Judges 21:25 "In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes."The Hebrew people failed to drive out the other religions in Canaan as directed by God. He gave them fair warning but the Hebrews were so influenced by the pagans that they accepted their gods. Because of the disobedience of His people, God refused to deliver them time and again, and left the pagans there to test the Hebrews. The other religions became thorns in the sides of the Hebrews.
Judges ruled at that time, but the people would not listen to the warnings of those who were wise. In effect, the only law that the Hebrew people had were not to have other gods besides God. They couldn't seem to even obey one law, let alone all of them. Because of the influence of other religions, the Hebrews did what was right in their own eyes! They were the earliest people who claimed to follow God, but were libertarian by nature!
Anarchy is the government of libertarians. Imagine all those Hebrew people with unfettered freedom doing as they pleased. There were no boundaries which they accepted to control their own desires. Think of this age: without laws: what would keep people sober, honest, civil, and obedient? Indeed laws are necessary because one person's will may be to conclude the will of another. Since Adam, the nature of man is corrupt. Anarchy became so rampant in the days of Noah, that God destroyed those early libertarians:
Genesis 6:5 "And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually."Left to our own devices, mankind is inherently evil! We need laws for our own safety and well-being. What better law than the Law of God - divine law? Natural law comes from the will of man. Divine Law comes from the will of God. When man does their own will, other men are in trouble. When men do God's will then love prevails. Natural law is the love and goodness of men. Divine Law is love and goodness of God, and the beneficiaries are others. Civilized nations do relatively well with natural law, but those less civil fail miserably. What civilizes the world is divine law. As such, civil natural law parallels divine law fairly well. However, it is men which govern, not God.
Whenever God is removed from the world, chaos ensues. History reveals the truth about godless nations. Even those which had another god besides God failed miserably. In western civilization most kings believed in God, but ultimately their own god was themselves. Terror reigned in most of those kingships because kings bowed to themselves. They prayed to God above but knelt to god below. Even Peter the Great prayed to God, but followed Bacchus as well. He served two masters, and as a cruel "king", the Tsar was vindictive and a tyrant.
Israel and Judah produced kings after God's own heart, and others who did what was right in their own eyes. The worst kings were those who had other gods besides God. They were evil. Man was wicked without rulers, but most of the rulers were as evil as the people. History shows that without God's will, mankind's will is on evil continually! Thus, evil became associated with the church because orthodox, catholic, and protestant kings brought forth evil. Every nation with a king sought expansion for their own edification, and the people suffered horribly from it. In many nations, the church received the blame because injustice was done in the Name of the Just!
The early Greeks toyed with democracy and republics. Without God, they were the enlightened ones. The thoughts of a democracy comes from Athens before 500 B.C. The Greek word transliterated dēmokratía means "the rule of the people". That sounds like a good thing, but enlightened people even know that people are inherently bad. Sparta, Athens, and even Rome had republics or res publica in the Latin. Republics are nations not the property of rulers, but a public concern. With that notion, republics ruled with representatives who sought the good of the people.
In the United States, democracy was the "rule of the people" in contrast to a king. However, so that even the less would have a say, we became a republic. Even insignificant states were granted a say in national affairs through elections of representatives which balanced the power.
We like to think that our nation was founded by religious people. Perhaps they were in their own way, but the God of many of the founders was not a personal God who they sought to please, but a Creator God who they mimicked in a secular way. Republics came about because of the Enlightenment - the Age of Reason. Rather than divine will, reason became the authority for legitimacy. Reason brought forth ideas such as liberty, tolerance, brotherhood, and progress. To be truthful, scripture is the auhtoriy on all these things but men turned to government to do what men would not do. Reason stole God's will right from under his nose! Of course he permitted it to test us.
Although scripture taught those things, the established church did not! Early on the church fought scientific discoveries as heresy. Some were but some were not. As such, the church was not on the side of truth oftentimes. That caused thinkers to dismiss the church along with the kings who bowed to it, in favor of doing things right in their own eyes. Thus reason became god in the eyes of those who rebeled against church and state. Because church and state were often the same, our own republic has made that relationship an entanglement.
In the western world, republics, even monarchies, rule according to the representatives. As such, the church has no part in governing. God has been thrown out of civil affairs. It is no longer God's will, which is good, but man's will which is terribly flawed! JHVH (Jehovah) is minimized while Reason is glorified. In enlightened nations such as ours, even the Ten Commandments are discarded, while the goddess of Reason - Liberty stands tall in our New York harbor, enkightening the nation. We are not a Christian nation, but a nation of deceived Christians. We thought, even with Thomas Paines's writings, that we were getting a nation of God, but it was a nation whose God would be Reason!
We have been fooled. We ate of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and evil. We became "as gods" - enlightened ones, and now we are paying the price. Who would have thought when Eve took of the fruit, that it was herself that she worshipped? The sinful evil person was enlightened. She did what was right in her own eyes. A statute to her stands in our New York Harbor. Is it really in commemoration to Eve? Not hardly, but to the Angel of Light himself - Lucifer. We have been fooled again! Reason is the thorn in the sides of Christian people. We now take the lies of science as fact when they are mere theories requiring much faith! How enlightened we have become, never realizing that God would be stolen from us by reasonable people. We have accepted the pagan god!
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