The Danger of Mixture in Political Authorities

Daniel saw in the image that was shown to him the image of the history of the kingdoms of the world was composed of two elements. The Scripture says that it was, I believe, partly of iron and partly of clay. And it pleased the Lord to show Daniel this kingdom in the particular form of a statue. And this last kingdom was in the feet, in that lower part of the body. That the stone, covered the mountain without hands, shall destroy as it strikes them.

But Daniel first saw that in the condition in which it was, partly of iron and partly of clay, speaking at least in part of a division, and also speaking in part of a mixture, of a combining of two elements to make a single thing. The two elements made…

The form of this last kingdom was a foot of that lower part. That was the shape of its political expression—if you can understand what I mean by that—that the kingdom is a political civil entity and its shape as Daniel saw it was that of a foot. That was its political contours is what I mean. And it was a mixture.

Now the mixture, the particular mixture… first, I should say I think, that Daniel was in Babylon. And Babylon is a figure in its day of the last great political civil kingdom that should rule over men. And it has in it the essence and genius of evil. It is full of the mystery of iniquity. And the sample that Daniel saw of it manifested in a small measure, a relatively small measure, the possibilities of the extent of the iniquity that Babylon shall actually have over most of mankind at the very end.

Now, its nature was that it was a political civil kingdom with the closest possible association and alliance and tying together of a false spirituality. That in Babylon the civil power at a certain point became wholly aligned with a false religious movement, which movement set up on the plain of Dura an abomination, a great image, and which political kingdom said, “This is the religion in this state. This statue, this image represents what we worship. We put this in the place of God and every citizen is required to worship this image.”

And there is the mystery of iniquity working in that, in that iniquity found a way to push itself up out of the lower regions and tie itself, you know, align itself utterly, mix itself together with the political structure, so that the will of Satan could be expressed with the force of law. And that is exactly the condition that the enemy desires. And that is the reason that the separation of church and state, which came so early in our country’s founding, is so utterly necessary. That separation of church and state affords us the protection of that alliance of the state with the false church, which itself constitutes a religious and civil tyranny.

What is the nature, the specific nature of the tyranny that has reigned in the Roman Catholic nations of South America? It is that they have… that the Roman Catholic system has through the thing called the Concordat mixed in, penetrated into the councils of government, as far as it possibly could, so that it would seem that the government and the spiritual thing are all mixed together. And indeed they are, because the government raises the sword that it has on behalf of the defense of this false religious system against the truth. When that condition prevails, persecution, both official and spontaneous, becomes easy. Why?

We had a sample yesterday [x] in this city of what can happen when the law enforcement does not press itself into a situation. When the Mayor Lindsay gave the figure yesterday, it was 500 construction workers entered the Wall Street area and went about beating up people. And observers from higher, higher than those in buildings said that the police, though they were there, with some exceptions did not choose to take action. They chose to stand neutral and to allow this to occur. They did not exercise the sword or the power that they had.

Now in South America, in a different… it’s the same thing, it’s the police. But if a Roman Catholic mob moves spontaneously as the devil would prompt them by leaders, by demagogic leaders or priests or whoever they are, against a Protestant establishment, the police are there—they exist in that territory, they have their headquarters and all that. But they do not choose to exercise themselves in the matter. And so the Protestant, the believer in the Lord Jesus Christ who is there to proclaim God’s word, finds himself without recourse to the civil authority. Why? Because it’s paralyzed by the nature of that mixture.

That’s why the cry of the believers in Colombia and other such states is break, break that mixture. Let there be a division sharply come between the civil power and this religion. Because then, as Andrew was praying before, then there is the liberty that was spoken of. There is the liberty to proclaim the gospel. And the police do not exercise themselves according to one religion or the other, but according to the law. The law says you have this right and it doesn’t have this right. If you do have the right, they protect your right. If you don’t have the right, they don’t protect the right. They deny you the proper exercise of it.

Now, this separation of church and state is not the separation of truth and the civil power. I’m afraid that American Christians have allowed it to be, very largely. They have taken this statement of the separation of church and state and allowed it to be a kind of paralysis of them of action on behalf of the Lord in the political arena, where it is better that righteousness be expressed than unrighteousness be expressed. Better for the people at large.

The separation of church and state that we have had in this nation is now under the most severe attack. It hasn’t… 25 years ago, 30 years ago, if the rules that are being made on behalf of it now had been made, there would have been such an outcry, a public outcry, that it would have been knocked back. But there’s hardly a [x]. Big, big changes are being made now in legislatures to destroy the separation of church and state and to align in a measure we have not had: religion with the state, which is the devil’s old formula for tyranny. What will it be?

