Why Almost Everyone Is Wrong About Self-Government Under God

Why Liberty Requires Responsibility… And Why The State Can Never Take God’s Place  Freedom Under God In An Age of Dependence

There was a time when Americans spoke naturally of liberty, independence, responsibility, and self-government. We still use those words, but words can survive long after the worldview that gave them meaning has disappeared.

That is precisely our problem.

We continue to speak of liberty while increasingly looking to institutions of power to relieve us of the responsibilities that liberty requires. We demand freedom while surrendering responsibility, insist upon rights while becoming uncomfortable with duties, and increasingly expect civil government to provide what Scripture assigns primarily to individuals, families, churches, and communities.

From a biblical perspective, however, the problem goes a lot deeper than politics. The fundamental question is not whether we will be governed, because we are always governed; the question is by whom and by what law?

Will we live under the government of God, accepting responsibility beneath His Word? Or will we reject God’s government and construct an ever-expanding government of man in its place?

There is no neutral ground.

Liberty Begins With the Sovereignty of God

The American tradition speaks of “unalienable rights.” There is something important in that language, but Christians need to go one step deeper and ask: unalienable because of whom? Rights cannot exist independently in the universe; if they are real, they must rest upon an authority greater than man.

Scripture begins not with the sovereignty of the individual but with the sovereignty of God:

“The earth is the LORD’S, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.”
—Psalm 24:1

That single declaration overturns both tyranny and autonomous individualism. The state is not sovereign, the individual is not sovereign, the family is not sovereign, and the church is not sovereign.

God alone is sovereign.

This is crucial to understanding biblical liberty. Freedom is not man’s right to define reality for himself; that was the temptation offered in Eden when the serpent promised, “ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5).

So think about it. Biblical freedom is something very different. It is freedom under God… the liberty to fulfill our God-given callings according to God’s law without another human institution claiming an authority God has not given it.

Jesus Christ therefore does not merely claim jurisdiction over man’s “spiritual life.” When He declares, “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth” (Matthew 28:18), He establishes His authority over the whole of life.

Christ’s lordship encompasses the individual, family, church, education, economics, property, vocation, charity, and civil government. There is no sphere of human existence in which Christ can legitimately be told, “This does not concern You.”

This was one of R. J. Rushdoony’s recurring emphases: every social order is ultimately a religious order because every social order rests upon some conception of ultimate authority and law. Even societies that congratulate themselves on being secular must locate sovereignty somewhere.

The question is never whether society will have a god.

The question is which god it will serve.

Responsibility Is Not Merely a Right

Our country’s Founders understood something modern Americans increasingly resist: freedom brings responsibility. Scripture takes us further, because responsibility is not merely the price we reluctantly pay for liberty; responsibility is part of man’s calling before God.

God created man and gave him work. Before the Fall, before poverty, bureaucracy, taxation, or welfare programs, God placed Adam in the garden “to dress it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15).

Work then isn’t a curse. Frustration in work belongs to the curse, but productive labor itself belongs to man’s original calling and remains one of the ordinary ways in which man exercises dominion under God.

Paul later states the principle with startling clarity:

“If any would not work, neither should he eat.”
—2 Thessalonians 3:10

Paul distinguishes inability from unwillingness. Scripture repeatedly commands generosity toward the genuinely poor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and those overtaken by calamity, but biblical compassion never requires us to pretend that deliberate irresponsibility is virtue.

Yep, biblical charity is profoundly personal. It requires the giver to give, the able-bodied recipient to work, families to care for their own, and the church to exercise discernment and mercy.

Paul writes:

“But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith.”
—1 Timothy 5:8

The same chapter commands children and grandchildren to care for widowed family members so that the church is not unnecessarily burdened (1 Timothy 5:4, 16). Here we encounter a principle largely forgotten by the modern welfare state: God distributes responsibilities among different institutions.

The family has responsibilities, the church has responsibilities, the individual has responsibilities, and civil government has responsibilities. One institution cannot continually absorb the responsibilities of the others without eventually absorbing their authority as well.

The State That Provides Becomes the State That Governs

This is where Rushdoony’s critique of the modern state becomes particularly relevant. When people cease looking to God as their ultimate source of law, justice, and security, they do not cease being religious; they transfer those expectations somewhere else.

Increasingly, they transfer them to the state.

The state is then expected to educate our children, guarantee our income, secure our retirement, provide medical care, manage economic outcomes, protect us from risk, define morality, redistribute wealth, and rescue us from the consequences of our decisions. At that point, civil government is no longer merely civil government.

It has acquired a messianic function.

