Stable Money
Your silver has become dross, your best wine mixed with water.
Isaish 1:22, English Standard VErsion
The poor need a stable store of wealth the most, as they are the most brutally crushed by inflation.
(As our own pointedly secularist governments are so eager to prove… while, like the Islamic Erdogan, yelling at the top of their lungs about their Concern for the Poor.)
Christian societies are not to follow the road of Islamic or Secularist societies.
As governments – Christian or otherwise – simply cannot be trusted with control over money, I expect that money be taken out of the control of the State in the Christian societies of the future.
The minarchist Christian State, such as it is, can have their taxes paid the coin they wish, gold or silver or bags of wheat. The concept of legal tender, however, must be abandoned to the government-god totalitarians. Debatably, the concept of a gold-only standard is also a scheme of Our Betters, and should be cut off at the knees.
(There is an interesting debate on whether there should be a 100% Reserve Banking system a la Rothbard, or a banking system based strictly on contracts. Gary North reviews the debate here. In any case, factional reserve banking is a fraud, as is the central banking system: both get tossed out the door in a Christian State that exalts God above itself, fears His Justice, and upholds His Law-Word.)
Interest Rates
Hewing close to Islamic financial doctrine, Erdogan refuses to have the government’s central bank raise interest rates on the Turkish Lira.
Erdogan has no interest in abolishing the central bank, instead taking control of it from the major Turkish banks and having his cronies and family run it instead.
Islamic Turks, like Secular Europeans, do indeed believe in the authoritarian, centralized state.1
God’s People are called away from the way of lawless, man-exalting tyranny.
Note that interest rates — the cost of money over time — is part of reality, and is specifically recognized by Jesus Christ as legitimate.
Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest.
Matthew 25:27, English Standard version
Christians are expected to uphold the authority of Jesus Christ, and His every word and deed.
What God DOES forbid, is the charging of interest on loans to the poor. The poor are to be treated with leniency: while they may be granted loans, they are not to be charged any interest on those loans.
“If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you shall not be like a moneylender to him, and you shall not exact interest from him.
Exodus 22:25, ESV
If your brother becomes poor and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall support him as though he were a stranger and a sojourner, and he shall live with you. Take no interest from him or profit, but fear your God, that your brother may live beside you. You shall not lend him your money at interest, nor give him your food for profit.
LEviticus 25:35-36, ESV
God absolutely demands such behaviour, today. Therefore, we must support His commandments, proclaim it as authoritative today, and uphold it ourselves as much as we can… while always pushing Divine Authority to be legally recognized and upheld in the political arenas we happen to live in.
The Kingdom of God – including the Laws of the Great King – must be extended and upheld. Today.
Perhaps slowly
- as we are weak today, due to our own and our forefather’s faithlessness, willful disobedience, and hatred of God’s Authority and Law-Word,
but steadily, and with increasing success
- as God strengthens, blesses, rewards, and empowers those who follow the Holy Spirit, and obey Him.
Fascism
The deeply Islamic President Erdogan is moving to crush the impoverished Islamic foreigner and stranger, to reward the major corporations that want to use the force of law to drive out the small entrepreneur (working 10-hour days, BTW), to secure at a major government subsidy the recycling section of the economy for itself.
Pious Muslim leaders may work and rule in such a fashion.
Pious Christian leaders may not.
The government-business partnership, a.k.a. fascism, is evil on it’s face. It corrupts the law and justice to favour powerful and wealthy men, businesses, and interests. And it undermine and destroys the concept of equality under the law.
The fascist road — “Socialism for hypocrites”, as Rushdoony noted — is forbidden to Christians, under threat of direct punishment of God, and is to be denounced by His representatives, clergy and layman alike.
Irony
After all this… if any Western Government has the kind of pro-Christian leadership that Turkey has with it’s pro-Islamic leadership, the conservatives would be rejoicing, and the progressives would be shrieking about the danger of theocracies.