When the antichrist reigns, it will be a civil, political state that exercises religious authority. It’s the very nature of the iniquity, that alignment of any false… you take any false spiritual thing, movement, person, belief, and align it with the government, and darkness gets control of the sources of powers and exercises and expresses itself out from there, because you can magnify your expression.

Amazingly, if you’re in that position, you can issue an administrative decree that will cut hard against the truth and bring a measure of tyranny, because you’re expressing the darkness that reigns in you religiously and spiritually through the civil instruments. And that becomes the tyranny, it becomes the knocking back to some degree of the liberty of the people.

And though I do not see that at this time we can take a very public stand, I believe we should be wholly alert that while we’re praying for the division to come in South America and the breaking up of this centuries-old tyranny, that we do not see the devil placing it upon this nation. That alignment, that mixture, that allows him to rule by decree through the civil power, which is exactly what he wants to do. And those decrees will cut in every conceivable way against the Lord’s truth, against the prophets of the Lord of which Linda we spoke earlier. It will be hindered if that occurs, because the pretensions, as you know, of this church and pretensions that he has not surrendered at all.

When the pope went to Geneva to the very top-most level of the so-called Protestant world’s gathering, he asserted in the boldest possible statement that he was the inheritor and the occupant of the throne of Peter, which is supreme over the Church. I tell you, no small measure of boldness to go into the Protestant headquarters in Geneva, and say, “I am Peter.” That’s what he said, he said, “I am Peter.” “We are Peter,” he said. Lie! Yet he was bold enough…

It shows you that all the ecumenical emphasis is notwithstanding, the Church at its summit has in no way surrendered its pretensions to being the one true Church. Now when that pretension exists in a society where there is the separation of church and state, it is only a pretension. It can only speak and be there and say, “Well, we are this.” And others are free to say, “Well, you are surely not,” and do so say. But when that situation changes, then they begin to say, “We are the one true church.” It takes acts of heroic courage to utter or warn against it, because they have that alignment with the civil power and they enforce it through the civil power.

We’ve seen in South America in the public squares the big government building and right next to it, right next to it in the closest possible way moving almost… Sometimes they are, they’re actually part—the stones are joined of the Catholic cathedral, stating that this is the nature of this state: here’s the civil power and right with it, here’s the religious spiritual power.

God save us from any such thing, any such mixing in our nation. Now, at the same time, God save us from the failure of truth in the civil arena.

What is the most perfect form of government? The most perfect form of government? Well, first ask yourself, what is the most evil form of government? You know what it is. The most evil form of government is that great Babylon which shall rule over the earth to come, over most of mankind to come. That is the summit expression of the will of the devil governmentally in the whole history of mankind, that’s the worst possible government for men or for truth.

But what is the most perfect government? The most perfect government is the reign of a holy, righteous governor. The Lord Jesus Christ reigning with absolute authority and with a rod of iron over the nations will bring forth the most perfect government this world has ever seen. That’s the perfection, because what? Because truth is totally mixed, totally mixed, identified, with the civil power and… all the power, as a matter of fact. Just as when the Antichrist comes, lies and error are as totally mixed as they can be with it, when the Lord Jesus Christ reigns in righteousness, truth will be utterly in charge of mankind.

Well, we cannot at this time, at this time, hope that our nation will immediately come under that reign. What we can hope for is that measure of that condition where truth is mixed, truth can express itself through the machine we have governing.

In history, you see this in the righteous reign of certain kings in Israel. When the kings got thoroughly right with God, were men of prayer, the nation prospered as no nation has ever prospered. There has never been such a show made, so that kings of the world came to see what this was.

David was God’s man to rule, civilly. The force that was against him, we know, was nearly total. There was a time when certain men began to understand that David was God’s anointed—not the one who was in office, but this unknown in a sense or unpowerful really, David. And they came out, and they said something like, “We are with you.” They spoke these wonderful words into the air, if you can hear them: “We are with you, O son of Jesse,” I think is what they said.

They were saying by that that they understood spiritually and thoroughly that he was God’s man and that they had taken a stand on behalf of that. And I wonder if you can sense at all what those words, what the hearing of those words must have meant. “We are with you, son of Jesse.” “We are with you,” in the conditions under which he was working. To find he had allies in the cause, oh, I believe it was marvelous to hear, it was relieving, because those words were spiritually uttered. They were uttered by the Spirit of God, no less.

