I’m always amazed how few Christians know about what God has ordained as seen in the Bible. Most don’t know how many institutions God has even ordained.
Ask your Christian friends. Some will say 1 or 2 and others may say 10 or 20 etc. How many do you think?
Well, there are 3 and only 3. That’s interesting to think about. That in the whole Bible for all the world and for all time, God has only ordained 3 institutions. They must be pretty important, and they are.
Two of them you will certainly know – marriage and church. God first ordained the marriage institution in Genesis 1 and the church was first ordained in Matthew 16.
In the Bible, the marriage institution, the family dynasty, was God’s only ruling institution in the world until the book of Exodus happened. The Church did not start until Pentecost in Acts 2 through Revelation.
Now the 3rd institution that most never think about in the Bible which God ordained, was civil government, the state institution.
How important do you think the state institution is to God? God had most of the Bible (Exodus to Acts) written in the context of and about the state institution!
Israel as a nation was the primary example but many other nations God also showed as examples. There are multitudes of examples showing Israel and other nations always being blessed when they honored God and His Word or always being punished when they did not. And there are no exceptions to this.
Now stop and ask, is God the same today as He was then. Jesus is God, and the Bible says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Heb. 13:8).
So what does that mean? God is involved with every nation today, even as He was in every nation in the Old Testament.
So how was God involved then and therefore today? God is either blessing or oppressing every nation today, depending on how much they honor Him and His Word or how much they dishonor Him and His Word.
Specifically, “God blessed… or cursed” (Deut.28) every nation depending on how much they kept or did not keep His moral Law – His Ten Commandments, Statutes, and Judgments. If you did not know this, read in the Bible the books of the Kings, Chronicles, Psalms, and the Prophets, and look for this. You’ll see the multitude of consistent examples of how God always did exactly this with every nation in every generation.
Virtually all Ten Commandments are repeated and amplified in the New Testament. And God commands every person and nation in the world to keep His Commands. Nations that don’t keep His Commandments are judged on earth here and now. People who don’t keep His Commands are in judgment now and for eternity.
God is loving but He is also just. And the only reason a person cannot be judged today and for all eternity, is if they now believe and receive God’s Son Jesus, for dying on the cross to pay for their just penalty in falling short in keeping God’s Law.
But that does not mean living by faith we can then neglect obeying God’s Law – “Do we then nullify the Law through faith? Far from it! On the contrary, we establish the Law” (Rom. 3:31).
Since no one can perfectly keep God’s commandments, we can only be saved by faith and God’s grace. But that doesn’t mean we are free to ignore or disobey Gods commandments:
o “And we can be sure that we know Him if we obey His commandments” (1John 2:3).
o “Loving God means keeping His commandments, and His commandments are not burdensome” (1John 5:3).
o “And this is love, that we walk according to His commandments” (2John 1:6).
o “Here is the perseverance of the saints who keep the commandments of God and their faith in Jesus” (Rev. 14:12).
Don’t be misled, it cost God’s Son’s life to redeem people, but God does not redeem nations. They get God’s full and just penalty here and now on earth when they don’t obey God’s Law. Not only Bible history proves this but the history of every nation and every empire since the Bible has proved this. God is patient, but His national judgments always come in time.
Now what does this all mean to us here today? God is involved with every nation. For a nation to last it must not reject honoring God and His Law-Word. And who on earth can affect a nation to honor God and His Word? ONLY CHRISTIANS!
Jesus said only to His disciple, Christians today, you are the “salt of the earth… and the light of the world.” The salt and light is not for the church but for the earth and world. The church, Christians, are to impact the earth and world, everything outside of the church. And that leaves only two others of God’s institutions in the world to impact - family and government.
This and this alone will determine whether we will be a nation as a tail or a head (Deut. 28:12-14):
“The Lord will send rain at the proper time from his rich treasury in the heavens and will bless all the work you do. You will lend to many nations, but you will never need to borrow from them. If you listen to these commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today, and if you carefully obey them, the Lord will make you the head and not the tail, and you will always be on top and never at the bottom. You must not turn away from any of the commands I am giving you today, nor follow after other gods and worship them.”
And here and here along is the only other alternative God gives us as a nation (Deut. 28:43-45):
“The foreigners living among you will become stronger and stronger, while you become weaker and weaker. They will lend money to you, but you will not lend to them. They will be the head, and you will be the tail!
“If you refuse to listen to the Lord your God and to obey the commands and decrees He has given you, all these curses will pursue and overtake you until you are destroyed.”
