I brought up the Shanghai lockdown in a meeting of our men’s group the other day, and when I mentioned that there were people there who said they had no food, the response was that there were trucks out delivering food, so—gathering from the tone of voice in which the statement was made—I infer that the ethos in the room was that the lockdown was simply a necessary inconvenience to its citizens: so, jeez, we wouldn’t want it to happen here, but hey, if it does, that’s just God’s appointed authorities doing what’s best for us.
But I have some questions.
When you lock 11 million people in their houses, does it have any effect on the production of food, clothing, or other essentials? If so, who decides whether the reduction in production is a good price to pay for the supposed safety of the lockdowns? On what basis and by what standard do they decide? If not, what do these people do when they are supposedly at work?
Do the people receiving the food have to pay for it? Or is it free? And if the food is free, are the people who grow it, process it, package it, and deliver it paid for their work? If so, where does that money come from if those under house arrest are not producing anything? If not, are those working free to not work? If so, they are truly heroes, but if not, what are they but slaves?
Is it safe to assume that the governing authorities (Rom 13:1–7) determine who receives what food? Does a man who is 5’5” tall get the same amount of food as a man who is 6’6”? Does a pregnant woman get the same amount of food as a woman who is not? Do they make allowances for allergies and gluten intolerance? Do these practical questions even matter, or is good enough for government work good enough?
If there were dissidents among the population, people whose opposition to the government were known—or suspected, as in the case of biblical Christians—would the governing authorities be tempted to treat them differently from their loyal subjects in the distribution of food? Might they yield to that temptation?
If it is reasonable to believe that at the best of times human needs and desires exceed the available supply, and if it is further reasonable to believe that a government’s highest priority is staying in power, what reason would a government have for treating dissidents equally with loyal subjects? Furthermore, what incentive with a government have for not manufacturing crises that would enable them to weed out dissidents?
How are people who are not allowed to leave their homes any different from prisoners? Does the government have the right to imprison people who are strong enough to resist the virus? Do they have the right to imprison people who have already had the virus and are therefore reasonably immune? If masks and vaccines are effective mitigation measures, why are people who would wear masks and have been vaccinated locked in their homes? And if not, why are those things required?
More importantly, does Jesus care about any of this? After all, most of those locked down in Shanghai are headed for a justly deserved Christless eternity. Won’t Christians standing up and saying that this is an injustice and an abomination to God simply drive them further from the gospel and make life more difficult for the Christians in China? Does God care about injustice in the abstract? If not, what is he good for? If so, what does he think, what should his disciples think, and what should his disciples do about it?
That is, when our own government puts teeth into the vaccine mandate and reinstates the mask mandates and lockdowns, what will American evangelicalism do? What are those ordained to teach us telling us to do?
And most importantly, why do we even need to discuss these questions? God told his people 3500 years ago not to kill, defraud, steal, or defame. Period. He gave them a society in which everyone was equal; there was death, but there were no taxes (i.e, no stealing; the tithe is not a tax). Over the next five hundred years, “there was no king in Israel” and “the land had peace” for eighty years once and forty years twice. Israel was the freest people the earth has ever seen, but only when they obeyed God—when they disobeyed, their peace evaporated.
Finally, their apostasy was so bad that they lost sight of the connection between obedience and peace; they believed the lie that, in Matthew Henry’s words, “a bad government is better than no government at all” and decided that what they needed was a king. God warned them that they were asking for trouble—asking to become slaves to the political class “like the other nations”—but they would not listen, and God’s people have been slaves under masters of various degrees of cruelty ever since.
So what do we do now? “Come out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord” might be a good place to start. Taking the beams out of our own eyes before we comment on the specks in others’ might be another.
But where the church seems weakest is in her understanding that while the gospel is a call for repentance, it is primarily an invitation to a kingdom. That kingdom has certain rules, the most important of which is that no one is exempt from the prohibitions against murder, fraud, theft, and slander. Winning a war or an election gives no one the right to take innocent people’s property, let alone their lives, for any reason, either directly or by fraud or slander. Taxation is theft, and until the church overcomes the Stockholm syndrome that has enthralled her to her captors, she will never be able to proclaim liberty to the captives in any form but “pie in the sky by and by.”
Of course, that pie is not to be disparaged, but is there no connection between the conduct of the king’s children and people’s willingness to believe that the king is good?
The last enemy to be conquered is death, and only God can conquer that. By implication, the political class God has established will be done away with before death is. But God does not call us to overthrow it by violence. “Not by [military] might, nor by [political] power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord.” “Our weapons are not carnal ... they are spiritual.” So then how?
Whatever means we use to overthrow the political class will be spiritual and will follow the prohibitions against murder, fraud, theft, and slander. But “without a vision, the people perish,” so we need the vision of a kingdom that comes to earth when God’s people do God’s will on earth as it is done in heaven. We need to be winsome ambassadors of that kingdom. We need to gather a community that lives for solely for Christ and him crucified, risen, and coming again. We can expect such a community to start small but to grow in accordance with its faithfulness (and probably to be painfully pruned by persecution).
The least painful way to begin that process—and as good a test as any of people’s decision to live for Christ alone—is to get the flags of the political class out of our gathering places and homes.