In our own nation now, we need especially now when confusion is trying to surge up from the lower parts and thrust itself over the people who run the government. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this nation in the state that it has been in this week, of disunity of the severest kind. I have never seen it before, when you could hear one side and the other side absolutely opposed, polarized in that enmity and [x].

And it’s the continual increase and exacerbation of that condition that Satan knows can plunge this nation down into the depths of chaos and tyranny, which you can surely believe he fully intends to do. And if you listen to them, you can hear the [x], they express the devil’s intention toward this nation to destroy it. One of the phrases is not “Destroy the government,” but there’s another word perhaps even more intense than destroy that I have seen and heard uttered in the last several weeks. “I’ve demolished”… No, pardon me, it is “Destroy the State.” “Destroy the State” is the phrase that is one of the rallying cries and one of the serious intentions of certain people. And behind that, the most serious intention of the demons.

There’s a verse in Proverbs 29 verse 2, from which there is absolutely no escaping, and it’s this: the Lord says, “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.”

We have not seen with very rare exceptions in this nation for some rather long time, a condition that could be described in general as “the righteous are in authority.” So that even when very good men, such as Eisenhower, were ruling for eight years in a kind of complacency, the very start was being made on that destruction the devil intends. Time was being taken from this nation at that point to give advantage to the enemy.

“When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked bear rule, the people mourn.” Who are the wicked? The degree of mourning by the people, of course, would depend upon the degree of the wickedness of the wicked. Because there are relatively speaking various degrees. There are wicked men that I would rather be under politically than other wicked man whose wickedness is of a much more vicious or vile kind.

But to go back from that the essence of this: “the wicked”… You could really translate it “the unconverted.” When the unconverted are in authority, the people mourn. Is there a mourning in America today? There is mourning in America, the people are mourning today, because the unconverted are in authority over practically everything.

John Phillips: …Operating not only in the religious realm, but they also operate after a kind in the political realm. And the voices in our own nation, on several sides of major issues, are growing stronger and stronger in uttering their solutions to the problems of the day. And as these appeals increase in their intensity and increase in their strength, the appeal that’s made to the human soul is an appeal for a stronger and stronger commitment to a particular cause or a particular formula, a particular way of looking at civil reality.

And one of the lines of the division that can go through the Lord’s people is that line where the Lord’s people become, or some of them become, committed on a political point and this becomes of the most utmost importance to them that a certain political personality or a certain political view prevail at that time and their souls get stirred to this…

… to an observer that the man himself is driven by demons. And I have seen before in less pronounced ways, but I see it in person, that the strong commitment of the soul to a political cause can send a line of division among the body of Christ, among God’s people, and also it can divide them and make them somewhat warring factions.

And I think we have to, at all times, realize that no men, however eloquent they may be, however sensible they may seem to talk, no men are the answers to these problems anyway. We have been hearing now all my lifetime, I’ve been hearing men stand up at lecture time and say that they themselves, because of their points of view, are the answers to the problems that beset us. And then you watch it two years later or four years later and the problems that beset us, in spite of the election of those answers, are more pronounced. They’re worse than they were when they started. So that no man himself is ever the answer, nor his program is ever the answer to the problems of the hour.

And I think Andrew hit an important point fairly early in his prayer when he was on this theme of not allowing the soul, our own souls, to rise and become overly or unduly exercised. It’s the habit in political life to stand before certain men, almost loosed from one’s senses, to cheer, to scream, to hail him as a sort of king. I’ve heard this sound in conventions, and the man is hailed, and a few years later he’s dead or gone or unknown. He is just no longer a factor.

And as we discern within ourselves that which would rise and commit itself strongly, I think we should always take care to step back and say, “Soul, do not commit yourself strongly on these points. These are not the points at this hour to be committed strongly to. There are things to be committed to, among them God’s word, but causes of any kind, no.”

Andrew Burrows: This is right down the line of something that has been occurring to me. It has occurred to me a number of times recently, as you talk to people around, you find… you come into contact with people with very strong and very decided political views. And one of whose intentions is to feel out where you stand, to find out whether you pass their particular litmus test of political okay-ness. And it’s very important at this point and I believe will become increasingly important if the polarization gets worse and worse that we be able to strike a balance between not being engaged in a particular point-of-view person, cause, without at the same time retiring entirely from an understanding of what is right in the particular circumstances.

Because one of the moves of this [contagion, it will deprive us], which retires from the scene of the world, retires from the scene of conflict and for whom the Lord is all in all, as He should be, but that’s it. And you never find this in Paul. He was a man for whom if any man was, if for anyone, the Lord was all in all, He was for Paul. And yet, he was there, vitally and significantly engaged in the issues and the conflicts of his hour, not in terms of giving forth a political stance or a political opinion, but at the same time being entirely able to give an answer for the hope that was within him.

