“Buckle up. We care.”
The sign seems so nice. But beneath such pleasant words along the highway, a worldview lurks. We have come to the point where we want the civil magistrate to love us and have a wonderful plan for our lives.
The book of Proverbs warns that a fool sent on an errand will soon prove to be an irritation. “He who sends a message by the hand of a fool cuts off his own feet and drinks violence” (Prov. 26:6). By the end of the day the message is mangled, and everybody is off doing the wrong thing. We are indeed a foolish generation of servants. God has told the cook to do something, and the gardener is in the kitchen with his hedge-clippers trying to do it instead. God has established certain governments among men — family, church, and civil — and he has set forth in His Word the various tasks He has assigned to each. One of the principal causes of grief in our broader culture today is that we have taken His instructions to Larry and assigned them to Moe, and the instructions given to Curly have been taken up by Larry.
Given the task Scripture assigns to the civil magistrate, the virtue of “caring” does not seem to rank as the most important of the virtues. “For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same” (Rom. 13:3). Not to put too fine a point on it, the civil magistrate is good at violence. For those who do evil, he should bring terror. Those who do good should receive praise. We should also realize as a corollary that God has not assigned tasks without granting the gifts necessary to perform those tasks. The magistrate has a God-given ability to bring terror to evil men, and to honor good men. But the magistrate is no good at all when it comes to changing diapers, reading stories, fixing lunches, bringing home a paycheck, wiping noses, and so forth. In brief, the civil government is not very good at day-care. Day-to-day caring on a personal level requires gifts not given to the magistrate. This is no problem as long as the civil government stays in the garden, and out of the kitchen. But this is not the case in our day. Our various cultural difficulties can be summed up in one phrase — “assignment drift.”
Our center has given way. No one has any clear idea who is supposed to be doing what. We have no clear idea because, as a culture, we have rejected God’s Word which clearly sets these things forth. The government schools, which are America’s only established religion, have insisted that we take no instruction whatever from the Word of God. The results are not surprising. Malcolm Muggeridge once quoted the wit who identified a similar problem in the time of Britain’s decline: “Everything was at sea except for the fleet.”
But assignment drift does not change the nature and abilities of the various governments. Even if everyone accepts the idea that “it takes a village,” the result will make us think “it takes a bureaucrat ensconced in a well-funded program, empowered to put people in jail or apply heavy fines if they prove uncooperative with the DCG swat teams.” DCG stands for Department of Care-Givers. The language is that of caring, but the actions always translate into the native language of the magistrate, which is that of force. As a case in point, we have recently begun lamenting the fact that “our children” have easy access to tobacco products. It is a national scandal, and anyone who questions this is immediately taken as a supporter of teenage smoking. But what will be the result? If the past is any indicator, the final result will be some ruined lives of laundromat operators who failed to hire a security guard for their cigarette vending machines, along with a significant increase in teenage smoking, thus demonstrating the need for a much more vigorous federal program.
Of course, none of this should be taken as exempting the magistrate from the duty of loving, as it must biblically understood. Any act of obedience is love, which is the fulfillment of the law. This applies equally to a civil magistrate, who can certainly love in the biblical sense. But in the modern mind, love is identified with sentiment and tender nurture. In the Bible, love is obedience to God’s commands. A soft-hearted father who neglects provision and discipline is loving in the modern sense, but hateful in the biblical sense (Prov. 13:24; 1 Tim. 5:8). In the same way, when the state “cares” for us, but neglects its assigned duties, the problem is not the love, but the lack of it. So as Christians we must learn to detach our evaluation of “love” from the various professions of love and caring which come to us — whether on highway signs or anywhere else. We must learn to evaluate the “love” in the light of whether God’s assignments are being fulfilled. “If the state really cares, then why do I live in fear, while criminals do not? If the state really cares, then why can I not walk across town after dark?”