The state begins promising a form of salvation through legislation, taxation, redistribution, regulation, and administration. Scripture warns against precisely this misplaced confidence: “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help” (Psalm 146:3).

Yet with every crisis comes the demand: Someone must do something. Increasingly, that “someone” means centralized civil government, even when the responsibility properly belongs elsewhere.

But the institution powerful enough to provide everything is necessarily powerful enough to control everything. The trade is rarely announced openly; no government says, “Give us your liberty and we will give you dependence.”

The bargain is presented as security.

Give us more authority, and we will protect you. Give us more revenue, and we will provide for you. Give us more control over education, commerce, medicine, property, and production, and we will protect you from uncertainty.

Biblical history should make Christians skeptical of such messianic promises. Samuel warned Israel that a centralized king like those of the surrounding nations would take their sons, daughters, servants, fields, vineyards, flocks, and produce (1 Samuel 8:10–18).

The repeated word in that passage is worth remembering:

Take.

Freedom Requires Self-Government Under God

The alternative to centralized government is not anarchy. It is self-government under God, and a society capable of governing itself must consist substantially of people capable of governing themselves.

This is why political liberty cannot ultimately be separated from Christian character. A guy who can’t govern his appetites will eventually demand that someone else govern their consequences, and a family unwilling to accept its responsibilities will invite institutions outside the family to assume them.

A church that abandons mercy, discipline, teaching, and community leaves a vacuum that another institution will gladly fill. A population that abandons responsibility while demanding security eventually creates the conditions for its own servitude.

Scripture states the principle positively:

“For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.”
—Galatians 5:13

Christian liberty is therefore neither libertinism nor isolation. Freedom is not the declaration, “Nobody can tell me what to do.”

The Christian declaration is, “Jesus Christ is Lord.”

Because Christ is Lord, Caesar is not. Because Christ is Lord, neither is the individual autonomous; every earthly authority is legitimate only within the jurisdiction God has assigned to it.

That’s the foundation of genuine liberty.

Rights Without Duties Become Humanism

Modern political rhetoric speaks endlessly about rights: economic rights, social rights, housing rights, healthcare rights, educational rights, and an ever-expanding catalog of claims upon society. The Christian must ask a question modern political discourse usually avoids:

Who is obligated to provide the thing being claimed as a right?

If I claim a right to something produced by another person’s labor, then somewhere behind that declaration is coercion, usually dressed up in friendly clothes. Someone must work, someone must pay, someone must surrender property, and someone must possess sufficient political authority to compel that surrender.

This, of course, doesn’t mean Christians can ignore suffering. Quite the opposite: God’s Word commands extraordinary generosity, declaring, “He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the LORD” (Proverbs 19:17), while James identifies care for widows and orphans as an expression of “pure religion” (James 1:27).

But there is an enormous moral difference between saying, “God commands me to give,” and saying, “I authorize the state to take from my neighbor.”

The first creates personal responsibility before God. The second can easily become a means of avoiding that responsibility while retaining the comforting language of compassion.

Biblical charity requires obedience, discernment, sacrifice, relationship, and accountability. Bureaucratic redistribution can convert a moral obligation before God into an administrative entitlement enforced by political power, weakening the very institutions God ordained to exercise compassion personally.

Property Is Stewardship Under God

Biblical liberty also requires a biblical understanding of property. The commandment “Thou shalt not steal” (Exodus 20:15) assumes legitimate possession, as does the command not to covet anything “that is thy neighbour’s” (Exodus 20:17).

But biblical property is not autonomous ownership. God declares, “The silver is mine, and the gold is mine” (Haggai 2:8), meaning that ownership on earth is always stewardship beneath God’s ultimate ownership.

The biblical answer to materialism is therefore not collectivism.

It is stewardship.

The productive man must remember that his wealth belongs ultimately to God, while the poor man must not covet his neighbor’s property. The ruler can’t confiscate simply because he possesses political power, while the Christian must give generously, the family provides responsibly, and the church cares faithfully for those genuinely in need.

Each stands accountable to God.

The Myth of Political Neutrality

Our age likes to imagine that government can be religiously neutral. It cannot, because every law declares something right and something else wrong, every educational system teaches some understanding of man, and every economic policy assumes something about property, justice, labor, and responsibility.

Every legal order ultimately answers the question:

Whose law?

If God’s law is rejected as the standard, another standard will replace it… perhaps majority opinion, judicial decree, administrative expertise, political ideology, or personal autonomy. Something must function as the final authority.

As Rushdoony repeatedly argued, when God’s law is displaced, man’s law does not become neutral. Man simply enthrones himself as lawgiver.