Even if the US was ruled by the Bible-quoting (but privately agnostic) Lincoln, with the level of Christian leadership that his administrating had, the liberals would be out of their mind.
As for me, I would recall the reign of King Josiah. A huge, three-decade-long, top-down religious revival… which could not repair the damage of the half-century+ corrupt reign of King Manasseh.
Or, for the fascist in the audience, the rule of Franco in Spain. Plenty of Christian fascists in authority, for decades. And the fruit of all that pious oppression and theft?
<Points to modern, intensely secular Spain>
“By their fruits ye shall know them.”
But God expects us to be far more godly, and far more lawful, than any fascist tyrant could ever be: cross-waving or otherwise.2
Turkey is discovering the cost of their folly the hard way.
Rather than gloating, we would be wise to learn the lessons they are teaching, at their own expense.
1Although, unlike secularist Europeans, Muslims do not make the state itself the Source of the Law – a.k.a. the functional Lord and God of a society. Instead, the Islamic state is the enforcement arm of an unknowable deity, whose desires are supposedly communicated by Mohammed and his followers.
Kant and his love of the unknowable noumenon — “something that exists independently of human senses”, in contrast to the knowable and measurable phenomenon — would instinctively recognize and admire the Islamic deity.
“God can Finally Shut Up, so the Right Sort can speak for Him.”
The Christian deity, in contrasts, speaks directly to us, and has indeed sent His Son to bridge the divide.
(And Moses was sent before Christ. Odd, how Muslims who proclaim Moses as a prophet have not the faintest idea of the Laws of Moses actually are. The people who know God, knows how He thinks, what He said, and what pleases Him.)
We have heard God’s voice, and recognize it…
….which is why the solid majority of humanity instinctively hates it.
Just as we did in the Garden of Eden, preferring the words of a snake to the words of God.
Fortunately for us and our future, the Holy Spirit was sent to the world after Jesus rose to rule at the right hand of the Father. Due to the power of the Holy Spirit, the gospel gains power, and the Kingdom of God – including justice, liberty, growth, prosperity, and even technology – grows.
As for the difference between Muslims and Secularists?
Muslims refuse to kill their children. And Muslims refuse to kill their unborn girls while sparing their unborn boys: all the little innocents get to live.
This factor, alone, is sufficient to insure Islam crushes the Secularists… including the Marxists.
Some obedience to the Law of God is better, and provides a better future, than No obedience to the Law of God.
Arabs have a future… even if that future ends up with them keeling before the throne of Christ, as least they will have biological descendants who will be alive at the end of time. Better humiliation and surrender before King Jesus – “you know, like the rest of us sinners!” – than rotting in some grave, and then roasting in the flames for eternity.
For God is the Lord of the Living. Not the Dead. Even though He has total authority over the dead as well, God has no interest in being called their Lord.
The partial obedience of the Arab in protecting the innocent leads to their partial blessing of their future by God. No such gift is planned for the future-hating Secularist Europeans, contemptuous as they are for the lives of the weakest among us. Or the sterile, Confucian East Asians, for that matter. And the Hindi East Indians had better watch out: Satan is hunting them, too, and the grave cries out for their future as well.
Best repent while you can.
2Note: Lincoln – and his opponent, Stephan Douglas – both had massive ties with major corporations of their time, railroad companies.
Fascism is older than Mussolini.
A LOT older.
Insert: the sound of the major Republican Rome business interests, as they look with raw hate at their profitable Carthaginian business competitors.
But was always was a profitable – and power-centralizing! – racket. The very health of the State, and its’ powerful friends.
There’s always a push for empire with these fascists.
But Turkey is not Germany: they will burn through their wealth, and lost the ability to finance major wars, far faster than the Germans did.
A grim warning: while the video certainly pushes the God of Power – the deity Mohammed respected most highly – the comments illustrate that there are many Western secular supporters of such a pragmatic Islamic philosophy.
Not surprising.
But Christians know: Law, Truth and Justice FIRST.
Political power? Second. Third. Fourth… maybe.
Acrosss the Stars 