By Tom Rose
Is it true that, in the mind of God, it makes no difference under what kind of economic and political rule His children live? Or, to pose the question in another way, is God indifferent to the atmosphere and manner in which men exchange goods and services? Is He just as pleased to see man’s economic activity centrally controlled and regulated by the totalitarian State compared to the decentralized responses of self-directed, God-responsible individuals via the impersonal mechanism of the free market?
Or, to put the issue still differently, has God, or has He not, mandated a particular way in which men should conduct themselves in producing and exchanging the many economic goods and services they and their families must depend on for their very survival?
This is a vital question for Christians to consider. For, depending on how they answer, they will either give aid and support to the forces in society that are ever striving to erect the all-powerful secular State as supervisor over every aspect of human life; or they will resist those forces in favor of the principle of voluntary exchange by persons who stand as free and self-responsible before God.
Some fifteen years ago this writer stumbled at the threshold of accepting Christ as his Savior for some time because so many so-called Christian leaders advocated socialist/communist ideology. How can Christianity be the answer, l asked, if it stands for the immoral system of coercive economic exchange directed by totalitarian rulers?
But, praise the Lord, the Word of God stands true, while some Christians and so-called Christian leaders can be very, very wrong! Upon a challenge by a believer who is now with the Lord, this confused searcher for truth started reading what the Bible says–not what men said the Bible has to say.
A fair reading of God’s inspired word does indeed show that God has mandated an economic way for man to follow. It is only too evident that many Christians–those who believe the Bible upholds, or at least tolerates, State collectivism as a method of economic exchange–have not properly “thought God’s thoughts after Him.”
What, then, does God’s word have to say about man, man’s self-responsibility before God, and the principle upon which man is to conduct his economic activity? We find the Trinity in the midst of a discussion about man before the foundation of the world: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…” (Genesis 1:26).
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