Government Cannot and Will Not Solve All of Your Problems
Personally, I find it quite intriguing to see how many folks believe the government in our modern-day is the source for helping with all of your problems. Have a health crisis? The government can solve it. Need a bit more money? Just go on the welfare program and you will be alright. Education need to be fixed? Leave it to the government, they will handle the job for you. How about churches? The government can give you advice on when it is safe for you to open or not. Primarily, our main issue here is a reliance upon the government to fix our problems. I am reminded of the words of Ronald Reagan in 1964:
This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
-Ronald Reagan1
Thinking that the government can fix all of your problems is like asking a lawyer to perform open-heart surgery on you. It won’t end well because they are not trained for the endeavor nor is their role to function as a surgeon! The government was never created to solve every problem in your life.
A Servant Not A Savior
“For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.”
-Romans 13:3-4
Notice how Scripture explicitly calls the government a “servant” here in this passage. It is not a savior to take all of your problems away, it is a servant used by God to protect the rights of every person given to them by God. We must think of the government as a servant because that is precisely how God made it to function! I know some will begin to wonder if I lack compassion because of my views saying the government should not be viewed as a savior? I will quote from President Reagan again to answer this question:
But seriously, what are we doing to those we seek to help? Not too long ago, a judge called me here in Los Angeles. He told me of a young woman who’d come before him for a divorce. She had six children, was pregnant with her seventh. Under his questioning, she revealed her husband was a laborer earning 250 dollars a month. She wanted a divorce to get an 80 dollar raise. She’s eligible for 330 dollars a month in the Aid to Dependent Children Program. She got the idea from two women in her neighborhood who’d already done that very thing.
Yet anytime you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we’re denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we’re always “against” things — we’re never “for” anything. Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so. -Ronald Reagan
Just because the government seeks to help fix a problem does not mean it always will. For example, as of September of 2020 one hundred thousand businesses that had temporarily shut down due to the virus are now permanently out of business.2 Many state governments were trying to be “kind” of course by enforcing shutdowns, or at the very least suggesting businesses shut down. However, those actions of businesses closing cut 100,000 of them out of the American economy. Of course, as I have argued elsewhere, lockdowns do absolutely no good at all for the virus and are detrimental to people.3 Point being, the government took a role that was never theirs to take and negatively impacted people with no perceivable benefit.
There Is Only One Savior
Jesus Christ is the only Savior and to try to place anything or anyone else on that pedestal is idolatry. The book of Jude closes by saying, “to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen (Jude 25).” Christ is the only Savior and He has complete authority. The government is not the savior, Jesus is the Savior and Lord! The government is a servant which is ordained by God to minister in the way He purposed for it. Government can do much good when operating correctly, but it is a poor savior. It is an institution that needs to exist, but it must be viewed in the proper perspective. And, that perspective is as a servant to protect rights, not an institution to be viewed as the redeemer of humanity!
Sources
1 All Reagan quotes come from this site: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ronaldreaganatimeforchoosing.htm
2 https://fortune.com/2020/09/28/covid-buisnesses-shut-down-closed/
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