According to the founding fathers of the American Republic, men are not angels and mankind is not governed by angels. What are the consequences of this fact? We must recognize that for the entirety of human history no human government has ever placed itself under the rule of God. The people of Israel accepted God’s rule with their mouths, but never obeyed God with their hearts, and God gave them a law that reflected His eternal unchanging character in a way that reflected the particular culture of the time. Because Israel and Judah never obeyed God with a whole heart the laws of God remain experiments yet to be tried, in stark contrast to the same satanic hierarchies that are tried over and over and over again.

The fact that we are not governed by angels has consequences. For one, it means that we cannot trust people with the power that would be given to God, the power to be lawmaker, enforcer, and judge. No human being can be trusted to have that sort of power, because all human beings are our equals, our brethren. Since no man or woman is in the position of God or the angelic realm over us, it is entirely unacceptable to have any legal or social order that places some mankind in the position of horses with saddles on their backs and some with boots and spurs to ride them. Therefore we see that one consequence of the fact that we are not governed by angels is that there is a separation of powers as well as a limitation of powers.

Another consequence is that all men, including rulers and kings and leaders in general, are under the law. Since no men are divine, no kings or emperors are the Sons of Heaven or the Sons of God more so than ordinary citizens, any citizen is capable of holding anyone else accountable to God’s standards, as Amos, a mere shepherd from Judah, who had not even been trained as a prophet nor was a member of any order of clergy, had the standing under God’s system to bring into account the whole nation and government of Israel, a nation in which he was not even a citizen, because of their rebellion against God’s ways.

Of course, there are lots of consequences to having power divided and not centralized. For one, change is slow. To replace one generation of judges and leaders with another may take 20 years. God’s training of leaders often takes many decades from the time in which a leader recognizes (or not) some sort of talent and the time in which their character is seasoned and they are humble and obedient enough to serve as a godly leader rather than merely another tyrant and bully. Even in the human system of the United States, constitutional change is very slow–it takes at least 4 or 6 years, or more, to develop a stable regime in the three branches of government. In times of crisis when people want change now, a godly form of government deliberates far longer than most people have any patience in dealing with.

When power is separated between periphery in core, decentralized between community and government and family and church, and between different branches of government, it takes a lot of work to get everyone to work together. In fact, that is the point. We ought not to want government to do anything for us. We ought to want to do things ourselves, or for our neighbors and relatives. The fact that we have lost the spirit to look out for the best interests of our friends and families and neighbors, and only seek after our own selfish interests, means that government is being called upon to do that which it is not competent for. We seek government to be our God because we cannot trust in each other to share the blessings that God has given us.

Power relationships between businesses and companies and churches become enmeshed when people cannot be trusted to perform their God-given tasks. Sadly, those times seem to be upon us. The fault of this is not in government; the fault is in we ourselves, for failing to fulfill our responsibilities. And because of that, we need for someone to pick up the slack. Invariably, that is the person or people who have the greatest ambition for power and position and who believe (rightly) that taking the burdensome responsibility from people who have the mentality of slaves is the best way to gain power and dominion over those people, to bring themselves into the position of a god over mankind and reduce human beings to chattel. This may not be consciously done, but the result is clear.

This the tendency of our own times. How is it to be stopped? It cannot be stopped merely by seeking to maintain ancient traditions of limited government, but it must be stopped by removing the ‘need’ for centralized hierarchies of agencies and czars by taking those responsibilities from the bottom up. There must be no job left to be undertaken by government, which will reduce the outcry for increased government intervention and make it possible to slash their bloated budgets without causing social disaster. Disaster will come from the top down, but and avoidance of that disaster requires deep changes from the bottom up. We did not reach this stage of corruption overnight, and it will not be cured overnight either. Do we have either the time or the will to repair the breaches and to become a better society, so that we can avoid the threatened judgment that awaits our society and our world? If we will not be governed by God’s ways and grow to become like Him, we will be governed by Satanic hierarchies because the only other choice will be unacceptable libertarian anarchy. If we are going to do better than that, we do not have much time left to call out for mercy.