Paradise Restored

Fulfilling the Great Commission 219
thunder, that the House of the Lord shall be built throughout
the earth: and these frogs sit in their marsh and croak – We are
the only Christians !”
We are the shapers of world history. God has remade us in
His image for world dominion; He has poured out upon us His
Spirit, with “power from on high” (Luke 24:49); He has committed
to us the gospel of the Kingdom, and commissioned us to
take over the world. If we trust and obey Him, there is no possibility
of failure.
The Theocratic Mandate
Our goal is a Christian world, made up of explicitly Christian
nations. How could a Christian desire anything else? Our Lord
Himself taught us to pray: “Thy Kingdom come; Thy will be done
on earth, m it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). We pray that God’s orders
will be obeyed on earth, just as they are immediately obeyed by the
angels and saints in heaven. The Lord’s Prayer is a prayer for the
worldwide dominion of God’s Kingdom – not a centralized world
government, but a world of decentrtilzed theocratic republics.
Now by theocracy I do not mean a government ruled by
priests and pastors. That is not what the word means at all. A
theocracy is a government ruled by God, a government whose
law code is solidly founded on the laws of the Bible. Civil rulers
are required to be God’s ministers, just as much as pastors are
(Rem. 13:1-4). According to God’s holy, infallible Word, the
laws of the Bible are the best laws (Deut. 4:5-8). They cannot be
improved upon.
The fact is that all law is “religious.” All law is based on
some ultimate standard of morality and ethics. Every lawsystem
is founded on the ultimate value of that system, and that
ultimate value is the god of that system. The source of law for a
society is the god of that society. This means that a theocracy is
inescapable. All societies are theocracies. The difference is that a
society that is not explicitly Christian is a theocracy of a false
god. Thus, when God instructed the Israelites about going into
the land of Canaan, He warned them not to adopt the law system
of the pagans:
I am the LORD your God. You shall not do what is done in the
land of Egypt where you lived, nor are you to do what is done in