, but the reality remains that most Christians stopped doing kingdom business and started doing church business, and the terms were all redefined to fit the foundational assumptions.
Conclusions
So, let me bring these three thoughts together, using the occasion of the latest “issue of church and state” as an opportunity to frame a greater consideration.
We establish kingdom. Jesus builds His church. He calls together from His kingdom, assemblies of citizens to give them kingdom assignments. He gives them kingdom authority to fulfill these assignments. He gives them kingdom leaders to prepare them to be good kingdom citizens and function with the ecclesia He calls together.
The antichrists we should overcome are defeating us while we wait around for some future representative of hell or attempt to identify one from ridiculous and distracting conspiracy theories as if this identification is our highest calling. We tend to process information in spiritual sound bites, win moral victories, and demand that our working conditions as slaves of the world system be improved.
We fail to act like kingdom people who can pray like Elijah, endure like Job, and rule like Jesus as leaders in a spiritual kingdom more powerful than any earthly politic. We operate from a position of weakness, division, and confusion because we don’t know who we are. We are more divided than our enemies because we continue to cling to distractions, major on minors, and fail to distinguish between truth and accommodation.
When the government compromises on this healthcare exemption issue, we will go back to our complacency because we process information in sound bites. If we were kingdom people, we would be functioning in kingdom strategies. How long has it been since you even heard a kingdom strategy, a strategy that made sense because the kingdom of God has power and authority on earth here and now that changes atmospheres and awakens a culture to its redemptive purpose?
This is not the time for a cave and a bag of beans. This is day of kingdom strategies that do more than accumulate believers and create religious subcultures. Get rid of your Scofield-Bible dispensationalism and start praying for an awakening in America that moves this nation back to its kingdom assignment. Stop following leaders who refuse to change. Do something radical with your life instead of being comforted by leaders whose objectives are to maintain instead of transform.
Stop thinking of every issue a political issue when the issues before us are kingdom of light or darkness issues, life and death, freedom and slavery, and overcoming and survival.