He says, for example, in the end of 2 Corinthians chapter 2, starting in verse 14, “Now thanks be unto God, which always causeth us to triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest the savour of his knowledge by us in every place.” It means that Paul never retired, but that what Paul manifested was not adherence to a particular line, party line, but adherence in such a way the Lord Jesus Christ… that God was able to use him, to make him the [x], to make the aroma in the atmosphere in the very sense of the knowledge of God manifest in his life.

Well, this requires a good deal of wisdom. Because when someone is espousing a particular point of view, it’s all too easy to agree with them on the points of agreement and then they think you’re great, and to just to keep silent about the points you disagree with them. Or on the other hand to get into a violent argument, which is also a temptation of the soul, because you know that the particular attitude or thought or mindset that that person has is all wrong.

And yet it’s not the issue. Because you can… maybe you could convince him, which is highly unlikely, I’ll tell you you could convince him. That wouldn’t change the specific situation, which is the of the need of the Lord. And we should have increasingly at our focus not our particular attitude for [x] or our particular attitude for this group or for that group. But how can this conversation, how can this contact, how can these questions point that person in the direction of the Lord? And for this we will have to be agile, mentally and spiritually, that we don’t get back into particular stereotypes, which is very, very easy.

Because as people get increasingly polarized, they have a characterization of the enemy or of those that they are disagreeing with, and the characterization of the good guys. And you talk to one person for whom the word radical means that he’s an extremely good person. So every time he says radical, you know that what he’s doing is saying that person… and he says, “He’s a real radical,” and you know that that’s good.

And you talk to another person and he says, “He’s a radical,” and you know that means he ought to be wiped off the face of the earth. And it’s the same word, which for two people—one wants to wipe him out and the other one couldn’t say anything better about the person, “He’s not just a liberal, he’s a real radical.”

Well, this requires on our part not getting off the track in answering the particular argument or issue at hand, because these arguments or issues are very temporal, they’re going to pass, whereas that person’s soul is going to stand forever. And if God can make us… it says, “¹⁵ For we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ, in them that are saved, and in them that perish:

¹⁶ To the one we are the savour of death unto death; and to the other the savour of life unto life. And who is sufficient for these things?” Because you would give up.

If we had to do it or be it by ourselves, to go around trying to give off the savor of the Lord, it would be an impossible job. How could you know how someone’s been going to interpret our actions or the way we say something or a hundred different and one things that people could say, “I don’t like that” or “I don’t like that” or “I don’t like that”? And if you’re going around trying in every case to please or to get the right response, no.

It says first, “We are unto God,” and just take those four words as being the essence of the matter. We are unto God first, and then He pours through us. He does in us and through us what He sees fits. That in every case, in every situation, it’s His name which is lifted up. [x] as a matter of fact, as we know if you look at it again, exactly what John was speaking of in Acts chapter 12 verse 20, or really verse 21.

There was a particular issue in which Herod was displeased with them of Tyre and Sidon and they desired to make peace. “²¹ And upon a set day Herod, arrayed in royal apparel, sat upon his throne, and made an oration unto them. ²² And the people gave a shout, saying, It is the voice of a god, and not of a man. ²³ And immediately the angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory: and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost. ²⁴ But the word of God grew and multiplied.”

It is clear throughout the Bible that the political events are very close to… in the center of God’s concern, because there are certain political conditions which means for the prospering of the Word of God, for the freedom of the people of God from bondage, for the openness of opportunity for broken… And the whole history of Israel is the history of the alternation between the times when politically Israel was on its own two feet, because the king was right with God, and politically oppressed, because the king and the people who had gone astray after the false gods of the nations. And these are always judged. The political conditions are judged and to be judged.

And as we seek the Lord and seek the mind of the Lord for the desperate time in which we live, let us believe that we will have insight to know how we are to hit and where these things are to count. Because the prospects for us are very, very dangerous as a nation. We are in a very precarious time, politically and economically and socially. The very things that make us a nation are now threatened to the core. And there are those who have declared themselves against them, unreserved, or who are doing something about it.

Well, some of the things that they are declaring against, we would probably find ourselves [x] in agreement with. Because just the fact that something has been done again and again and again doesn’t make it right. But to know where to hit in, that our prayers effectually move behind the scenes, out of sight, see done that which will count for God, will make opportunity… the continued opportunity for the word and for people to turn to the Lord in this nation.