The Government that God Wants

Posted by Lorren on October 28, 2008

This election season is pretty hotly contested. A lot of people (on both sides of the political spectrum) are afraid of the outcome. I’m pretty concerned myself.

Today I was reading about the political conditions of Jesus’s day. The ancient Israelites were in a country ruled by pagan Romans. The Jewish people of the day had a lot of rules that they were to follow; they could be stoned for committing adultery, for example. The Romans… not so much. I have been to both Pompeii and Herculanium (Ercolano), I suppose before Mount Vesuvius Erupted and covered their towns in ash, they were probably pretty typical Roman towns. In Pompeii, you could find signs on the streets that would direct you to the local brothel. The Romans weren’t exactly Victorian… and these were the people that were in charge of the land of Judea. While Judea itself was probably a lot more Jewish than Pompeii and may not have had signs on the streets pointing to the brothel, the Israelites were probably not happy at all to be governed by idol-worshipping pagans.

If you go back even farther in history, Israel was governed by the Medes and Persians, where praying to God once got Daniel thrown into a den of lions, and refusing to worship a false god landed three Jewish teenagers into the furnace. Going back farther than that, Israel spent 400 years enslaved by the Egyptians.

These governments, although not what the Israelites wanted at the time, were what God wanted for them at the time. There were different reasons… when Israel was enslaved by the Egyptians, it allowed them to grow in size so that they were able to take the promised land after the Exodus. The Medes and Persians were sent to punish the Israelites for their wickedness and failure to follow after God. Roman oppression made people hunger for a messiah to save them… and Rome’s massive territory and road systems probably helped Christianity spread far and wide in the centuries following Jesus’s death.

Nobody wants to live under a wicked or corrupt government, but sometimes God uses wicked governments to carry out his plans. It frustrates a lot of Americans when the government passed a bailout bill that nobody wanted, won’t do a thing to secure the borders, encouraged bankers to pass bad loans, and doesn’t do a thing when Mexican soldiers invade our country and hold up border patrol agents and gunpoint. I’m sure a lot of Mexican citizens are frustrated with the corruption in their country. There are Russian citizens that don’t like their government, although most are afraid to speak out because that might be the death of them there. I’m sure there are Indian, Chinese, Iraqi, and North Korean Christians that are frustrated because they live in countries that allow religious persecution.

But God has the governments in place for a reason, good or (what seems like right now in most places) bad. I don’t know why, but if we can look back in history and see the reasons why God put the Israelites under certain governments, it stands to reason that in 1000 years, we’ll see the reason why God put these governments where they are today. No matter who gets sworn in as President of the United States on January 20th, it will be the person God wants there… for good or bad.

God has not promised any of us a life of sunshine and roses. In fact, most of us capable of reading this message have led VERY charmed lives when compared to those that lived before us in history. We live a life of luxury that even kings of some eras couldn’t have imagined (did you sleep on a bed with a mattress last night? Many kings didn’t). If we are called to suffer at some point in the future, then we are not alone. What God has promised us is eternal life (and a better life without sin) in Heaven if we repent of our sins now and trust in the forgiveness of sin offered by Jesus’s death on the cross.