The biblical issue therefore is not law versus freedom, but God’s law versus autonomous man’s law. Scripture itself joins law and liberty: “I will walk at liberty: for I seek thy precepts” (Psalm 119:45), while James speaks of “the perfect law of liberty” (James 1:25).

Modern man finds that expression contradictory because he has been taught that freedom means liberation from authority.

Scripture teaches something different:

Freedom is found under righteous authority.

The Problem Is Not Primarily Washington

Christians must be careful here. It is easy to condemn bureaucrats, blame politicians, point toward Washington, and imagine that the problem resides entirely beneath government domes.

But political centralization does not occur in a vacuum. A people unwilling to govern themselves eventually demands government by others, and the state often expands precisely because individuals, families, churches, and communities have contracted.

We surrendered responsibilities before government assumed many of them. We surrendered education, charity, care for aging family members, economic responsibility, and community discipline… and after surrendering responsibility, we discovered that we had surrendered authority with it.

This means the restoration of liberty cannot begin merely with an election.

It must begin with repentance.

“For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God” (1 Peter 4:17). If Christians want limited civil government, they must embrace expanded Christian responsibility.

If we want stronger families, fathers and mothers must accept their covenantal duties. If we want Christian education, Christians must take responsibility for educating their children; if we want less bureaucratic welfare, families and churches should take biblical charity seriously.

If we want economic liberty, Christians must practice honesty, productivity, thrift, generosity, inheritance, and stewardship.

If we want freedom, we must become responsible again.

Freedom Is Covenantal

This is where a biblical worldview finally pushes back against secular conservatism and libertarianism. The ultimate goal is not merely smaller government, rugged individualism, economic prosperity, or even political liberty considered by itself.

The goal is faithfulness to God.

Biblical freedom is covenantal because biblical man is covenantal. We live before God, under His authority, surrounded by responsibilities He’s assigned to us and relationships in which He requires faithfulness.

The free man therefore does not say, “I owe nothing to anyone.” He says, “I owe obedience to God, love to my neighbor, provision to those entrusted to my care, justice to those with whom I deal, charity to those genuinely in need, and submission to every lawful authority within the limits God has established.”

That is a much richer conception of freedom, and it demands far more from us. The autonomous man wants freedom from responsibility.

The covenantal man seeks freedom for responsibility.

The Way Back Is Forward

We cannot simply recreate colonial America, nor should we romanticize previous generations as though they were without serious sins and contradictions. Every age stands beneath the judgment of God’s Word, and our task is not antiquarian but covenantal.

Here’s the deal: We need to recover the principle beneath genuine Christian liberty: God governs man, and therefore man’s institutions must remain limited by God’s jurisdiction. The family must be a family, the church must be the church, and civil government must remain civil government.

None may legitimately claim total jurisdiction because none is God.

And above them all stands Jesus Christ.

Paul declares, “For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet” (1 Corinthians 15:25). That is why Christians have no reason for despair: our hope does not rest upon the next election, the next political movement, or the survival of any particular nation.

Christ’s kingdom is greater than them all.

The kingdom of God begins like a mustard seed and grows (Matthew 13:31–32); it works like leaven until the whole is leavened (Matthew 13:33). Christ commands His church not merely to gather converts but to disciple the nations, “teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19–20).

That calling requires generations. It requires faithful families, productive work, Christian education, churches willing to exercise charity and discipline, and men and women who refuse both the tyranny of the state and the tyranny of their own appetites.

Above all, it requires Christians willing to accept responsibility.

The great crisis of liberty is therefore not merely that government has become too powerful. It is that we have too often become willing to be governed in exchange for being relieved of responsibility.

The answer is not autonomy, anarchy, or another political savior.

The answer is the restoration of self-government under God.

The Christian works because God commands productive labor, provides because God has entrusted others to his care, and gives because God commands generosity. He teaches his children because they belong first to God, respects his neighbor’s property because God’s law forbids theft and covetousness, and obeys lawful authority because authority itself is ordained by God.

But he must also reject the claim of any human authority to become absolute.

Jesus Christ alone is Lord.

Freedom without responsibility eventually becomes servitude. Responsibility without God becomes another form of human autonomy, but responsibility beneath the sovereign God produces something increasingly rare in our age: a free man who knows why he is free, who made him free, and what his freedom is for.

“Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.”
—Galatians 5:1

That is our duty… not merely to demand freedom, but, under God, to become the kind of people capable of living free.

Source: https://www.offthegridnews.com/religion/why-almost-everyone-is-wrong-about-self-government-under-god/