AnthonyFlood.com
Philosophy against Misosophy
Jesus Is an Anarchist
James Redford
7. On Peter and 1 Peter 2:13-18
Another Bible passage that is sometimes cited by statists in an attempt to demonstrate that people ought to submit to mortal government is 1 Peter 2:13-18:
Therefore submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake, whether to the king as supreme, or to governors, as to those who are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of those who do good. For this is the will of God, that by doing good you may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men – as free, yet not using liberty as a cloak for vice, but as bondservants of God. Honor all people. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the king. Servants, be submissive to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the harsh.
But Peter himself did not so submit! Peter and the apostles were arrested in Jerusalem by the Sadducees for preaching the gospel of Jesus and brought before the Sanhedrin court for questioning:
Acts 5:27-32: And when they had brought them, they set them before the council. And the high priest asked them, saying, "Did we not strictly command you not to teach in this name? And look, you have filled Jerusalem with your doctrine, and intend to bring this Man's blood on us!" But Peter and the other apostles answered and said: "We ought to obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised up Jesus whom you murdered by hanging on a tree. Him God has exalted to His right hand to be Prince and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are His witnesses to these things, and so also is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey Him."
So here we have it from Peter himself: We ought to obey God rather than men! Yet Jesus already commanded that the ultimate Law is for everyone to treat others as they themselves would want to be treated – therefore, according to Peter, any command by men that are contrary to this ultimate Law are automatically null and void.
Once again one must consider that the Christians at this time were a persecuted minority under the surveillance of the mortal "authorities" as possible insurrectionists, and so statements like what is written in 1 Peter 2:13-18 were included to pacify such "authorities" so that the most important task of saving people's souls could continue – yet, just as Paul included an "escape clause" in Romans 13 ("Owe no one anything except to love one another"), Peter also includes an escape clause contained in 1 Peter 2:13-18, which is the 16th verse therein:
For this is the will of God, that by doing good you may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men – [verse 16:] as free, yet not using liberty as a cloak for vice, but as bondservants of God.
The NIV Bible translates verse 16 as "Live as free men, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as servants of God." Most other modern English Bible versions translate the beginning of this passage as either "Live as free" or "Act as free."
So in other words, when this is combined with what Peter said in Acts 5:29, we can take the entire passage of 1 Peter 2:13-18 to mean that we ought to obey all the ordinances of men: except for all such ordinances that happen to conflict with our God-given liberty and Jesus's ultimate commandment – which is virtually every single one of them!
But other than that, do indeed obey every other ordinance of man, for in so doing one will merely be obeying Jesus's commandment – in which case the ordinances of man which one ought to obey are merely redundant!
Also, consider the following statement by Peter which some statists might try to construe in their favor:
2 Peter 2:9,10: [...] then the Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptations and to reserve the unjust under punishment for the day of judgment, and especially those who walk according to the flesh in the lust of uncleanness and despise authority. They are presumptuous, self-willed. They are not afraid to speak evil of dignitaries, [...]
As has already been pointed out, the statist fallacy when encountering such statements is to automatically deem the "authorities" and "dignitaries" spoken of in these cases as necessarily being the "authorities" and "dignitaries" that the positive law (i.e., the government's law) so regards – but such cannot be the actual case, as it is written:
Hosea 8:4: "They set up kings, but not by Me; They made princes, but I did not acknowledge them."
As well, Jesus Himself rebuked the supposed "authority" of the Earthly "rulers":
Mark 10:42-45: But Jesus called them to Himself and said to them, "You know that those who are considered rulers over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. Yet it shall not be so among you; but whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant. And whoever of you desires to be first shall be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many."
The Ruler and God of This World and Age which All Mortal Governments Worship is Satan (A.K.A. Lucifer)
The Bible is quite explicit as to who it is that really controls all the mortal governments on Earth, and which god is the god that the mortal rulers worship:
Luke 4:4-8: Then the devil, taking Him up on a high mountain, showed Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said to Him, "All this authority I will give You, and their glory; for this has been delivered to me, and I give it to whomever I wish. Therefore, if You will worship before me, all will be Yours." And Jesus answered and said to him, "Get behind Me, Satan! For it is written, 'You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only you shall serve.' " (See also Matt. 4:1-11; Mark 1:12,13; Luke 4:1-13.)
This is one of the offers Satan made to Christ during the forty days in which Satan tempted Jesus, an event now sometimes referred to as the Temptation of Christ. Satan wasn't lying when he made the above offer to Jesus: it was an absolutely real offer that Satan would have delivered on.
This is necessarily the case, as Luke even writes in verse 2 of the above chapter that here Jesus was "tempted for forty days by the devil" – thus, this had to be a real offer or else it could hardly qualify as a real temptation, as certainly Jesus would have known whether or not what Satan said here was true: if what Satan was saying here were false then Jesus would have already known that, and hence Satan's offer could not have been the least bit tempting to Jesus.
How true indeed Satan was being when he said that all the kingdoms of the world have been delivered to him, and that he gives them to whomever he wishes: which are those who worship him as their God! All Earthly, mortal potentates have quite literally made a pact with Satan! – every last one of them has literally sold their soul to Satan in return for Earthly power! As God spoke in Hosea 8:4: "They set up kings, but not by Me; They made princes, but I did not acknowledge them."
And Jesus later said on two separate occasions that Satan is the ruler of this world – thus in John 12:31: "Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out." And in John 14:30: "I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming, and he has nothing in Me."
And Paul in two separate letters writes that Satan is the god and ruler of this age:
2 Corinthians 4:3,4: But even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, whose minds the god of this age has blinded, who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine on them.
And in Ephesians 6:11,12:
Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
All one has to do to realize just how literal and true Satan, Jesus and Paul were being when they made the above statements is to consider that more than four times the amount of non-combatants have been systematically murdered for purely ideological reasons by their own governments within the past century than were killed in that same time-span from wars.
From 1900 to 1923, various Turkish regimes killed from 3,500,000 to over 4,300,000 of its own Armenians, Greeks, Nestorians, and other Christians. Communist governments have murdered over 110 million of their own subjects since 1917.
And Germany committed genocide against some 16 million people – 6 million of them Jews. (The preceding figures are from Prof. R.J. Rummel's website:
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills.)
Over 800,000 Christian Tutsis in Rwanda were hacked to death with machetes between April and July of 1994 by the Hutu-led military force after the Tutsis had been disarmed by governmental decree in the early 1990s, of which disarmament decree the United Nations helped to enforce.
On several occasions, United Nations soldiers stationed in Rwanda actually handed over helpless Tutsi Christians under their protection to members of the Hutu military.
They then stood by as their screaming charges were unceremoniously hacked to pieces. This massacre happened one year after the United Nations helped to put in a national ID card in Rwanda, and it was that very national ID card system which the Hutus used to track-down and identify the Christian Tutsis. Needless to say, all of the subject populations of the above mass murders had been disarmed beforehand.
The wars and mass murders which the mortal governments routinely engage in are literal human-sacrifice orgies that the Earthly rulers of those governments offer up to appease their God Satan, a.k.a. Lucifer!
Government, throughout all of recorded history, has been the most methodical and efficient human-meat grinder to ever exist. It is a purely Satanical machination masquerading as humanity's salvation, but has always been – and forever will be so long as it exists – the scourge of mankind and its decline.
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8. Jesus Defended the Right to Freely Contract and Private Property Rights